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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology > General
In The Rhetorical Presidency, Jeffrey Tulis argues that the president 's relationship to the public has changed dramatically since the Constitution was enacted: while previously the president avoided any discussions of public policy so as to avoid demagoguery, the president is now expected to go directly to the public, using all the tools of rhetoric to influence public policy. This has effectively created a "second" Constitution that has been layered over, and in part contradicts, the original one. In our volume, scholars from different subfields of political science extend Tulis 's perspective to the judiciary and Congress; locate the origins of the constitutional change in the Progressive Era; highlight the role of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the mass media in transforming the presidency; discuss the nature of demagoguery and whether, in fact, rhetoric is undesirable; and relate the rhetorical presidency to the public 's ignorance of the workings of a government more complex than the Founders imagined. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society.
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2019 This book documents and discusses the meaning(s) of the creative process at play in the crafting and staging of circus acts. It highlights the experience of circus artists as their skills develop and mature into public performances that create aesthetic and emotional values in the modern economy of live spectacles. It scrutinizes the meaning that circus acts produce for the spectators and for the artists themselves who live this process from the inside. This is a book for those studying semiotics and wanting to see it applied to a real life milieu in accessible and passionate prose. The Meaning of the Circus is grounded on the personal experience of Professor Paul Bouissac as both a circus entrepreneur and a researcher with decades of primary material on the significance of past and contemporary circus acts. It is based on substantial accounts provided by many men and women who have agreed to share the challenges, joys, and anxieties of their life as artists. Personal and rigorous, it contributes to the hermeneutics of the circus arts by adding existential depth to the production and reception of their performances.
This book provides insights into the emotional dimensions of human mobility. Drawing on findings and theoretical discussions in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, linguistics, migration studies, human geography and political science, the authors offer interdisciplinary perspectives on a highly topical debate, asking how 'emotions' can be conceptualised as a tool to explore human mobility. Emotions and Human Mobility investigates how emotional processes are shaped by migration, and vice versa. To what extent are people s feelings about migration influenced by structural possibilities and constraints such as immigration policies or economic inequality? How do migrants interact emotionally with the people they meet in the receiving countries, and how do they attach to new surroundings? How do they interact with 'the locals', with migrants from other countries, and with migrants from their own homeland? How do they stay in touch with absent kin? The volume focuses on specific cases of migration within Europe, intercontinental mobility, and diasporic dynamics. Critically engaging with the affective turn in the study of migration, Emotions and Human Mobility will be highly relevant to scholars involved in current theoretical debates on human mobility. Providing grounded ethnographic case studies that show how theory arises from concrete historical cases, the book is also highly accessible to students of courses on globalisation, migration, transnationalism and emotion. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Receives accolades by the ICAS 8 Committee 2013 Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail is an ethnographic study of migrants from India's north-east border region living and working in Delhi, the nation's capital. Northeast India borders China, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia. Despite burgeoning interest in the region, little attention is given to the thousands of migrants leaving the region for Indian cities for refuge, work, and study. The stories of Northeast migrants reveal an everyday Northeast India rarely captured elsewhere and offer an alternative view of contemporary India. Northeast migrants covet the employment opportunities created by India's embrace of globalization; shopping malls, restaurants, and call centres. Yet Northeast migrants also experience high levels of racism, harassment, and violence. Far from simply victims of the city, Northeast migrants have created their own 'map' of Delhi, enabling a sense of belonging, albeit an uneasy one. Interdisciplinary in nature, this book will appeal to scholars of anthropology, urban studies, geography, migration, and Asian Studies. Most accessible and captivating work for the non-specialist reader Accolade by the ICAS 8 Reading Committee.
Debates on the meaning of religious belief in an advanced technological age have established the emergence of religion as a fact of daily life. The nineteenth-century imagery of "warfare" between science and religion is long dismissed. Emphasizing this fact of the continuing relevance and importance of religion as a driving force in contemporary life is the stunning emergence on the world scene of militant Muslim beliefs in a period of relatively inactive religious belief elsewhere. In this volume of Culture and Civilization, religion is examined in the context of post-modern societies. The collection of essays is divided by themes: religions, civilizations, cultures, and the history of ideas. The contributors William Donohue, Simon Kuznets, A. L. Kroeber, Greg Mills, Yoani Sanchez, Murray Weidenbaum, Andreas Herberg-Rothe, Daniel Bell, John W. Gardner, John Charles, and Liu Xiaobo's discuss a variety of topics, with titles including "The Catholic Church and Sexual Abuse," "Why is Africa Poor?," "Freedom and Exchange in Communist Cuba," and the "Economic Structure and the Life of the Jews." This volume concludes with a grouping of review essays on famous figures ranging from Crane Brinton and Herbert Spencer to Max Gluckman and Hannah Arendt. The volume as a whole projects a sense of the future and avoids hysteria about the past. The contributors have a sharp edge and speak in a critical voice to the dilemmas of the present world order.
Scholarly studies of Chinese culture, history and society, both within and outside of China, generally pay little attention to leisure, entertainment and amusement, though it has long been known that this aspect of life gives a deep understanding of the psyche and soul, and the hopes and fears, of a person. Leisure is a less coerced-upon, mandatory human conduct than work; certainly leisurely conduct is more voluntary, expressive and creative. But when seen as human behaviour, leisure and entertainment cannot be separated from history, heritage, ethnicity, the community, family and kin, rituals and customs thus a collective activity and its constraints on the person. This book examines a variety of genre of Chinese entertainment, from singing clubs, Cantonese opera and film, to Chinese rock and tourism. Though formally voluntary, Chinese entertainment, when entangled with ethnicity, heritage and history, is ironically a site of both enjoyment and struggle, both pleasure and suffering. This book was originally published as a special issue of Visual Anthropology.
" . . . collected in a single volume, these papers] become a rich case study of an African people's relations with various European agents over more than four centuries." - Choice " . . . a true treasure . . . challenging example of how history and anthropology can be combined in practice . . . such a combination can offer a deeper understanding of present-day issues and tensions." - Africa The Bakweri people of Mount Cameroon, an active volcano on the coast of West Africa a few degrees north of the equator, have had a varied and at times exciting history which has brought them into contact, not only with other West African peoples, but with merchants, missionaries, soldiers and administrators from Portugal, Holland, England, Jamaica, Sweden, Germany and more recently France. Edwin Ardener, the distinguished social anthropologist who spoke their language, wrote a number of studies on the history and culture of the Bakweri Kingdom. Some of the unpublished writings, and some of the published but now out of print materials are here brought together for the first time. The book covers the early contacts with the Portuguese and Dutch from the sixteenth century, the arrival of the missionaries in the nineteenth century, the dramatic defeat of the first German punitive expedition, the subsequent establishment by the Germans of the plantation system, and the British Trusteeship period until independence in 1961 as part of the Federal Republic of Cameroon.
What is creative in kinship? How are people connected to places? James Leach answers these questions through formulating "creativity" as an integral part of kinship on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. The book contains a new critique of the genealogical model of kinship, suggesting that this model prevents us from grasping the way generative relations, including those to land and place, constitute persons on the Rai Coast. Analytic attention is focused upon the life cycle, marriage, exchange and artistic production as the activities in which substantial connection is generated. The argument, made in relation to detailed ethnography, yields a fresh perspective on the connections people trace to each other.
This book first published in 1973 offers a broad survey of the study of symbolic ideas and behaviour. The study of symbolism is popular nowadays and anthropologists have made substantial contributions to it. Raymond Firth has long been internationally known for his field research in the Solomons and Malaysia, and for his theoretical work on kinship, economics and religion. Here from a new angle, he has produced a broad survey of the study of symbolic ideas and behaviour. Professor Firth examines definitions of symbol. He traces the history of scientific inquiry into the symbolism of religious cults, mythology and dreams back into the eighteenth century. He compares some modern approaches to symbolism in art, literature and philosophy with those in social anthropology. He then cites examples in anthropological treatment of symbolic material from cultures of varying sophistication. Finally he offers dispassionate analyses of symbols used in contemporary Western situations - from hair-styles to the use and abuse of national flags; from cults of Black Jesus to the Eucharistic rite. In all this Professor Firth combines social and political topicality with a scholarly and provocative theoretical inquiry.
The building of human towers (castells) is a centuries-old competitive practice where hundreds of men, women, and children gather in Catalan squares to create breathtaking edifices through a feat of collective athleticism. The result is a great spectacle of suffering and overcoming, tension and release. Catalonia's Human Towers is an ethnographic look at the thriving castells practice—a symbol of Catalan cultural heritage and identity amid debates around autonomy versus subsummation by the Spanish state. While the main function of building castells is to grow community through a low-cost, intergenerational, and inclusive leisure activity, Mariann Vaczi reveals that this unique sport also provides a social base, image, and vocabulary for the pro-independence movement. Highlighting the intersection of folklore, performance, and self-determination, Catalonia's Human Towers captures the subtle and unconscious processes by which the body becomes politicized and ideology becomes embodied, with all the risks and precarities of collective constructions.
