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.

Afghanistan in the 20th century was virtually unknown in Europe and America. At peace until the 1970s, the country was seen as a remote and exotic land, visited only by adventurous tourists or researchers. Afghan Village Voices is a testament to this little-known period of peace and captures a society and culture now lost. Prepared by two of the most accomplished and well-known anthropologists of the Middle East and Central Asia, Richard Tapper and Nancy Tapper-Lindisfarne, this is a book of stories told by the Piruzai, a rural Afghan community of some 200 families who farmed in northern Afghanistan and in summer took their flocks to the central Hazarajat mountains. The book comprises a collection of remarkable stories, folktales and conversations and provides unprecedented insight into the depth and colour of these people's lives. Recorded in the early 1970s, the stories range from memories of the Piruzai migration to the north a half century before, to the feuds, ethnic strife and the doings of powerful khans. There are also stories of falling in love, elopements, marriages, childbirth and the world of spirits. The book includes vignettes of the narrators, photographs, maps and a full glossary. It is a remarkable document of Afghanistan at peace, told by a people whose voices have rarely been heard.

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.

In this comprehensive study, Kenneth Morgan provides an authoritative account of European exploration and discovery in Australia. The book presents a detailed chronological overview of European interests in the Australian continent, from initial speculations about the 'Great Southern Land' to the major hydrographic expeditions of the 19th century. In particular, he analyses the early crossings of the Dutch in the 17th century, the exploits of English 'buccaneer adventurer' William Dampier, the famous voyages of James Cook and Matthew Flinders, and the little-known French annexation of Australia in 1772. Introducing new findings and drawing on the latest in historiographical research, this book situates developments in navigation, nautical astronomy and cartography within the broader contexts of imperial, colonial, and maritime history.

Although multilingualism is the norm in the day-to-day lives of most sub-Saharan Africans, multilingualism in settings outside of cities has so far been under-explored. This gap is striking when considering that in many parts of Africa, individual multilingualism was widespread long before the colonial period and centuries before the continent experienced large-scale urbanization. The edited collection African Multilingualisms fills this gap by presenting results from recent and ongoing research based on fieldwork in rural African environments as well as environments characterized by contact between urban and rural communities of speakers. The contributors-mostly Africans themselves, including a number of emerging scholars-present findings that both complement and critique current scholarship on African multilingualism. In addition, new methods and tools are introduced for the study of multilingualism in rural settings, alongside illustrations of the kinds of results that they yield. African Multilingualisms reveals an impressive diversity in the features of local language ideologies, multilingual behaviors, and the relationship between language and identity.

During the long eighteenth century the moral and socio-political dimensions of family life and gender were hotly debated by intellectuals across Europe. John Millar, a Scottish law professor and philosopher, was a pioneer in making gendered and familial practice a critical parameter of cultural difference. His work was widely disseminated at home and abroad, translated into French and German and closely read by philosophers such as Denis Diderot and Johann Gottfried Herder. Taking Millar's writings as his basis, Nicholas B. Miller explores the role of the family in Scottish Enlightenment political thought and traces its wider resonances across the Enlightenment world. John Millar's organisation of cultural, gendered and social difference into a progressive narrative of authority relations provided the first extended world history of the family. Over five chapters that address the historical and comparative models developed by the thinker, Nicholas B. Miller examines contemporary responses and Enlightenment-era debates on polygamy, matriarchy, the Amazon legend, changes in national character and the possible futures of the family in commercial society. He traces how Enlightenment thinkers developed new standards of evidence and crafted new understandings of historical time in order to tackle the global diversity of family life and gender practice. By reconstituting these theories and discussions, Nicholas B. Miller uncovers hitherto unexplored aspects of the Scottish contribution to European debates on the role of the family in history, society and politics.

