In this collection of essays, anthropologists of religion examine the special challenges they face when studying populations that proselytize. Conducting fieldwork among these groups may involve attending services, meditating, praying, and making pilgrimages. Anthropologists participating in such research may unwittingly give the impression that their interest is more personal than professional, and inadvertently encourage missionaries to impose conversion upon them. Moreover, anthropologists' attitudes about religion, belief, and faith, as well as their response to conversion pressures, may interfere with their objectivity and cause them to impose their own understandings on the missionaries. Although anthropologists have extensively and fruitfully examined the role of identity in research-particularly gender and ethnic identity-religious identity, which is more fluid and changeable, has been relatively neglected. This volume explores the role of religious identity in fieldwork by examining how researchers respond to participation in religious activities and to the ministrations of missionaries, both academically and personally. Including essays by anthropologists studying the proselytizing religions of Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, as well as other religions, this volume provides a range of responses to the question of how anthropologists should approach the gap between belief and disbelief when missionary zeal imposes its interpretations on anthropological curiosity.

The study investigates the cultural production of the visual iconography of popular pleasure grounds from the eighteenth century pleasure garden to the contemporary theme park. Deborah Philips identifies the literary genres, including fairy tale, gothic horror, Egyptiana and the Western which are common to carnival sites and traces their historical transition across a range of media to become familiar icons of popular culture.Though the bricolage of narratives and imagery found in the contemporary leisure zone has been read by many as emblematic of postmodern culture, the author argues that the clash of genres and stories is less a consequence of postmodern pastiche than it is the result of a history and popular tradition of conventionalized iconography.

Winner, 2019 Inaugural Outstanding Ethnography Book Award, given by the Ethnography in Education Research Forum Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, given by the Council on Anthropology and Education The stories of Mexican migrant women who parent from afar, and how their transnational families stay together While we have an incredible amount of statistical information about immigrants coming in and out of the United States, we know very little about how migrant families stay together and raise their children. Beyond the numbers, what are the everyday experiences of families with members on both sides of the border? Focusing on Mexican women who migrate to New York City and leave children behind, Motherhood across Borders examines parenting from afar, as well as the ways in which separated siblings cope with different experiences across borders. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic research, Gabrielle Oliveira offers a unique focus on the many consequences of maternal migration. Oliveira illuminates the life trajectories of separated siblings, including their divergent educational paths, and the everyday struggles that undocumented mothers go through in order to figure out how to be a good parent to all of their children, no matter where they live. Despite these efforts, the book uncovers the far-reaching effects of maternal migration that influences both the children who accompany their mothers to New York City, and those who remain in Mexico. With more mothers migrating without their children in search of jobs, opportunities, and the hope of creating a better life for their families, Motherhood across Borders is an invaluable resource for scholars, educators, and anyone with an interest in the current dynamics of U.S immigration.

China and Russia are rising economic and political powers that share thousands of miles of border. Despite their proximity, their interactions with each other - and with their third neighbour Mongolia - are rarely discussed. Although the three countries share a boundary, their traditions, languages and worldviews are remarkably different. Frontier Encounters presents a wide range of views on how the borders between these unique countries are enacted, produced, and crossed. It sheds light on global uncertainties: China's search for energy resources and the employment of its huge population, Russia's fear of Chinese migration, and the precarious independence of Mongolia as its neighbours negotiate to extract its plentiful resources. Bringing together anthropologists, sociologists and economists, this timely collection of essays offers new perspectives on an area that is currently of enormous economic, strategic and geo-political relevance.

