In Contours of Culture the authors discuss the uses of various ethnographic methods in the study of culture, drawing on their field research with an opera company, Welsh artists, and classes on the popular Brazilian martial art capoeira. In their practical research and in the research of other scolars, they encounter complex problems and themes that often require new ways of organizing and conceiving cultural material, and even new ways of giving expression to phenomena that are only partially understood. This book is not only about the inherent complexities involved in ethnography; it is also about the kinds of opportunities available to researchers immersed in this complexity and how they might grasp cultural settings in their entirety.

This book examines how the social and cultural paradigms of contemporary Israel are articulated through the body. To construct a panoramic view of how the Israeli body is chosen, regulated, cared for, and ultimately made perfect, the author draws upon some twenty years of ethnographic research in Israel in a range of subjects. These include premarital and prenatal screening, the regulation of the body and its imagery among appearance-impaired children and their families, the screening and sanctifying of the body as part of the bereavement and commemoration of fallen soldiers, and the discourse of the chosen body as it surfaces during terrorist attacks, military socialization, war, and the peace process.

Within the United Kingdom questions about the relevance of educational research and its relationship to policy have recently been the centre of a prolonged, public and sometimes acrimonious debate.
The chapters in this book illustrate the ability of ethnographic work to assist in understanding the effects of educational policies to gradually influence the policy discourse. The book includes studies of policy initiatives at the local level that show the extent to which an intended change actually occurred in practice, others where actual change occurred, but there were unintended consequences as well as those planned by the policy, and others that illuminate the contradictions within the original policy itself. Chapters focus on a diversity of topics such as the ideology of educational 'success', politics and school mathematics, ITC teaching, sports coaching, basic skills provision for offenders, second language learning, ESOL teaching, primary teachers work, and the teaching of reading and spelling.

Drawing on ethnographic research, Living Sharia examines the role of sharia in the sociopolitical processes of contemporary Malaysia. The book traces the contested implementation of Islamic family and criminal laws and sharia economics to provide cultural frameworks for understanding sharia among Muslims and non-Muslims. Timothy Daniels explores how the way people think about sharia is often entangled with notions about race, gender equality, nationhood, liberal pluralism, citizenship, and universal human rights. He reveals that Malaysians' ideas about sharia are not isolated from-nor always opposed to-liberal pluralism and secularism. Living Sharia will be of interest to scholars as well as to policy makers, consultants, and professionals working with global NGOs.

This is the first historical study of indigenous Australian masculinity. Using the reactions of eighteenth-century western explorers to Aboriginal men, Konishi argues that these encounters were not as negative as has been thought.

Founded during the Gold Rush years, the Chinese community of San Francisco became the largest and most vibrant Chinatown in America. For those Chinese traveling between the Old World and the New, San Francisco was a port of entry and departure. Many Chinese settled there, forming one of the oldest continuing ethnic communities in urban America. This is a detailed social and cultural history of the Chinese in San Francisco, relating the development of various social and cultural institutions, ranging from brothels to the powerful "Six Companies." The book recaptures in vivid detail not only the community's collective mentalities but also the lives of ordinary people-laborers, theater-goers, gamblers, and prostitutes. In so doing, the author achieves what has been missing from virtually all the historiographic writing on the Chinese in America-he brings to life individual personalities with their varying human qualities. The book shows the persistence of Chinese social patterns in San Francisco Chinatown, and demonstrates how the community helped shape white America's view of Asians in general and the development of race consciousness and strife. The author challenges several long-accepted views, such as the myth that the Chinese exodus to California in the mid-nineteenth century occurred mainly because of impoverishment in South China and the notion that the overwhelming majority of Chinese women in San Francisco were prostitutes. He also makes insightful comparisons of Chinese Americans with other ethnic groups. The book makes imaginative use of a wide range of materials, private and public, fictional and statistical, in both Chinese and English, produced by both pro- and anti-Chinese sources. Among these are Chinese-language newspapers (including their advertisements), handbills, personal diaries, and other cultural productions. The author offers multidisciplinary analyses of such documents, showing the possibilities of extracting rich historical information from texts created for very different purposes.

