The Materiality and Efficacy of Balinese Letters examines traditional uses of writing on the Indonesian island of Bali, focusing on the power attributed to Balinese script.The approach is interdisciplinary and comparative, bringing together insights from anthropological and philological perspectives. Scholars have long recognized a gap between the practices of philological interpretation and those of the Javano-Balinese textual tradition. The question is what impact this gap should have on our conception of 'the text'. Of what relevance, for example, are the uses to which Balinese script has been put in the context of ceremonial rites? What ideas of materiality, power and agency are at work in the production and preservation of palm-leaf manuscripts, inscribed amulets and other script-bearing instruments? Contributors include: Andrea Acri, Helen Creese, Richard Fox, H.I.R. Hinzler, Annette Hornbacher, Thomas M. Hunter and Margaret Wiener.

Feasting and commensality formed the backbone of social life in the polis, the most characteristic and enduring form of political organization in the ancient Greek world. Exploring a wide array of commensal practices, Feasting and Polis Institutions reveals how feasts defined the religious and political institutions of the Greek citizen-state. Taking the reader from the Early Iron Age to the Imperial Period, this volume launches an essential inquiry into Greek power relations. Focusing on the myriad of patronage roles at the feast and making use of a wide variety of methodologies and primary sources, including archaeology, epigraphy and literature, Feasting and Polis Institutions argues that in ancient Greece political interaction could never be complete until it was consummated in a festive context.

In Muslim Tatar Minorities in the Baltic Sea Region, edited by Ingvar Svanberg and David Westerlund, the contributors introduce the history and contemporary situation of these little known groups of people that for centuries have been part of the religious and ethnic mosaic of this region. The book has a broad and multi-disciplinary scope and covers the early settlements in Lithuania and Poland, the later immigrations to Saint Petersburg, Finland, Estonia and Latvia, as well as the most recent establishments in Sweden and Germany. The authors, who hail from and are specialists on these areas, demonstrate that in several respects the Tatar Muslims have become well-integrated here. Contributors are: Toomas Abiline, Tamara Bairasauskaite, Renat Bekkin, Sebastian Cwiklinski, Harry Halen, Tuomas Martikainen, Agata Nalborczyk, Egdunas Racius, Ringo Ringvee, Valters Scerbinskis, Sabira Stahlberg, Ingvar Svanberg and David Westerlund.

The spread of the Internet is remaking marriage markets, altering the process of courtship and the geographic trajectory of intimacy in the 21st century. For some Latin American women and U.S. men, the advent of the cybermarriage industry offers new opportunities for re-making themselves and their futures, overthrowing the common narrative of trafficking and exploitation. In this engaging, stimulating virtual ethnography, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer follows couples' romantic interludes at "Vacation Romance Tours," in chat rooms, and interviews married couples in the United States in order to understand the commercialization of intimacy. While attending to the interplay between the everyday and the virtual, Love and Empire contextualizes personal desires within the changing global economic and political shifts across the Americas. By examining current immigration policies and the use of Mexican and Colombian women as erotic icons of the nation in the global marketplace, she forges new relations between intimate imaginaries and state policy in the making of new markets, finding that women's erotic self-fashioning is the form through which women become ideal citizens, of both their home countries and in the United States. Through these little-explored, highly mediated romantic exchanges, Love and Empire unveils a fresh perspective on the continually evolving relationship between the U.S. and Latin America.

From stories of biblical patriarchs and matriarchs and their children, through the Gospel's Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and to modern Jewish families in fiction, film, and everyday life, the family has been considered key to transmitting Jewish identity. Current discussions about the Jewish family's supposed traditional character and its alleged contemporary crisis tend to assume that the dynamics of Jewish family life have remained constant from the days of Abraham and Sarah to those of Tevye and Golde in Fiddler on the Roof and on to Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. Jonathan Boyarin explores a wide range of scholarship in Jewish studies to argue instead that Jewish family forms and ideologies have varied greatly throughout the times and places where Jewish families have found themselves. He considers a range of family configurations from biblical times to the twenty-first century, including strictly Orthodox communities and new forms of family, including same-sex parents. The book shows the vast canvas of history and culture as well as the social pressures and strategies that have helped shape Jewish families, and suggests productive ways to think about possible futures for Jewish family forms.

