This compelling volume explores how war magic and warrior religion unleash the power of the gods, demons, ghosts, and the dead. Documenting war magic and warrior religion as they are performed in diverse cultures and across historical time periods, this volume foregrounds embodiment, practice, and performance in anthropological approaches to magic, sorcery, shamanism, and religion. The authors go beyond what magic 'represents' to consider what magic does. From Chinese exorcists, Javanese spirit siblings, and black magic in Sumatra to Tamil Tiger suicide bombers, Chamorro spiritual re-enchantment, tantric Buddhist war magic, and Yanomami dark shamans, religion and magic are re-evaluated not just from the practitioner's perspective but through the victim's lived experience. These original investigations reveal a nuanced approach to understanding social action, innovation, and the revitalization of tradition in colonial and post-colonial societies undergoing rapid social transformation.

Inhuman Thoughts is a philosophical exploration of the possibility of increasing the physiological and psychological capacities of humans to the point that they are no longer biologically, psychologically, or socially human. The movement is from the human through the trans-human, to the post-human. The tone is optimistic; Seidel argues that such an evolution would be of positive value on the whole. Seidel's initial argument supports the need for a comprehensive ethical theory, the success of which would parallel that of a large-scale scientific revolution, such as Newtonian mechanics. He elaborates the movement from the improved-but-still-human to the post-human, and philosophically examines speculated examples of post-human forms of life, including indefinitely extended life-span, parallel consciousness, altered perception, a-sociality, and a-sexuality. Inhuman Thoughts is directed at those interested in philosophical questions on human nature and the best life given the possibilities of that nature. Seidel's overall argument is that the most satisfactory answer to the latter question involves a transcendence of the present confines of human nature.

By the end of the 20th century, the ethnic question had resurfaced in public debate. Every country had been affected by what is commonly known as cultural pluralism, as a result of conflicts interpreted from an ethnic perspective, for instance, in the Balkans and central Africa; nationalist struggles, such as the Basque country, Quebec and Belgium; and demands for recognition and political representation by new ethnic minorities. This resurgence or extension of the salience of ethnicity in most of the societies around the world can now be found not only in public discourse, policy making, scientific literature and popular representation, but also in the pivotal realm of statistics. This volume explores the ethnic and racial classification in official statistics as a reflection of the representations of population, and as an interpretation of social dynamics through a different lens. Spanning all continents, a wide range of international authors discuss how ethnic and racial classifications are built, their (lack of) accuracy and their contribution to the representation of ethnic and racial diversity of multicultural societies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

This volume explores the experience of hunger and food insecurity among college students at a large, public university in north Texas. Ninety-two clients of the campus food pantry volunteered to share their experiences through qualitative interviews, allowing the author to develop seven profiles of food insecurity, while at once exploring the impact of childhood food insecurity and various coping strategies. Students highlighted the issues of stigma and shame; the unwillingness to discuss food insecurity with their peers; the physical consequences of hunger and poor nutrition; the associations between mental health and nutrition; the academic sacrifices and motivations to finish their degree in the light of food insecurity; and the potential for raising awareness on campus through university engagement. Henry concludes the book with a discussion of solutions-existing solutions to alleviate food insecurity, student-led suggestions for additional resources, solutions in place at other universities that serve as potential models for similar campuses-and efforts to change federal policy.

Thirty years after the collapse of Communism, and at a time of increasing anti-migrant and anti-Roma sentiment, this book analyses how Roma identity is expressed in contemporary Europe. From backgrounds ranging from political theory, postcolonial, cultural and gender studies to art history, feminist critique and anthropology, the contributors reflect on the extent to which a politics of identity regarding historically disadvantaged, racialized minorities such as the Roma can still be legitimately articulated.

The work of Louis Dumont, who died in 1998, on India and modern individualism represented certain theoretical advances on the earlier structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. One such advance is Dumont's idea of hierarchical opposition, which he proposed as a truer representation of indigenous ideologies than Levi-Strauss's binary opposition. In this book the author argues that, although structuralism is often thought to have gone out of fashion, Dumont's greater concern with praxis and agency makes his own version of structuralism more contemporary. The work of his followers and fellow travelers, as well as his own, indicates that hierarchical opposition is capable of taking structuralism in new and more realistic directions, reminding us that it has never been the preserve of Levi-Strauss alone.

Robert Parkin is a social anthropologist who took his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1984 for a thesis on kinship in South and Southeast Asia. His main theoretical interests are in kinship, religion and identity, and he has conducted research and field enquiries in Orissa (India), Poland, Italy and Brussels."

The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory is the first scholarly book from the humanities on the subject of the Grenada Revolution and the US intervention. It is simultaneously a critique, tribute, and memorial. It argues that in both its making and its fall, the 1979-1983 Revolution was a transnational event that deeply impacted politics and culture across the Caribbean and its diaspora during its life and in the decades since its fall. Drawing together studies of landscape, memorials, literature, music, painting, photographs, film and TV, cartoons, memorabilia traded on e-bay, interviews, everyday life, and government, journalistic, and scholarly accounts, the book assembles and analyzes an archive of divergent memories. In an analysis that is relevant to all micro-states, the book reflects on how Grenada's small size shapes memory, political and poetic practice, and efforts at reconciliation.

This book points out a novel pattern in colonial intimacy - that Catholic colonizers tended to leave behind significant mixed communities while Protestant colonizers were more likely to police relations with local women. The varied genetic footprints of Catholic and Protestant colonizers, while subject to some exceptions, holds across world regions and over time. Having demonstrated that this pattern exists, this book then seeks to explain it, looking to religious institutions, political capacity, and ideas of nation and race.

By conversing with the main bodies of relevant literature from Migration Studies and Memory Studies, this overview highlights how analysing memories can contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of migrant incorporation. The chapters consider international case studies from Europe, North America, Australia, Asia and the Middle East.

This original collection brings islands to the fore in a growing body of scholarship on the Indian Ocean, examining them as hubs or points of convergence and divergence in a world of maritime movements and exchanges. Straddling history and anthropology and grounded in the framework of connectivity, the book tackles central themes such as smallness, translocality, and "the island factor." It moves to the farthest reaches of the region, with a rich variety of case studies on the Swahili-Comorian world, the Maldives, Indonesia, and more. With remarkable breadth and cohesion, these essays capture the circulations of people, goods, rituals, sociocultural practices, and ideas that constitute the Indian Ocean world. Together, they take up "islandness" as an explicit empirical and methodological issue as few have done before.

The Poplars housing development in suburban Paris is home to what one resident called the "Little-Middles" - a social group on the tenuous border between the working- and middle- classes. In the 1960s The Poplars was a site of upward social mobility, which fostered an egalitarian sense of community among residents. This feeling of collective flourishing was challenged when some residents moved away, selling their homes to a new generation of upwardly mobile neighbors from predominantly immigrant backgrounds. This volume explores the strained reception of these migrants, arguing that this is less a product of racism and xenophobia than of anxiety about social class and the loss of a sense of community that reigned before.

RLE Social and Cultural Anthropology brings together a collection of key titles from a range of historic imprints. From Anthropology and Nursing to Everyday Life, from The Gift Economy to Two-Dimensional Man, they form an essential reference source from a selection of acclaimed international authors.

By adopting oral history and fieldwork methods and exploring historical data, this book chronologically depicts the development of the schools and education in a village in North China over a century. The book reveals how education and school life in the rural village are being impacted not only by its own history and traditions, but also by external powers; more specifically, the development of rural schools is influenced by the tensions between Chinese and Western culture, between history and reality, between countryside and cities, and between national and local powers. In essence, villagers' educational experience is actually a battlefield for school education and local tradition - the children's lives are dominated by school education, leaving local traditions few opportunities to exert an influence. The study also discusses how school education and local traditions have influenced villagers' social mobility, a topic that has rarely been studied in previous literature. In summary, rural schools have been developing within an interactive network composed of various actors. With the fading of national power since the 1980s, local rural actors have enjoyed a much more liberal social and political space and thus now play a more active role in rural education. Presenting a microcosm that reflects the historical development of rural education in China, the book is a valuable resource for researchers in the field of in rural education, educational history, and educational anthropology, as well as for readers interested in rural education in China.

Originally published in 1914, this text describes L.T. Headland and his wife's experience in China in the early twentieth century. With a focus on home life this study explores issues such as children, marriage and education as well as food, religion and concubinage as well as presenting anecdotes and personal stories from the families Headland interacted with. This title will be of interest to students of Asian Studies and Anthropology.

Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners' beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism-especially in post-Soviet societies-and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.

Reveals a profound understanding of evolutionary biology, and an excellent up-to-date knowledge of human evolution studies. It is not only very well done, but...it is written from a novel point of view. It needs to be very widely read and I hope that it will be. Megarry is doing his subject a great service.
--Bernard Campbell University of California

Social scientists have tended to neglect prehistory in their approach to human societies. Tim Megarry's lucid and authoritative book remedies this neglect. It will be of great value to students of anthropology, psychology, and sociology.
--Paul HirstBirkbeck College, University of London

Stressing the importance of culture as a formative agent in the evolutionary emergence of modern humans, Society in Prehistory provides an impressive, interdisciplinary, and deeply informed survey of prehistory. Individual chapters focus on culture and evolution; biology and culture; primate societies; the first hominids; tools and culture; the economics of foraging; modern humans and human behavior; sex and the division of labor; and sexuality and social life. The book reveals that, while social behavior is biologically grounded, it is not biologically determined.

The conventional wisdom says that the devolution of Classic Maya civilization occurred because its population grew too large and dense to be supported by primitive neotropical farming methods, resulting in debilitating famines and internecine struggles. Using research on contemporary Maya farming techniques and important new archaeological research, Ford and Nigh refute this Malthusian explanation of events in ancient Central America and posit a radical alternative theory. The authors-show that ancient Maya farmers developed ingenious, sustainable woodland techniques to cultivate numerous food plants (including the staple maize);-examine both contemporary tropical farming techniques and the archaeological record (particularly regarding climate) to reach their conclusions;-make the argument that these ancient techniques, still in use today, can support significant populations over long periods of time.

1945 to 1980 marks an extensive period of mass migration of students, refugees, ex-soldiers, and workers from an extraordinarily wide range of countries to West Germany. Turkish, Kurdish, and Italian groups have been studied extensively, and while this book uses these groups as points of comparison, it focuses on ethnic communities of varying social structures-from Spain, Iran, Ukraine, Greece, Croatia, and Algeria-and examines the interaction between immigrant networks and West German state institutions as well as the ways in which patterns of cooperation and conflict differ. This study demonstrates how the social consequences of mass immigration became intertwined with the ideological battles of Cold War Germany and how the political life and popular movements within these immigrant communities played a crucial role in shaping West German society.

An ideal book for those coming to the anthropology of drugs for the first time, filling a surprisingly big gap in the literature Includes many case studies, such as drug tourism, the opioid crisis and 'county lines' in the UK as well as global examples from the Philippines, Mexico, North America and Europe Helps connect the anthropology of drugs to issues highly relevant to professional working in drug treatment, health, social work and mental health

Love and Death are two major facets of the whole of human existence and in The Drama of Love and Death, Carpenter attempts to analyse the interplay of love and death in everyday life. Originally published in 1912, this study focuses on how love and death are perceived and treated in the history of humankind and how these views evolved up until the early twentieth century. This title will be of interest to students of Sociology and Anthropology.

The Things We Value takes as its subject the creativity and cultural heritage of Solomon Islands, focusing on the kinds of objects produced and valued by local communities across this diverse country in the south-west Pacific. Combining historical and interpretive analyses with personal memories and extensive illustrations, the contributors examine such distinctive forms as red feather-money, shell valuables, body ornaments, war canoes, ancestral stones and wood carvings. Their essays discuss the materials, designs, manufacture, properties and meanings of artefacts from across the country. Solomon Islanders value these things variously as currency, heirlooms and commodities, for their beauty, power and sanctity, and as bearers of the historical identities and relationships which sustain them in a rapidly changing world. The volume brings together indigenous experts and leading international scholars as authors of the most geographically comprehensive anthology of Solomon Islands ethnography yet published. It engages with historical and contemporary issues from a range of perspectives, anthropological and archaeological, communal and personal, and makes a major new contribution to Pacific Islands studies.

This book is a lively indictment of American culture's pervasive use of the psychotherapeutic metaphor to explain behaviors. Throop argues that the use of psychotherapy and excessive individualism is profoundly unjust, working only to ensure the continuance of social problems.