Engaging exploration of race and youth culture which examines the development of new identities, ethnicities and forms of racism. This text analyzes the relationship between racism, community and adolescent social identities in the African and South Asian diasporas.; This book is intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses in race and ethnicity, urban sociology, cultural studies and social anthropology. It will also have some appeal within social policy and social work.

The first book entirely devoted to the practice and ethics of the emerging methodology of ethnocinema, this volume brings vividly to life not only the Sudanese young women with whom the author has collaborated for two years, but her own struggles as researcher, teacher and intercultural fellow traveller. A superb resource for anyone interested in conducting their own ethnocinema research project, the contents will be welcomed too by classroom teachers who recognise a need for alternative pedagogies within diverse classrooms, and peripatetic researchers and students who search for authentic representations of their own experiences within the academy and education system. With access to online filmed material included, this publication is part handbook and part theoretical treatise framing a new creative ethnographic methodology. One of a rare breed of books covering the visual research techniques that are gaining traction in the academic community, it also introduces ground-breaking intercultural research into Sudanese women who have resettled in the West. Functional as pedagogic material in university and high school classrooms, this package has broad appeal in the academic and educational sectors. "It is innovative, gutsy, practical, useful, critical and follows principles of socially just research." Prof Carolyn Ellis, University of Southern Florida, USA "This is an ambitious and passionate work. The author has taken on the task not only of exploring the difficult experiences of a group of young refugee women but has also reflected bravely on her own personal and professional life."Assoc Prof Greg Noble, University of Western Sydney, Australia "This is an ambitious and passionate work. The author has taken on the task not only of exploring the difficult experiences of a group of young refugee women but has also reflected bravely on her own personal and professional life." Assoc Prof Greg Noble, University of Western Sydney, Australia "This is an ambitious and passionate work. The author has taken on the task not only of exploring the difficult experiences of a group of young refugee women but has also reflected bravely on her own personal and professional life." Assoc Prof Greg Noble, University of Western Sydney, Australia "It is innovative, gutsy, practical, useful, critical and follows principles of socially just research." Prof Carolyn Ellis, University of Southern Florida, USA "This is an ambitious and passionate work. The author has taken on the task not only of exploring the difficult experiences of a group of young refugee women but has also reflected bravely on her own personal and professional life." Assoc Prof Greg Noble, University of Western Sydney, Australia "This is an ambitious and passionate work. The author has taken on the task not only of exploring the difficult experiences of a group of young refugee women but has also reflected bravely on her own personal and professional life." Assoc Prof Greg Noble, University of Western Sydney, Australia "This is an ambitious and passionate work. The author has taken on the task not only of exploring the difficult experiences of a group of young refugee women but has also reflected bravely on her own personal and professional life." Assoc Prof Greg Noble, University of Western Sydney, Australia

Social scientists have used the term "Creolization" to evoke cultural fusion and the emergence of new cultures across the globe. However, the term has been under-theorized and tends to be used as a simple synonym for "mixture" or "hybridity." In this volume, by contrast, renowned scholars give the term historical and theoretical specificity by examining the very different domains and circumstances in which the process takes place. Elucidating the concept in this way not only uncovers a remarkable history, it also re-opens the term for new theoretical use. It illuminates an ill-understood idea, explores how the term has operated and signified in different disciplines, times, and places, and indicates new areas of study for a dynamic and fascinating process.

