The contributors assess to what extent regional organizations in Europe and Latin America provide a space for the regulation and provision of social policies in the area of social protection, higher education and health. They analyse the impact of regional organizations on social citizenship following political struggle and contestation.

Of all the things we do and say, most will never be repeated or reproduced. Once in a while, however, an idea or a practice generates a chain of transmission that covers more distance through space and time than any individual person ever could. What makes such transmission chains possible? For two centuries, the dominant view (from psychology to anthropology) was that humans owe their cultural prosperity to their powers of imitation. In this view, modern cultures exist because the people who carry them are gifted at remembering, storing and reproducing information. How Traditions Live and Die proposes an alternative to this standard view. What makes traditions live is not a general-purpose imitation capacity. Cultural transmission is partial, selective, often unfaithful. Some traditions live on in spite of this, because they tap into widespread and basic cognitive preferences. These attractive traditions spread, not by being better retained or more accurately transferred, but because they are transmitted over and over. This theory is used to shed light on various puzzles of cultural change (from the distribution of bird songs to the staying power of children's rhymes) and to explain the special relation that links the human species to its cultures. Morin combines recent work in cognitive anthropology with new advances in quantitative cultural history, to map and predict the diffusion of traditions. This book is both an introduction and an accessible alternative to contemporary theories of cultural evolution.

Just like Scheherazade, undercover agents talk to save their lives. If they put in a poor performance, they don't see the curtain rise again. ART OF DARKNESS pries open the virtuoso identity techniques practiced by undercover operatives, fugitives, disguise artists, pranksters, con artists, and federally protected witnesses. It draws on original interviews with undercover operators in order to show how identity artists on both sides of the law obtain fake ID, develop a disguise, build a cover story, maintain believability in street performances, and deal with threats to their identities-all without formal acting training. ART OF DARKNESS inhabits the grey areas of morality as it exposes identity roleplays at the borders of lawfulness. In it you'll find stories of: law-enforcement workers who adopt the techniques of criminals in order to catch them but somehow get caught up in their own trick identities; self-defined artists whose work also has a criminal dimension; criminal informants who masterfully play sides and roles against each other; and hoaxsters and impersonators who may perform trick identities primarily for gain but do so with tremendous inventiveness and a directorial consciousness. This book may explode any remaining notion you harbor that you are not at some level a member of the intelligence community, discerning who is "for real" and who is presenting a self for personal gain.

Since Vietnam introduced economic reforms in the mid-1980s, domestic service has become an established sector of the labour market, and domestic workers have become indispensable to urban life in the rapidly changing country. This book analyzes the ways in which the practices and discourses of domestic service serve to forge and contest emerging class identities in post-reform Vietnam. Drawing on a rich and diverse range of qualitative data, including ethnographies, interviews, and narratives, it shows that such practices and discourses are rooted in cultural notions of gender and rural-urban difference and enduring socialist structures of feeling, which, in turn, clash with the realities of growing differentiation. Domestic workers' experiences reveal negotiations with class boundaries actively set by the urban middle class, who seek distinction through emerging notions and practices of domesticity. These boundaries are nevertheless riddled with gender and class anxiety on the side of the latter, partly because of the very struggles and contestations of the domestic workers. More broadly, Minh T. N. Nguyen links the often invisible intimate dynamics of class formation in the domestic sphere with wider political economic processes in a post-socialist country embarking on marketization while retaining the political control of a party-state. As a pioneering ethnographic study of domestic service in Vietnam today, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Southeast Asian culture & society, social anthropology, gender studies, human geography and development studies.

As the world changes, so sexual identities are changing. In a context of globalisation, mass communication and technological advances, individuals find themselves able to make lifestyle choices in new and different ways. In this increasingly confusing world, sociologists have argued that identities are in flux, and that traditional patterns of identity and intimacy are being disrupted and reshaped, with all the implications for sexual identities that this suggests. Changing Gay Male Identities draws on the powerful life stories of twenty-one gay men to explore how individuals construct and maintain their sense of self in contemporary society. The book draws upon theoretical debates on topics such as gender, performance, sex, class, camp, race and ethnicity, to explore four aspects of identity: the role of the body in who we are relationships and communities performing in everyday life reconciling different aspects of our selves (such as religion and sexuality). In Changing Gay Male Identities Andrew Cooper assesses the magnitude of these social and sexual changes. He argues that although there are many opportunities for new forms of identity in a changing world, the possibilities can be significantly constrained, and that this has major implications for the freedoms and choices of individuals in contemporary societies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, sexuality studies, gender studies, and GLBTQ studies.

