This insightful book offers practical advice to fieldworkers in social research, enabling robust and judicious applications of research methods and techniques in data collection. It also outlines data collection challenges that are commonly faced when working in the field. Authors address key strategies to tackle the major challenges to fieldwork, including advice on using indigenous or innovative skills and making intelligent use of the advantages already available within standard research methodologies. International contributors provide a hands-on account of research methodologies as applied in the field, with particular focus on research ethics and community culture and interactions. The book offers a number of useful case studies, featuring examples of the application of research techniques in different cultural and socio-economic contexts. Utilizing an innovative and dynamic 'storytelling' method, this book will be a useful research tool for fieldworkers engaging in social science research in community settings, as well as students in the field learning the core techniques of fieldwork.

Ethnography in the digital age presents new methods for research. It encourages scientists to think about how we live and study in a digital, material, and sensory world. Digital ethnography considers the impact of digital media on the methods and processes by which we perform ethnography and how the digital, methodological, practical, and theoretical aspects of ethnographic research are becoming increasingly interwoven. This planet does not exist in a static state; as technology grows and shifts, we must learn how to appropriately analyze these changes. Practices, Challenges, and Prospects of Digital Ethnography as a Multidisciplinary Method examines the pervasiveness of digital media in digital ethnography's setting and practice. It investigates how digital settings, techniques, and procedures are reshaping ethnographic practice and explores the ethnographic-theoretical interactions through which "old" opinions are influenced by digital ethnography practice, going beyond merely transferring conventional concepts and techniques into digital research settings. Covering topics such as data triangulation, indigenous living systems, and digital technology, this premier reference source is an essential resource for libraries, students, teachers, sociologists, anthropologists, social workers, historians, political scientists, geographers, public health officials, archivists, government officials, researchers, and academicians.

American Boarding School Fiction, 1981-2021: Inclusion and Scandal is a study of contemporary American boarding-school narratives. Before the 1980s, writers of American boarding-school fiction tended to concentrate on mournful teenagers - the center was filled with students: white, male, Protestant students at boys' schools. More recently, a new generation of writers-including Richard A. Hawley, Anita Shreve, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Tobias Wolff-has transformed school fiction by highlighting issues relating to gender, race, scandal, sexuality, education, and social class in unprecedented ways. These new writers present characters who are rich and underprivileged, white and Black, male and female, adolescent and middle-aged, conformist and rebellious. By turning their attention away from the bruised feelings of teenagers, they have reinvented American boarding-school fiction, writing vividly about a host of subjects the genre overlooked in the past.

This cutting-edge Research Handbook, at the intersection of comparative law and anthropology, explores mutually enriching insights and outlooks. The 20 contributors, including several of the most eminent scholars, as well as new voices, offer diverse expertise, national backgrounds and professional experience. Their overall approach is ''ground up'' without regard to unified paradigms of research or objects of study. Through a pluralistic definition of law and multidisciplinary approaches, Comparative Law and Anthropology significantly advances both theory and practice. The Research Handbook's expansive concept of comparative law blends a traditional geographical orientation with historical and jurisprudential dimensions within a broad range of contexts of anthropological inquiry, from indigenous communities, to law schools and transitional societies. This comprehensive and original collection of diverse writings about anthropology and the law around the world offers an inspiring but realistic source for legal scholars, anthropologists and policy-makers. Contributors include: U. Acharya, C. Bell, J. Blake, S. Brink, E. Darian-Smith, R. Francaviglia, M. Lazarus-Black, P. McHugh, S.F. Moore, E. Moustaira, L. Nader, J. Nafziger, M. Novakovic, R. Price, O. Ruppel, J.A. Sanchez, W. Shipley, R. Tejani, A. Telesetsky, K. Thomas

The acclaimed and award-winning book about what a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planet.

Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?

A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.

By investigating one of the world's most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.

Rethinking Sage Philosophy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on and beyond H. Odera Oruka discusses a variety of aspects of Henry Odera Oruka's sage philosophy project, rethinking it with a view to current demands and recent debates in scholarship across several disciplines. Edited by Kai Kresse and Oriare Nyarwath, the collection engages perspectives and interests from within and beyond African philosophy and African studies, including especially anthropology, literature, postcolonial critique, and decolonial scholarship. The chapters focus on: studies of women sages; sage philosophy in relation to oral literature; an Acholi poem on 'being human' in context; takes on aesthetics and gender in Maasai thought; a comparative discussion of Oruka's and Gramsci's approaches to the relevance of philosophy in society; a critical review of method; a comparative discussion dedicated to the project of decolonization, with a South African case study; and a conceptual reconsideration of Oruka's understanding of sages, presenting the 'pragmatic sage' as typical of the late phase of the sage philosophy project.

Africa Reimagined is a passionately argued appeal for a rediscovery of our African identity. Going beyond the problems of a single country, Hlumelo Biko calls for a reorientation of values, on a continental scale, to suit the needs and priorities of Africans. Building on the premise that slavery, colonialism, imperialism and apartheid fundamentally unbalanced the values and indeed the very self-concept of Africans, he offers realistic steps to return to a more balanced Afro-centric identity.

Historically, African values were shaped by a sense of abundance, in material and mental terms, and by strong ties of community. The intrusion of religious, economic and legal systems imposed by conquerors, traders and missionaries upset this balance, and the African identity was subsumed by the values of the newcomers. Biko shows how a reimagining of Africa can restore the sense of abundance and possibility, and what a rebirth of the continent on Pan-African lines might look like. This is not about the churn of the news cycle or party politics – although he identifies the political party as one of the most pernicious legacies of colonialism. Instead, drawing on latest research, he offers a practical, pragmatic vision anchored in the here and now.