The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve presents a road map for an evolutionary psychology of the twenty-first century. It brings together theory from biology and cognitive science to show how the brain can be composed of specialized adaptations, and yet also an organ of plasticity. Although mental adaptations have typically been seen as monolithic, hard-wired components frozen in the evolutionary past, The Shape of Thought presents a new view of mental adaptations as diverse and variable, with distinct functions and evolutionary histories that shape how they develop, what information they use, and what they do with that information. The book describes how advances in evolutionary developmental biology can be applied to the brain by focusing on the design of the developmental systems that build it. Crucially, developmental systems can be plastic, designed by the process of natural selection to build adaptive phenotypes using the rich information available in our social and physical environments. This approach bridges the long-standing divide between "nativist" approaches to development, based on innateness, and "empiricist" approaches, based on learning. It shows how a view of humans as a flexible, culturally-dependent species is compatible with a complexly specialized brain, and how the nature of our flexibility can be better understood by confronting the evolved design of the organ on which that flexibility depends.

Read Chapter One.

"Initiate[s] a useful and innovative dialogue. . . . A very important book, especially in its opening up a discussion of methodological issues around current research on racism and racial grouping."
-- "Contemporary Sociology"

"Essential reading for all those whose research explicitly engages racial issues-and for all those who do not realize that their work inevitably engages racial issues."
"-Ruth Frankenberg, author of White Women, Race Matters and editor of Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Cultural Criticism"

"Absolutely critical reading. This volume powerfully explores how scholars' own racial background shapes the analytical lens with which they view whiteness, blackness . . . the exoticism and eroticism of racial 'others' and the domain of white privilege."
"-William Darity, Jr., coauthor of Persistent Disparity and Boshamer Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Research Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics, Sociology and African American Studies at Duke University"

"Timely and challenging, this innovative book engages questions and dilemmas that researchers on race and racism rarely talk about in public. Refreshingly clear and comparative in scope, it is a must reading in all courses about race and ethnic relations, calling for a fundamental rethinking of research agendas in this field."
"-John Solomos, author of Race and Racism in Britain, coeditor of The Blackwell Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, and Professor of Sociology, South Bank University (London)"

"Points to the ethical dilemmas of researchers researching race among communities that are at once 'victims' ofracism and active in the continued process of racialization."
"-Rinaldo Walcott, author of Black Like Who?, and Professor of Humanities, York University (Canada)"

"A remarkable collection of essays interrogating the political, methodological and ethical dilemmas of conducting research in racially stratified societies. These theoretically astute and ethnographically rich case studies compellingly demonstrate how the production of knowledge is framed and mediated by the racialized subject positions held by social scientists. Racing Research, Researching Race will no doubt incite a critical and long overdue discussion of the racial politics of ethnographic fieldwork."
"-Steven Gregory, author of Black Corona, and Professor of Africana and American Studies at New York University"

A white woman studies upper-class eighth grade girls at her alma mater on Long Island and finds a culture founded on misinformation about its own racial and class identity. A black American researcher is repeatedly assumed by many Brazilian subjects to be a domestic servant or sex worker.

Racing Race, Researching Race is the first volume of its kind to explore how ideologies of race and racism intersect with nationality and gender to shape the research experience.

Critical work in race studies has not adequately addressed how racial positions in the field--as inflected by nationality, gender, and age--generate numerous methodological dilemmas. Racing Research, Researching Race begins to fill this gap by infusing critical race studies with more empirical work and suggesting how a critical race perspective might improve research methodologies and outcomes.

The contributors to the volume encompassa wide range of disciplinary backgrounds including anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, women=s studies, political science, and Asian American studies.

Hardbound. The series as a whole recognises that the nature of ethnography is contested, and takes this to be a sign of its strength and vitality. This second volume in the series focuses on debates and developments in methodology and the many ways in which ethnographic work interacts with education. The contributions to this volume are diverse and challenging. They indicate that ethnography is a rich field that has much to offer the study of education. Particular chapters are concerned with access to research sites, critical ethnography, text construction, dilemmas of researching different ethnic groups and or researching children, the influence of the researcher, writing ethnography, ethno-drama, and the concept of triangulation.