Primitive Man as Philosopher by Paul Radin, Ph. D. Research Fellow of Yale University and sometime Lecturer in Ethnology in Cambridge University editor of Crashing Thunder, the Autobiography of an American Indian with a foreword by John Dewcy Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University New York and London D, Appleton and Company 1927 COPYRIGHT, 1927, D. APPLETON AND COMPANY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO MY WIFE PREFACE When a modern historian desires to study the civilization of any people, he regards it as a necessary preliminary that he divest himself, so far as possible, of all prejudice and bias. He realizes that differences between cultures exist, but he does not feel that it is necessarily a sign of inferiority that a people differs in customs from his own. There seems, how ever, to be a limit to what an historian treats as legitimate difference, a limit not always easy to determine. On the whole it may be said that he very naturally passes the same judgments that the majority of his fellow countrymen do. Hence, if some of the differences between admittedly civil ized peoples often call forth unfavorable judgments or even provoke outbursts of horror, how much more must we expect this to be the case where the differences are of so funda mental a nature as those separating us from people whom we have been accustomed to call uncivilized. The term uncivilized is a very vague one, and it is spread over a vast medley of peoples, some of whom have comparatively simple customs and others extremely com plex ones. Indeed, there can be said to be but two charac teristics possessed in common by all these peoples, the absence of a written language and the fact of originalposses sion of the soil when the various civilized European and Asiatic nations came into contact with them. But among all aboriginal races appeared a number of customs which undoubtedly seemed exceedingly strange to their European and Asiatic conquerors. Some of these customs they had never heard of others they recognized as similar to observ vli viii PREFACE ances and beliefs existing among the more backward mem bers of their own communities. Yet the judgments civilized peoples have passed on the aborigines, we may be sure, were not initially based on any calm evaluation of facts. If the aborigines were regarded as innately inferior, this was due in part to the tremendous gulf in custom and belief separating them from the con querors, in part to the apparent simplicity of their ways, and in no small degree to the fact that they were unable to offer any effective resistance. Romance soon threw its distorting screen over the whole primitive picture. Within one hundred years of the dis covery of America it had already become an ineradicably established tradition that all the aborigines encountered by Europeans were simple, untutored savages from whom little more could be expected than from uncontrolled children, individuals who were at all times the slaves of their passions, of which the dominant one was hatred. Much of this tradi tion, in various forms, disguised and otherwise, has persisted to the present day. The evolutionary theory, during its heyday in the iSyos and Sos, still further complicated and misrepresented the situation, and from the great classic that created modern ethnology Tylors Primitive Culture, published in 1870 future ethnologists were to imbibe the cardinal andfunda mentally misleading doctrine that primitive peoples represent an early stage in the history of the evolution of culture. What was, perhaps, even more dangerous was the strange and uncritical manner in which all primitive peoples were lumped together in ethnological discussion simple Fuegians with the highly advanced Aztecs and Mayans, Bushmen with the peoples of the Nigerian coast, Australians with Poly nesians, and so on. PREFACE ix For a number of years scholars were apparently content with the picture drawn by Tylor and his successors...

In Israel, anthropologists have customarily worked in their ""home""-in the company of the society that they are studying. In the Company of Others: The Development of Anthropology in Israel by Orit Abuhav details the gradual development of the field, which arrived in Israel in the early twentieth century but did not have an official place in Israeli universities until the 1960s.Through archival research, observations and interviews conducted with active Israeli anthropologists, Abuhav creates a thorough picture of the discipline from its roots in the Mandate period to its current place in the Israeli academy. Abuhav begins by examining anthropology's disciplinary borders and practices, addressing its relationships to neighboring academic fields and ties to the national setting in which it is practiced. Against the background of changes in world anthropology,she traces the development of Israeli anthropology from its pioneering first practitioners-led by Raphael Patai, Erich Brauer, and Arthur Ruppin-to its academic breakthrough in the 1960s with the foreign-funded Bernstein Israel Research Project. She goes on to consider the role and characteristics of the field's professional association, the Israeli Anthropological Association (IAA), and also presents biographical sketches of fifty significant Israeli anthropologists. While Israeli anthropology has historically been limited in the numbers of its practitioners, it has been expansive in the scope of its studies. Abuhav brings a first-hand perspective to the crises and the highs, lows, and upheavals of the discipline of Israeli anthropology, which will be of interest to anthropologists, historians of the discipline, and scholars of Israeli studies.

Examining the dynamics between subject, photographer and viewer, Fashioning Brazil analyses how Brazilians have appropriated and reinterpreted clothing influences from local and global cultures. Exploring the various ways in which Brazil has been fashioned by the pioneering scientific and educational magazine, National Geographic, the book encourages us to look beyond simplistic representations of exotic difference. Instead, it brings to light an extensive history of self-fashioning within Brazil, which has emerged through cross-cultural contact, slavery, and immigration. Providing an in-depth examination of Brazilian dress and fashion practices as represented by the quasi-ethnographic gaze of National Geographic and National Geographic Brazil (the Portuguese language edition of the magazine, established in 2000), the book unpacks a series of case studies. Taking us from body paint to Lycra, via loincloths and bikinis, Kutesko frames her analysis within the historical, cultural, and political context of Latin American interactions with the United States. Exploring how dress can be used to manipulate identity and disrupt expectations, Fashioning Brazil examines readers' sensory engagements with an iconic magazine, and sheds new light on key debates concerning global dress and fashion.

