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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology > General
The authors present a historical picture of gender relations in Highlands New Guinea by exploring domains of imagination as revealed in courting songs, ballads, and folktales from across the Highlands but with particular reference to field areas in the western Highlands. Texts and/or translations are from a rich corpus of materials previously unpublished in English. The examples draw the reader into the imaginative world of the people, while the analytical framework sets the discussion firmly into debates within interpretive anthropology. The aim is to re-examine the images of gender relations in Highlands New Guinea by revealing the sensuous and emotional modalities of expressive folk genres and their aesthetic qualities. Ideas and practices centered on female spirit entities are shown to be important and pervasive in cult contexts, and these spirits were felt to have a significant influence on relations of courtship, marriage, and reproduction. Both women and men are also shown to have complex expressions of emotional dispositions in the spheres of courting and the choice of marital partners. By entering into these domains, the book modifies earlier analyses that have concentrated on antagonism, behavioral taboos, separation, and domination as themes in gender relations in Highland societies.
After introducing the dramaturgical perspectives by drawing on insights from anthropology, sociology, and the theater, the contributors give examples of enactments for which the persons involved were quite conscious of the fact that they must first establish a stage, or action area, before they could perform. As in theater, the setting of the stage has implicit meanings and actions will then become explicit as the drama unfolds. In Part I of the book, the accounts of the early kibbutzniks who needed an action area for their collective agricultural settlements, the new settlers who wish to reclaim Judea and Samaria, and the African-Americans who discovered that Israel was at the intersection of Hebrew and African traditions, provide variations on this theme. Part II details varieties of enactments that have and possibly will take place in Israel, including an account of Ethiopian youths who experienced their crossing of the Sudan on their way to Israel to participate in the events of the Millennium. Other accounts of social dramas describe the sulha, the traditional Bedouin method of the resolution of a blood feud between Bedouin tribes, and the religious pilgrimmages by Jews, Arabs, and Christians to holy sites where they sometimes reenact a past event.
This book analyses how children from transnational Japanese-Singaporean families are educated. The author demonstrates that the negotiated educational pathways of these children have significant bearing on the ways in which individual identities of mixedness may be constructed or contested - where notions of mixedness are necessarily recognised for their inherent fluidity, contextuality and contingency. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to students and scholars across the fields of education, neoliberalism, globalization, multiculturalism, mobility and cross-border migration.
Organizational Culture provides a sweeping interdisciplinary overview of the organizational culture literature, showing how and why researchers have disagreed about such fundamental questions as: What is organizational culture? What are the major theoretical perspectives used to understand cultures in organizations? How can a researcher decipher the political interests inherent in research that claims to be political neutral -- merely "descriptive"? Expert author Joanne Martin examines a variety of conflicting ways to study cultures in organizations, including different theoretical orientations, political ideologies (managerial, critical, and apparently neutral); methods (qualitative, quantitative, and hybrid approaches), and styles of writing about culture (ranging from traditional to postmodern and experimental). In addition, she offers a guide for those who might want to study culture themselves, addressing such issues as: What qualitative, quantitative, and hybrid methods can be used to study culture? What standards are used when reviewers evaluate these various types of research? What innovative ways of writing about culture have been introduced? And finally, what are the most important unanswered questions for future organizational culture researchers? Intended for graduate students and established scholars who need to understand, value, and utilize highly divergent approaches to the study of culture. The book will also be useful for researchers who do not study culture, but who are interested in the ways political interests affect scholarly writing, the ways critical and managerial approaches to theory differ, the use and justification of qualitative methods in domains where quantitative methods are the norm.
Since the earliest days of universities, students have told stories about their daily lives, often emphasizing extraordinary, surprising, and baffling events. This book examines the fascinating world of college and university legends. While it primarily looks at legends, it also gives some attention to rumors, pranks, rituals, and other forms of folklore. Included are introductory chapters on types of campus folklore, a collection of some 50 legends from a broad range of colleges and universities, an overview of scholarship, and a discussion of campus legends in movies, television, and popular culture. Since the earliest days of universities, students have told stories about their daily lives, often emphasizing extraordinary, surprising, and baffling events. Legends often dramatize certain hopes and fears, showing how stressful and exciting the college experience can be. From the stereotype of the absent minded professor to the adventures of spring break to the mysterious world of fraternities and sororities, campus legends have also become an important part of popular culture. This book provides a convenient, readable introduction to campus legends. While the volume focuses primarily on legends, it also explores rumors, pranks, rituals, and other related folklore types. The book begins with an overview of college and university folklore. This is followed by a discussion of particular types of legends and other folklore genres. The handbook then presents some 50 examples of college and university legends, including ghost stories, urban legends, food lore, drinking tales, murders and suicides, and many others. These examples are accompanied by brief comments. The book next surveys scholarship on campus folklore and discusses the place of college and university legends in films, television, literature, and popular culture. The volume cites numerous print and electronic resources.