A special issue of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies This issue provides an area-studies perspective on intimacy and explores the analytic, theoretical, and political work that intimacy promises as a concept. The contributors explore how multiple domains and forms of intimacies are defined and transformed across the cultural and social worlds of the Middle East, looking in particular at Egypt, Turkey, and Israel. Focusing on everyday constructions of intimacies, the contributors engage with questions about how we should calibrate the evolving nature of intimacy in times of rapid transition, what intimacy means for individual and social lives, and what social, political, and economic possibilities it creates. Topics include physical exercise, Turkish beauty salons, transnational surrogacy arrangements, gender reassignment, and coffee shops as intimate spaces for men outside the family. Article Contributors: Aymon Kreil, Claudia Liebelt, Sibylle Lustenberger, Sertac Sehlikoglu, Asli Zengin Review and Third Space Contributors: Dena Al-Adeeb, Adam George Dunn, Rima Dunn, Meral Duzgun, Iklim Goksel, Didem Havlioglu, Sarah Ihmoud, Sarah Irving, Adi Kuntsman, Shahrzad Mojab, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Rachel Rothendler, Afiya Zia

This book begins with a simple question: why do so many Dominicans deny the African components of their DNA, culture, and history? Seeking answers, Milagros Ricourt uncovers a complex and often contradictory Dominican racial imaginary. Observing how Dominicans have traditionally identified in opposition to their neighbors on the island of Hispaniola - Haitians of African descent - she finds that the Dominican Republic's social elite has long propagated a national creation myth that conceives of the Dominican as a perfect hybrid of native islanders and Spanish settlers. Yet as she pores through rare historical documents, interviews contemporary Dominicans, and recalls her own childhood memories of life on the island, Ricourt encounters persistent challenges to this myth. Through fieldwork at the Dominican-Haitian border, she gives a firsthand look at how Dominicans are resisting the official account of their national identity and instead embracing the African influence that has always been part of their cultural heritage. Building on the work of theorists ranging from Edward Said to Edouard Glissant, this book expands our understanding of how national and racial imaginaries develop, why they persist, and how they might be subverted. As it confronts Hispaniola's dark legacies of slavery and colonial oppression, The Dominican Racial Imaginary also delivers an inspiring message on how multicultural communities might cooperate to disrupt the enduring power of white supremacy.

Cybercartography in a Reconciliation Community: Engaging Intersecting Perspectives, Volume Eight gathers perspectives on issues related to reconciliation-primarily in a residential / boarding school context-and demonstrates the unifying power of Cybercartography by identifying intersections among different knowledge perspectives. Concerned with understanding approaches toward reconciliation and education, preference is given to reflexivity in research and knowledge dissemination. The positionality aspect of reflexivity is reflected in the chapter contributions concerning various aspects of cybercartographic atlas design and development research, and related activities. In this regard, the book offers theoretical and practical knowledge of collaborative transdisciplinary research through its reflexive assessment of the relationships, processes and knowledge involved in cybercartographic research. Using, most specifically, the Residential Schools Land Memory Mapping Project for context, Cybercartography in a Reconciliation Community provides a high speed tour through the project's innovative collaborative approach to mapping institutional material and volunteered geographic information. Exploring Cybercartography through the lens of this atlas project provides for a comprehensive understanding of both Cybercartography and transdisciplinary research, while informing the reader of education and reconciliation initiatives in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Italy.

Further Developments in the Theory and Practice of Cybercartography, Third Edition, Volume Nine, presents a substantively updated edition of a classic text on cybercartography, presenting new and returning readers alike with the latest advances in the field. The book examines the major elements of cybercartography and embraces an interactive, dynamic, multisensory format with the use of multimedia and multimodal interfaces. Material covering the major elements, key ideas and definitions of cybercartography is newly supplemented by several chapters on two emerging areas of study, including international dimensions and language mapping. This new edition delves deep into Mexico, Brazil, Denmark, Iran and Kyrgyzstan, demonstrating how insights emerge when cybercartography is applied in different cultural contexts. Meanwhile, other chapters contain case studies by a talented group of linguists who are breaking new ground by applying cybercartography to language mapping, a breakthrough that will provide new ways of understanding the distribution and movement of language and culture.

The Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Identity examines the social, cultural, and political processes that shape the experience of taste. The book positions flavor as involving all the senses, and describes the multiple ways in which taste becomes tied to local, translocal, glocal, and cosmopolitan politics of identity. Global case studies are included from Japan, China, India, Belize, Chile, Guatemala, the United States, France, Italy, Poland and Spain. Chapters examine local responses to industrialized food and the heritage industry, and look at how professional culinary practice has become foundational for local identities. The book also discusses the unfolding construction of "local taste" in the context of sociocultural developments, and addresses how cultural political divides are created between meat consumption and vegetarianism, innovation and tradition, heritage and social class, popular food and authenticity, and street and restaurant food. In addition, contributors discuss how different food products-such as kimchi, quinoa, and Soylent-have entered the international market of industrial and heritage foods, connecting different places and shaping taste and political identities.