Though Graeco-Roman antiquity (‘classics’) has often been considered the handmaid of colonialism, its various forms have nonetheless endured through many of the continent’s decolonising transitions. Southern Africa is no exception. This book canvasses the variety of forms classics has taken in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and especially South Africa, and even the dynamics of transformation itself.

How does (u)Mzantsi classics (of southern Africa) look in an era of profound change, whether violent or otherwise? What are its future prospects? Contributors focus on pedagogies, historical consciousness, the creative arts and popular culture.

The volume, in its overall shape, responds to the idea of dialogue – in both the Greek form associated with Plato’s rendition of Socrates’ wisdom and in the African concept of ubuntu. Here are dialogues between scholars, both emerging and established, as well as students – some of whom were directly impacted by the Fallist protests.

Rather than offering an apologia for classics, these dialogues engage with pressing questions of relevance, identity, change, the canon, and the dynamics of decolonisation and potential recolonisation. The goal is to interrogate classics – the ways it has been taught, studied, perceived, transformed and even lived – from many points of view.

How are injurious pasts redeployed by the dispossessed? After Servitude explores how agrarian engineers, Indigenous farmers, Mestizo mining bosses, and rural workers navigate racial hierarchies rooted in histories of forced agrarian labor. In the rural Bolivian province of Ayopaya, where the liberatory promises of property remain elusive, Quechua people address such hierarchies by demanding aid from Mestizo elites and, when that fails, through acts of labor militancy. Against institutional faith in property ownership as a means to detach land from people and present from past, the kin of former masters and servants alike have insisted that ethical debts from earlier racial violence stretch across epochs and formal land sales. What emerges is a vision of justice grounded in popular demands that wealth remain beholden to the region's agrarian past. By tracing Ayopayans' active efforts to contend with servitude's long shadow, Mareike Winchell illuminates the challenges that property confronts as both an extractive paradigm and a means of historical redress.

This is a collection of key essays about the Akan Peoples, their history and culture. The Akans are an ethnic group in West Africa, predominately Ghana and Togo, of roughly 25 million people. From the twelfth century on, Akans created numerous states based largely on gold mining and trading of cash crops. This brought wealth to numerous Akan states, such as Akwamu, which stretched all the way to modern Benin, and ultimately led to the rise of the best known Akan empire, the Empire of Ashanti. Throughout history, Akans were a highly educated group; notable Akan people in modern times include Kwame Nkrumah and Kofi Annan. This volume features a new array of primary sources that provide fresh and nuanced perspectives. This collection is the first of its kind.

Questions the way we understand the idea of community through an investigation of the term "historically black" In Historically Black, Mieka Brand Polanco examines the concept of community in the United States: how communities are experienced and understood, the complex relationship between human beings and their social and physical landscapes-and how the term "community" is sometimes conjured to feign a cohesiveness that may not actually exist. Drawing on ethnographic and historical materials from Union, Virginia, Historically Black offers a nuanced and sensitive portrait of a federally recognized Historic District under the category "Ethnic Heritage-Black." Since Union has been home to a racially mixed population since at least the late 19th century, calling it "historically black" poses some curious existential questions to the black residents who currently live there. Union's identity as a "historically black community" encourages a perception of the town as a monochromatic and monohistoric landscape, effectively erasing both old-timer white residents and newcomer black residents while allowing newer white residents to take on a proud role as preservers of history. Gestures to "community" gloss an oversimplified perspective of race, history and space that conceals much of the richness (and contention) of lived reality in Union, as well as in the larger United States. They allow Americans to avoid important conversations about the complex and unfolding nature by which groups of people and social/physical landscapes are conceptualized as a single unified whole. This multi-layered, multi-textured ethnography explores a key concept, inviting public conversation about the dynamic ways in which race, space, and history inform our experiences and understanding of community.

