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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology > General
Over several generations villagers of Dominica have been shifting from Patwa, an Afro-French creole, to English, the official language. Despite government efforts at Patwa revitalization and cultural heritage tourism, rural caregivers and teachers prohibit children from speaking Patwa in their presence. Drawing on detailed ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of video-recorded social interaction in naturalistic home, school, village and urban settings, the study explores this paradox and examines the role of children and their social worlds. It offers much-needed insights into the study of language socialization, language shift and Caribbean children's agency and social lives, contributing to the burgeoning interdisciplinary study of children's cultures. Further, it demonstrates the critical role played by children in the transmission and transformation of linguistic practices, which ultimately may determine the fate of a language. Amy L. Paugh is Associate Professor of Anthropology at James Madison University. Her research investigates language socialization, children's cultures and language ideologies in the Caribbean and United States.
The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first full-length ethnographic study among the adolescence of Siberian indigenous peoples, it presents the young people's narratives about their own future and shows how they form constructs of time, space, agency and personhood through the process of growing up and experiencing their social world. The study brings a new perspective to the anthropology of childhood and uncovers a quite unexpected dynamic in narrating and foreshadowing the future while relating it to cultural patterns of prediction and fulfillment in nomadic cosmology.
This volume brings together new anthropological research on the Greek crisis. With a number of contributions from academics based in Greece, the book addresses a number of key issues such as the refugee crisis, far-right extremism and the psychological impact of increased poverty and unemployment. It provides much needed ethnographic contributions and critical anthropological perspectives at a key moment in Greece's history, and will be of great interest to researchers interested in the social, political and economic developments in southern Europe. It is the first collection to explore the impact of this period of radical social change on anthropological understandings of Greece.
This is an excellent book that adds to the anthropological and historical literature on shared sacred sites. The majority of the articles are very well written, present strong arguments that are revealed with important research. The result is that the book adds to and clarifies some of the debates about the sacred sites, how they are shared as well as the role of the various actors involved in the process. The cases are varied, rich and evocative. Furthermore they are of contemporary importance and relevance. . Karen Barkey, Columbia University "Shared" sites, where members of distinct, or factionally opposed, religious communities interact-or fail to interact-is the focus of this volume. Chapters based on fieldwork from such diverse sites as India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, China, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and Vietnam demonstrate how sharing and tolerance are both more complex and multifaceted than they are often recognized to be. By including both historical processes (the development of Chinese funerals in late imperial Beijing or the refashioning of memorial commemoration in the wake of the Vietnam war) and particular events (the visit of Pope John Paul II to shared shrines in Sri Lanka or the Al-Qaeda bombing of an ancient Jewish synagogue on the Island of Djerba in Tunisia), the volume demonstrates the importance of understanding the wider contexts within which social interactions take place and shows that tolerance and intercommunalism are simultaneously possible and perpetually under threat. Glenn Bowman is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent where he directs the postgraduate program in the Anthropology of Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Identity. He has done extensive field research on Jerusalem pilgrimages as well as on intercommunal shrine practices in the Middle East and the Balkans. In addition to this research on holy places he has worked in Jerusalem and the West Bank on issues of nationalism and resistance for nearly thirty years and has carried out fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia on political mobilization and the politics of contemporary art.
Transdisciplinarity is a new way of scientifically meeting the challenges of sustainability. Indeed, interdisciplinary collaboration and co-operation with non-academic 'practice partners' is at the core of this; creating contextualised, socially relevant knowledge about complex real-world problems. Transdisciplinary Research and Sustainability breaks new ground by presenting transdisciplinary research in practice, drawing on recent advances by the vibrant transdisciplinary research communities in the German-speaking world. It describes methodological innovations developed to address wide-ranging contemporary issues including climate change adaptation, energy policy, sustainable agriculture and soil conservation. Furthermore, the authors reflect on the challenges involved in integrating non-academic actors in scientific research, on the tensions that arise in the encounter of theory and praxis, and on the inherently normative, political nature of sustainability research. Highlighting the need for academic institutions to be transformed to reflect transdisciplinarity, this timely volume will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Sustainability Science, Transdisciplinary Studies and Philosophy of Science.
