Utilizing contemporary accounts of India, China, Siam and the Levant, this study provides rich detail about these exotic lands and explores the priorities that shaped and motivated these bold envoys and chroniclers. Ames and Love offer a fascinating look at the symbiotic nature of cross-cultural interaction between France and the major trading regions of the Indian Ocean basin during the 17th century. During this period of intense French interest in the rich trade and cultures of the region, Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert in particular were concerned with encouraging French travelers, both clerical and lay, to explore and document these lands. Among the accounts included here are those of Francois Bernier, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, and Francois Pyrard. Because these accounts reflect as much about the structures and priorities of France as they do about the cultures they describe, Ames and Love hope their analysis bridges the gap between studies on early modern France and those on the major Asiatic countries of the same period. Their findings challenge the current thinking in the study of early modern France by demonstrating that overseas expansion to Asia was of considerable importance and interest to all segments of French society. Specialists in traditional "internal" French history will find much in this study of European expansion to complement and supplement their research.

This book sets out to define and consolidate the field of bioinformation studies in its transnational and global dimensions, drawing on debates in science and technology studies, anthropology and sociology. It provides situated analyses of bioinformation journeys across domains and spheres of interpretation. As unprecedented amounts of data relating to biological processes and lives are collected, aggregated, traded and exchanged, infrastructural systems and machine learners produce real consequences as they turn indeterminate data into actionable decisions for states, companies, scientific researchers and consumers. Bioinformation accrues multiple values as it transverses multiple registers and domains, and as it is transformed from bodies to becoming a subject of analysis tied to particular social relations, promises, desires and futures. The volume harnesses the anthropological sensibility for situated, fine-grained, ethnographically grounded analysis to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue on the conceptual, political, social and ethical dimensions posed by bioinformation.

Bringing together case studies of prehistoric and historic sites from Western and non-Western contexts, including China, the Philippines, the Pacific, Egypt, and elsewhere, Frontiers of Colonialism makes the surprising claim that colonialism can and should be compared across radically different time periods and locations. Christine Beaule challenges archaeologists to rethink these two major self-imposed boundaries of study and instead to examine colonial administrative strategies, local resistance, and cross-cultural interaction within a larger, comparative framework. Beaule argues that crossing these frontiers of study will give scholars more power to recognize and explain the varied local impacts of colonialism.

This first volume of The Society Pages series focuses on politics. Drawn largely from feature content, posts, and exchanges provoked by the elections of 2012, the chapters are organized into three main sections. "Core Contributions" exemplifies how sociologists and other social scientists think about otherwise familiar political phenomena like power, polling, and social movements. Chapters in the "Cultural Contexts" section draw out the political content and implications of cultural realms-from religion and race, to sports, humor, and new media technologies-that are often ignored or taken for granted. And the "Critical Takes" rubric gathers pieces on inequalities embedded in and reproduced through the political system, how sociological tools and insights are employed in the public sphere, and the role of government in shaping society through public policy.

Whereas most studies of migration focus on movement, this book examines the experience of staying put. It looks at young men living in a Soninke-speaking village in Gambia who, although eager to travel abroad for money and experience, settle as farmers, heads of families, businessmen, civic activists, or, alternatively, as unemployed, demoted youth. Those who stay do so not only because of financial and legal limitations, but also because of pressures to maintain family and social bases in the Gambia valley. 'Stayers' thus enable migrants to migrate, while ensuring the activities and values attached to rural life are passed on to the future generations.

Anthropological writings on humor are not very numerous or extensive, but they do contain a great deal of insight into the diverse mental and social processes that underlie joking and laughter. On the basis of a wide range of ethnographic and textual materials, the chapters examine the cognitive, social, and moral aspects of humor and its potential to bring about a sense of amity and mutual understanding, even among different and possibly hostile people. Unfortunately, though, cartoons, jokes, and parodies can cause irremediable distress and offence. Nevertheless, contributors' cross-cultural evidence confirms that the positive aspects of humor far outweigh the danger of deepening divisions and fueling hostilities

Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets provides an ethnographic study of varmakkalai, or "the art of the vital spots," a South Indian esoteric tradition that combines medical practice and martial arts. Although siddha medicine is officially part of the Indian Government's medically pluralistic health-care system, very little of a reliable nature has been written about it. Drawing on a diverse array of materials, including Tamil manuscripts, interviews with practitioners, and his own personal experience as an apprentice, Sieler traces the practices of varmakkalai both in different religious traditions-such as Yoga and Ayurveda-and within various combat practices. His argument is based on in-depth ethnographic research in the southernmost region of India, where hereditary medico-martial practitioners learn their occupation from relatives or skilled gurus through an esoteric, spiritual education system. Rituals of secrecy and apprenticeship in varmakkalai are among the important focal points of Sieler's study. Practitioners protect their esoteric knowledge, but they also engage in a kind of "lure and withdrawal"--a performance of secrecy--because secrecy functions as what might be called "symbolic capital." Sieler argues that varmakkalai is, above all, a matter of texts in practice; knowledge transmission between teacher and student conveys tacit, non-verbal knowledge, and constitutes a "moral economy." It is not merely plain facts that are communicated, but also moral obligations, ethical conduct and tacit, bodily knowledge. Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets will be of interest to students of religion, medical anthropologists, historians of medicine, indologists, and martial arts and performance studies.

Focusing on tradition, technology, and authority, this volume challenges classical understandings that mortuary rites are inherently conservative. The contributors examine innovative and enduring ideas and practices of death, which reflect and constitute changing patterns of social relationships, memorialisation, and the afterlife. This cross-cultural study examines the lived experiences of men and women from societies across the globe with diverse religious heritages and secular value systems. The book demonstrates that mortuary practices are not fixed forms, but rather dynamic processes negotiated by the dying, the bereaved, funeral experts, and public institutions. In addition to offering a new theoretical perspective on the anthropology of death, this work provides a rich resource for readers interested in human responses to mortality: the one certainty of human existence.

This wide-ranging resource uses evidence-based documentation to examine claims and beliefs-and provide the facts-about sexual assault and harassment and other forms of sexual violence in the United States. Each title in the Contemporary Debates series examines the veracity of controversial claims or beliefs surrounding a major political/cultural issue in the United States. They do so to give readers a clear and unbiased understanding of current issues by informing them about falsehoods, half-truths, and misconceptions-and confirming the factual validity of other assertions-that have gained traction in America's political and cultural discourse. Ultimately, this series has been crafted to give readers the tools for a fuller understanding of issues, events, policies, and laws that occupy center stage in American life and politics. This volume in the series addresses the issue of sexual violence in the U.S. It includes chapters devoted to quantifying the extent of the problems of sexual assault and harassment; demographic groups most likely to experience sexual violence; physical, emotional, and societal impacts of sexual assault; how investigations of sex-related charges are conducted; laws and policies pertaining to both victims and offenders; and sexual violence prevention and response services outside of the criminal justice system. Features an easy-to-navigate question-and-answer format Uses quantifiable data from respected sources as the foundation for examining every issue Provides readers with leads to conduct further research in extensive Further Reading sections for each entry Examines claims and positions held by individuals and groups of all political backgrounds and ideologies

Although humans sleep for approximately one third of our lives, sleep itself is vastly understudied. As a biological universal, it is easy to overlook the degree to which culture shapes how we sleep, with whom we sleep, where and when we sleep, and how we conceptualize sleep. This edited volume explores the cultural dimensions of sleep in different societies around the world today, with the explicit intention of providing a comparative context through which we can understand the myriad ways in which sleep reflects, and literally (as well as metaphorically) embodies culture.

Using qualitative research data on Mexican/Mexican Americans and their historias de exito that center on Mexican centric concepts such as buen trabajador, bien educado, and buena gente, Octavio Pimentel reveals that when social networks guide personal goals in these communities, goals become community-oriented rather than personally-oriented.

Through an ethnographic study of schooling in the Republic of Tatarstan, this book explores how competing notions of nationhood and belonging are constructed, articulated and negotiated within educational spaces. Amidst major political and ideological moves toward centralization in Russia under the Putin presidency, this small provincial town in Tatarstan provides a unique case of local attempts to promote and preserve minority languages and cultures through education and schooling. Ultimately, the study reveals that while schooling can be an effective instrument of the state to transform individuals as well as society as a whole, school also encompasses various spaces where the agency of local actors unfolds and official messages are contested. Looking at what happens inside schools and beyond-in classrooms, hallways and playgrounds to private households or local Islamic schools-Dilyara Suleymanova here offers a detailed ethnographic account of the way centrally devised educational policies are being received, negotiated and contested on the ground.

