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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology > General
At once a social history and anthropological study of the world's oldest voluntary collective farms, All or None is a story of how landless laborers joined together in Ravenna, Italy to acquire land, sometimes by occupying private land in what they called a "strike in reverse," and how they developed sophisticated land use plans, based not only on the goal of profit, but on the human value of providing work where none was available. It addresses the question of the viability of cooperative enterprise as a potential solution for displaced workers, and as a more humane alternative to capitalist agribusiness.
Anthropology is changing. Traditionally seen as the comparative
study of cultural diversity, Anthropology now faces an increasingly
globalised world, a world in which societies are not discrete or
unique but are all, to some degree, connected. The role of the
anthropologist is now less the comparative study of specific
cultures than the study of the flow of goods, persons and ideas in
the contemporary world. The World of the Anthropologist is a guide
to this changing world, revealing what Anthropology is today and
what anthropologists do now. This book explains what remains of a
traditional Anthropology - such as the anthropological construction
of kinship, politics, religion and economics as well as the
continuing centrality of fieldwork -- and also explores the newer
territory which Anthropology is studying, such as performance,
science, sexuality, media, ethics, and visual culture. Clearly
explaining the key ideas and methods which underpin the subject --
from fieldwork through to the construction of knowledge itself -
The World of the Anthropologist offers a fascinating insight into
and overview of Anthropology today.
Cultural Traditions of Ancient Mesoamerica describes ancient cultural traditions of the Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, and Aztecs, among others, providing students with a survey of Precontact Mesoamerica. The text features a multidisciplinary approach, including perspectives from archaeology, cultural history, epigraphy, art history, and ethnography. The book is organized into ten chapters and proceeds in roughly chronological order to reflect developmental changes in Mesoamerican culture from around 16kya to A.D. 1492. The opening chapter summarizes the foundational concerns of Mesoamerican studies. Chapters Two and Three explore the cultural development of Mesoamerica from the first migrations into the Americas to the Preclassic period. Chapter Four discusses various theories pertaining to culture change. In Chapters Five and Six, students examine Mesoamerica's Classic period. Chapter Seven outlines the nature and importance of ancient and post-contact books and pictorial documents to the study of Mesoamerica. In Chapters Eight and Nine, students learn about the Classic Collapse, the Terminal Classic period, and the Post-Classic period. The final chapter describes the Spanish impact on Native Mesoamerican culture. Cultural Traditions of Ancient Mesoamerica is well suited for courses in anthropology, archaeology, ancient civilizations, ancient Mesoamerica, Latin American history, and Latin American studies.
Umhlonyane, also known as Artemisia afra, is one of the oldest and best-documented indigenous medicines in South Africa. This bush, which grows wild throughout the sub-Saharan region, smells and tastes like "medicine," thus easily making its way into people's lives and becoming the choice of everyday healing for Xhosa healer-diviners and Rastafarian herbalists. This "natural" remedy has recently sparked curiosity as scientists search for new molecules against a tuberculosis pandemic while hoping to recognize indigenous medicine. Laplante follows umhlonyane on its trails and trials of becoming a biopharmaceutical - from the "open air" to controlled environments - learning from the plant and from the people who use it with hopes in healing.
This distinctive text makes social theory accessible to and usable by students. Whereas social theory is often seen as abstract, esoteric and separate from our understanding of the social world, here it is shown to be a flexible and practical resource for anyone wanting to explain social phenomena. This expanded and updated second edition actively encourages readers to develop and practice their own capacities for social explanation: - Providing readers with a powerful 'tool kit' of five social theoretical concepts - Individuals, Nature, Culture, Action and Social Structure - that are fundamental to social explanation; - Drawing on a historically and geographically wide range of examples of social phenomena to show how these theoretical concepts operate and why they're important; - Offering end of chapter questions that enable readers to put theory into practice and begin theorising for themselves. Explaining Social Life is ideal for anyone interested in social theory, including students of sociology, anthropology and related social sciences - both those engaging with social theory for the first time, and more advanced students looking to build upon their understanding.
