How are historians and social scientists to understand the emergence, the multiplicity, and the mutability of collective memories of the Ottoman Empire in the political formations that succeeded it? With contributions focussing on several of the nation-states whose peoples once were united under the aegis of Ottoman suzerainty, this volume proposes new theoretical approaches to the experience and transmission of the past through time. Developing the concept of topology, contributors explore collective memories of Ottoman identity and post-Ottoman state formation in a contemporary epoch that, echoing late modernity, we might term "late nationalism".

American society is more diverse than ever. A country that used to think of itself as the "great melting pot" may soon be calling itself "the great lifestyle buffet." With increasing affluence, more and more Americans are in a position to choose whatever lifestyle most appeals to them. The result is that the national landscape has become an intricate mosaic of varying styles, self-expressions, and ways of life. Even the distinction between majority and minority is starting to blur. Is there any pattern to this ever-shifting kaleidoscope of identities? The author puts the pieces together into a coherent picture in this fascinating study of American diversity. Applying the astute pattern-recognition skills that he demonstrated in his previous book, the critically acclaimed Anatomy of a Trend, the author examines how we transform our identities into practical everyday living--into our lifestyle. Going beyond the usual markers of identity--race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, income level, etc--he focuses on modes of communicating group identity nonverbally through consumer choices, clothing fashions, personal color choices, adornments, accessories, logos, signs, and symbols. Curiously, what emerges from his analysis is a pattern as ancient as human culture itself--a new form of tribalism. He foresees this trend continuing so that by the end of the twenty-first century there will be less identification with nation-states and ethnic groups and more small-group identification. As globalization and mass communication continue to link us together, we may all become so used to diversity that the idea of conflict based on national identity distinctions may seem antiquated. A book of remarkable insights, this will have great appeal to readers interested in popular culture, social change, and consumer tastes.

How do real individuals live together in real societies in the real world?
Jeffrey Alexander's masterful work, The Civil Sphere, addresses this central paradox of modern life. Feelings for others--the solidarity that is ignored or underplayed by theories of power or self-interest--are at the heart of this novel inquiry into the meeting place between normative theories of what we think we should do and empirical studies of who we actually are. A grand and sweeping statement, The Civil Sphere is a major contribution to our thinking about the real but ideal world in which we all reside.

Tongan barkcloth, made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, still features lavishly in Polynesian ceremonies all over the world. Yet despite the attention paid to this textile by anthropologists and art historians alike, little is known about its history. Providing a unique insight into Polynesian material culture, this book explores barkcloth's rich cultural history, and argues that its manufacture, decoration and use are vehicles of creativity and female agency. Based on twelve years of extensive ethnographic and archival research, the book uncovers stories of ceremony, gender, the senses, religion and nationhood, from the 17th century up to the present-day. Placing the materiality of textiles at the heart of Tongan culture, Veys reveals not only how barkcloth was and continues to be made, but also how it defines what it means to be Tongan. Extending the study to explore the place of barkcloth in the European imagination, she examines international museum collections of Tongan barkcloth, from the UK and Italy to Switzerland and the USA, addressing the bias of the European 'gaze' and challenging traditional gendered understandings of the cloth. A nuanced narrative of past and present barkcloth manufacture, designs and use, Unwrapping Tongan Barkcloth demonstrates the importance of the textile to both historical and contemporary Polynesian culture.

Black women's experiences functioning as mothers, teachers and leaders are confounding and complex. Queen Mothers from Ghanaian tradition are revered as the leaders of their matrilineal families and the teachers of the high chiefs (Muller, 2013; Stoeltje, 1997). Conversely, the influence of the British Queen Mother on Black women in the Americas translates as a powerless title of (dis)courtesy. Characterized as a deviant figure by colonialists, the Black Queen Mother's role as disruptive agent was created by White domination of Black life (Masenya, 2014) and this branding persists among contemporary perceptions of Black women who function as the mother, teacher, or leader figure in various spaces. Nevertheless, Black women as cultural anomalies were suitable to mother others for centuries in their roles as chattel and domestic servants in the United States. Dill (2014), Lawson (2000), Lewis (1977) and Rodriguez (2016) provide explorations of the devaluation of Black women in roles of power with these effects wide-ranging from economic and family security, professional and business development, healthcare maintenance, political representation, spiritual enlightenment and educational achievement. This text interrogates contexts where Black women function as Queen Mothers and contests the trivialization of their manifold contributions. The contributed chapters explore: The myriad experiences of Black women mothering, teaching and leading their children, families and communities; how spirituality has influenced the leadership styles of Black women as mothers and teachers; and how Black women are uniquely positioned to mother, teach, and lead in personal and professional spaces.

In 1909, the US Circuit Court in Cincinnati set out to decide "whether a Turkish citizen shall be naturalized as a white person"; the New York Times article on the decision, discussing the question of Turks' whiteness, was cheekily entitled "Is the Turk a White Man?" Within a few decades, having understood the importance of this question for their modernization efforts, Turkish elites had already started a fantastic scientific mobilization to position the Turks in world history as the generators of Western civilization, the creators of human language, and the forgotten source of white racial stock. In this book, Murat Ergin examines how race figures into Turkish modernization in a process of interaction between global racial discourses and local responses.

In Guinea, situated against the background of central government struggles, rural elites use identity politics through contemporary political reforms to maintain their privileges and perpetuate a generations-old local social contract that bridges ethnic and religious divides. Simultaneously, administrative reform and national unrest lead to the creative re-combination of sources of authority and practices of legitimate rule. Past periods of colonization, socialism and authoritarian regime are reflected in contemporary struggles to make sense of participatory democracy and the future of the embattled Guinean national state.

The issue of patronage-clientelism has long been of interest in the social sciences. Based on long-term ethnographic research in southern Italy, this book examines the concept and practice of raccomandazione: the omnipresent social institution of using connections to get things done. Viewing the practice both from an indigenous perspective - as a morally ambivalent social fact - and considering it in light of the power relations that position southern Italy within the nesting relations of global Norths and Souths, it builds on and extends past scholarship to consider the nature of patronage in a contemporary society and its relationship to corruption.

How does design and innovation shape people's lives in the Pacific? Focusing on plant materials from the region, How Materials Matter reveals ways in which a variety of people - from craftswomen and scientists to architects and politicians - work with materials to transform worlds. Recognizing the fragile and ephemeral nature of plant fibres, this work delves into how the biophysical properties of certain leaves and their aesthetic appearance are utilized to communicate information and manage different forms of relations. It breaks new ground by situating plant materials at the centre of innovation in a region.

This book explores recent developments in Institutional Ethnography (IE) and offers reflective accounts on how IE is being utilised and understood in social research. IE is a sociological sub-discipline developed by Dorothy E. Smith that seeks to explicate the textual mediation of people's everyday experiences in their local sites of being. As an approach, IE is growing in significance across the globe, particularly in Canada, USA, Australia and UK. This collection includes contributions from those involved in the early development of IE alongside Smith as well as early career researchers, new to the sociology, theory and method of IE. Chapters focus on IE as a sociological theory and qualitative research method; the relationship between data generation and analysis in IE; implications from its findings for policy; and IE as a significant methodological approach. This involves explication of the theoretical, the operationalization of IE, and links between the theoretical and the empirical. It illuminates the relationship between data generation and analysis and includes consideration of its own textual relations of ruling.

"This is a very good book which will certainly become one of the essential works of reference for the jazz enthusiast. It covers the ragtime to swing period by way of 250 LPs, each of which is afforded full discographical information on dates, titles, and personnels. . . . The quality of the writing is extemely high, as indeed one has a right to expect from authors of this calibre. . . . Harrison, Fox, and Thacker have produced some beautifully composed essays on artistes such as Billie Holliday, Roy Eldridge, Duke Ellington, etc. . . . It is a book which needs to be dipped into frequently, a volume to keep close to one's record collection. . . . It will increase immeasurably anyone's knowledge of, and appreciation for, jazz." The Gramophone

50 years ago, World Bank President Robert McNamara promised to end poverty. Alleviation was to rely on economic growth, resulting in higher incomes stimulated by Bank loans processed by deskbound Washington staff, trickling down to the poorest. Instead, child poverty and homelessness are on the increase everywhere. In this book, anthropologist and former World Bank Advisor Glynn Cochrane argues that instead of Washington's "management by seclusion," poverty alleviation requires personal engagement with the poorest by helpers with hands-on local and cultural skills. Here, the author argues, the insights provided by anthropological fieldwork have a crucial role to play.

Pursues the hypothesis that fictional literature has been instrumental in the development and dissemination of European anti-Americanism from the early 1800s to today. Focusing on Britain, France and Germany, it offers analyses of a range of canonical literary works in which resentful hostility towards the United States is a predominant feature.