In this comparative, international study Marilena Alivizatou investigates the relationship between museums and the new concept of "intangible heritage." She charts the rise of intangible heritage within the global sphere of UN cultural policy and explores its implications both in terms of international politics and with regard to museological practice and critical theory. Using a grounded ethnographic methodology, Alivizatou examines intangible heritage in the local complexities of museum and heritage work in Oceania, the Americas and Europe. This multi-sited, cross-cultural approach highlights key challenges currently faced by cultural institutions worldwide in understanding and presenting this form of heritage.
I. C. Jarvie was trained as a social anthropologist in the center of British social anthropology - the London School of Economics, where Bronislaw Malinowski was the object of ancestor worship. Jarvie's doctorate was in philosophy, however, under the guidance of Karl Popper and John Watkins. He changed his department not as a defector but as a rebel, attempting to exorcize the ancestral spirit. He criticized the method of participant obser vation not as useless but as not comprehensive: it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the making of certain contributions to anthropology; rather, it all depends on the problem-situation. And so Jarvie remained an anthro pologist at heart, who, in addition to some studies in rather conventional anthropological or sociological molds, also studied the tribe of social scien tists, but also critically examining their problems - especially their overall, rather philosophical problems, but not always so: a few of the studies in cluded in this volume exemplify his work on specific issues, whether of technology, or architecture, or nationalism in the academy, or moviemaking, or even movies exhibiting excessive sex and violence. These studies attract his attention both on account of their own merit and on account of their need for new and powerful research tools, such as those which he has forged in his own intellectual workshop over the last two decades."
This collection of papers discusses the impact of diasporas on the articulations and practices of legal, political, cultural and social citizenship in their country of origin. While the majority of current citizenship debates focus on the challenges and directions in which diasporic and migrant communities impact on the citizenship regime in their country of settlement, the papers in this volume approach the study of citizenship from the perspective of the link between the sending state and its diasporic communities abroad. The papers discuss the role of language, religion, kinship, and other ethnic markers in diaspora politics and trace their implications for the articulations and practices of citizenship. Through discussing cases across political and geographical spectrums, and from different historical epochs the book broadens and enriches the debate on citizenship by demonstrating important ways in which diasporas impact on the delineation of citizenship regimes and the politics of national identity in their homeland. This links to the continued use of language as an ethnic marker, but also one which may be learned, allowing a certain degree of choice and shifting affiliations amongst putative members of a diaspora. This book was published as a special issue of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.
This volume explores the myriad manifestations, tropes and experiences of power' in contemporary Southeast Asia. The contributors address the surprising absence of direct scholarly engagement with the theme of power' in Southeast Asia given innumerable social, political and economic transformations of the region over the last half-century. The rise of postcolonial nation-states, industrialization, rapid economic growth, widespread repression and genocide, social upheaval and democratization are just some of the currents that have wrought far reaching changes across Southeast Asia. Power lies at the core of these important developments, whether in the form of brute military force or as a more capillary disciplinary' influence on religious and political subjectivities. New religious, economic and political movements -- all drawing deeply on local traditions while proposing new forms of personhood, civil and political society -- cut across national, cultural, ideological and sectarian boundaries. Yet for all that power can be detected in the region, there seems to be little specifically Southeast Asian about contemporary scholarly analyses. Integrating theoretical debates with empirical evidence drawn from the contributing authors' own research, this volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of anthropology and Asian Studies.
Katie Wright explores how human wellbeing is constructed and how it 'travels' across spatial boundaries. She draws on empirical research, undertaken with Peruvian migrants based in London and Madrid and their Peru-based relatives and close friends to explore how human wellbeing is constructed and how it 'travels' transnationally.
