The present book examines the cultural diversities of the Northeast region in India. The chapters cover various aspects of cultural forms and practices of the communities. It serves as a bridge between vanishing cultural forms and their commodification, on the one hand, and their cultural ritual origins, evolution and significance in identity formation, on the other. The book analyses the continuity of cultural forms, their plural embodied representations associated with people's belief systems and their reinventions under globalisation. Further, the book underlines historical forces such as colonialism and religious conversion that transformed socio-cultural practices. Yet some of the pre-colonial, ritual-performative traditions hold on. Theoretically rich in analysis, this book presents a balanced view of the region's historical, ethnic-folk and socio-cultural aspects. The book is invaluable to students and researchers in cultural studies, anthropology, folklore, history and literature. It is also helpful for those critical readers engaged in research and interested in Northeast cultural forms and practices.

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. Since the financial crisis of 2008, the anthropological study of economic activity has profoundly changed. A Research Agenda for Economic Anthropology poses new questions for anthropologists about the post-recession world, interrogating common social and political assumptions and stimulating innovative directions for research in economic anthropology. Employing a broad range of intellectual orientations, this comprehensive book tackles the most pressing developments in economic anthropology. The stimulating and thought-provoking chapters engage with the major features of modern economies, including inequality, debt, financialisation, neoliberalism and the ethics of economic practice, as well as with the effects of social mobilisation and activism. The contributors shed light on previously overlooked topics, reassess familiar subjects that need a fresh approach and share their own predilections concerning the modern economic world. With contributors ranging from senior academics to those early in their career, this work is critical reading for any anthropologist concerned with the economy and economic activity. Those searching for novel questions or for a sense of the direction of the discipline will particularly benefit from this book's broad, inquisitive approach. Economic sociologists and geographers will also gain from the comprehensive coverage of the many facets of modern economies. 'The chapters in James Carrier's provocative new collection give us stimulating ideas that set us well on the way to a new kind of economic anthropology. Anybody who finds themselves simultaneously fascinated and yet puzzled by what seems to be the ever more ''economized'' kind of society we live in will find much to attract them in these wide-ranging pages. And this won't just be anthropologists (or broad-minded economists), but students old and young, some seeking a new take on an old issue - markets and the state, inequality, or ethical action; others instead urged to reach toward new challenges - expanding our ideas of ''management'', thinking about resources along a time dimension, or reflecting on how politics is expressed in the language of finance. And there is much more. The opposite of a comprehensive ''wrapping-up'' exercise, this lively collection provides us with a distinct set of starting points that take us into exciting new fields within, and well beyond, economic anthropology. Lively, challenging and rewarding reading.' - Gavin Smith, University of Toronto, Canada and the National University of Ireland

The complex, highly problematic, often thorny dynamics of trust and authority are central to the anthropological study of legitimacy. In this book, this sine qua non runs across the in-depth examination of the ways in which healthcare and public health are managed by the authorities and experienced by the people on the ground in urban Europe, the USA, India, Africa, Latin America and the Far and Middle East. This book brings comparatively together anthropological studies on healthcare and public health rigorously based on in-depth empirical knowledge. Inspired by the current debate on legitimacy, legitimation and de-legitimation, the contributions do not refrain from taking into account the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the health systems under study, but carefully avoid letting this issue monopolise the discussion. This book raises key challenges to our understanding of healthcare practices and the governance of public health. With a keen eye on urban life, its inequalities and the ever-expanding gap between rulers and the ruled, the findings address important questions on the complex ways in which authorities gain, keep, or lose the public’s trust.

"One of the season's most talked about cultural studies" ("Los Angeles" "Times")--an incisive and irreverent appreciation of nerds that combines history, sociology, psychology, and memoir from noted journalist and self-proclaimed nerd Ben Nugent.
Most people know a nerd when they see one, but yet can't define just what a nerd is exactly. "American Nerd: The Story of My People "gives readers the history of" "the concept of nerdiness and its related subcultures. What makes Dr. Frankenstein the archetypal nerd? Where did the modern jock come from? When and how did being a self-described nerd become trendy? As the nerd emerged in the nineteenth century, and popped up again and again in college humor journals and sketch comedy, our culture obsessed over the phenomenon.
"Part history, part memoir, and all funny" ("GQ"), "American Nerd" is critically acclaimed writer Benjamin Nugent's entertaining fact-finding mission. He seeks the best definition of nerd and illuminates the common ground between nerd subcultures that might seem unrelated: high-school debate team kids and ham radio enthusiasts, medieval reenactors and pro-circuit videogame players. Why do the same people who like to work with computers also enjoy playing Dungeons & Dragons? How are those activities similar? This clever, enlightening book will appeal to the nerd (and anti-nerd) that lives inside everyone.