This is an elegantly written and well-organised book on a subject whose star continues to rise. Those who are familiar with Rapport's project will be anticipating its publication with some excitement. Those who are not familiar with his work are in for a treat in that this is the culmination of his work so far... He is an exceptional essayist and although each chapter might stand alone, together they form a considerable contribution which is significant both in terms of the theoretical and moral advance of the discipline. . Peter Collins, Durham University The book is one of the first full-length monographs on the cosmopolitan project in anthropology, and should draw a wide readership... It]is well researched and brings together a wealth of important scholarly sources. Readers stand to learn much from the discussion. . Lisette Josephides, Queen's University Belfast The significance that people grant to their affiliations as members of nations, religions, classes, races, ethnicities and genders is evidence of the vital need for a cosmopolitan project that originates in the figure of Anyone - the universal and yet individual human being. Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to multiculturalism, a different vision of identity, belonging, solidarity and justice, that avoids the seemingly intractable character of identity politics: it identifies samenesses of the human condition that underlie the surface differences of history, culture and society, nation, ethnicity, religion, class, race and gender. This book argues for the importance of cosmopolitanism as a theory of human being, as a methodology for social science and as a moral and political program. Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St. Andrews, where he directs the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He has also held a Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh."
Interest in the study of kinship, a key area of anthropological enquiry, has recently reemerged. Dubbed 'the new kinship', this interest was stimulated by the 'new genetics' and revived interest in kinship and family patterns. This volume investigates the impact of biotechnology on contemporary understandings of kinship, of family and 'belonging' in a variety of European settings and reveals similarities and differences in how kinship is conceived. What constitutes kinship for different publics? How significant are biogenetic links? What does family resemblance tell us? Why is genetically modified food an issue? Are 'genes' and 'blood' interchangeable? It has been argued that the recent prominence of genetic science and genetic technologies has resulted in a 'geneticization' of social life; the ethnographic examples presented here do show shifts occurring in notions of 'nature' and of what is 'natural'. But, they also illustrate the complexity of contemporary kinship thinking in Europe and the continued interconnectedness of biological and sociological understandings of relatedness and the relationship between nature and nurture.
This volume is very well put-together. The editors have done a good job to rein in the various authors to a single collective argument...It's an important volume on an important issue. . Jon Mitchell, University of Sussex The topic of everyday religion is becoming an increasingly attractive in the social sciences of religion, as an alternative to more orthodox and canonical accounts of religious phenomena... This volume sets out to debate the concept of 'everyday religion' in a very explicit and straightforward manner...The final result is a convincing volume with diverse and challenging case studies that open different paths for the discussion of the main theme. . Ruy Blanes, Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such. Samuli Schielke is a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. His research interests include Islam, festive culture, subjectivity and morality, and migration and aspiration in Egypt. Liza Debevec is a research fellow at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her research focuses on the anthropology of everyday life practices in urban Burkina Faso."
In this richly contextualized study, Liana Chua explores how a largely Christian Bidayuh community has been reconfiguring its relationship to its old animist rituals through the trope and politics of "culture." Placing her ethnography in dialogue with developments in the nascent anthropology of Christianity, Chua argues that such efforts at "continuity speaking" are the product not only of Malaysian cultural politics, but also of conversion and Christianity itself. This book invites scholars to rethink the nature and scope of conversion, as well as the multifarious, yet distinctive, forms that Christianity can take.
The Indigo Child concept is a contemporary New Age redefinition of self. Indigo Children are described in their primary literature as a spiritually, psychically, and genetically advanced generation. Born from the early 1980s, the Indigo Children are thought to be here to usher in a new golden age by changing the world's current social paradigm. However, as they are "paradigm busters", they also claim to find it difficult to fit into contemporary society. Indigo Children recount difficult childhoods and school years, and the concept has also been used by members of the community to reinterpret conditions such as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) and autism. Cynics, however, can claim that the Indigo Child concept is an example of "special snowflake" syndrome, and parodies abound. This book is the fullest introduction to the Indigo Child concept to date. Employing both on- and offline ethnographic methods, Beth Singler objectively considers the place of the Indigo Children in contemporary debates around religious identity, self-creation, online participation, conspiracy theories, race and culture, and definitions of the New Age movement.