Migration of Rich Immigrants addresses flows of emigrants who establish themselves in other countries temporarily or permanently, in favorable economic conditions. Vailati and Rial explore these migratory paths and analyze how gender, class, age, sexual orientation and ethnicity influence these processes.

This book examines how the beliefs and practices of each of the major world religions, as well as other belief systems, affect the variables that influence growth and development in the Global South. Evidence suggests that as countries develop, the influence of religion on all aspects of society declines. In stark contrast to the developed world, in the Global South, the role of religion is highly pervasive - the distinctive conclusion of this book is therefore that a lessening of religiosity is a sine qua non for growth and development, including secular laws and constitutions. Offering a ground-breaking study in an area little explored in the English language, this book will satisfy an important gap in the literature on the political economy of development, sociology of religion, law, and anthropology.

Rapid industrialization, urbanization, and marketization have led to startling social changes in reform-era China. Mindful of the many forms of social theory that relate modernity to individualism, this volume addresses social and cultural change through the lens of psychological anthropology.

The word "blood" awakens ancient ideas, but we know little about its historical representation in Western cultures. Anthropologists have customarily studied how societies think about the bodily substances that unite them, and the contributors to this volume develop those questions in new directions. Taking a radically historical perspective that complements traditional cultural analyses, they demonstrate how blood and kinship have constantly been reconfigured in European culture. This volume challenges the idea that blood can be understood as a stable entity, and shows how concepts of blood and kinship moved in both parallel and divergent directions over the course of European history.

Friendship, descent and alliance are basic forms of relatedness that have received unequal attention in social anthropology. Offering new insights into the ways in which friendship is conceptualized and realized in various sub-Saharan African settings, the contributions to this volume depart from the recent tendency to study friendship in isolation from kinship. In drawing attention to the complexity of the interactions between these two kinds of social relationships, the book suggests that analyses of friendship in Western societies would also benefit from research that explores more systematically friendship in conjunction with kinship.

This book describes how Christian communities in South Africa have responded to HIV/AIDS and how these responses have affected the lives HIV-positive people, youth and broader communities. Drawing on Foucault and the sociology of knowledge, it explains how religion became influential in reshaping ideas about sexuality, medicine and modernity.

In this unique and insightful book, Markus Bell explores the hidden histories of the men, women, and children who traveled from Japan to the world's most secretive state-North Korea. Through vivid ethnographic details and interviews with North Korean escapees, Outsiders: Memories of Migration to and from North Korea reveals the driving forces that propelled thousands of ordinary people to risk it all in Kim Il-Sung's "Worker's Paradise", only to escape back to Japan half a century later.

Culture, once a center-stage concept in anthropology, is now being discussed by talk show personalities and journalists and included in a wide range of academic disciplines. In view of the myriad uses and abuse of the concept, "The Relevance of Culture" sets the record straight through a careful survey of the development of the concept of culture, and the arguments and continuing relevance of it to theoretical discussions. The authors illustrate its roles in such diverse areas as risk and technology, nursing and health care, evolution, criminology, information, economy, geography, and even the uneven the understanding of suicide.

Noted shcolars apply their wit and wisdom to illustrate and analyze the role of culture, creating a definitive picture for scholars, beginning students of cultural anthroplogy, and related social sciences.

Updated with a new Preface, this seminal work challenges the routine ways in which anthropologists have thought about the complexity and quantity of their materials. Marilyn Strathern focuses on a problem normally regarded as commonplace; that of scale and proportion. She combines a wide-ranging interest in current theoretical issues with close attention to the cultural details of social life, attempting to establish proportionality between them. Strathern gives equal weight to two areas of contemporary debate: The difficulties inherent in anthropologically representing complex societies, and the future of cross-cultural comparison in a field where 'too much' seems known. The ethnographic focus of this book emphasizes the context through which Melanesianists have managed the complexity of their own accounts, while at the same time unfolding a commentary on perception and the mixing of indigenous forms. Revealing unexpected replications in modes of thought and in the presentation of ambiguous images, Strathern has fashioned a unique contribution to the anthropological corpus. This book was originally published under the sponsorship of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania.