This book explores how, unlike in the West, the daily religious life of most Chinese people spreads without institutional propagation. Based upon more than a decade of field research in rural China, the book demonstrates the decisive role of rites of passage and yearly festival rituals held in every household in shaping people's religious dispositions. It focuses on the family, the unit most central to Chinese culture and society, and reveals the repertoire embodied in daily life in a world envisioned as comprising both the "yin" world of ancestors, spirits, and ghosts, and the "yang" world of the living. It discusses especially the concept of bai, which refers to both concrete bodily movements that express respect and awe, such as bowing, kneeling, or holding up ritual offerings, and to people's religious inclinations and dispositions, which indicate that they are aware of a spiritual realm that is separate from yet close to the world of the living. Overall, the book shows that the daily practices of religion are not a separate sphere, but rather belief and ritual integrated into a way of dwelling in a world envisaged as consisting of both the "yin" and the "yang" worlds that regularly communicate with each other.

In this interdisciplinary study, Monika Fodor explores how intergenerational memory narratives embedded in the speaker's own stories impact ethnic subjectivity construction. Working with thematically selected life experiences from interviews conducted with second- and late-generation European Americans, Fodor demonstrates how the storytellers position themselves in a range of social, cultural, and political discourses to claim or disclaim ethnicity as part of their subjectivity. Tying narrative content, structural, and performance analysis to the sociological and sociolinguistic concepts of "symbolic capital" and "investment," Fodor unpacks the changing levels of identifying with one's ancestral ethnic heritage and its potential to carry meaning for late-generation descendants. In doing so, she reveals the shared features of identification among individuals through narrative meaning-making, which may be the basis of real or imagined, heterolocal discourse community formation and sustained ethnic subjectivity. The narrative analysis demonstrates how the cohesive force among members of the community is the shared knowledge of story frames and the personalized retelling of these. Ethnic Subjectivity in Intergenerational Memory Narratives draws on inherited, often moving, personal experiences that offers new insights into the so far largely unexplored terrain of the narrative structure of intergenerationally transferred memory retellings, that will be of great interest to students and scholars of ethnic studies, migration and identity studies.

Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context examines modern Taiwanese culture through the prism of global cultural interactions. Challenging the view of Taiwan as a product of transience and displacement, it highlights Taiwan's subjectivity, viewing the island as a site of a global development that epitomizes both resistance and negotiation in the process of cultural flows. The fourteen contributions by an international team of scholars investigate the multi-layered and multidirectional interplays between the island and the outside world, exploring the impact of complex cultural encounters on the construction, writing and rewriting of Taiwan in a global context. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the topics covered range from Taiwanese literature, cinema, food culture and tourism to cultural geography, colonial history, and folk religion, with comparisons made with Japan, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the West. Focusing on continuous cross-cultural interplays, this book affords readers a deeper understanding of identity politics and a better insight into the fluidity, changeability, and constructionist nature of culture. As such, it will be will be of great interest to students and scholars of Taiwan Studies and Cultural Studies, as well as Asian film, literature and popular culture.

Using key perspectives from Linguistic anthropology the book illuminates how social actors take up the ideals of law, equality, and democratic representation in locally-meaningful ways to make their own national history in ways that may perpetuate violence and inequality. Focusing specifically on post-war conditions in Ireland, the author contextualizes commonplace practices by which citizens are made to learn the gap between official membership in and political belonging to a democratic state. Each chapter takes up a different aspect of state authority and power to constitute citizenship, to enact laws, to mediate conflict, and to create histories in the context of social inequalities and political hostilities. This book is an excellent ethnographic addition to courses in linguistic anthropology, giving readers the opportunity to explore applications and ramifications of key theoretical text within research.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the methodological, theoretical, and meta-theoretical considerations and guidelines involved in undertaking institutional ethnographic work involving people with cognitive and communicative disabilities. It presents a coherent platform for integrating theory and method built on classical and recent anthropological and sociological theory as well as classic and recent methodological considerations within the ethnographic tradition. Furthermore, it introduces readers to the challenging work of understanding the lifeworld of people who cannot express themselves in ordinary ways or who are deeply stigmatised and oppressed by dominating discourses telling them how to understand and define their role in society. It will be of interest to all scholars, students and researchers of disability studies, particularly those who undertake ethnographic research or want to understand the challenges involved in doing so.