By looking beyond identities and values imposed from outside, and transcending the divisions and frontiers imposed under colonialism, it should be possible for Africans to develop fully their skills, values and ingenuity, to build institutions that reflect African values, and to create wealth for the benefit of the continent as a whole.

Sociologist Jeffrey Guhin spent a year and a half embedded in four high schools in the New York City area - two of them Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian. At first pass, these communities do not seem to have much in common. But under closer inspection Guhin finds several common threads: each school community holds to a conservative approach to gender and sexuality, a hostility towards the theory of evolution, and a deep suspicion of secularism. All possess a double-sided image of America, on the one hand as a place where their children can excel and prosper, and on the other hand as a land of temptations that could lead their children astray. He shows how these school communities use boundaries of politics, gender, and sexuality to distinguish themselves from the secular world, both in school and online. Guhin develops his study of boundaries in the book's first half to show how the school communities teach their children who they are not; the book's second half shows how the communities use "external authorities" to teach their children who they are. These "external authorities" - such as Science, Scripture, and Prayer - are experienced by community members as real powers with the ability to issue commands and coerce action. By offloading agency to these external authorities, leaders in these schools are able to maintain a commitment to religious freedom while simultaneously reproducing their moral commitments in their students. Drawing on extensive classroom observation, community participation, and 143 formal interviews with students, teachers, and staff, this book makes an original contribution to sociology, religious studies, and education.

Writing Ambition: Literary Engagements between Women in France analyzes pairs of women writing in French. Through examining pairs of writers, ranging from Colette and Anne de Pene to Nancy Huston and Leila Sebbar, Katharine Ann Jensen assesses how their literary ambitions affected their engagements with each other. Focused on the psychological aspects of the women's relationships, the author combines close readings of their works with attention to historical and biographical contexts to consider how and why one or both women in the pair express contradictory or anxious feelings about literary ambition.

How are natures and animals integrated inclusively into research projects through Multispecies Ethnography? While preceded by a vision that seeks to question holistically how scientists can integrate natures and animals into research projects through Multispecies Ethnography, this book focuses on inter- and multidisciplinary collaboration. From an examination of the interfaces between social and natural science-oriented disciplines, a complex view of natures, humans, and animals emerges. The insights into interdependencies of different disciplines illustrate the need for a Multispecies Ethnography to analyze HumansAnimalsNaturesCultures. While the methodology is innovative and currently not widespread, the application of Multispecies Ethnography in areas of research such as climate change, species extinction, or inequalities will allow new insights. These research debates are closely interwoven, and the methodological inclusion of the agency of natures and animals and the consideration of Indigenous Knowledge allow new insights of holistic multispecies research for the different disciplines. Multispecies Ethnography allows for positivist, innovative, attentive, reflexive and complex analyses of HumansAnimalsNaturesCultures.

Karl Marx is buried in London, John Keats in Rome and Leon Trotsky in Mexico. Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris is today known for the graves of Jim Morrison, Victor Hugo and Oscar Wilde, but when it opened in the early 19th century the owners felt that they needed some star names to make it a desired burial site - and so they had Moliere's body transferred there. Arranged thematically into 75 entries, Graves of the Great and Famous tours the world exploring the resting places of leading artists, thinkers, scientists, sportspeople, revolutionaries, politicians and pioneers. Some, such as communist leaders Ho Chi Minh and Vladimir Lenin, are interred in great mausoleums, where they are visited by millions each year; others are buried in little-known country graveyards. From lives cut short through assassinations - Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln - to those who suffered terrible accidents (Princess Diana), from mobsters such as Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel and John Gotti to Napoleon and his mistress Marie Walewska, from Nelson Mandela to Eva Peron, Graceland to Highgate Cemetery, the book provides a guide to some of the most famous and unusual graves of the great and the good. Featuring 150 photographs of graves, cemeteries, graveyards and mausoleums, Graves of the Great and Famous is a compact guide to the final resting place of the famous - and infamous.

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self and informal practices of care at distance as part of contemporary household dynamics.

In this groundbreaking book, based on in-depth ethnographic research spanning ten years, Antoinette Elizabeth DeNapoli brings to light the little known, and often marginalized, lives of female Hindu ascetics (sadhus) in the North Indian state of Rajasthan. Her book offers a new perspective on the practice of asceticism in India today, exploring a phenomenon she terms vernacular asceticism. Examining the everyday religious worlds and practices of primarily "unlettered" female sadhus who come from a variety of castes, Real Sadhus Sing to God illustrates that the female sadhus whom DeNapoli knew experience asceticism in relational and celebratory ways and construct their lives as paths of singing to God. While the sadhus have combined ritual initiation with institutionalized and orthodox orders of asceticism, they also draw on the non-orthodox traditions of the medieval devotional poet-saints of North India to create a form of asceticism that synthesizes multiple and competing world views. DeNapoli suggests that in the vernacular asceticism of the sadhus, singing to God serves as the female way of being an ascetic. As women who have escaped the dominant societal expectations of marriage and housework, female sadhus are unusual because they devote themselves to a way of life traditionally reserved for men in Indian society. Female sadhus are simultaneously respected and distrusted for transgressing normative gender roles in order to dedicate themselves to a life of singing to the divine. Real Sadhus Sing to God is the first book-length study to explore the ways in which female sadhus perform and, thus, create gendered views of asceticism through their singing, storytelling, and sacred text practices, which DeNapoli characterizes as the sadhus' "rhetoric of renunciation." The book also examines the relationship between asceticism (sannyas) and devotion (bhakti) in contemporary contexts. It brings together two disparate fields of study in religious scholarship-yoga/asceticism and bhakti-through use of the orienting metaphor of singing bhajans (devotional songs) to understand vernacular asceticism in contemporary India.