Majorities are made, not born. This book argues that there are no pure majorities in the Asia-Pacific region, broadly defined, nor in the West. Numerically, ethnically, politically, and culturally, societies make and mark their majorities under specific historical, political, and social circumstances. This position challenges Samuel Huntington's influential thesis that civilizations are composed of more or less homogeneous cultures, suggesting instead that culture is as malleable as the politics that informs it.
The fourteen contributors to this volume argue that emphasis on minority/majority rights is based on uncritically accepted ideas of purity, numerical superiority, and social consensus. Emphases upon multiculturalism can become ways of masking serious political, ethnic, and class differences merely in terms of cultural difference, and affirmative-action policies can isolate, identify, and stigmatize minorities as often as they homogenize, unify, and naturalize majorities.
This book analyzes how minorities are made and marked across cultural, regional, and national boundaries from Hawai'i to Turkey, a region that encompasses extraordinarily diverse populations and political developments and that is often regarded as composed of relatively homogeneous majorities.
This volume details discourses of majority and minority, allowing exploration of a number of questions of more general concern in the humanities and social sciences, including: How does one become officially "ethnic" in many states in Asia? How are understandings of majority and minority cultures created and shaped in specific political and historical contexts? How does the state shape the way people think of themselves? How do people resist, transform, and appropriate these official representations?

What teeth can teach us about the evolution of the human species Whether we realize it or not, we carry in our mouths the legacy of our evolution. Our teeth are like living fossils that can be studied and compared to those of our ancestors to teach us how we became human. In Evolution's Bite, noted paleoanthropologist Peter Ungar brings together for the first time cutting-edge advances in understanding human evolution and climate change with new approaches to uncovering dietary clues from fossil teeth to present a remarkable investigation into the ways that teeth--their shape, chemistry, and wear--reveal how we came to be. Ungar describes how a tooth's "foodprints"--distinctive patterns of microscopic wear and tear--provide telltale details about what an animal actually ate in the past. These clues, combined with groundbreaking research in paleoclimatology, demonstrate how a changing climate altered the food options available to our ancestors, what Ungar calls the biospheric buffet. When diets change, species change, and Ungar traces how diet and an unpredictable climate determined who among our ancestors was winnowed out and who survived, as well as why we transitioned from the role of forager to farmer. By sifting through the evidence--and the scars on our teeth--Ungar makes the important case for what might or might not be the most natural diet for humans. Traveling the four corners of the globe and combining scientific breakthroughs with vivid narrative, Evolution's Bite presents a unique dental perspective on our astonishing human development.

This volume provides in-depth coverage of a key piece of today's human resource selection technology--the viability of alternatives to paper and pencil multiple-choice selection tests. Each chapter of this edited volume presents an intensive examination of a key "alternative to multiple-choice testing." The content of the book's chapters ranges from reviews of issues associated with, and evidence available for, the use of particular selection text alternatives (computerized testing, performance assessments) to empirical investigation of other alternatives (biodata, creative skills); from examination of standards for choosing among selection tests to practitioners' and test takers' perspectives. This book is important for researchers and practitioners in the human resource selection field who have wanted a resource that provides a comprehensive examination of multiple-choice selection testing and its alternatives.

A Times Higher Education Book of the Week Approximately 200,000 years ago, as modern humans began to radiate out from their evolutionary birthplace in Africa, Neanderthals were already thriving in Europe-descendants of a much earlier migration of the African genus Homo. But when modern humans eventually made their way to Europe 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals suddenly vanished. Ever since the first Neanderthal bones were identified in 1856, scientists have been vexed by the question, why did modern humans survive while their closest known relatives went extinct? "Shipman admits that scientists have yet to find genetic evidence that would prove her theory. Time will tell if she's right. For now, read this book for an engagingly comprehensive overview of the rapidly evolving understanding of our own origins." -Toby Lester, Wall Street Journal "Are humans the ultimate invasive species? So contends anthropologist Pat Shipman-and Neanderthals, she opines, were among our first victims. The relationship between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis is laid out cleanly, along with genetic and other evidence. Shipman posits provocatively that the deciding factor in the triumph of our ancestors was the domestication of wolves." -Daniel Cressey, Nature