This book investigates the entangled relations between people's daily worship practices and their umwelt in South India. Focusing on the practices of spirit (buta) worship in the coastal area of Karnataka, it examines the relationship between people and deities. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book links important anthropological theories on personhood, perspectives, transactions, and gift-exchanges together with the Gestaltkreis theory of Viktor von Weizsacker. First, it examines the relations between buta worship and land tenure, matriliny, and hierarchy in the society. It then explores the reflexive relationship between modern law and current practices based on conventional law, before examining new developments in buta worship with the rise of mega-industries and environmental movements. Furthermore, this book sheds light on the struggles and endeavours of the people who create and recreate their relations with the realm of sacred wildness, as well as the formations and transformations of the umwelt in perpetual social-political transition. Modernity and Spirit Worship in India will be of interest to academics in the field of anthropology, religious studies and the dynamics of religion, and South Asian Culture and Society.

What exactly is a crowd? How do crowds differ from other large gatherings of people? And how do they transform emotions, politics, or faith? In Crowds, contributors draw on their experiences and expertise to reflect on their encounters with crowds. Each chapter examines a particular crowd or conception of crowdedness to provide an analysis of how, when, where-and with whom-crowds form in different contexts, as well as their purpose and the practical effect the experience has on both the participants and their environment. The wide selection of case studies ranges from the crowds that form every year during the Hajj, to New Year celebrations in China, commuters on the Delhi metro, public prayer in Nigeria, online mobs in Bangladesh, and the crowds that have emerged during protest movements in Thailand and Syria. Crowds makes a key contribution to establishing an anthropological theory of crowds and will be an essential read for both students and researchers.

This book addresses some of the questions that have been brought to light by the varied experiences of culture industry workers and consumer publics across East Asia over the past decade. For over twenty years, the creative industries have been seen as the engine driving global economic transformation, as a way out of the dilemmas of de-industrialization, and as key to the projection of national soft power. The chapters in this book cover the former 'Tiger Economies' of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as Japan and China, and focus on a number of different industries - cinema, television, graphic design, fashion, and literature. The authors include sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars, who approach the topics of creative work, government policy, and entrepreneurial strategy from a variety of perspectives. The chapters examine the varied political, economic, and social structures that influence the development of creative industries within the region and reveal how the careers of creative industry workers in different cities and different industries can vary. They also show how the development of the creative industries can affect many aspects of society, including city planning, policing, democratic politics, and ethnic and national identities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique.

How are notions of 'home' made and negotiated by ethnographers? And how does the researcher relate to forms of home encountered during fieldwork? Rather than searching for an abstract, philosophical understanding of home, this collection asks how home gains its meaning and significance through ongoing efforts to create, sustain or remake a sense of home. The volume explores how researchers and informants alike are always involved in the process of making and unmaking home, and challenges readers to reimagine ethnographic practice in terms of active, morally complex process of home-making. Contributions reach across the globe and across social contexts, and the book includes chapters on council housing and middle-class apartment buildings, homelessness and migration, problems with accessing the field as well as limiting it, physical as well as sentimental notions of home, and objects as well as inter-human social relations. Home draws attention to processes of sociality that normally remain analytically invisible, and contributes to a growing and rich field of study on the anthropology of home.

Mannequins in Museums is a collection of historical and contemporary case studies that examine how mannequins are presented in exhibitions and shows that, as objects used for storytelling, they are not neutral objects. Demonstrating that mannequins have long histories of being used to promote colonialism, consumerism, and racism, the book shows how these histories inform their use. It also engages readers in a conversation about how historical narratives are expressed in museums through mannequins as surrogate forms. Written by a select group of curators and art historians, the volume provides insight into a variety of museum contexts, including art, history, fashion, anthropology and wax. Drawing on exhibition case studies from North America, South Africa, and Europe, each chapter discusses the pedagogical and aesthetic stakes involved in representing racial difference and cultural history through mannequins. As a whole, the book will assist readers to understand the history of mannequins and their contemporary use as culturally relevant objects. Mannequins in Museums will be compelling reading for academics and students in the fields of museum studies, art history, public history, anthropology and visual and cultural studies. It should also be essential reading for museum professionals who are interested in rethinking mannequin display techniques.