This book presents accounts of fieldwork conducted in French Louisiana by anthropologists and folklorists between the 1970s and 2000 and looks at the personal, ethical, political, and scientific issues researchers need to confront and resolve when they attempt to explain a modern complex culture by using the traditional tools and methods of anthropology, participant observation, and interviews.

The study casts a critical look at the core anthropological concepts of field, informants, and knowledge. In line with the ongoing reassessment of these concepts, it proposes that the field, identities, and knowledge acquired through research are not set, given entities but rather are a matter of construction. It shows how the personal profiles of the researchers (native or outsider, activist or academic, man or woman, black or white) contribute to frame the research. It illustrates the shifting of these identities during and after the research in response to personal, relational, and political circumstances. It also considers the application of the knowledge derived from research in the fields of tourism, cultural activism, and language policy in the context of the cultural renaissance experienced by Cajuns and Creoles over the past decades.

The promotion of an enterprise culture and entrepreneurship in India in recent decades has had far-reaching implications beyond the economy, and transformed social and cultural attitudes and conduct. This book brings together pioneering research on the nature of India's enterprise culture, covering a range of different themes: workplace, education, religion, trade, films, media, youth identity, gender relations, class formation and urban politics. Based on extensive empirical and ethnographic research by the contributors, the book shows the myriad manifestations of enterprise culture and the making of the aspiring, enterprising-self in public culture, social practice, and personal lives, ranging from attempts to construct hegemonic ideas in public discourse, to appropriation by individuals and groups with unintended consequences, to forms of contested and contradictory expression. It discusses what is 'new' about enterprise culture and how it relates to pre-existing ideas, and goes on to look at the processes and mechanisms through which enterprise culture is becoming entrenched, as well as how it affects different classes and communities. The book highlights the social and political implications of enterprise culture and how it recasts family and interpersonal relationships as well as personal and collective identity. Illuminating one of the most important aspects of India's current economic and social transformation, this book is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Business, Sociology, Anthropology, Development Studies and Media and Cultural Studies.

aThe Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum conveys all the lucidity, passion, dynamism, and insightfulness of the field over several generations of scholars. The book captures the deeply collective character that Chicana/o cultural studies has exemplified since its beginnings.a
--Mary Louise Pratt, New York University

The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum brings together a diverse group of scholars whose work spans the interdisciplinary fields of Chicana/o studies and cultural studies. Editor Angie Chabram-Dernersesian provides an overview of current debates, locating Chicana/o cultural criticism at the intersections of these fields. She then acts as moderator of a virtual roundtable of critics, including Frances Aparicio, Lisa Lowe, George Lipsitz, Wahneema Lubiano, Renato Rosaldo, Jose David Saldivar, and Sonia Saldivar-Hull.

This highly collaborative and deeply interdisciplinary project addresses the questions: What is the relationship between Chicana/o studies and cultural studies? How do we do cultural studies from within Chicana/o cultural studies? How do Chicana/o cultural studies formations (hemispheric, borderland, and feminist) intermingle? The lively conversations documented here attest to the vitality and spirit of Chicana/o cultural studies today and track the movements between disciplines that share an interest in the study of culture, power relations, identity, and representation.

This book offers a unique resource for understanding not just the development of Chicana/o cultural studies, but how new social movements and epistemologies travel and affiliate with progressive forms of social inquiry in the global era.

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.

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.

Return migration is a topic of growing interest among academics and policy makers. Nonetheless, issues of psychosocial wellbeing are rarely discussed in its context. Return Migration and Psychosocial Wellbeing problematises the widely-held assumption that return to the country of origin, especially in the context of voluntary migrations, is a psychologically safe process. By exploding the forced-voluntary dichotomy, it analyses the continuum of experiences of return and the effect of time, the factors that affect the return process and associated mobilities, and their multiple links with returned migrants' wellbeing or psychosocial issues. Drawing research encompassing four different continents - Europe, North America, Africa and Asia - to offer a blend of studies, this timely volume contrasts with previous research which is heavily informed by clinical approaches and concepts, as the contributions in this book come from various disciplinary approaches such as sociology, geography, psychology, politics and anthropology. Indeed, this title will appeal to academics, NGOs and policy-makers working on migration and psychosocial wellbeing; and undergraduate and postgraduate students who are interested in the fields of migration, social policy, ethnicity studies, health studies, human geography, sociology and anthropology.

During the last 15 years Latin American governments reformed their constitutions to recognize indigenous rights. The contributors to this book argue that these changes pose fundamental challenges to accepted notions of democracy, citizenship, and development in the region. Using case studies from Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Peru, they analyze the ways in which new legal frameworks have been implemented, appropriated and contested within a wider context of accelerating economic and legal globalization, highlighting the key implications for social policy, human rights, and social justice.

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.

This book explores the lived experiences of boxers in a French banlieue, largely populated by people from working-class and immigrant backgrounds. Jerome Beauchez, who joined in the men's daily workouts for many years, analyzes the act of boxing as a high-stakes confrontation that extends well beyond the walls of the gym. Exploring the physical and existential realities of combat, the author provides a multifaceted "thick description" of this world and shows that the violence faced by the gym's members is not so much to be found in the ring as in the adversity of everyday racism and social exclusion. Boxing can therefore be understood as an act of resistance that is about more than simply fighting an opponent and that reflects all the existential struggles facing these men who are both stigmatized and socially dominated by race and class.

In the early morning hours of May 18, 1944 the Russian army, under orders from Stalin, deported the entire Crimean Tatar population from their historical homeland. Given only fifteen minutes to gather their belongings, they were herded into cattle cars bound for Soviet Central Asia. Although the official Soviet record was cleansed of this affair and the name of their ethnic group was erased from all records and official documents, Crimean Tatars did not assimilate with other groups or disappear. This is an ethnographic study of the negotiation of social memory and the role this had in the growth of a national repatriation movement among the Crimean Tatars. It examines the recollections of the Crimean Tatars, the techniques by which they are produced and transmitted and the formation of a remarkably uniform social memory in light of their dispersion throughout Central Asia. Through the lens of social memory, the book covers not only the deportation and life in the diaspora but the process by which the children and grandchildren of the deportees returned and anchored themselves in the Crimean Peninsula, a place they had never visited.

Examining street vending as a global, urban, and informalized practice found both in the Global North and Global South, this volume presents contributions from international scholars working in cities as diverse as Berlin, Dhaka, New York City, Los Angeles, Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City. The aim of this global approach is to repudiate the assumption that street vending is usually carried out in the Southern hemisphere and to reveal how it also represents an essential-and constantly growing-economic practice in urban centers of the Global North. Although street vending activities vary due to local specificities, this anthology illustrates how these urban practices can also reveal global ties and developments.

This book contributes to an understanding of the complex relationship of gender and language alongside religion and religious life as experienced by various religious groups around the world. The intention is to put forward current studies in the field of linguistics and explore how gender and various religions intersect with language use. The universal and diverse experience of religion provides for this unique collection of papers concerning the use of language in religious liturgy, in religious communities, and in interaction with identity. As such, the book will attract students and researchers in discourse, gender studies and religious studies.

An original ethnography of sound and listening in one of our major institutions, Hearing and the Hospital reveals the hospital to be a space in which several modes of listening are simultaneously in play and in which different layers of auditory knowledge and experience coexist. Engaging with Sound Studies, the Anthropology of the Senses, Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies in this volume, Tom Rice shows how sound and listening produce, articulate and mediate social relations inside the hospital; how listening acquires direction and focus within that environment; and how certain sounds become endowed with particular meanings and associations. He also exposes many of the sensory minutiae that both underpin and undermine the production of medical knowledge and skill. Hearing and the Hospital creates an acoustic interrogation of hospital life, and in doing so questions accepted ideas about the sense of hearing itself. There's a great deal to admire in Tom Rice's ethnography of the aural politics of the hospital. First because it represents a unique conjunction of the ethnography of sound and senses with medical anthropology and social studies of science. Next because it patiently details how sound as a way of knowing so deeply informs social practices of medical listening. And finally because it is so successful in revealing both how hospitals and bodies pulse as acoustic spaces, and how patients and doctors professionalize, personalize, and participate as situated listeners.(Steven Feld, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music, University of New Mexico). Tom Rice is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Exeter, and specializes in auditory culture. As well as writing and teaching on sound he has produced audio pieces including the BBC Radio 4 feature The Art of Water Music.

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.

Taking Care of the Future examines the moral dimensions and transformative capacities of education and humanitarianism through an intimate portrayal of learners, volunteers, donors, and educators at a special needs school in South Africa and a partnering UK-based charity. Drawing on his professional experience of "inclusive education" in London, Oliver Pattenden investigates how systems of schooling regularly exclude and mishandle marginalized populations, particularly exploring how "street kids" and poverty-afflicted young South Africans experience these dynamics as they attempt to fashion their futures. By unpacking the ethical terrains of fundraising, voluntourism, Christian benevolence, human rights, colonial legacies, and the post-apartheid transition, Pattenden analyzes how political, economic and social aspects of intervention materialize to transform the lives of all those involved.

This study outlines the emerging cultural turn in Peace Studies and provides a critical understanding of the cultural dimension of reconciliation. Taking an anthropological view on decentralization and peacebuilding in Indonesia, it sets new standards for an interdisciplinary research field.