The purposes of this book are rooted in the move from invisibility to visibility and silence to voice. This work uses auto ethnography as an enterprise to break down traditional barriers that support the invisibility of diverse epistemologies (Altheide & Johnson,2011). The reality of invisibility and silence has plagued scholars of colour in their attempt to make known the cultural significance found in the planning and execution of research. As a result, this book purposes to support the visibility and voice of scholars of colour who conduct auto ethnographic research from a racial, gendered, and critical theoretical framework. This work further supports the research community as it examines and re-examines culturally indigenous epistemologies as a viable vehicle for rigorous and authentic inquiry (Dillard, 2000). The significance of this book can be grafted from its attention to new ways of thinking about doing research. While much of the previous scholarship on auto ethnography highlights the importance of personal narrative and voice, this book includes the latter but also examines the concept of race and culture as undisputable factors in the doing of research. Burdell & Swadener (1999) contends that auto ethnography should interrogate the subjective nature and question master narratives and empirical assumptions. Spry (2011) emphasizes auto ethnography as a moral discourse that foster intimate experiences grounded in historical processes. Authoethnographic research then, has the potential to provide a lens by which researchers can delve into research with a greater sense of personal experiences and critical understanding of the inquiry context.
This book is an ethnographic account of English football fans, based upon sixteen years' of participant observation. The author identifies a distinct sub-culture of supporter - the 'carnival fan' - who dominated the travelling support of the three teams observed - Manchester United, Blackpool and the England National Team. This accessible account follows these groups home and abroad, describing their interpretations, motivations and behaviour and challenging a number of the myths about 'hooliganism' and crowd control. The text will be of value to anyone studying, researching or interested in ethnographic modes of enquiry or the behaviour of football fans. In particular it will be of value to anyone involved in the academic disciplines of policing, criminal justice, sociology, criminology, sports studies and research methods. It also makes recommendations for the management of football crowds that will be of use to practitioners involved in policing, crowd control and event management. -- .
Based on detailed ethnographic material, "New Lithuania in Old Hands" analyzes the impact that European Union accession has had upon the country's aging smallscale farmers, and describes how the reality of Lithuania's EU membership has been a far cry from the scenarios of wealth and overabundance once promised. The text reveals that, in many instances, membership has resulted in a return to subsistence production, increased insecurity and a reinforcement of kinship obligations. Thus instead of treating the European Union as an elite project and voicing the support of various other segments of the population, this volume shows how broad parts of the rural population have been affected by and engaged in processes of change following Lithuania's accession - changes that threaten to have a large impact upon the future of the country's family structures and its farming demographic.
Blackness, as a concept, is extremely fluid: it can refer to cultural and ethnic identity, socio-political status, an aesthetic and embodied way of being, a social and political consciousness, or a diasporic kinship. It is used as a description of skin color ranging from the palest cream to the richest chocolate; as a marker of enslavement, marginalization, criminality, filth, or evil; or as a symbol of pride, beauty, elegance, strength, and depth. Despite the fact that it is elusive and difficult to define, blackness serves as one of the most potent and unifying domains of identity. God and Blackness offers an ethnographic study of blackness as it is understood within a specific community--that of the First Afrikan Church, a middle-class Afrocentric congregation in Atlanta, Georgia. Drawing on nearly two years of participant observation and in‑depth interviews, Andrea C. Abrams examines how this community has employed Afrocentrism and Black theology as a means of negotiating the unreconciled natures of thoughts and ideals that are part of being both black and American. Specifically, Abrams examines the ways in which First Afrikan's construction of community is influenced by shared understandings of blackness, and probes the means through which individuals negotiate the tensions created by competing constructions of their black identity. Although Afrocentrism operates as the focal point of this discussion, the book examines questions of political identity, religious expression and gender dynamics through the lens of a unique black church.
Drawing on Louis Althusser's concept of internal distantiation, " Reconstituting Americans" reads post-1960s U.S. literature to reveal the representational paradoxes of liberal multicultural subjecthood. This engaging study uses historicist and formalist methodologies within Marxist, psychoanalytic, and critical race frameworks to discuss the formal techniques in the work of Arturo Islas, Bharati Mukherjee, Jamaica Kincaid, Reginald McKnight, and Audre Lorde. Megan Obourn deftly looks at the historical and social realities of social identities, while simultaneously bringing to the fore the limitations of liberal multicultural ways of conceptualizing identity and difference.
The mobilization of people, populations, and places--and the social interrelations of space and time, memory and longing, and the global and local--are uniquely analyzed in this fascinating study. Instead of viewing social and cultural relations through the lenses of rigid institutions, fixed territories, or rooted communities, Ilcan focuses on mobile sites to explore the cultural politics of settlement. This book examines the social relations of longing and belonging to be found in nation building, ethnographic practices, dwelling, and diasporas. Ilcan propels us into various dimensions of movement, as well as social relations in the fields of dispersion, transition, and displacement. Drawing on insights from cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology, she inquires into contemporary and critical issues on the movement of peoples. Transitional communities represent the tensions and risks confronting those compelled to leave home, or those for whom a sense of longing superseded any feeling of belonging. This book provides fresh insight into the placement, and displacement, of particular social groups, including guest workers, migrants, and immigrants. Ilcan covers the varieties of diasporic relations and the settlements they form, as well as the manifold ways in which they affect traditional practices of settlement. She considers the cultural, economic, and political implications of globalization, evoking the struggle in our places of habitation, and the strategies deployed to subvert our habits of settlement.
Sex is often regarded as a dangerous business that must be rigorously controlled, regulated, and subjected to rules. Sexual acts that defy acceptable practices may be seen as variously defiling, immoral, and even unnatural. They may challenge and subvert both cultural preconceptions and the social order in a politics of sexual transgression that threatens to transform permissible boundaries and restructure bodily engagements. This collection of essays explores acts of sexual transgression that have the power to reconfigure perceptions of bodily intimacy and the social norms of interaction. Considering issues such as domestic violence, child prostitution, health and sex, teenage sex, and sex with animals across a range of settings from contemporary Oceania, the Pacific, South Africa, and southeast Asia to Euro-America, this book should interest all those who question the "naturalness" of sex, including public health workers, clinical practitioners and students of sex, sexuality, and gender in the humanities and social sciences.
Winner of the 2019 John Collier Jr Award Street style blogging has experienced a meteoric rise in popularity over the last decade. Amateur photographers, often with no formal training in fashion, have become critical arbiters of taste and trends, influencing the representations that appear in magazines and on runways, and putting new cities on the fashion world map. This cutting-edge book documents the evolution of street style photography, from the fieldwork photos of early anthropology to the glamorized snapshots that appear on blogs today, and explores the structural shifts in the global fashion industry that street style has helped bring about. Chronicling author and anthropologist Brent Luvaas' experience over three years of blogging through vivid street imagery and rich ethnographic detail, this book turns the lens of street style photography back onto anthropology itself, arguing that the phenomenon is a powerful mode of amateur ethnography. Bloggers blur the distinction between professional and amateur, insider and outsider, self and brand. This book documents that blur from the ground level-from the streets of Philadelphia to the sidewalks of New York Fashion Week. Street Style is an essential read for students and scholars of fashion, anthropology, sociology, media and cultural studies, and fans of street style photography alike.
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.
..".a scholar with extensive knowledge of indigenous life in the Canadian North, has compiled a valuable and timely compendium on how Native societies from the Arctic to Australia use new media technologies to reinforce local cultures and establish global connections...Highly recommended." . Choice "There is a lot of fascinating material in this book and it is striking that, the internet notwithstanding, radio remains central to indigenous media activity... Alia provides a very useful chronology which, although it starts in 11,000 BC, concentrates on developments in the last 100 years. There is also a filmography of indigenous films and videos." . British Journal of Canadian Studies "Alia should be commended for revealing a world of indigenous media use. This wide-ranging study lays a foundation for the study of how indigenous people use new media technologies, and future researchers of indigenous media use will want to use this book as a starting point." . Anthropos "Alia has crafted an accessible book for many audiences. It is easy to read; includes critical theory that is relevant, applicable and understandable; and flows through the many points of entry for indigenous people into the new media nation...The book is scholarly, yet it also reveals the depth and span of networks created by the new media nation that can be enhanced through awareness. The New Media Nation is brave and hopeful. As a document of the many instances of indigenous media, it captures events, experiences and testimony. It is also innately reflective of a network of global resistance, linking many indigenous groups' affirmation of identity through the new media." . The International Journal of Communication Around the planet, Indigenous people are using old and new technologies to amplify their voices and broadcast information to a global audience. This is the first portrait of a powerful international movement that looks both inward and outward, helping to preserve ancient languages and cultures while communicating across cultural, political, and geographical boundaries. Based on more than twenty years of research, observation, and work experience in Indigenous journalism, film, music, and visual art, this volume includes specialized studies of Inuit in the circumpolar north, and First Nations peoples in the Yukon and southern Canada and the United States. Valerie Alia is Adjunct Professor in the Doctor of Social Sciences program at Royal Roads University (Canada). An award-winning scholar, journalist, photographer and poet, she was Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture at Western Washington University, Running Stream Professor of Ethics and Identity at Leeds Metropolitan University, a research associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, and a television and radio broadcaster, newspaper and magazine writer and arts reviewer in the US and Canada. Her books include: "Un/Covering the North: News, Media and Aboriginal People; Media Ethics and Social Change;" and "Names and Nunavut: Culture and Identity in the Inuit Homeland." She is a founding member of the International Arctic Social Sciences Association.