To Know the Soul of a People is a history of religion and race in the agricultural South before the Civil Rights era. Jamil W. Drake chronicles a cadre of social scientists who studied the living conditions of black rural communities, revealing the abject poverty of the Jim Crow south. These university-affiliated social scientists documented shotgun houses, unsanitary privies and contaminated water, scaly hands, enlarged stomachs, and malnourished bodies. However, they also turned their attention to the spiritual possessions, chanted sermons, ecstatic singing, conjuration, dreams and visions, fortune-telling, taboos, and other religious cultures of these communities. These scholars aimed to illuminate the impoverished conditions of their subjects for philanthropic and governmental organizations, as well as the broader American public, in the first half of the 20th century, especially during the Great Depression. Religion was integral to their efforts to chart the long economic depression across the South. From 1924 to 1941, Charles Johnson, Guy Johnson, Allison Davis, Lewis Jones, and other social scientists framed the religious and cultural practices of the black communities as "folk" practices, aiming to reform them and the broader South. Drawing on their correspondence, fieldnotes, and monographs, Drake shows that social scientists' use of "folk" reveals the religion was an important site for highlighting the supposed mental, moral, and cultural deficits of America's so-called folk population. Moreover, these social scientists did not just pioneer rural social science and reform but used their study of religion to plant the seeds of the concept that would become known as the "culture of poverty" in the latter half of the twentieth century. To Know the Soul of a People is an exciting intellectual history that invites us to explore the knowledge that animated the earnest yet shortsighted liberal efforts to reform black and impoverished communities.
First published in 1967, this book gives some of the fruits of the author's study of Tikopia ways of thought as the result of three field expeditions. Most Polynesians became Christians more than a century ago but Tikopia had a substantial pagan population until quite recent years. This book of essays describes rites and beliefs of a people who still maintained their traditional institutions remote from civilization. Studies of totemism, of magic and of beliefs in the fate of the soul in the afterworld, not only throw new light on Polynesian attitudes but also contribute some novel ideas to the interpretation of standard theoretical problems in social anthropology. Studies of rumour, suicide, and a new essay on spirit mediumship, also provide links between social anthropology and psychology. A general review based on the author's visit in 1966 describes the modern position after the adoption of Christianity.
Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in constructions of identity, particularly in relation to different forms of travel such as tourism, migration and pilgrimage, and the social, cultural and experiential landscapes associated with these and other mobilities. The ritual, performative and embodied geographies of borderzones, non-places, transitional spaces, or 'spaces in-between' are often discussed in terms of the liminal, yet there have been few attempts to problematize the concept, or to rethink how ideas of the liminal might find critical resonance with contemporary developments in the study of place, space and mobility. Liminal Landscapes fills this void by bringing together variety of new and emerging methodological approaches of liminality from varying disciplines to explore new theoretical perspectives on mobility, space and socio-cultural experience. By doing so, it offers new insight into contemporary questions about technology, surveillance, power, the city, and post-industrial modernity within the context of tourism and mobility. The book draws on a wide range of disciplinary approaches, including social anthropology, cultural geography, film, media and cultural studies, art and visual culture, and tourism studies. It brings together recent research from scholars with international reputations in the fields of tourism, mobility, landscape and place, alongside the work of emergent scholars who are developing new insights and perspectives in this area. This timely intervention is the first collection to offer an interdisciplinary account of the intersection between liminality and landscape in terms of space, place and identity. It therefore charts new directions in the study of liminal spaces and mobility practices and will be valuable reading for range of students, researchers and academics interested in this field.
Based on the author's extensive fieldwork among the Akha people prior to full nation-state integration, this illuminating study critically re-examines assumptions about space, power, and the politics of identity, so often based on modern, western contexts. Tooker explores the active role that spatial practices (and their indigenous link to a 'life force') have played in maintaining cultural autonomy in an historically migratory, multiethnic context. Space and the Production of Cultural Difference Among the Akha Prior to Globalization: Channeling the Flow of Life expands current debates about power relations in the region from a mostly political and economic framework into the domains of ritual, cosmology, and indigenous meaning and social systems.
Twenty percent of Palestinians-1.57 million Israeli citizens and over seven hundred thousand exiles and immigrants around the world-live in Europe and the Americas, participating daily in languages and cultures other than Arabic. The dispersion of Palestinians and the consequent diversity of experiences running through three generations since the Nabka of 1948 have significantly dispelled a sense of cultural homogeneity. This cultural diversification is powerfully reflected in literature as an increasing number of Palestinians are writing in Hebrew, English, Spanish, Italian, and Danish, among other languages. In Being There, Being Here, Ebileeni calls for a renewed definition of Palestinian writing, one that includes Anglophone, Nordic, Latinate, and Hebrew language literary works into the national canon. The relevance of studying Palestinian writings composed in languages other than Arabic is grounded in the tension between the idea of remaining loyal to a more-or-less fixed national narrative and the desire to understand the ongoing lingual and cultural proliferations of the Palestinian story. The concept of "homeland" remains inextricable to Palestinian experiences notwithstanding generation and location, but, it may not necessarily connote to the notion of home for those who were born and raised in the West. Although most of the works discussed here are steeped in the historic injustices committed against Palestinians, Ebileeni's intention is to unsettle this foundation for the purpose of yielding a richer and fuller understanding of Palestinian literary texts.
