Lewis Island in Lambertville, New Jersey, is the site of the Lewis Fishery, the last haul seine American shad fishery on the nontidal Delaware River. The Lewis family has fished in the same spot since 1888 and operated the fishery through five generations. The extended Lewis family, its fishery's crew, and the Lambertville community connect with people throughout the region, including environmentalists concerned about the river. It was a Lewis who raised the alarm and helped resurrect a polluted river and its biosphere. While this once exclusively masculine activity is central to the tiny island, today men, women, and children fish, living out a sense of place, belonging, and sustainability. In Another Haul: Narrative Stewardship and Cultural Sustainability at the Lewis Family Fishery, author Charlie Groth highlights the traditional, vernacular, and everyday cultural expressions of the family and crew to understand how community, culture, and the environment intersect. Groth argues there is a system of narrative here that combines verbal activities and everyday activities. On the basis of over two decades of participation and observation, interviews, surveys, and a wide variety of published sources, Groth identifies a phenomenon she calls ""narrative stewardship."" This narrative system, emphasizing place, community, and commitment, in turn, encourages environmental and cultural stewardship, tradition, and community. Intricate and embedded, the system appears invisible, but careful study unpacks and untangles how people, often unconsciously, foster sustainability. Though an ethnography of an occupation, the volume encourages readers to consider what arises as special about all cultures and what needs to be seen and preserved.

How are we to read and understand stories of Jesus healing the lame, deaf, blind, and those with a variety of other maladies? Pilch takes us beyond the historical and literary questions to examine the social questions of how the earliest followers of Jesus and ancient Judeans understood healing, what roles healers played, and the different emphases on healing among the gospels. In his comparative analysis, the author draws on the anthropology of the Mediterranean as well as the models employed by medical anthropologists to understand peasant societies and their health-care systems.Utilizes social-science modelsFeatures a complementary web- site with additional resources

Since the Iraq war, the Middle East has been in continuous upheaval, resulting in the displacement of millions of people. Arriving from Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Syria in other parts of the world, the refugees show remarkable resilience and creativity amidst profound adversity. Through careful ethnography, this book vividly illustrates how refugees navigate regimes of exclusion, including cumbersome bureaucracies, financial insecurities, medical challenges, vilifying stereotypes, and threats of violence. The collection bears witness to their struggles, while also highlighting their aspirations for safety, settlement, and social inclusion in their host societies and new homes.

Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, this book focuses on concepts such as domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. By looking into hunting rituals and herding techniques, the ethnography questions the dynamics between people, domesticated reindeer, and wild animals. It focuses on the role of the spirited landscape which embraces all living creatures and acts as a unifying concept at the center of the human and non-human relations.

Proposing a series of innovative steps towards better understanding human lives at the interstices of water and land, this volume includes eight ethnographies from deltas around the world. The book presents 'delta life' with intimate descriptions of the predicaments, imaginations and activities of delta inhabitants. Conceptually, the collection develops 'delta life' as a metaphor for approaching continual and intersecting sociocultural, economic and material transformations more widely. The book revolves around questions of hydrosociality, volatility, rhythms and scale. It thereby yields insights into people's lives that conventional, hydrological approaches to deltas cannot provide.

Readings in Cultural Anthropology and the Contemporary World: Critical Perspectives provides students with a carefully curated selection of articles that address the principal issues inclusive in the history of the discipline, including globalization, gender, race and ethnicity, kinship, language, and climate change. The anthology is divided into six units. The readings in Unit I address the history of the cultural anthropology discipline and its all-important and central concept of culture. In Unit II, students read selections that address race and ethnicity, including historical and contemporary conceptions of race and the highly politicized US-Mexico border. Unit III focuses on economic anthropology with readings that discuss women as economic agents and the economic factors and consequences associated with migrants. Unit IV is about political anthropology and includes two readings that criticize some of the stereotypes associated with leadership among Indigenous people. In Unit V, the readings distinguish sex as biological for gender as social constructs and examine the reality of gender-based violence. The final unit explores the world system and globalization, including readings that cover a range of topics from the internet to the globalization of fast food to climate change. Readings in Cultural Anthropology and the Contemporary World is an ideal primary or supplementary resource for courses in cultural anthropology and anthropological theory.