This book is an introduction to the social anthropology of kinship
- to the ways in which the peoples of different cultures marry and
relate to each other within and outside the family, and to the
means by which one generation relates to those that come before and
after it. It is addressed in particular to students of
anthropology, but is also intended as a one-volume guide to those,
such as social historians, demographers and geographers, who find
it necessary to understand patterns of kinship in different places
and at different times. The book is divided into two parts. Part I opens with a
discussion of what kinship means to the social anthropologist as
distinct from the biologist, and considers the different possible
approaches to the subject within social anthropology itself. The
following chapters cover topics such as descent, inheritance,
succession, the family, residence, marriage, kinship terminology,
systems of affinal alliance, the new reproductive technologies, and
symbolic approaches to kinship. In Part II the first four chapters provide an overview of
theoretical debates concerning different aspects of kinship. The
final chapter provides ethnographic examples, together with an
annotated guide to further reading, divided by chapter. The book applies and illustrates these concepts and topics to a number of contrasting case studies. These illustrate the insights that can be achieved from the study of kinship, and also show that the complexity of even the most familar kinship patterns rarely lends itself to simple description. The author also includes annotated guides to further reading.
This riveting volume dispels the sanitized history surrounding Native American practices toward their enemies that preceded the European exploration and colonization of North America. "We abandon truth when we gloss over the clashes between Native Americans and Europeans, encounters of parties equally matched in barbarity," says George Franklin Feldman, "We neglect true history when we hide the uniqueness of the varied cultures that evolved during the thousands of years before Europeans invaded North America." The research is impeccable, the writing sparkling, and the evidence incontrovertible: headhunting and cannibalism were practiced by many of the native peoples of North America.
Maroon Cosmopolitics: Personhood, Creativity and Incorporation sheds further light on the contemporary modes of Maroon circulation and presence in Suriname and in the French Guiana. The contributors assembled in the volume look to describe Maroon ways of inhabiting, transforming and circulating through different localities in the Guianas, as well as their modes of creating and incorporating knowledge and artefacts into their social relations and spaces. By bringing together authors with diverse perspectives on the situation of the Guianese Maroon at the twenty-first century, the volume contributes to the anthropological literature on Maroon societies, providing ethnographic, and historical depth and legitimacy to the contemporary lives of the descendants of those who fled from slavery in the Americas.
China is emerging front and center on the global economic stage as a new member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Beijing will host the 2008 Summer Olympics and Shanghai will host Expo 2010. Moreover, China is becoming a major trading nation. Is Western culture ready to respect a country known primarily for population control and communism? "Chinese Culture, Western Culture" asserts that as these events unfold, the Western world will naturally want to know more about China. People will have to filter through an excessive supply of information, and in some cases, misinformation, to understand a culture that has traditionally held so little of the Western world's attention. A primer that explores the complementary aspects of Chinese and Western cultures, this book demonstrates how we can learn from both in order to establish a dynamic balance in this new era of globalization and rapid technological advancement. By discovering new ways of thinking, we can transform how we do business, how we treat our environment, and how we interact with others as we face future challenges.
This volume revisits the notions of Orientalism, Occidentalism and, to a certain extent, Reverse Orientalism/Occidentalism in the 21st century, adopting post-modern, constructionist and potentially non-essentialising approaches. The representations of the 'cultural Other' in education, literature and the arts are examined by scholars working in Australia, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and the USA. Vinyl compilations, TV series, novels, institutional discourses and surveys, amongst others, are examined so as to better understand how people construct their identity in relation to an imagined and idealised Other. This book will appeal to all researchers and students interested in cultural identity and stereotypes of the 'East' and the 'West', in particular in the fields of academic mobility, cultural studies, intercultural education, postcolonial literature and media studies.
