A murderous whirlwind, an evil child-abducting witch-woman, a masked cannibal, terrifying scalped men, a mysterious man-slaying flint creature: the oral tradition of the Caddoan Indians is alive with monsters. Whereas Western historical methods and interpretations relegate such beings to the realms of myth and fantasy, Mark van de Logt argues in Monsters of Contact that creatures found in the stories of the Caddos, Wichitas, Pawnees, and Arikaras actually embody specific historical events and the negative effects of European contact: invasion, war, death, disease, enslavement, starvation, and colonialism. Van de Logt examines specific sites of historical interaction between American Indians and Europeans, from the outbreaks and effect of smallpox epidemics on the Arikaras, to the violence and enslavement Caddos faced at the hands of Hernando de Soto's expedition, and Wichita encounters with Spanish missionaries and French traders in Texas. In each case he explains how, through Indian metaphor, seemingly unrelated stories of supernatural beings and occurrences translate into real people and events that figure prominently in western U.S. history. The result is a peeling away of layers of cultural values that, for those invested in Western historical traditions, otherwise obscure the meaning of such tales and their ""monsters."" Although Western historical methods have become the standard in much of the world, van de Logt demonstrates that indigenous forms of history are no less valuable, and that oral traditions and myths can be useful sources of historical information. A daring interpretation of Caddoan lore, Monsters of Contact puts oral traditions at the center of historical inquiry and, in so doing, asks us to reconsider what makes a monster.

This book discusses the legal thought of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), undoubtedly one of the titans of social sciences who greatly influenced not only the shape of modern cultural anthropology but also the social sciences as a whole. This is the first comprehensive work to focus on his legal conceptions: while much has been written about his views on language, magic, religion, and culture, his views on law have not been fairly reconstructed or recapitulated. A glance at the existing literature illustrates how little has been written about Malinowski's understanding of law, especially in the legal sciences. This becomes even more evident given the fact that Malinowski devoted much of his scholarly work to studying law, especially in the last period of his life, during which he conducted broad research on law and "primitive jurisprudence". The main aim of this book is to address this gap and to present in detail Malinowski's thoughts on law. The book is divided into two parts. Part I focuses largely on the impact that works of two distinguished professors from his alma mater (L. Dargun and S. Estreicher) had on Malinowski's legal thoughts, while Part II reconstructs Malinowski's inclusive, broad and multidimensional understanding of law and provides new readings of his legal conceptions mainly from the perspective of reciprocity. The book offers a fresh look at his views on law, paving the way for further studies on legal issues inspired by his methodological and theoretical achievements. Malinowski's understanding of law provides a wealth of fodder from which to formulate interesting research questions and a solid foundation for developing theories that more accurately describe and explain how law functions, based on new findings in the social and natural sciences.

This text provides an overview of the sociology of change and transition, exploring how global transformation processes impact on everyday life by examining a number of 'hot spots' of change in contemporary society: the city, the workplace, patterns of consumption, politics, broader areas and the environment. It engages with a range of theories and concepts, in order to investigate the interplay of continuity and change in contemporary society, and assesses their usefulness. It also speculates on the shape of emerging social orders.

..". a good book ... clearly written ... that raises a number of important general issues relevant to the contemporary political, cultural and economic struggles of indigenous peoples of the Amazon and elsewhere." - Terence Turner, Cornell University Like many other indigenous groups, the Huaorani of eastern Ecuador are facing many challenges as they attempt to confront the globalization of capitalism in the 21st century. In 1991, they formed a political organization as a direct response to the growing threat to Huaorani territory posed by oil exploitation, colonization, and other pressures. The author explores the structures and practices of the organization, as well as the contradictions created by the imposition of an alien and hierarchical organizational form on a traditionally egalitarian society. This study has broad implications for those who work toward "cultural survival" or try to "save the rainforest." A native of Pennsylvania, Lawrence Ziegler-Otero teaches in the Department of Anthropology at SUNY Plattsburgh. After a "first career" as a trade union organizer in the United States, he became an anthroplogist in order to study political, labor and indigenous organizations. He has also lived and worked in Ecuador and Puerto Rico.

This book compares understandings and experiences of love and intimacy of one distinct cultural group - Gujarati Indians - born and brought up in two different countries. Using in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with middle-class Gujaratis aged between 20 and 30 years of age, it explores their relationship ideals and early experiences of marriage formation. It shows how discourses on what it means to be modern have interacted with pervasive ongoing status ideologies in both the UK and India.

