Technology and Touch addresses the development of a range of new touch technologies, both technologies that we reach out to touch and technologies that touch us, by exploring how we use touch to connect with and understand our world, and ourselves.

An interrogation of the often-unexamined assumption that silence is oppressive, to consider the multiple possibilities silence enables. The volume features diverse feminist reflections on the nuanced relationship between silence and voice to foreground the creative, meditative, generative and resistive power our silences engender.

Long before the recent "Arab Spring", when the topic of democracy with in many Muslim countries took center stage internationally, Malaysia's Anwar Ibrahim, an energetic and charismatic politician, had been one of the most vocal global proponents of the compatibility of Islam and democratic principles. Anwar, who at one time was asked to be secretary-general of the United Nations, has lived a life that is a compelling testimony of the growth and evolution of his love for his country and his faith. Anwar has been active at the highest levels of Malaysian politics for over thirty years, and though he has been jailed for his activism on several occasions, he continues to be a dynamic, passionate voice for the diverse cultures, religions, and peoples of Malaysia. Anwar's life story is told in a factual, impartial way, and his one-on-one interviews with this book's author add a personal component. This volume is essential reading for scholars and students interested in Islamic politics and South East Asian studies.

The rapid increase in adoption of modern 'connective' technologies like the mobile phone has reshaped the social landscape of Africa. This book examines the myriad possibilities that the post-global moment offers African societies to develop and to relate, offering profound new insights into the processes of globalization.

This book interrogates the global utopian vision for smart energy technologies and the new energy consumer intended to realise it. It enriches and extends the possibilities of four residential smart strategies: energy feedback, dynamic pricing, home automation and micro-generation, focusing on how they are being integrated into everyday practice.

The analysis of social distinction cannot indefinitely remain confined to logics of reasoning that are markedly ethnocentric. Rather than just applying the consecrated schemes of Veblen or Bourdieu, Daloz provides new foundations in this book for understanding 21st Century Dubai, China, Russia and settings of the past.

Assembling Mass Observation Archive material with historiographies of family, house and nation from ancient-Greece to present-day Europe, China and America, this book contributes to current debates on identity, belonging, memory and material culture by exploring how power works in the small spaces of home.

This book explores how digital communication generates new intimacies and meanings of friendship in a networked society, developing a theory of mediated intimacies to explain how social media contributes to dramatic changes in our ideas about personal relationships, through themes of self, youth, families, digital dating and online social capital.

This book investigates the use of football to create, shape and promote Spanish, Catalan and Basque national identities and explores the utilization of soccer to foster patriotic feelings, exposing the often dark vested interests behind the propagation of national narratives through soccer.

There is something unsettling, but also powerful, in the encounter with individual and collective experiences of human suffering. Intensive Media explores the discomfort and fascination initiated by instances of pain and suffering, their 'aversive affects', as they trouble but also vitalise contemporary media environments.

Providing fresh perspectives on managing expatriates in the changing host country of China, this book investigates expatriate management from a language and identity angle. The authors' multilingual and multicultural backgrounds allow them to offer a solid view on the best practices towards managing diverse groups of expatriates, including Western, Indian, and ethnic Chinese employees. With carefully considered analysis which incorporates micro and macro perspectives, together with indigenous Chinese and Western viewpoints, this book explores topics that include the importance of the host country language, expatriate adjustment, ethnic identity confirmation, acceptance and identity. The book presents a longitudinal yet contemporary snapshot of the language, culture, and identity realities that multinational corporation subsidiary employees are facing in China in the present decade (2006-2016). It will thus be an invaluable resource for International Management scholars, those involved in HRM and other practitioners, as well as business school lecturers and students with a strong interest in China.

This study addresses the contemporary conflict of national identity in Sudan between the adherents of Islamic nationalism and those of customary secularism. The former urge the adoption of a national constitution that derives its civil and criminal laws from the Sharia, and want Arabic as the language of instruction in national institutions. The latter demand the adoption of secular laws, derived from the set of customary laws, and equal opportunities for all African languages beside Arabic and English. In the past, the adherents of Islamic nationalism imposed the Islamic-Arab model. In reaction, secularists resorted to violence; the Islamists declared Jihad against the secularists and adopted a racial war, which has caused a humanitarian disaster. The main primary material of this research is based on a survey conducted among 500 students of five universities in Sudan. Besides, the study considers the diverse theoretical models for the formation of a nation-state, where diversity is not discouraged, but states apply laws to promote religious and ethnic diversities within one territorial state.

Weaving together a social history of the American beef industry with her own account of growing up in the shadow of her grandfather's cattle business, Halley juxtaposes the two worlds and creates a link between the meat industry and her own experience of the formation of gender and sexuality through family violence.