Winner of the 2016 PROSE Award in Language and Linguistics Data. Suddenly it is everywhere, and more and more of it is about us. The computing revolution has transformed our understanding of nature. Now it is transforming human behaviour. For some, pervasive computing offers a powerful vehicle of introspection and self-improvement. For others it signals the arrival of a dangerous 'control society' in which surveillance is no longer the prerogative of discrete institutions but a simple fact of life. In Computable Bodies, anthropologist Josh Berson asks how the data revolution is changing what it means to be human. Drawing on fieldwork in the Quantified Self and polyphasic sleeping communities and integrating perspectives from interaction design, the history and philosophy of science, and medical and linguistic anthropology, he probes a world where everyday life is mediated by a proliferating array of sensor montages, where we adjust our social signals to make them legible to algorithms, and where old rubrics for gauging which features of the world are animate no longer hold. Computable Bodies offers a vision of an anthropology for an age in which our capacity to generate data and share it over great distances is reconfiguring the body-world interface in ways scarcely imaginable a generation ago.

Although the United States has always been a nation of immigrants, the recent demographic shifts resulting in burgeoning young Latino and Asian populations have literally changed the face of the nation. This wave of massive immigration has led to a nationwide struggle with the need to become bicultural, a difficult and sometimes painful process of navigating between ethnic cultures. While some Latino adolescents become alienated and turn to antisocial behavior and substance use, others go on to excel in school, have successful careers, and build healthy families. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data ranging from surveys to extensive interviews with immigrant families, Becoming Bicultural explores the individual psychology, family dynamics, and societal messages behind bicultural development and sheds light on the factors that lead to positive or negative consequences for immigrant youth. Paul R. Smokowski and Martica Bacallao illuminate how immigrant families, and American communities in general, become bicultural and use their bicultural skills to succeed in their new surroundings The volume concludes by offering a model for intervention with immigrant teens and their families which enhances their bicultural skills.

A unique historical and linguistic resource for those in anthropology, art, folklore, history, linguistics, literature, psychology, religion, sociology, and environmental studies, as well as performers and poets. Not simply relics of the past, proverbs are an oral tradition containing historical and anthropological knowledge missing from conventional sources, and as micro-histories, provide a valuable source for the reconstruction of the manners, characteristics, and worldviews of societies. While only a few hundred Kamba proverbs have ever appeared in print, thousands have circulated over time, from the monsoon exchange era of the Roman Empire through the advent of Islam, European imperialism and colonialism to independence. Today, a resurgence of interest in the form has been generated via social media, songs and vernacular radio programmes. This book provides the first, comprehensive collection of Kamba proverbs from Eastern Kenya in their original Kikamba language and in translation. Analysing 2,000 proverbs drawn from oral interviews, archival collections, museum artefacts and published sources, the author traces the origins of each and explores their meaning, interpretation and use. Covering a diverse range of subjects that ranges from plants, animals, birds and insects, to weather, land, the roles of men and women, cosmology, ritual and belief, healing, trade, politics and peacemaking, the book offers new insights into Kenya's rural world and the expansion of Kamba society, East African history, language and culture of vital significance for the social sciences. A valuable comparative work for societal change elsewhere in Africa and beyond, the book also suggests an innovative, alternative approach to the study of the African past.

Researching Education for Social Justice in Multilingual Settings provides innovative guidance on carrying out qualitative research in education by offering a wide range of examples of research projects with a focus on the methodologies and data collection strategies used. Rather than decontextualised 'how-to' advice, the book offers insights into the complexities of actually carrying out research in multilingual settings. In this practical guide, examples of real-life projects are framed by chapters providing a theoretical background to the principles of ethnography and to the processes and practices of qualitative research, focusing on data generation and collection strategies. Case study chapters offer a rich understanding of the detail of qualitative research in education from the points of view of people who have engaged in it. Moreover, the book promotes understanding of current research that aims to make a difference to pupils, students, teachers and families whose diverse languages and cultural experiences are not fully valued in society and in mainstream education contexts. Pedagogical features that support private study and use on courses include a glossary of key terms, guiding questions for reading at the start of each section, and discussion questions to promote reflection as well as suggestions for further reading. Researching Education for Social Justice in Multilingual Settings is a supportive guide to the principles of ethnography and the processes of qualitative research for all those wishing to investigate complex problems in multilingual education settings.

Are crime rates rising or falling around the world? Are specific types of crime more prevalent in some cultures than others? Do different cultures vary greatly in their attitudes toward crime prevention? Students will find answers to these and similar questions in this unique resource of 15 case studies exploring the problems of crime and crime control in different countries, ranging from Germany to Ghana, to around the world. Cross-cultural comparisons examine the history, the public perceptions, contemporary problems, and the future of crime and crime control in each country. The comparisons also provide readers with the opportunity to discover both the many differences and the many similarities that exist among the different cultures in their rates of crime, forms of prevention, and attitudes toward it.