This collection of fifteen essays, selected from papers presented at the April 1981 Citadel Conference on the South, examines three of the most powerful operating forces in southern life: race, class, and folk culture. The Southern Enigma, representing the work of both established and emerging scholars, reflects the most recent historical analyses of southern history.

"Edith and Victor Turner were among the most influential researchers and teachers and social and cultural anthropology in the twentieth century. Together they, and Edie alone after Vic's death, raised the idea of participant observation (and indeed of team learning) to heights and depth most anthropologists never achieve." [From the Foreword] This fascinating memoir is a lively testimony to a remarkable partnership and to Edie Turner's own achievements during more than two decades after Victor's untimely death.

"The book accomplishes admirably its stated aim, namely 'to highlight and critically examine the fundamental features of the extended-case method, in order to advance its substantial, continuing merits'. Its editors and chapter contributors demonstrate that the extended-case method is more than a 'method', it is a sophisticated mode of research and analysis arising from the long-standing political, institutional and epistemological concerns of Gluckman and his students...This book is a timely addition to the ongoing rethinking of practice theory after Bourdieu. With its ethnographic grounding, attention to situated process, and stress on the latent potentialities of social interaction for the structuring of social life (cf. Giddens 1984), the renewal of this social anthropological tradition signaled by the present study has much to offer cultural anthropologists in the United States and elsewhere." . Ethnos ... Everyone will welcome this renewal of the extended case / situational analysis approach. Recovering the original reasons for doing things that one otherwise takes for granted not only recovers an earlier richness and generosity of intellect but makes for a very spirited and reinvigorating contemporary exercise....this is an important enterprise in charting the development of anthropology, and indeed social science more broadly. . Marilyn Strathern, DBE, FBA, University of Cambridge

"One strength of Carrier's book is the way he charts these debates, showing how they were symptomatic of a wider struggle over national memory. Another great strength of this book is its thorough and informative knowledge of theoretical literature on memory and memorials, a knowledge which Carrier - to his enormous credit - does not simply parade before us but actually applies to the objects of his study...a superb book."- European History Quarterly

" Carrier] argues convincingly that what really matters about these memorials is not so much the finished product as the social and political context in which they were mooted, conceived and built - and the empirical context in which they are subsequently interpreted... Another great strength of this book is its thorough and informative knowledge of theoretical literature on memory and memorials. - European History

"Carrier's analysis of the form and the multidimensional meaning of the monuments is insightful. One of the most important contributions of this book is its argument that sites of memory produce not only social consensus but also dialogue and competition between the victims." - German History

Since 1989, two sites of memory with respect to the deportation and persecution of Jews in France and Germany during the Second World War have received intense public attention: the Velo d'Hiver (Winter Velodrome) in Paris and the Monument for the Murdered Jews of Europe or Holocaust Monument in Berlin. Why is this so? Both monuments, the author argues, are unique in the history of memorial projects. Although they are genuine "sites of memory," neither monument celebrates history, but rather serve as platforms for the deliberation, negotiation and promotion of social consensus over the memorial status of war crimes in France and Germany. The debates over these monuments indicate that it is the communication among members of the public via the mass media, rather than qualities inherent in the sites themselves, which transformed these sites into symbols beyond traditional conceptions of heritage and patriotism.

This book develops a philosophical conception of human rights that responds satisfactorily to the challenges raised by cultural and political critics of human rights, who contend that the contemporary human rights movement is promoting an imperialist ideology, and that the humanitarian intervention for protecting human rights is a neo-colonialism. These claims affect the normativity and effectiveness of human rights; that is why they have to be taken seriously. At the same time, the same philosophical account dismisses the imperialist crusaders who support the imperialistic use of human rights by the West to advance liberal culture. Thus, after elaborating and exposing these criticisms, the book confronts them to the human rights theories of John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, in order to see whether they can be addressed. Unfortunately, they are not. Therefore, having shown that these two philosophical accounts of human rights do not respond convincingly to those the postco lonial challenges, the book provides an alternative conception that draws the understanding of human rights from local practices. It is a multilayer conception which is not centered on state, but rather integrates it in a larger web of actors involved in shaping the practice and meaning of human rights. Confronted to the challenges, this new conception offers a promising way for addressing them satisfactorily, and it even sheds new light to the classical questions of universality of human rights, as well as the tension between universalism and relativism.

Brazilian Bodies, and their Choreographies of Identification retraces the presence of a particular way of swaying the body that, in Brazil, is commonly known as ginga . Cristina Rosa its presence across distinct and specific realms: samba-de-roda (samba-in-a-circle) dances, capoeira angola games, and the repertoire of Grupo Corpo.