This volume attempts to construct a theory of black intellectualism drawing on the areas of culture, politics, class and myth. Both mainstream and radical black intellectual thought are charted and defined with reference to the life and writings of Oliver Cox, C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cornel West and James Baldwin. The dialectics of nationalism and internationalism are examined, along with the place of the black intellectual in the social, political and cultural structure of society.

Why does one society survive while others perish? When two cultures come into contact, how do exploitation, violence, and terror arise? Interested in the survival of various cultures in the face of encroaching white civilization, Peter Elsass has studied five separate groups in Venezuela and Colombia and documented their successes and failures as they struggle to remain independent. This book has broad implications for anyone working with minority populations.

A comprehensive and stimulating examination of how the migration of women affects attitudes in receiving countries, among the women themselves, and how changing women's attitudes shapes their relations with men and between generations within ethnic groups.

What are new interview methods and practices in our new 'interview society' and how do they relate to traditional social science research? This volume interrogates the interview as understood, used - and under-used - by anthropologists. It puts the interview itself in the hotseat by exploring the nature of the interview, interview techniques, and illustrative cases of interview use.What is a successful and representative interview? How are interviews best transcribed and integrated into our writing? Is interview knowledge production safe, ethical and representative? And how are interviews used by anthropologists in their ethnographic practice?This important volume leads the reader from an initial scrutiny of the interview to interview techniques and illustrative case studies. It is experimental, innovative, and covers in detail matters such as awkwardness, silence and censorship in interviews that do not feature in general interview textbooks. It will appeal to social scientists engaged in qualitative research methods in general, and anthropology and sociology students using interviews in their research and writing in particular.

Among the Tuareg people in the Air Mountain region of Niger, women are sometimes possessed by spirits called ‘the People of Solitude’. The evening curing rituals of the possessed, featuring drumming and song, take place before an audience of young men and women, who joke and flirt as the ritual unfolds. In her analysis of this tolerated but unofficial cult, Susan Rasmussen analyses symbolism and aesthetic values, provides case studies of possessed women, and reviews what local people think about the meaning of possession.

In Contours of Culture the authors discuss the uses of various ethnographic methods in the study of culture, drawing on their field research with an opera company, Welsh artists, and classes on the popular Brazilian martial art capoeira. In their practical research and in the research of other scolars, they encounter complex problems and themes that often require new ways of organizing and conceiving cultural material, and even new ways of giving expression to phenomena that are only partially understood. This book is not only about the inherent complexities involved in ethnography; it is also about the kinds of opportunities available to researchers immersed in this complexity and how they might grasp cultural settings in their entirety.

Thomas Csordas's eloquent analysis of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal answers one of the primary callings of anthropology: to stimulate critical reflection by making the exotic seem familiar and the familiar appear strange. Csordas describes the movement's internal diversity and traces its development and expansion across 30 years. He offers insights into the contemporary nature of rationality, the transformation of space and time in Charismatic daily life, gender discipline, the blurring of boundaries between ritual and everyday life, the sense of community forged through shared ritual participation, and the creativity of language and metaphor in prophetic utterance. Charisma, Csordas proposes, is a collective self-process, located not in the personality of a leader, but in the rhetorical resources mobilized by participants in ritual performance. His examination of ritual language and ritual performance illuminates this theory in relation to the postmodern condition of culture.

This book is unique in its approach in that each chapter covers women in their everyday lives and the problems, which concern them. Until now, ethnographic research has almost always been carried out with the help of the male population and as a result the picture that has emerged has been largely the image, which the men, and the men alone, have of their society. Originally published in 1963.