In the first book on Aztec dance in the United States, Ernesto Colin combines cultural anthropology, educational theory, and postcolonial theory to create an innovative, interdisciplinary, long-term ethnography of an Aztec dance circle and makes a case for the use of the metaphor of palimpsest as an ethnographic research tool.

Who are the people that make up London's French community and why did they choose to leave France and settle in London? How is 'Frenchness' played out in physical and digital diasporic spaces? And what impact has Brexit had on French Londoners' sense of belonging, identity and embeddedness? French London offers an unprecedented perspective on the everyday lived experience of French migrants in London. Based on years of immersive on-land and on-line empirical enquiry, the book uncovers the motivations underlying mobility from France and the appeal of London as a long-term home. Through the individual (hi)stories of a diverse group of French Londoners and an ethnosemiotic analysis of blogs and websites, London emerges as a place of liberation and openness, where migrants are free from inequalities encountered in the birthplace of l'egalite, whether in education, work or wider society. This volume explores the messy complexity and paradoxical ambivalence of cross-Channel mobility, including here-there, explicit-implicit, physical-digital, subject-object and reinvention-reproduction dichotomies. Structured around Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic violence and habitus, the book considers how apparently pragmatic mobility decision-making is often underpinned by powerful social, affective and pre-reflective factors. Its subdivision of habitus into three interrelated components - habitat, habituation and habits - provides an enlightening conceptual lens to examine participants' material lifeworlds, the gradual creep of settlement, and a 'common-unity' of practice. From schooling and healthcare to eating and drinking, the migrants' evolving behaviours, attitudes, identities and belongings are expertly scrutinised. Spanning pre- and post-Brexit periods, this timely book gives voice to a largely neglected minority and offers a linguistically and culturally sensitive insight into French migrants' on-land trajectories and on-line representations. -- .

This short volume is an ideal starting point for anyone wanting to learn about, arguably, the most famous anthropologist of the twentieth century. "Since her death, a steady drip of books about Mead, one of the most significant women in twentieth century social science and American society, has appeared, some interesting, many quite a bit less so. While Shankman's biography makes use of them, it nevertheless stands out among the better ones, not only for its well-informed and balanced view of Mead, but also for its concision."-Times Literary Supplement Tracing Mead's career as an ethnographer, as the early voice of public anthropology, and as a public figure, this elegantly written biography links the professional and personal sides of her career. The book looks at Mead's early career through the end of World War II, when she produced her most important anthropological works, as well as her role as a public figure in the post-war period, through the 1960s until her death in 1978. The criticisms of Mead are also discussed and analyzed. From the introduction: After her death, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter.... On the other side of the world, Mead's passing was remembered in a very different context. On the island of Manus off the coast of New Guinea, the people of Pere village also mourned her death. Mead first studied the people of Pere in the late 1920s, returning in the 1950s with further visits thereafter. Over a span of five decades, she touched their lives, and they touched hers. Such was Mead's stature that they commemorated her death with a ceremony befitting a great leader.

This book reinvigorates the philosophical treatment of the nature, purpose, and meaning of thought in today's universities. The wider discussion about higher education has moved from a philosophical discourse to a discourse on social welfare and service, economics, and political agendas. This book reconnects philosophy with the central academic concepts of thought, reason, and critique and their associated academic practices of thinking and reasoning. Thought in this context should not be considered as a merely mental or cognitive construction, still less a cloistered college, but a fully developed individual and social engagement of critical reflection and discussion with the current pressing disciplinary, political, and philosophical issues. The editors hold that the element of thought, and the ability to think in a deep and groundbreaking way is, still, the essence of the university. But what does it mean to think in the university today? And in what ways is thought related not only to the epistemological and ontological issues of philosophical debate, but also to the social and political dimensions of our globalised age? In many countries, the state is imposing limitations on universities, dismissing or threatening academics who speak out critically. With this volume, the editors ask questions such as: What is the value of thought? What is the university's proper relationship to thought? To give the notion of thought a thorough philosophical treatment, the book is divided into in three parts. The focus moves from an epistemological perspective in Part I, to a focus on existence and values in higher education in Part II, and then to a societal-oriented focus on the university in Part III. All three parts, in their own ways, debate the notion of thought in higher education and the university as a thinking form of being.