This book throws light on ideologies, practices and sociocultural developments currently shaping language use in Japan by departing from the more common investigation of language in private contexts and examining aspects of the language found in a range of significant public spaces, from the material (an international airport, the streets of Tokyo, the JSL classroom in Japan and courtrooms) to the electronic (television dramas, local government web pages and cyberspace). Through its study of the language encountered in such settings, the volume provides a deeper understanding of multifaceted aspects of linguistic diversity, both in terms of the use of languages other than Japanese and of issues relating to the Japanese language itself. The variety of theoretical approaches brought to bear by contributing authors ensures a substantial intellectual contribution to the literature on language in contemporary Japan. This book was published as a special issue of Japanese Studies.
The 1880s were a critical time in Cameroon. A German warship arrived in the Douala estuary and proclaimed Cameroon a protectorate. At that time, two Swedes, Knutson and Waldau, were living on the upper slopes of the Cameroon Mountain. Very little is known about their activities. One, Knutson, wrote a long memoir of his time in Cameroon (1883-1895) which is published here for the first time. It gives fascinating insights into everyday life in Cameroon and into the multifaceted relationships among the various Europeans, and between them and the Africans, at the end of the 19th century; we learn about the Swedes' quarrels first with the Germans and later with the British, over land purchases, thus revealing the origins of long on-going disputes over Bakweri lands. We are given vivid descriptions of Bakweri notables and their, and the Europeans', cultural practices, a rare eye-witness account of the sasswood witchcraft ordeal, and learn about Knutson's friendships with slaves. Together with appended contemporary correspondence, legal opinions, and early (translated) texts, this memoir must be considered as a unique and invaluable primary source for the pre-colonial history of Cameroon.
From childcare to healthcare to provision for the elderly and the homeless, the Nordic countries are world leaders in organising society - no wonder Finland has been ranked among the happiest places on the planet. In The Nordic Theory of Everything, Finnish journalist and US immigrant Anu Partanen sets out to understand why America - and much of the Western world - suffers from such stark inequality and struggling social services. Filled with fascinating insights, advice and practical solutions, she makes a convincing argument that we can rebuild society, rekindle optimism and become more autonomous citizens by following in the footsteps of our neighbours to the North.
Trust is a central feature of relationships within the Mafia, oppressed minorities, kin groups everywhere, among dissidents, nationalist freedom fighters, ethnic tourists, ethnic middlemen, exchange networks of Kalahari Bushmen, and families subjected to Stalinist social control. Each of these types of trust is examined by a leading scholar and compared with the expectations of neo-Darwinian theory, in particular the theories of kin selection and ethnic nepotism. The result is a fascinating, theoretically focused yet empirically eclectic contribution to the overlapping fields of human ethnology, evolutionary psychology, and bio-politics. The common thread uniting these diverse phenomena is a trusting relationship predicated on altruism. Chapters examine the strengths and limits of human trust under various stressers and temptations to defect. By exploring the relationship between kin and ethnic altruism and showing its sensitivity to culture, Risky Transactions recasts the evolutionary approach to ethnicity as a blend of primordial and instrumental factors.
The 1880s were a critical time in Cameroon. A German warship arrived in the Douala estuary and proclaimed Cameroon a protectorate. At that time, two Swedes, Knutson and Waldau, were living on the upper slopes of the Cameroon Mountain. Very little is known about their activities. One, Knutson, wrote a long memoir of his time in Cameroon (1883-1895) which is published here for the first time. It gives fascinating insights into everyday life in Cameroon and into the multifaceted relationships among the various Europeans, and between them and the Africans, at the end of the 19th century; we learn about the Swedes' quarrels first with the Germans and later with the British, over land purchases, thus revealing the origins of long on-going disputes over Bakweri lands. We are given vivid descriptions of Bakweri notables and their, and the Europeans', cultural practices, a rare eye-witness account of the sasswood witchcraft ordeal, and learn about Knutson's friendships with slaves. Together with appended contemporary correspondence, legal opinions, and early (translated) texts, this memoir must be considered as a unique and invaluable primary source for the pre-colonial history of Cameroon. |
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