Dreams seem the most private territory of experience. Yet Dreaming Culture argues they are a space in which we practice, consider, question, and adapt cultural models of the self, gender, sexuality, relationships, and agency. Through an innovative "dream ethnography" from college students in the northwestern U.S., this book contributes to recent research on dreaming and the brain in psychology and continuing research on dreaming and the self in clinical psychology and psychological anthropology. Dreaming Culture uses critical theory to understand power relations embedded in cultural models, a perspective often lacking in cognitive anthropology and in psychological studies of self and mind.

Educational provision for nomadic peoples is a highly complex, as well as controversial and emotive, issue. For centuries, nomadic peoples educated their children by passing on from generation to generation the socio-cultural and economic knowledge required to pursue their traditional occupations. But over the last few decades, nomadic peoples have had to contend with rapid changes to their ways of life, often as a consequence of global patterns of development that are highly unsympathetic to spatially mobile groups. The need to provide modern education for nomadic groups is evident and urgent to all those concerned with achieving Education For All; yet how they can be included is highly controversial. This volume provides a series of international case studies, prefaced by a comprehensive literature review and concluding with an end note drawing themes together, that sets out key issues in relation to educational services for nomadic groups around the world.

For several years now, the concepts of 'civil culture' and 'civil society' have been widely discussed in the social sciences. Theoretically innovative and empirically rich, this volume is one of few studies that offer solid and focused ethnographic research on how the tenets and assumptions of civil culture are inculcated in schools. The authors examined school curricula, texts and pedagogical practices, observed daily interaction within the schools and outside, and conducted numerous interviews and discussion groups. The experience of students from Turkish backgrounds in the four countries was given special attention, thus offering valuable insights into the changing dynamics of nation-state civil cultures in multicultural societies.

"These excellent books enrich our understanding of immediate return societies and the persistence of immediate-return arrangements in delayed-return societies. I was reflecting recently that anthropologists have not given sufficient attention to Woodburn's theoretical framework. These contributions go a long way towards filling that gap." . Jerome Rousseau in Anthropological Forum

The ethnography of egalitarian social systems was first met with sheer disbelief. Today it is still hotly debated in a number of fields and has gained sophistication as well as momentum. This collection of essays on "property and equality" acknowledges this diversification by presenting research results in two complementary volumes. They bring together a wide range of authoritative researchers most of whom have worked with hunter-gatherer groups. These two volumes cover existing ethnographic and theoretical ground while maintaining a clear focus on the relation between property and equality. The book consists of the most recent work of prominent members of the original group of researchers in hunter-gatherer studies among them James Woodburn and Richard Lee, and very recent ethnography on hunter-gatherers and other egalitarian systems.

The ethnography of egalitarian social systems was first met with sheer disbelief. Today it is still hotly debated in a number of fields and has gained sophistication as well as momentum. This collection of essays on "property and equality" acknowledges this diversification by presenting research results in two complementary volumes. They bring together a wide range of authoritative researchers most of whom have worked with hunter-gatherer groups. These two volumes cover existing ethnographic and theoretical ground while maintaining a clear focus on the relation between property and equality. The book consists of the most recent work of prominent members of the original group of researchers in hunter-gatherer studies among them James Woodburn and Richard Lee, and very recent ethnography on hunter-gatherers and other egalitarian systems.

Ever since Darwin, scholars have noted that cultural entities such as languages, laws, firms and theories seem to 'evolve' through sequences of variation, selection and replication, in many ways just like living organisms. These essays consider whether this comparison is 'just a metaphor', or whether modern evolutionary theory can help us to understand the dynamics of different cultural domains.

The 'evolutionary paradigm of rationality' has a significant role to play throughout the human sciences, but raises complex issues in every cultural context where it is applied. By fostering discussion between scholars from a wide range of research traditions, this volume aims to influence the evolution of all of them.

Issues of the construction of Self and Other, normally in the context of social exclusion of those perceived as different, have assumed a new urgency. This collection offers a fresh perspective on the ongoing debates on these questions in the social sciences and the humanities by focusing specifically on one theoretical proposition, namely, that the seemingly universal processes of identity formation and exclusion of the 'other' can be differentiated according to three modalities. All contributors directly engage with rigorous empirical testing and theoretical cross-examination of this proposition. Their results have direct implications not only for a more differentiated understanding of collective identities, but also for a better understanding of extreme collective violence and genocide.