From clothing to the painted and scarified nude body, through overt, public display or esoteric symbols known only to the initiated, dress can convey information about beliefs, faith, identity, power, agency, resistance, and fashion. Taking a 'senses' approach, Hume's engaging account takes into consideration the look, smell, feel, touch and sound of religious apparel, the 'smells and bells' of dress and its accoutrements, as well as the emotions evoked by donning religious garb. The book's global perspective provides wide-ranging, yet detailed, coverage of religious dress, from the history and meaning of the simple 'no-frills' attire of the Anabaptists to the power structure displayed in the elaborate fabrics and colours of the Roman Catholic Church; Hume examines the 2,500 year-old tradition of Buddhist robes, the nudity of India's holy men, and much more. With chapters on Sufism, Vodou, modern Pagans, as well as painted and tattooed indigenous and modern Western bodies, the reader is swept along on a sensual journey of the sight, sound, smell and feel of wearing religion. Unique in its field, this intriguing and informative anthropological approach to the body and dress is an essential read for students of Anthropology, Anthropology of Dress, Sociology, Fashion and Textiles, Culture and Dress, Body and Culture and Cultural Studies.

Sapiens showed us where we came from. In uncertain times, Homo Deus shows us where we’re going.

Yuval Noah Harari envisions a near future in which we face a new set of challenges. Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century and beyond – from overcoming death to creating artificial life.

It asks the fundamental questions: how can we protect this fragile world from our own destructive power? And what does our future hold?

'Homo Deus will shock you. It will entertain you. It will make you think in ways you had not thought before’ Daniel Kahneman, bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

Central to the book are Gbigbil women's experiences with different ""reproductive interruptions"": miscarriages, stillbirths, child deaths, induced abortions, and infertility. Rather than consider these events as inherently dissimilar, as women do in Western countries, the Gbigbil women of eastern Cameroon see them all as instances of ""wasted wombs"" that leave their reproductive trajectories hanging in the balance. The women must navigate this uncertainty while negotiating their social positions, aspirations for the future, and the current workings of their bodies. Providing an intimate look into these processes, Wasted Wombs shows how Gbigbil women constantly shift their interpretations of when a pregnancy starts, what it contains, and what is lost in case of a reproductive interruption, in contrast to Western conceptions of fertility and loss. Depending on the context and on their life aspirations-be it marriage and motherhood, or rather an educational trajectory, employment, or profitable sexual affairs with so-called ""big fish""-women negotiate and manipulate the meanings and effects of reproductive interruptions. Paradoxically, they often do so while portraying themselves as powerless. Wasted Wombs carefully analyzes such tactics in relation to the various social predicaments that emerge around reproductive interruptions, as well as the capricious workings of women's physical bodies.

Nearly one hundred thousand newly enfranchised blacks voted against race-baiting Eugene Talmadge in Georgia's 1946 Democratic primary. His opponent won the popular vote by a majority of sixteen thousand. Talmadge was elected anyway, thanks to the malapportioning county unit system, but died before he could be inaugurated, whereupon the General Assembly chose his son Herman to take his place. For the next sixty-three days, Georgia waited in shock for the state supreme court to decide whether Herman or the lieutenant governor-elect would be seated. What had happened to so suddenly reverse four years of progressive reform under retiring governor Ellis Arnall? To find out, Calvin Kytle and James A. Mackay sat through the tumultuous 1947 assembly, then toured Georgia's 159 counties asking politicians, public officials, editors, businessmen, farmers, factory workers, civic leaders, lobbyists, academicians, and preachers the question "Who runs Georgia?" Among those interviewed were editor Ralph McGill, novelist Lillian Smith, defeated gubernatorial candidate James V. Carmichael, powerbroker Roy Harris, pollwatcher Ira Butt, and more than a hundred others--men and women, black and white, heroes and rogues--of all stripes and stations. The result, as Dan T. Carter says in his foreword, captures "the substance and texture of political life in the American South" during an era that historians have heretofore neglected--those years of tension between the end of the New Deal and the explosive start of the civil rights movement. What's more, Who Runs Georgia? has much to tell us about campaign finance and the political influence of Big Money, as relevant for the nation today as it was then for the state.