Through a range of ethnographic case studies focusing on the Portuguese recovery after the economic crisis, this book begins a conversation about the experience of recuperation and repair. Located in the cracks and gaps between the state and society, recuperation appears as a social and infrastructural answer linked to reciprocity, critical urbanity, generational interweaving, alternate ordering and reconnection of different bodies and histories. With chapters looking at public art in Lisbon and recuperative modes of action, this collection takes a thorough look at a society in crisis and shows how the people of the community create micro-politics of resistance. Ultimately, Politics of Recuperation reflects on the meaning of personal and collective resilience in Europe today, as well as on the limits and interstices of contemporary politics.

This book centers on two inquisitorial investigations, both of which began in the 1540s. One involved relations of Europeans and Native Americans in the Oaxacan town of Yanhuitlan (in New Spain, today's Mexico). The other involved relations of Moriscos (recent Muslim converts to Catholicism) and Old Christians (people with deep Catholic ancestries) in the Mediterranean kingdom of Valencia (in the "old" Spain). Although separated by an ocean, the social worlds preserved in these inquisitorial files share many things. By bringing the two inquisitions together, Hamann reveals how very local practices and debates had long-distance parallels, parallels that reveal larger entanglements of the early modern world. Through a dialogue of two microhistories, he presents a macrohistory of large-scale social transformation. We see how attempts in both places to turn old worlds into new ones were centered on struggles over materiality and temporality. By paying close attention to theories (and practices) of reduction and conversion, Hamann suggests we can move beyond anachronistic models of social change as colonization, and place early modern concepts of time and history at the center of our understandings of the sixteenth-century past. Overall, this project intervenes in major debates from both history and anthropology: about the writing of global histories, our conceptualizations of the colonial, the nature of religious and cultural change, and the roles of material things in social life and the imagination of time.

Examining Internet culture in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the US, this book analyzes videos which entertain both English and Chinese-speaking viewers to gain a better understanding of cultural similarities and differences. Each of the chapters in the volume studies streaming videos from YouTube and its Chinese counterparts, Todou and Youku, with the book using a combination of interpretative analysis of content, commentary, and ethnographic interviews. Employing a diverse range of examples, from Michael Jackson musical mash-ups of Cultural Revolution visuals, to short clips of Hitler ranting about twenty-first century issues with Chinese subtitles, this book goes on to explore the ways in which traditional beliefs regarding gender, romance, religion, and politics intersect. Looking at how these issues have changed over the years in response to new technologies and political economies, it also demonstrates how they engage in regional, transnational, and global dialogues. Comparing and incorporating the production of videos with traditional media, such as television and cinema, Internet Video Culture in China will be useful to students and scholars of Internet and digital anthropology, as well as Cultural Studies and Chinese Studies more generally.

This book reflects on the myriad ways in which forms of exclusion and inclusion play out in narratives of migration, focusing on the case of Northern Italian narratives in today's superdiverse Italy. Drawing on over a decade of the author's fieldwork in the region, the volume examines the emergence of racialized language in conversations about migrants or migration issues in light of increasing recent migratory flows in the European Union, couched in the broader context of changing socio-political forces such as anti-immigration policies and nativist discourse in political communication in Italy. The book highlights case studies from everyday discourse in both villages and cities and at different levels of society to explore these "intimacies of exclusion," the varying degrees to which inclusion and exclusion manifest themselves in conversation on migration. The book also employs a narrative practice-based approach which considers storytelling as a more dynamic form of discourse, thus allowing for equally new ways of analyzing their content and impact. Offering a valuable contribution to the growing literature on narratives of migration, this volume is key reading for graduate students and scholars in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, sociocultural anthropology, language and politics, and migration studies.

Focusing on the world of Norwegian Opioid Substitution Treatment (OST) in the aftermath of significant reforms, this book casts a critical light on the intersections between medicine and law, and the ideologies infusing the notions of "individual choice" and "patient involvement" in the field of addiction globally. With ethnographic attention to the encounters between patients, clinicians, and bureaucrats, the volume shows that OST sustains the realities it is meant to address. The chapters follow one particular patient through complex clinical and legal battles as they fight to achieve a better quality of life. The study provides ethnographic insight that captures the individual, experiential aspects of addiction treatment, and how these experiences find a register within different domains of treatment and policy, including the familial, social, legal, and clinical. Offering a rare view of addiction treatment in a Scandinavian welfare state, this book will be of interest to scholars of medical and legal anthropology and sociology, and others with an interest in drug policy and addiction treatment.

Drawing on the author's extensive fieldwork in the Dong areas in southwest China, this book presents a detailed picture of the Dong's buildings and techniques, with new insights into the Dong's cosmology and rituals of everyday life meshed with the architecture, and the symbolic meanings. It examines how the buildings and techniques of the Dong are ordered and influenced by the local culture and context. The timber bridges and drum towers are the Dong's most prominent architectural monuments. Usually built elaborately with multiple roofs, these bridges and drum towers were designed and maintained by the local carpenters who also built the village suspended houses, in an oral tradition carried down from father to son or to apprentice. They were funded entirely by the local people, and the bridges tend to be built in places without great pressure of traffic or another bridge already existing close by. Why does such great expense go into the Dong's buildings with elaboration? How were they built? And what do they mean to their users and builders? This book is an anthropological study on the Dong's architecture and technique, and it aims to contribute a discourse on the interdisciplinary research area. It is suitable for graduate and postgraduate readers.

In recent years, social scientists have turned their critical lens on the historical roots and contours of their disciplines, including their politics and practices, epistemologies and methods, institutionalization and professionalization, national development and colonial expansion, globalization and local contestations, and their public presence and role in society. The Social Sciences in the Looking Glass offers current social scientific perspectives on this reflexive moment. Examining sociology, anthropology, philosophy, political science, legal theory, and religious studies, the volume's contributors outline the present transformations of the social sciences, explore their connections with critical humanities, analyze the challenges of alternate paradigms, and interrogate recent endeavors to move beyond the human. Throughout, the authors, who belong to half a dozen disciplines, trace how the social sciences are thoroughly entangled in the social facts they analyze, and are key to helping us understand the conditions of our world. Contributors. Chitralekha, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Didier Fassin, Johan Heilbron, Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, Kristoffer Kropp, Nicolas Langlitz, John Lardas Modern, Alvaro Morcillo Laiz, Amin Perez, Carel Smith, George Steinmetz, Peter D. Thomas, Bregje van Eekelen, Agata Zysiak

This book analyzes the processes of social transformation in Iran from the height of the country's power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under the Safavid dynasty to the aftermath of the startling revolution that overthrew the Pahlavi monarchy in 1979.

This book compares aspirations and life choices among educated young adults in urban China and Taiwan. As two places that share a cultural heritage but very different political and economic systems, it assesses how the socio-economic and political trajectories of China and Taiwan have influenced young people's decision-making and the strategies they apply to realize their goals. Drawing upon ethnographic research, this book analyzes young adults' choices in the areas of education, career and marriage, considering their individual social backgrounds and economic resources. In this context, it also discusses how feelings of hope, doubt and disenchantment are mitigated by the specific societal atmospheres and ideological discourses. Whereas stable employment and marriage appeared to be universal goals, this book demonstrates how young adults in Beijing had more autonomy in decision-making concerning individual life choices than those in Taipei. Among other things, China's demographic controls and urban migration policies appear to increase the independence of young people from their parents. Further, the prevalence of boarding school education in China compared to Taiwan provides an opportunity for earlier autonomy for young people in China. Taking a comparative approach, Young Adults in Urban China and Taiwan will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Chinese Studies and Taiwan Studies, as well as social and cultural anthropology and youth culture.

In this book, Gregory Salter traces how artists represented home and masculinities in the period of social and personal reconstruction after the Second World War in Britain. Salter considers home as an unstable entity at this historical moment, imbued with the optimism and hopes of post-war recovery while continuing to resonate with the memories and traumas of wartime. Artists examined in the book include John Bratby, Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan, Francis Newton Souza and Victor Pasmore. Case studies featured range from the nuclear family and the body, to the nation. Combined, they present an argument that art enables an understanding of post-war reconstruction as a temporally unstable, long-term phenomenon which placed conceptions of home and masculinity at the heart of its aims. Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain sheds new light on how the fluid concepts of society, nation, masculinity and home interacted and influenced each other at this critical period in history and will be of interest to anyone studying art history, anthropology, sociology, history and cultural and heritage studies.