" The Anthropology of Media: A ReaderBrings together key writings in the emergent field of the anthropology of media for the first timeIntegrates key themes in the anthropology of media by means of editorial commentaryExplores the theoretical issues that have arisen from ethnographic studies of media" offers a critical overview of how mass media represents and constructs both Western and non-Western cultures. Moving beyond earlier anthropological preoccupation with ethnographic film and drawing on the recent explosion of creative studies of culture and media, this volume heralds the emergence of a new field - the anthropology of media - and brings its key literature together for the first time.
This book tries to answer the question how different communities in such an arid area as the Iranian central plateau could have shared their limited water resources in a perfect harmony and peace over the course of history. They invented some indigenous technologies as well as cooperative socio-economic systems in order to better adapt themselves to their harsh environment where the scarce water resources had to be rationed among the different communities as sustainably as possible. Those stories hold some lessons for us on how to adjust our needs to our geographical possibilities while living side by side with other people. This work gives insight into the indigenous adaptation strategies through the territorial water cooperation, and describes how water can appear as a ground for cooperation. It explains the water supply systems and social aspects of water in central Iran. Topics include the territorial water cooperation, qanat's, the traditional water management and sustainability, the socio-economic context, the sustainable management of shared aquifers system and more.
In today's European arts and sciences most of the time we see not
only other, but also our own cultural traditions and the different
forms of modernity like a dim image in a mirror. And the future of
our own and other cultures seems to be shrouded in mystery, because
our gift of knowledge and inspired messages are only partial. The
question this book addresses is whether it is possible to get an
almost face-to-face intimacy with various forms of cultural
tradition and modernity by using our experiences and our powers of
imagination, i.e. our expectations, in a more fruitful way.
Recent literature has identified modern "parenting" as an expert-led practice-one which begins with pre-pregnancy decisions, entails distinct types of intimate relationships, places intense burdens on mothers and increasingly on fathers too. Exploring within diverse historical and global contexts how men and women make-and break-relations between generations when becoming parents, this volume brings together innovative qualitative research by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists. The chapters focus tightly on inter-generational transmission and demonstrate its importance for understanding how people become parents and rear children.
Exploring the dispersion of populations and cultures across many
geographic regions and spheres, diaspora studies has emerged as a
vibrant area of research amid rapidly increasing transnationalism
and globalization. "Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader" presents in a
single volume the most influential and critically well-received
essays that have shaped the trajectory of diaspora studies and
contemporary theorizations of diaspora as a specific terrain
within, and beyond, postcolonial studies.
The book offers classic statements that have defined the field
by such scholars as Appadurai, Gilroy, Radhakrishnan, and Hall.
Essays tackle a number of subjects and diasporic configurations
across the globe: Chinese, Black African, Jewish, South Asian,
Latin American, and Caribbean. Marking multinational and interdisciplinary theorizations of diaspora, and reflecting disciplinary modalities and methodologies of the humanities and social sciences, "Theorizing Diaspora" is a central resource for understanding diaspora as an emergent and contested theoretical space.
A volume in Education Policy in Practice: Critical Cultural Studies Series Editors Bradley A. U. Levinson, and Margaret Sutton, Indiana University Sally Anderson's book on sport, cultural policy, and ""civil sociality"" in Denmark has been a long time in coming, but it's well worth the wait. Based on many years of familiarity with Danish society, and countless hours of intensive fieldwork, Dr. Anderson provides us with a unique anthropological perspective on the process by which state cultural policy actively engages civil society in a quest to shape social relations in the public sphere. The particular domain of policy and social activity is nonschool, voluntary sport, in its various forms. By definition, of course, such activity takes place outside the regular Danish school curriculum, but it is not for this reason any less ""educational."" Indeed, although it is very broadly attended and institutionalized, perhaps because Danish after-school sport is not compulsory, it is all the more compelling for children and youth, and therefore more powerful in certain ways. Indeed, Dr.Anderson has a signal talent for showing us how afterschool sport in Denmark both transmits and produces social knowledge, and powerfully shapes social relations.
In 1979, Steven C. Caton went to a remote area of Yemen to do fieldwork on the famous oral poetry of its tribes. The recent hostage crisis in Iran made life perilous for a young American in the Middle East; worse, he was soon embroiled in a dangerous local conflict and tribal hostilities simmered for months. "Yemen" "Chronicle "is his extraordinary report both on events that ensued and on the many theoretical--let alone practical--difficulties of doing ethnography in such circumstances. Caton also offers a profound meditation on the political, cultural, and sexual components of modern Arab culture.
Since the early 1990s, the seventeen-fold growth in South African sport hunting has made the South African wildlife ranching industry the sixth largest contributor to South Africa's agricultural sector, bringing in $680 million per annum. Biltong Hunting as a Performance of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa links biltong hunting's rapid growth to the 1990s disassembly of the apartheid state and analyzes how the hierarchy, and belonging that biltong hunters associate with it, emerges anew in the post-apartheid context. It examines the narrative and embodied strategies employed by hunters and farmers to create a space that naturalizes the mythic Afrikaner nationalist past in the post-apartheid present.
Exploring some of the ways in which repair practices and perceptions of brokenness vary culturally, Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough argues that repair is both a process and also a consequence which is sought out-an attempt to extend the life of things as well as an answer to failures, gaps, wrongdoings, and leftovers. This volume develops an open-ended combination of empirical and theoretical questions including: What does it mean to claim that something is broken? At what point is something broken repairable? What are the social relationships that take place around repair? And how much tolerance for failure do our societies have?
The community of Agua Blanca, deep within the Machalilla National Park on the coast of Ecuador, found itself facing the twenty-first century with a choice: embrace a booming tourist industry eager to experience a preconceived notion of indigeneity, or risk losing a battle against the encroaching forces of capitalism and development. The facts spoke for themselves, however, as tourism dollars became the most significant source of income in the community. Thus came a nearly inevitable shock, as the daily rhythms of life--rising before dawn to prepare for a long day of maintaining livestock and crops; returning for a late lunch and siesta; joining in a game of soccer followed by dinner in the evening--transformed forever in favor of a new tourist industry and the compromises required to support it. As Practically Invisible demonstrates, for Agua Blancans, becoming a supposedly ""authentic"" version of their own indigenous selves required performing their culture for outsiders, thus becoming these performances within the minds of these visitors. At the heart of this story, then, is a delicate balancing act between tradition and survival, a performance experienced by countless indigenous groups.
While Jews have long had a presence in Ethiopia and the Maghreb, Africa's newest Jewish community of note is in Nigeria, where upwards of twenty thousand Igbos are commonly claimed to have adopted Judaism. Bolstered by customs recalling an Israelite ancestry, but embracing rabbinic Judaism, they are also the world's first "Internet Jews."William Miles has spent over three decades conducting research in West Africa. In /Jews of Nigeria: An Afro-Judaic Odyssey, /he shares life stories from this spiritually passionate community, as well as his own Judaic reflections as he celebrates Hanukka and a bar mitzvah with "Jubos" in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. A concluding encounter with laureate Chinua Achebe reveals unexpected family connections to one of the most intriguing Jewish and African communities to emerge in modern times.
Author of novels, memoirs, and travel writings, Maria de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, better known as la Condesa de Merlin (1789-1852), is arguably one of Cuba's most engaging authors; yet until now her works have gone largely ignored. Born in colonial Havana to an aristocratic Creole family, the future countess of Merlin left Cuba for Spain at an early age. Later, her marriage to the French count Antoine Christophe Merlin and the invasion of French Napoleonic troops precipitated another move to France, where she became one of the belle dames of Paris and began her literary career. She returned only once to Cuba after the death of her husband in 1840, a journey that produced "Viaje a la Habana." Upon her return to Paris, Merlin expanded this into "La Havane," an ambitious three-volume account of the political, social, and economic organization of the island. From the viewpoint of feminist and psychoanalytical theory, "Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba" brilliantly explores the many ways in which issues of gender have contributed to Merlin's virtual absence from the canons of literature and from the discourses on Cuban national identity. Merlin's double identity as both Cuban and French is symbolic of the Cuban exiled condition, a fact taken up by contemporary exiled Cuban writers who see the countess as an alter-ego. Mendez Rodenas seeks to restore Merlin as the first woman writer in Cuban literary history to articulate a sense of national identity, as well as being Cuba's first female historian. She focuses on Merlin's travel writings because they examine such issues as slavery, independence, nationhood, the role of women, education, and local literature. Together her writings construct an alternative, gendered history of nineteenth-century Cuba that must be acknowledged as both functional and authentic. By situating Merlin at the intersection of the discourses of gender and nationalism, Mendez Rodenas reveals not only her pioneering role but also the need to expand current critical categories to account for the specificity of the Latin American literary tradition. In the process of restoring Merlin to her appropriate place in the canon of Latin American literature, she broadens our understanding of colonial Cuban history and expands our knowledge of the ways in which travel writing can influence a country's national literature .