Secret Manipulations is the first comprehensive study of African register variation, polylectality, and derived languages. Focusing on a specific form of language change-deliberate manipulations of a language by its speakers-it provides a new approach to local language ideologies and concepts of grammar and metalinguistic knowledge.
Anne Storch concentrates on case studies from Nigeria, Uganda, Sudan, the African diaspora, and 16th century Europe. In these cases, language manipulation varies with social and cultural contexts, and is almost always done in secret. At the same time, this manipulation can be an act of subversion and an expression of power, and it is often central to the construction of social norms, as it constructs oppositions and gives marginalized people a chance to articulate themselves. This volume illustrates how manipulated languages are constructed, how they are used, and how they wield power.

This open access book argues that contrary to dominant approaches that view nationalism as unaffected by globalization or globalization undermining the nation-state, the contemporary world is actually marked by globalization of the nation form. Based on fieldwork in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East and drawing, among others, on Peter van der Veer's comparative work on religion and nation, it discuss practices of nationalism vis-a-vis migration, rituals of sacrifice and prayer, music, media, e-commerce, Islamophobia, bare life, secularism, literature and atheism. The volume offers new understandings of nationalism in a broader perspective. The text will appeal to students and researchers interested in nationalism outside of the West, especially those working in anthropology, sociology and history.

Heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, affects people from all walks of life, yet who lives and who dies from heart disease still depends on race, class, and gender. While scientists and clinicians understand and treat heart disease more effectively than ever before, and industrialized countries have made substantial investments in research and treatment over the past six decades, patterns of inequality persist. In Heart-Sick, Janet K. Shim argues that official accounts of cardiovascular health inequalities are unconvincing and inadequate, and that clinical and public health interventions grounded in these accounts ignore many critical causes of those inequalities. Examining the routine activities of epidemiology--grant applications, data collection, representations of research findings, and post-publication discussions of the interpretations and implications of study results--Shim shows how social differences of race, social class, and gender are upheld by the scientific community. She argues that such sites of expert knowledge routinely, yet often invisibly, make claims about how biological and cultural differences matter--claims that differ substantially from the lived experiences of individuals who themselves suffer from health problems. Based on firsthand research at epidemiologic conferences, conversations with epidemiologists, and in-depth interviews with people of color who live with heart disease, Shim explores how both scientists and lay people define "difference" and its consequences for health. Ultimately, Heart-Sick explores the deep rifts regarding the meanings and consequences of social difference for heart disease, and the changes that would be required to generate more convincing accounts of the significance of inequality for health and well-being.

Hasidic Art and the Kabbalah presents eight case studies of manuscripts, ritual objects, and folk art developed by Hasidic masters in the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, whose form and decoration relate to sources in the Zohar, German Pietism, and Safed Kabbalah. Examined at the delicate and difficult to define interface between seemingly simple, folk art and complex ideological and conceptual outlooks which contain deep, abstract symbols, the study touches on aspects of object history, intellectual history, the decorative arts, and the history of religion. Based on original texts, the focus of this volume is on the subjective experience of the user at the moment of ritual, applying tenets of process philosophy and literary theory - Wolfgang Iser, Gaston Bachelard, and Walter Benjamin - to the analysis of objects.

This timely and fascinating feminist ethnography is the first of its kind to focus on commercial surrogacy workers in Russia and from other countries of the former Soviet Union. Examining surrogacy workers' reproductive labour, and experiences of stratification and migration, the study presents innovative insights into current research on global surrogacy practices and travels for assisted reproduction. It links to wider fields of studies, such as ethnicity, feminism, women's and gender studies in the post-Soviet sphere. Weis expertly brings together rigorous ethnographic research, feminist debates and anthropological theory to explore the attributed significance of origin, citizenship, race, ethnicity and religion, and the cultural framing and social organization of surrogacy as an economic exchange; thereby challenging and contributing to the discourse of surrogacy as a gift, a labour of love, a maternal sacrifice or work. Tracing surrogacy workers' journeys for surrogacy work across Russia, Weis introduces geographic and geopolitical stratifications as two new lenses of stratified reproduction to analyse how surrogacy in Russia builds on and propels surrogacy workers' mobility and results in reproductive migrations. Given the rapid global increase in the use of surrogacy and its increasingly internationalised nature, Weis's research has implications for surrogacy users, medical practitioners and regulators, as well as researchers concerned with (cross-border) surrogacy, reproductive stratifications and reproductive justice. Shortlisted for the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize 2022