From the twins Osugi and Peeco to longstanding icon Miwa Akihiro, Claire Maree traces the figure of the Japanese queerqueen, showing how a diversity of gender identifications, sexual orientations, and discursive styles are commodified and packaged together to form this character. Representations of gay men's speech have changed in tandem with gender norms, increasingly crossing over into popular media via the body of the "authentic" gay male up to and including the current "LGBT boom" in Japan. In this context, queerqueen demonstrates how commercial practices of recording, transcribing, and editing spoken interactions and use of on-screen text encode queerqueen speech as inherently excessive and in need of containment. Tackling questions of authenticity, self-censorship, and the restrictions of heteronormativity within this perception of queer excess, Maree shows how queerqueen styles reproduce stereotypes of gender, sexuality, and desire that are essential to the business of mainstream entertainment.
Found in Translation is a rich account of language and shifting cross-cultural relations on a Christian mission in northern Australia during the mid-twentieth century. It explores how translation shaped interactions between missionaries and the Anindilyakwa-speaking people of the Groote Eylandt archipelago and how each group used language to influence, evade, or engage with the other in a series of selective "mistranslations." In particular, this work traces the Angurugu mission from its establishment by the Church Missionary Society in 1943, through Australia's era of assimilation policy in the 1950s and 1960s, to the introduction of a self-determination policy and bilingual education in 1973. While translation has typically been an instrument of colonization, this book shows that the ambiguities it creates have given Indigenous people opportunities to reinterpret colonization's position in their lives. Laura Rademaker combines oral history interviews with careful archival research and innovative interdisciplinary findings to present a fresh, cross-cultural perspective on Angurugu mission life. Exploring spoken language and sound, the translation of Christian scripture and songs, the imposition of English literacy, and Aboriginal singing traditions, she reveals the complexities of the encounters between the missionaries and Aboriginal people in a subtle and sophisticated analysis. Rademaker uses language as a lens, delving into issues of identity and the competition to name, own, and control. In its efforts to shape the Anindilyakwa people's beliefs, the Church Missionary Society utilized language both by teaching English and by translating Biblical texts into the native tongue. Yet missionaries relied heavily on Anindilyakwa interpreters, whose varied translation styles and choices resulted in an unforeseen Indigenous impact on how the mission's messages were received. From Groote Eylandt and the peculiarities of the Australian settler-colonial context, Found in Translation broadens its scope to cast light on themes common throughout Pacific mission history such as assimilation policies, cultural exchanges, and the phenomenon of colonization itself. This book will appeal to Indigenous studies scholars across the Pacific as well as scholars of Australian history, religion, linguistics, anthropology, and missiology.
The book sets out to examine the concept of 'chav', providing a review of its origins, its characterological figures, the process of enregisterment whereby it has come to be recognized in public discourse, and the traits associated with it in traditional media representations. The author then discusses the 'chav' label in light of recent re-appropriations in social network activity (particularly through the video-sharing app TikTok) and subsequent commentary in the public sphere. She traces the evolution of the term from its use during the first decade of the twenty-first century to make sense of class, status and cultural capital, to its resurgence and the ways in which it is still associated with appearance in gendered and classed ways. She then draws on recent developments in linguistic anthropology and embodied sociocultural linguistics to argue that social media users draw on communicative resources to perform identities that are both situated in specific contexts of discourse and dynamically changing, challenging the idea that geo-sociocultural varieties and mannerisms are the sole way of indexing membership of a community. This volume contends that equating 'chav' with 'underclass' in the most recent uses of the concept on social networks may not be the whole story, and the book will be of interest to sociocultural linguistics and identity researchers, as well as readers in anthropology, sociology, British studies, cultural studies, identity studies, digital humanities, and sociolinguistics.
The concept of culture has long been criticized, with many scholars reformulating it or discarding it entirely. The field of intercultural communication and relations, however, still relies on culture to examine interculturality and this volume provides a comprehensive examination of the problems that the concept poses today.
This book is an ethnographic study of a group of Western women development workers living in Gilgit, northern Pakistan. It focuses on their efforts to construct comfortable lives and identities while temporarily working abroad in this Muslim community. It also analyses the political consequences of their actions, addressing the ways in which these women perpetuate and resist unequal global power relations in their everyday lives. The author traces the legacy of many of these relations from the colonial period into the present, and provides ideas about how they can be changed to realise a more just global social reality.
The Gaddi of North India are agro-pastoralists who rear sheep and goats following a seasonal migration around the first Himalayan range. While studies on pastoralists have focused either on the pastoralists' adaptation to their physical environment or treated the environment from a symbolic perspective, this book offers a new, holistic perspective that analyzes the ways in which people "make" place. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book not only describes a contemporary understanding of the Gaddi's engagement with the environment but also analyzes religious practices and performances of social relations, as well as media practices and notions of aesthetics. Thereby, the landscape in which the Gaddi live is understood as a network of places that is constantly being built and rebuilt through these local practices. The book contributes to the growing interest in approaches of practice within environmental anthropology.
For the first time in over 30 years, a new ethnographic study emerges on the Bugkalot tribe, more widely known as the Ilongot of the northern Philippines. Exploring the notion of masculinity among the Bugkalot, Cutting Cosmos is not only an experimental, anthropological study of the paradoxes around which Bugkalot society revolves, but also a reflection on anthropological theory and writing. Focusing on the transgressive acts through which masculinity is performed, this book explores the idea of the cosmic cut, the ritual act that enables the Bugkalot man to momentarily hold still the chaotic flows of his world.
Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners' beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism-especially in post-Soviet societies-and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.
In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration. Through creative interventions that unfold what we term as "fieldwork devices"-such as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms-anthropologists engage with their counterparts in the field in the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative of intervention, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with participant observation. Building on this, the book proposes the concept of "experimental collaborations" to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality.
Waiting for Elijah is an intimate portrait of time-reckoning, syncretism, and proximity in one of the world's most polarized landscapes, the Bosnian Field of Gacko. Centered on the shared harvest feast of Elijah's Day, the once eagerly awaited pinnacle of the annual cycle, the book shows how the fractured postwar landscape beckoned the return of communal life that entails such waiting. This seemingly paradoxical situation-waiting to wait-becomes a starting point for a broader discussion on the complexity of time set between cosmology, nationalism, and embodied memories of proximity.
Honorable Mention, 2019 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, given by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology Honorable Mention, 2019 Sharon Stephens Prize, given by the American Ethnological Society Examines the role that race played in the inception of the airline industry Empire in the Air is at once a history of aviation, and an examination of how air travel changed lives along the transatlantic corridor of the African diaspora. Focusing on Britain and its Caribbean colonies, Chandra Bhimull reveals how the black West Indies shaped the development of British Airways. Bhimull offers a unique analysis of early airline travel, illuminating the links among empire, aviation and diaspora, and in doing so provides insights into how racially oppressed people experienced air travel. The emergence of artificial flight revolutionized the movement of people and power, and Bhimull makes the connection between airplanes and the other vessels that have helped make and maintain the African diaspora: the slave ships of the Middle Passage, the tracks of the Underground Railroad, and Marcus Garvey's black-owned ocean liner. As a new technology, airline travel retained the racialist ideas and practices that were embedded in British imperialism, and these ideas shaped every aspect of how commercial aviation developed, from how airline routes were set, to who could travel easily and who could not. The author concludes with a look at airline travel today, suggesting that racism is still enmeshed in the banalities of contemporary flight.
This book provides a three-part investigation into identity construction. Theory, voice and praxis are all represented as the book follows the rationale, stories and narrative methodology of the study of a group of women. The final part of the book presents a new model of identity construction framed in women's health identity.
With the spread of neoliberal projects, responsibility for the welfare of minority and poor citizens has shifted from states to local communities. Businesses, municipalities, grassroots activists, and state functionaries share in projects meant to help vulnerable populations become self-supportive. Ironically, such projects produce odd discursive blends of justice, solidarity, and wellbeing, and place the languages of feminist and minority rights side by side with the language of apolitical consumerism. Using theoretical concepts of economic citizenship and emotional capitalism, Economic Citizenship exposes the paradoxes that are deep within neoliberal interpretations of citizenship and analyzes the unexpected consequences of applying globally circulating notions to concrete local contexts. |
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