This is the first full-length book to provide an introduction to badhai performances throughout South Asia, examining their characteristics and relationships to differing contexts in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Badhai's repertoires of songs, dances, prayers, and comic repartee are performed by socially marginalised hijra, khwaja sira, and trans communities. They commemorate weddings, births and other celebratory heteronormative events. The form is improvisational and responds to particular contexts, but also moves across borders, including those of nation, religion, genre, and identity. This collaboratively authored book draws from anthropology, theatre and performance studies, music and sound studies, ethnomusicology, queer and transgender studies, and sustained ethnographic fieldwork to examine badhai's place-based dynamics, transcultural features, and communications across the hijrascape. This vital study explores the form's changing status and analyses these performances' layered, scalar, and sensorial practices, to extend ways of understanding hijra-khwaja sira-trans performance.

An explosive, long-forgotten story of police violence that exposes the historical roots of today's criminal justice crisis A deeply researched and propulsively written story of corrupt governance, police brutality, Black resistance, and violent white reaction in turn-of-the-century New Orleans that holds up a dark mirror to our own times.--Walter Johnson, author of River of Dark Dreams On a steamy Monday evening in 1900, New Orleans police officers confronted a black man named Robert Charles as he sat on a doorstep in a working-class neighborhood where racial tensions were running high. What happened next would trigger the largest manhunt in the city's history, while white mobs took to the streets, attacking and murdering innocent black residents during three days of bloody rioting. Finally cornered, Charles exchanged gunfire with the police in a spectacular gun battle witnessed by thousands. Building outwards from these dramatic events, To Poison a Nation connects one city's troubled past to the modern crisis of white supremacy and police brutality. Historian Andrew Baker immerses readers in a boisterous world of disgruntled laborers, crooked machine bosses, scheming businessmen, and the black radical who tossed a flaming torch into the powder keg. Baker recreates a city that was home to the nation's largest African American community, a place where racial antagonism was hardly a foregone conclusion--but which ultimately became the crucible of a novel form of racialized violence: modern policing. A major new work of history, To Poison a Nation reveals disturbing connections between the Jim Crow past and police violence in our own times.

Most cultural critics theorize modernity as a state of disenchanted distraction, one linked to both the rationalizing impulses of scientific and technological innovation and the kind of dispersed, fragmented attention that characterizes the experience of mass culture. Patrick Kindig's Fascination, however, tells a different story, showing that many fin-de-siecle Americans were in fact concerned about (and intrigued by) the modern world's ability to attract and fix attention in quasi-supernatural ways. Rather than being distracting, modern life in their view had an almost magical capacity to capture attention and overwhelm rational thought. Fascination argues that, in response to the dramatic scientific and cultural changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many American thinkers and writers came to conceive of the modern world as fundamentally fascinating. Describing such diverse phenomena as the electric generator, the movements of actresses, and ethnographic cinema as supernaturally alluring, they used the language of fascination to process and critique both popular ideologies of historical progress and the racializing logic upon which these ideologies were built. Drawing on an archive of primary texts from the fields of medicine, (para)psychology, philosophy, cultural criticism, and anthropology-as well as creative texts by Harriet Prescott Spofford, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edward S. Curtis, Robert J. Flaherty, and Djuna Barnes-Kindig reconsiders what it meant for Americans to be (and to be called) modern at the turn of the twentieth century.

This anthropological work thoroughly illustrates the novel synthesis of Christian religion and New Age spirituality in Greece. It challenges the single-faith approach that traditionally ties southern European countries to Christianity and focuses on how processes of globalization influence and transform vernacular religiosity. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in Greece, this book demonstrates how the popular belief in the 'evil eye' produces a creative affinity between religion and spirituality in everyday practice. The author analyses a variety of significant research themes, including lived and vernacular religion, alternative spirituality and healing, ritual performance and religious material culture. The book offers an innovative social scientific interpretation of contemporary religiosity, while engaging with a multiplicity of theoretical, analytic and empirical directions. It contributes to current key debates in social sciences with regard to globalization and secularization, religious pluralism, contemporary spirituality and the New Age movement, gender, power and the body, health, illness and alternative therapeutic systems, senses, perception and the supernatural, the spiritual marketplace, creativity and the individualization of religion in a multicultural world.