Each of the 15 chapters opens with a brief overview, which includes the type of government and the living environment of the country to introduce readers to the population. The countries were chosen to represent every region of the world and to provide as broad a picture as possible when exploring the issues presented by the problem of crime and different cultures' efforts to control it. The user-friendly format of the volume, with each chapter following the same outline, makes it easy for readers to compare specific aspects among the 15 cultures. These different views of the crime problem around the world and what it means to different people will help students to understand it in a broad sense as a social issue that affects all of humanity.

In the 19th century, personhood was a term of regulation and discipline in which slaves, criminals, and others, could be "made and unmade." Yet it was precisely the fraught, uncontainable nature of personhood that necessitated its constant legislation, wherein its meaning could be both contested and controlled. Examining scientific and literary narratives, Nihad M. Farooq's Undisciplined encourages an alternative consideration of personhood, one that emerges from evolutionary and ethnographic discourse. Moving chronologically from 1830 to 1940, Farooq explores the scientific and cultural entanglements of Atlantic travelers in and beyond the Darwin era, and invites us to attend more closely to the consequences of mobility and contact on disciplines and persons. Bringing together an innovative group of readings-from field journals, diaries, letters, and testimonies to novels, stage plays, and audio recordings-Farooq advocates for a reconsideration of science, personhood, and the priority of race for the field of American studies. Whether expressed as narratives of acculturation, or as acts of resistance against the camera, the pen, or the shackle, these stories of the studied subjects of the Atlantic world add a new chapter to debates about personhood and disciplinarity in this era that actively challenged legal, social, and scientific categorizations.

The epics of the three Flavian poets-Silius Italicus, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus-have, in recent times, attracted the attention of scholars, who have re-evaluated the particular merits of Flavian poetry as far more than imitation of the traditional norms and patterns. Drawn from sixty years of scholarship, this edited collection is the first volume to collate the most influential modern academic writings on Flavian epic poetry, revised and updated to provide both scholars and students alike with a broad yet comprehensive overview of the field. A wide range of topics receive coverage, and analysis and interpretation of individual poems are integrated throughout. The plurality of the critical voices included in the volume presents a much-needed variety of approaches, which are used to tackle questions of intertextuality, gender, poetics, and the social and political context of the period. In doing so, the volume demonstrates that by engaging in a complex and challenging intertextual dialogue with their literary predecessors, the innovative epics of the Flavian poets respond to contemporary needs, expressing overt praise, or covert anxiety, towards imperial rule and the empire.

Flexible Families examines the struggles among Nicaraguan migrants in Costa Rica (and their families back in Nicaragua) to maintain a sense of family across borders. The book is based on more than twenty-four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Costa Rica and Nicaragua (2009-2012) and more than ten years of engagement with Nicaraguan migrant communities. Author Caitlin Fouratt finds that migration and family intersect as sites for triaging inequality, economic crisis, and a lack of state-provided social services since the 1990s. Flexible Families situates transnational families in an analysis of the history of unstable family life in Nicaragua due to decades of war and economic crisis, rather than in the migration process itself, which is often blamed for family breakdown in public discourse. Fouratt argues that the kinds of family configurations often seen as problematic consequences of migration-specifically single mothers, absent fathers, and grandmother caregivers-represent flexible family configurations that have enabled Nicaraguan families to survive the chronic crises of the past decades. By examining the work that goes into forging and sustaining transnational kinship, the book argues for a rethinking of national belonging and discourses of solidarity. In parallel, the book critically examines conditions in Costa Rica, especially the ways in which the instabilities and inequalities that have haunted the rest of the region have begun to take shape there, resulting in perceptions of increased crime rates and a declining quality of life. By linking this crisis of Costa Rican exceptionalism to recent immigration reform, the book also builds on scholarship about the production and experiences of immigrant exclusion. Flexible Families offers insight into the impacts of increasingly restrictive immigration policies in the everyday lives of transnational families within the developing world.

During the last 300 years circus clowns have emerged as powerful cultural icons. This is the first semiotic analysis of the range of make-up and costumes through which the clowns' performing identities have been established and go on developing. It also examines what Bouissac terms 'micronarratives' - narrative meanings that clowns generate through their acts, dialogues and gestures. Putting a repertory of clown performances under the semiotic microscope leads to the conclusion that the performances are all interconnected and come from what might be termed a 'mythical matrix'. These micronarratives replicate in context-sensitive forms a master narrative whose general theme refers to the emergence of cultures and constraints that they place upon instinctual behaviour. From this vantage point, each performance can be considered as a ritual which re-enacts the primitive violence inherent in all cultures and the temporary resolutions which must be negotiated as the outcome. Why do these acts of transgression and re-integration then trigger laughter and wonder? What kind of mirror does this put up to society? In a masterful semiotic analysis, Bouissac delves into decades of research to answer these questions.