This book addresses the numerous national movements of ethnic groups around the world seeking independence, more self-rule, or autonomy-movements that have proliferated exponentially in the 21st century. In the last 15 years, globalization, religious radicalization, economic changes, endangered cultures and languages, cultural suppression, racial tensions, and many other factors have stimulated the emergence of autonomy and independence movements in every corner of the world-even in areas formerly considered immune to self-government demands such as South America. Researching the numerous ethnic groups seeking autonomy or independence worldwide previously required referencing many specialized publications. This book makes this difficult-to-find information available in a single volume, presented in a simple format accessible to everyone, from high school readers to scholars in advanced studies programs. The book provides an extensive update to Greenwood's Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations: Ethnic and National Groups around the World that was published more than a decade earlier. Each ethnic group receives an alphabetically organized entry containing information such as alternate names, population figures, flag or flags, geography, history, culture, and languages. All the information readers need to understand the motivating factors behind each movement and the current situation of each ethnic group is presented in a compact summary. Fact boxes at the beginning of each entry enable students to quickly access key information, and consistent entry structure makes for easy cross-cultural comparisons. Provides readers with an understanding of a global phenomenon that continues even today Presents specific, hard-to-find information on the many ethnic and national groups seeking greater self-government in an easy-to-access format with up-to-date facts and histories Provides further reading suggestions, an index, and an appendix of dates of independence declarations by nation
In this stimulating and timely book, Scott Bailey, an American teaching Russian and Eurasian history in Japan, traces the history of the dynamic Russian Geographical Society, which carried out major research expeditions to Central Eurasia during the second half of the nineteenth century. The immediate goal of its expeditions was to collect ethnographic, geographic, and natural-scientific information on these regions and their peoples. Their wider benefits established and extended Russia's imperial control in Central Eurasia, including some regions under direct or indirect Chinese control. These expeditions served the acquisition of social and scientific information to benefit the Russian Empire's colonization efforts. Their leaders were often elites trained in ethnography, geography, and natural science subjects, and a major objective of this book is to give a fuller picture of the diverse biographies of these figures, not all of whom were Russian or European males. In the `Wild Countries' moves chronologically from the founding of the Russian Geographical Society in 1845 to the beginning of the revolutionary period in Russia in 1905. During these decades, research missions became more overtly "imperial" and coincided with the consolidation of Russian hegemony over Central Eurasia and an increasing Russian interest in territories in the western and northern regions of the Chinese Q'ing Empire. The book also addresses wider moves toward imperial projects worldwide.
In Indonesia, light skin colour has been desirable throughout recorded history. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race explores Indonesia's changing beauty ideals and traces them to a number of influences: first to ninth-century India and some of the oldest surviving Indonesian literary works; then, a thousand years later, to the impact of Dutch colonialism and the wartime occupation of Japan; and finally, in the post-colonial period, to the popularity of American culture. The book shows how the transnational circulation of people, images, and ideas have shaped and shifted discourses and hierarchies of race, gender, skin colour, and beauty in Indonesia. The author employs "affect" theories and feminist cultural studies as a lens through which to analyse a vast range of materials, including the Old Javanese epic poem Ramayana, archival materials, magazine advertisements, commercial products, and numerous interviews with Indonesian women. The book offers a rich repertoire of analytical and theoretical tools that allow readers to rethink issues of race and gender in a global context and understand how feelings and emotions--Western constructs as well as Indian, Javanese, and Indonesian notions such as rasa and malu-contribute to and are constitutive of transnational and gendered processes of racialisation. Saraswati argues that it is how emotions come to be attached to certain objects and how they circulate that shape the "emotionscape" of white beauty in Indonesia. Her ground-breaking work is a nuanced theoretical exploration of the ways in which representations of beauty and the emotions they embody travel geographically and help shape attitudes and beliefs toward race and gender in a transnational world. |
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