Food Heritage and Nationalism in Europe contends that food is a fundamental element of heritage, and a particularly important one in times of crisis. Arguing that food, taste, cuisine and gastronomy are crucial markers of identity that are inherently connected to constructions of place, tradition and the past, the book demonstrates how they play a role in intangible, as well as tangible, heritage. Featuring contributions from experts working across Europe and beyond, and adopting a strong historical and transnational perspective, the book examines the various ways in which food can be understood and used as heritage. Including explorations of imperial spaces, migrations and diasporas; the role of commercialisation processes, and institutional practices within political and cultural domains, this volume considers all aspects of this complex issue. Arguing that the various European cuisines are the result of exchanges, hybridities and complex historical processes, Porciani and the chapter authors offer up a new way of deconstructing banal nationalism and of moving away from the idea of static identities. Suggesting a new and different approach to the idea of so-called national cuisines, Food Heritage and Nationalism in Europe will be a compelling read for academic audiences in museum and heritage studies, cultural and food studies, anthropology and history. Chapters 1,2,4,6 and 12 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

This book focuses on the mechanisms that undergird the operation of racialization and works to empirically define the specific mechanisms by which racialization outside of black-white paradigm operates. The contributors highlight the advantages and benefits of using case studies from outside of the black-white racial boundary in the social scientific study of racism, racial identity, racial meaning, and racial representation. Their contributions can be grouped into three specific areas of focus: the investigation of the relationship between racialization and the state; the interplay between racialization and identities; and the role of racialization in the media. Taken together, the book lays out a roadmap for future study of racialization and the study of race beyond the racial categories of black and white Serving as a guiding point to future research, this book will be of interest to all scholars of race, and those seeking to understand the ideologies, actions, interactions, structures and social practices associated with racialization. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

This book interrogates politics and practices of multiculturalism and multicultural education in contexts where liberal and critical multiculturalism is under pressure. It examines and interrogates perspectives on multiculturalism and the political and social to diversity in societies in Asia and Europe. It is set against a background of increasing right wing radicalism and pervasive authoritarianism in different parts of the world. These ideologies not only undermine multiculturalism but the potential of democracy itself. The book includes chapters from leading scholars on multiculturalism, interculturalism and diversity around the world. It examines the challenges to multicultural diversity in the Global North, and makes a distinctive contribution by addressing this issue in the Global South societies of Asia, including Myanmar, China, and Pakistan. As such, this book opens up international debate about multiculturalism by providing exchanges rarely heard across borders.

Thoroughly updated and revised throughout with brand new chapters on affective bodies, indeterminate bodies, assemblaged bodies and a new conclusion, and featuring essay and classroom questions for classroom use, The Body: Key Concepts, Second Edition, presents a concise and up-to-date introduction to, and analysis of, the complex and influential debates around the body in contemporary culture. Lisa Blackman outlines and illuminates those debates which have made the body central to current interdisciplinary thinking across the arts, humanities and sciences. Since body studies hit the mainstream, it has grown in new regions, including China, and moved in new directions to question what counts as a body and what it means to have and be a body in different contexts, milieu and settings. Lisa Blackman guides the reader through socio-cultural questions around representation, performance, class, race, gender, disability and sexuality to examine how current thinking about the body has developed and been transformed. Blackman engages with classic anthropological scholarship from Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock, revisits black feminist writings from the 1980s, as well as engaging with recent debates, thought and theorists who are inventing new concepts, methods and ways of apprehending embodiment which challenge binary and dualistic categories. It provides an overview of the proliferation of body studies into other disciplines, including media and cultural studies, philosophy, gender studies and anthropology, as well as mapping the future of body studies at the intersections of body and affect studies.

This book captures the dynamics of history, memory, and territorial cults in Houay Yong, a Tai Vat village situated in the multiethnic highland frontier between Laos and Vietnam. By taking seriously the experiences of the villagers, it partakes in a broader movement to reintegrate highlanders and their agency into history at large. Based on comprehensive fieldwork research and the examination of colonial archives, this book makes accessible, for an English-speaking audience, untapped French archives on Laos and early publications on territorial cults written by French ethnologists. In so doing, it provides a balanced perspective, drawing from the fields of memory studies and classical historical research. Following a chronological approach stretching from the nineteenth century to the present, it extends narrative analysis through a comparative ethnography of territorial cults, a key component of the performative and material presentification of the past. Highly interdisciplinary in nature, History, Memory and Territorial Cults in the Highlands of Laos will be useful to students and scholars of anthropology, history, and religious studies, as well as Asian culture and society.