This is the first book to consider the major implications for culture of the new science of biosemiotics. The volume is mainly aimed at an audience outside biosemiotics and semiotics, in the humanities and social sciences principally, who will welcome elucidation of the possible benefits to their subject area from a relatively new field. The book is therefore devoted to illuminating the extent to which biosemiotics constitutes an 'epistemological break' with 'modern' modes of conceptualizing culture. It shows biosemiotics to be a significant departure from those modes of thought that neglect to acknowledge continuity across nature, modes which install culture and the vicissitudes of the polis at the centre of their deliberations. The volume exposes the untenability of the 'culture/nature' division, presenting a challenge to the many approaches that can only produce an understanding of culture as a realm autonomous and divorced from nature.

This volume brings together leading scholars in the area of symbolic interactionism to offer a broad discussion of issues including identity, dialogue and legitimacy. Authors move the concept of interaction order into new interpretive spaces, marking the unique contributions of symbolic interactionism to the contractions that define the postmodern social order.

Jean Muteba Rahier examines the cultural politics of Afro-Ecuadorian populations within the context of the Andean region's recent pivotal history and the Latin American 'multicultural turn" of the past two decades, bringing contemporary political trends together with questions of race, space, and sexuality. Organized around eight ethnographic vignettes, the book looks at race and Ecuadorian popular culture; Afro-Ecuadorian cultural politics, cultural traditions, and political activism; "mestizaje" and the non-inclusion of blackness in official imaginations of national identity ('the ideological biology of national identity'); race, gender relations, and anti-black racism; stereotypes of black female hypersexuality and sexual self-constructions; blackness and beauty contest politics; the passage from 'monocultural "mestizaje"' to multiculturalism in the 1990s, which got a second life following the "revolucion ciudadana" (citizen revolution) and the election of Rafael Correa to the Ecuadorian presidency in late 2006; and blackness, racism, sports, and national pride in multicultural Ecuador.

When the Wabanaki were moved to reservations, they proved their resourcefulness by catering to the burgeoning tourist market during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Bar Harbor was called Eden. This engaging, richly illustrated, and meticulously researched book chronicles the intersecting lives of the Wabanaki and wealthy summer rusticators on Mount Desert Island. While the rich built sumptuous summer homes, the Wabanaki sold them Native crafts, offered guide services, and produced Indian shows.

On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification explores the discursive spaces of our speaking position, or what has routinely been referred to in the literature as the poetics and politics of writing culture. At issue here are its problematic underlying notions of cultural identity, authorial subjectivity and postcolonial critique. Contrary to the widespread assumption that cultural studies and the social sciences share a common discourse of culture and society, Allen Chun argues that 'modern' disciplinary practices and axioms have in fact produced inherently incompatible theories. Anthropology's ethical relativism has also created obstacles for a critical theory of culture and society.

Mobile money, e-commerce, cash cards, retail credit cards, and more-as new monetary technologies become increasingly available, the global South has cautiously embraced these mediums as a potential solution to the issue of financial inclusion. How, if at all, do new forms of dematerialized money impact people's everyday financial lives? In what way do technologies interact with financial repertoires and other socio-cultural institutions? How do these technologies of financial inclusion shape the global politics and geographies of difference and inequality? These questions are at the heart of Money at the Margins, a groundbreaking exploration of the uses and socio-cultural impact of new forms of money and financial services.

Tracing the boom of local NGOs since the 1990s in the context of the global political economy of aid, current trends of neoliberal state restructuring, and shifting post-Cold War hegemonies, this book explores the "associational revolution" in post-socialist, post-conflict Serbia. Looking into the country's "transition" through a global and relational analytical prism, the ethnography unpacks the various forms of dispossession and inequality entailed in the democracy-promotion project.

This study analyzes American, Vietnamese, and Japanese personal values, attempting to understand how it can be ethnographers find large differences in values between cultures, yet empirical surveys find relatively small differences in personal values between cultures. D'Andrade argues that people live in two distinct value worlds; the world of "personal values" and the world of "institutionalized values." Assessing these value worlds, D'Andrade is able to explain the contrast between ethnography and survey data, while making vital commentary on American, Vietnamese, and Japanese culture. With insight and precision, this book contributes to the important debate that the Culture, Mind, and Society series has initiated.

An anthropological study of the health system of the Dagara people of northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso, Of Life and Health develops a cultural and epistemological lexicon of Dagara life by examining its religious, ritual, and artistic expressions. Consisting of ethnographic descriptions and analyses of six Dagara cultic institutions, each of which deals with different aspects of sustaining and transmitting life, the volume gives a holistic account of the Dagara knowledge system.