In recent years, digital technologies have become pervasive in academic and everyday life. This comprehensive volume covers a wide range of concepts for studying the new cultural dynamics that are evident as a result of digitisation. It considers how the cultural changes triggered by digitisation processes can be approached empirically. The chapters include carefully chosen examples and help readers from disciplines such as Anthropology, Sociology, Media Studies, and Science & Technology Studies to grasp digitisation theoretically as well as methodologically.
Engaging Native American Publics considers the increasing influence of Indigenous groups as key audiences, collaborators, and authors with regards to their own linguistic documentation and representation. The chapters critically examine a variety of North American case studies to reflect on the forms and effects of new collaborations between language researchers and Indigenous communities, as well as the types and uses of products that emerge with notions of cultural maintenance and linguistic revitalization in mind. In assessing the nature and degree of change from an early period of "salvage" research to a period of greater Indigenous "self-determination," the volume addresses whether increased empowerment and accountability has truly transformed the terms of engagement and what the implications for the future might be.
Within and Beyond Citizenship brings together cutting-edge research in sociology and social anthropology on the relationship between immigration status, rights and belonging in contemporary societies of immigration. It offers new insights into the ways in which political membership is experienced, spatially and bureaucratically constructed, and actively negotiated and contested in the everyday lives of citizens and non-citizens. Themes, concepts and ideas covered include: The shifting position of the non-citizen in contemporary immigration societies; The intersection of human mobility, immigration control and articulations of citizenship; Activism and everyday practices of membership and belonging; Tension in policy and practice between coexisting traditions and regimes of rights; Mixed status families, belonging and citizenship; The ways in which immigration status (or its absence) intersects with social cleavages such as age, class, gender and 'race' to shape social relations. This book will appeal to academics and practitioners working in the disciplines of Social and Political Anthropology, Sociology, Social Policy, Human Geography, Political Sciences, Citizenship Studies and Migration Studies.
While inquiries into early encounters between East Asia and the West have traditionally focused on successful interactions, this collection inquires into the many forms of failure, experienced on all sides, in the period before 1850. Countering a tendency in scholarship to overlook unsuccessful encounters, it starts from the assumption that failures can prove highly illuminating and provide valuable insights into both the specific shapes and limitations of East Asian and Western imaginations of the Other, as well as of the nature of East-West interaction. Interdisciplinary in outlook, this collection brings together the perspectives of sinology, Japanese and Korean studies, historical studies, literary studies, art history, religious studies, and performance studies. The subjects discussed are manifold and range from missionary accounts, travel reports, letters and trade documents to fictional texts as well as material objects (such as tea, chinaware, or nautical instruments) exchanged between East and West. In order to avoid a Eurocentric perspective, the collection balances approaches from the fields of English literature, Spanish studies, Neo-Latin studies, and art history with those of sinology, Japanese studies, and Korean studies. It includes an introduction mapping out the field of failures in early modern encounters between East Asia and Europe, as well as a theoretically minded essay on the lessons of failure and the ethics of cross-cultural understanding.
Winner of the 2019 Society for Anthropological Sciences Book Prize This book engages with the issue of how culture is incorporated into individuals' lives, a question that has long plagued the social sciences. Starting with a critical overview of the treatment of culture and the individual in anthropology, the author makes the case for adopting a cognitive theory of culture in researching the relationship. The concept of cultural consonance is introduced as a solution and placed in theoretical context. Cultural consonance is defined as the degree to which individuals incorporate into their own beliefs and behaviors the prototypes for belief and behavior encoded in shared cultural models. Dressler examines how this can be measured and what it can reveal, focusing in particular on the field of health. Written in an accessible style by an experienced anthropologist, Culture and the Individual pulls together more than twenty-five years of research and offers valuable insights for students as well as academics in related fields. |
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