For all peoples on all continents and for all times, water has been the blood of life. It is fitting then, that this book about the peoples of the Southwest be dedicated to an examination of water in a land that has historically been dry, making the need to locate water supplies essential. The Southwest became an important frontier for Spanish and then Anglo explorers and colonizers who battled with native occupants for strategic locations. Each one of these groups who made the Southwest their home were ethnically quite different. They represented diverse histories, cultures, nationalities, classes, religions and world views.

Beginning with discussion of innovative prehistoric land and water use, the book describes the ways in which early farmers learned how to harness the precious drops of water for their fields. The story then continues with views from the Pueblos and beyond as the living sacredness of earth's resource is described by native peoples. This emic view, however, is often in conflict with the various legal definitions of resources carved by federal, state and local officials and developers. The book goes on to examine the background of contemporary land conflicts and water litigation between numerous contestants: Indian, Hispanic, and Anglo. The book ends with articles that attest to the clever ways in which ethnicity is configured and boldly proclaimed in order to reclaim privilege.

This study focuses on the field of security studies through the prism of migration. Using ethnographic methods to illustrate an experiential theory of security taken from the perspective of migrants and asylum seekers in Europe, it effectively offers a means of moving beyond state-based and state-centric theories in International Relations.

This book frames our biological and psychological capacity to make friends as an evolved ability, comparing friendship to other evolved traits of human beings such as walking upright on two legs, having opposable thumbs and a prominent chin, and possessing the capacity for speech and complex abstract reasoning. Professor John Terrell investigates how the human brain has evolved to perform two functions essential to friendship that, at first glance, appear to be at odds with one another: remaking the outside world to suit our collective needs, and escaping into our own inner thoughts and imagining how things might and ought to be. We must all deal with our species' hereditary legacy-that we are social animals who need to include others in our lives for our biological and psychological survival. Yet we are also able to exercise the cognitive freedom to detach from the adaptive realities and demands of life. These thought patterns have important consequences for how we understand aggression and cooperation. Terrell claims that conflict is best understood in terms of friendship-as challenges that emerge when we are forced to reconcile the inner, private worlds of our imaginations with the experienced realities of our daily lives and each other.

This book discusses Asia's rapid pace of urbanization, with a particular focus on new spaces created by and for everyday religiosity. The essays in this volume - covering topics from the global metropolises of Singapore, Bangalore, Seoul, Beijing, and Hong Kong to the regional centers of Gwalior, Pune, Jahazpur, and sites like Wudang Mountain - examine in detail the spaces created by new or changing religious organizations that range in scope from neighborhood-based to consciously global. The definition of "spatial aspects" includes direct place-making projects such as the construction of new religious buildings - temples, halls and other meeting sites, as well as less tangible religious endeavors such as the production of new "mental spaces" urged by spiritual leaders, or the shift from terra firma to the strangely concrete effervesce of cyberspace. With this in mind, it explores how distinct and blurred, and open and bounded communities generate and participate in diverse practices as they deliberately engage or disengage with physical landscapes/cityscapes. It highlights how through these religious organizations, changing class and gender configurations, ongoing political and economic transformations, continue as significant factors shaping and affecting Asian urban lives. In addition, the books goes further by exploring new and often bittersweet "improvements" like metro rail lines, new national highways, widespread internet access, that bulldoze - both literally and figuratively - religious places and force relocations and adjustments that are often innovative and unexpected. Furthermore, this volume explores personal experiences within the particularities of selected religious organizations and the ways that subjects interpret or actively construct urban spaces. The essays show, through ethnographically and historically grounded case studies, the variety of ways newly emerging religious communities or religious institutions understand, value, interact with, or strive to ignore extreme urbanization and rapidly changing built environments.

Arguing against the postmodern claim that systematic theory is unable to account for difference, "Difference in Time: A Critical Theory of Culture" adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of cultural judgement and social change. With music as her model for theory, Hanrahan explores the role of time, the creation of meaning, the identification of difference, and the basis for judgements in cultural life, and in doing so provides a foundation for the critique of cultural objects and practices that avoids both the elitism of traditional aesthetics and the unwavering relativism of so much contemporary cultural analysis. A broad-ranging and deeply philosophical work building on the scholarship of the Frankfurt School, "Difference in Time: A Critical Theory of Culture "drives home the need for critique in the evaluation and revision of the social knowledge and institutions of democratic civic life.

In Hanrahan's analysis, the dualism of critique--that of universal judgement and relative standpoint--is false when critique is understood as a dynamic process in which both judgement and standpoint are emergent and contingent. Differences are not given or static but are articulated in time; therefore, both the categories of critique and of social theory in general must be temporalized. Hanrahan's musical model draws attention to the fundamental temporality of social life and social structure, and integrates that understanding into the structure of a new dynamic in which difference is compatible with both system and structure. Thus, Hanrahan demonstrates that it is possible to construct critical categories that do not become orthodoxies.

Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa examines the gendered and generational conflicts surrounding social change in South Africa's rural Eastern Cape roughly twenty years after the end of Apartheid. In post-Aparatheid South Africa, rights-based public discourse and state practices promote liberal, autonomous, and egalitarian notions of personhood, yet widespread unemployment and poverty demand that people rely closely on one another and forge relationships that disrupt the gendered and generational hierarchies framed as traditional and culturally authentic. Kathleen Rice examines the ways these tensions and restructurings lead to uncertainties about how South Africans should live together in their daily lives. Focusing particularly on the women of the village of Mhlambini, Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa offers compelling portraits of how they experience and navigate widespread social and economic change and presents their experiences as a way of understanding how people navigate the moral ambiguities of contemporary South African life.

This book examines how computer-based programs can be used to acquire 'big' digital cultural heritage data, curate, and disseminate it over the Internet and in 3D visualization platforms with the ultimate goal of creating long-lasting "digital heritage repositories.' The organization of the book reflects the essence of new technologies applied to cultural heritage and archaeology. Each of these stages bring their own challenges and considerations that need to be dealt with. The authors in each section present case studies and overviews of how each of these aspects might be dealt with. While technology is rapidly changing, the principles laid out in these chapters should serve as a guide for many years to come. The influence of the digital world on archaeology and cultural heritage will continue to shape these disciplines as advances in these technologies facilitate new lines of research. serif">The book is divided into three sections covering acquisition, curation, and dissemination (the major life cycles of cultural heritage data). Acquisition is one of the fundamental challenges for practitioners in heritage and archaeology, and the chapters in this section provide a template that highlights the principles for present and future work that will provide sustainable models for digital documentation. Following acquisition, the next section highlights how equally important curation is as the future of digital documentation depends on it. Preservation of digital data requires preservation that can guarantee a future for generations to come. The final section focuses on dissemination as it is what pushes the data beyond the shelves of storage and allows the public to experience the past through these new technologies, but also opens new lines of investigation by giving access to these data to researchers around the globe. Digital technology promises significant changes in how we approach social sciences, cultural heritage, and archaeology. However, researchers must consider not only the acquisition and curation, but also the dissemination of these data to their colleagues and the public. Throughout the book, many of the authors have highlighted the usefulness of Structure from Motion (SfM) work for cultural heritage documentation; others the utility and excitement of crowdsourcing as a 'citizen scientist' tool to engage not only trained students and researchers, but also the public in the cyber-archaeology endeavor. Both innovative tools facilitate the curation of digital cultural heritage and its dissemination. Together with all the chapters in this volume, the authors will help archaeologists, researchers interested in the digital humanities and scholars who focus on digital cultural heritage to assess where the field is and where it is going.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become ubiquitous in the development sector in Africa and attracting more academic attention. However, the fact that NGOs are an integral part of the everyday lives of men and women on the continent has been overlooked thus far. In Africa, NGOs are not remote, but familiar players, situated in the midst of cities and communities. By taking a radical empirical stance, this book studies NGOs as a vital part of the lifeworlds of Africans. Its contributions are immersed in the pasts, presents and futures of personal encounters, memories, decision-making and politics.

Chechens: Culture and Society is an ethnography that elaborates the lived experiences of Chechens, focusing primarily on relationships and socio-cultural norms within the context of the current conflict in the Chechen Republic.