This book is about silence and power and how they interact. It argues that only by studying how silence works-how it is implicated in the construction of meaning-can we arrive at the elusive roots of power in all its dimensions. Silence becomes the currency of power by delineating the margins or what we perceive and through a sleight of hand wherein behaviors undertaken in the service of self-interest appear instead as inevitable and devoid of human agency. The theoretical load of this argument is carried by vivid ethnographic material dealing with music, linguistic behavior, racial conflicts, work dislocations, and the construction of anthropological subjects and texts.

Maria-Luisa Achino-Loeb, PhD, teaches at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Studies where she continues to develop courses on silence. She has done research with Waldensians and other minorities within religious groups. Her work has been published in journals such as American Anthropologist and Theory in Psychology, among others. She currently co-chairs the Advisory Council of the Anthropology Section, New York Academy of Sciences.

Focusing on contemporary Tibetan Buddhist revivals in the Tibetan regions of the Sichuan and Qinghai Provinces in China, this book explores the intricate entanglements of the Buddhist revivals with cultural identity, state ideology, and popular imagination of Tibetan Buddhist spirituality in contemporary China. In turn, the author explores the broader socio-cultural implications of such revivals. Based on detailed cross-regional ethnographic work, the book demonstrates that the revival of Tibetan Buddhism in contemporary China is intimately bound with both the affirming and negating forces of globalization, modernity, and politics of religion, indigenous identity reclamation, and the market economy. The analysis highlights the multidimensionality of Tibetan Buddhism in relation to different religious, cultural, and political constituencies of China. By recognizing the greater contexts of China's politics of religion and of the global status of Tibetan Buddhism, this book presents an argument that the revival of Tibetan Buddhism is not an isolated event limited merely to Tibetan regions; instead, it is a result of the intersection of both local and global transformative changes. The book is a useful contribution to students and scholars of Asian religion and Chinese studies.

The powerful individualist and subjectivist turn in anthropology - a turn that cannot be easily separated from larger political processes of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism - is one factor resulting in notions of the social and of society as becoming little else than empty shells of small or no analytical value. The essays presented here, all by leading anthropologists, take a variety of positions on the matter of the retreat of the social. All demonstrate that if anthropology and other social sciences are to fulfill the task of a critical understanding of the diverse realities in which we all must live, these disciplines will find it impossible to so do without a strong concept of the social.

."a timely book that.sets a standard for a new field of study and therefore deserves to be read widely. the volume's] contributions contain fascinating material for further study." . International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter "Steven Brown and Ulrik Volgsten haveput together a valuable collection of essays on a consistently interesting theme. The book constitutes an important resource for the future development of this theme." . Music Perception ."fascinating and challenging.this book, illustrates the diversity, the depth and the potential of the field of the sociology of music. As much as these texts enlighten, they also highlight the vastness of the research yet to be conducted. However, this book is far more than just a compilation of papers presented at a conference, they are relevant discussions to anybody who turns on the radio, purchases or downloads a record or even sings a lullaby." . Leonardo Digital Reviews Since the beginning of human civilization, music has been used as a device to control social behavior, where it has operated as much to promote solidarity within groups as hostility between competing groups. Music is an emotive manipulator that influences attitude, motivation and behavior at many levels and in many contexts. This volume is the first to address the social ramifications of music's behaviorally manipulative effects, its morally questionable uses and control mechanisms, and its economic and artistic regulation through commercialization, thus highlighting not only music's diverse uses at the social level but also the ever-fragile relationship between aesthetics and morality. Steven Brown is a researcher in cognitive neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He received his doctorate at Columbia University in New York, and has done research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. His research deals with the neural basis of human communication, including the arts. Ulrik Volgsten is a research fellow in the Department of Culture, Aesthetics and Media at Goteborg University in Sweden. He received his doctorate in the Department of Musicology at Stockholm University, and has published papers on both musical and philosophical topics. Volgsten's multidisciplinary research mainly focuses on human communication in different medi

Offering a rich ethnographic account, this book traces the historical processes by which Andalusians experienced the shift from being poor emigrants to northern Europe to becoming privileged citizens of the southern borderland of the European Union, a region where thousands of African immigrants have come in search of a better life. It draws on extended ethnographic fieldwork in Granada and Senegal, exploring the shifting, complementary and yet antagonistic relations between Spaniards and African immigrants in the Andalusian agrarian work place. The author's findings challenge the assumption of fixed national, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries vis-a-vis outside migration in core countries, showing how legal and cultural identities of Andalusians are constructed together with that of immigrants. Liliana Suarez-Navaz is Professor in the Social Anthropology Department at Autonoma University of Madrid.