A comparative, whole-of-society approach to the Boko Haram insurgency that offers a more nuanced understanding of the risks, resilience and resolution of violent radicalization in Nigeria and beyond. It is now more than a decade since the violent Islamic group Boko Haram launched its reign of terror across northern Nigeria, claiming more than 27,000 lives and displacing over 2 million people. While its territorial gains have largely been recaptured, the insurgency rages on, devastating communities across vast stretches of the north-east and disrupting governance, livelihoods and food security, as well as posing a security risk to Niger, Chad and Cameroon. Less attention is paid to the pervasive popular rejection of violent extremism on the ground. How did a diverse and economically dynamic West African society unravel so violently, and for so long? Why does radicalizationhave so little influence on large Muslim populations in surrounding areas, such as the Yoruba in south-western Nigeria, or the poor ethnically similar Muslim majority in central Niger just north of the border? This book looks beyond the details of the insurgency to examine the wider social and political processes that explain why Boko Haram emerged when and where it did, and what forces exist within society to contain it. Drawing on the detailed fieldworkof specialist Nigerian and Nigerianist scholars from Nigeria, connecting the worst of Boko Haram violence to the wider realities of the present, the book offers new insights into the drivers of Islamic extremism in Nigeria - poverty, regional inequality, environmental stress, migration, youth unemployment, and state corruption and human rights abuses - with a view to charting more sustainable paths out of the conflict. Nigeria: Premium Times Books

Why do secular states pursue different policies toward religion? This book provides a generalizable argument about the impact of ideological struggles on the public policy making process, as well as a state-religion regimes index of 197 countries. More specifically, it analyzes why American state policies are largely tolerant of religion, whereas French and Turkish policies generally prohibit its public visibility, as seen in their bans on Muslim headscarves. In the United States, the dominant ideology is 'passive secularism', which requires the state to play a passive role, by allowing public visibility of religion. Dominant ideology in France and Turkey is 'assertive secularism', which demands that the state play an assertive role in excluding religion from the public sphere. Passive and assertive secularism became dominant in these cases through certain historical processes, particularly the presence or absence of an ancien regime based on the marriage between monarchy and hegemonic religion during state-building periods.

Jesus sent His disciples into the world as sheep among wolves, instructing them to be "as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves" (Matt. 10:16). In Using the Psychology of Attraction in Christian Outreach: Lessons from the Dark Side, Wendy L. Patrick proposes that consistent with this instruction, Christian outreach should incorporate effective strategies of interpersonal influence into a biblical, proactive approach to sharing faith. Drawing on her experience as a sex crimes prosecutor and a review of relevant research, this book exposes five powerful social and psychological techniques (proactivity, emotional appeal, identification, affirmation, and credibility) used successfully within both the dark side by criminals and on the positive side of interpersonal influence by those with selfless motives seeking to benefit others that capitalize on the power of attraction. Because the outcome of these techniques is dependent on the motivation of the user, this book explores the efficacy of using them authentically, selflessly, and benevolently in Christian outreach.

At the core of this book is an attempt to explain a conflict in Oman in the 1950s and 1960s between two claimants to authority: the Imam of the Ibadi sect in the interior and the Sultan with his capital at Muscat on the coast. The crisis, precipitated by two rival oil companies, acquired wider dimensions because the Sultan was supported by the British, whilst the Imam was eventually backed by Saudi Arabia. In his analysis of the roots of this conflict John Wilkinson traces the themes of regional identity, tribal organization and political authority over some 1200 years of history in south-eastern Arabia. The constitution of the Imamate has periodically unified the tribes of central Oman into a form of statehood capable of creating an overseas empire. But in spite of the accruing wealth, notably from Eastern Africa in the nineteenth century, the institutions necessary for permanent government were never created.

Human dignity as a shared heritage of humanity functions as an anthropological key to the understanding of the person. Historically it became the fundament for modern constitutions and rights. Although found almost on every lip the meaning of human dignity remains inexhaustible. The difference in the understanding of human person mirrored in the various cultural and traditional human images comes from the open ended nature of the concept. In this sense human dignity remains an interpretative open concept that creates a useful gap among cultures, which theology can fill through dialogue. Originally themes like human beings and history did not belong to the classical dogmas, but were later recognised in the late middle Ages as veritable sources of theological knowledge (Loci theologici alieni). This book focuses on the problems of person and human dignity. It takes advantage of the Melchior Cano's principles of theological knowledge to stage a dialogue with the Igbo (African) thought and culture.

This book draws on core concepts coined by Adorno, such as identity thinking, the culture industry, and his critique of the autonomous and rational subject, to address the ills that plague neoliberal capitalist societies today. These ills range from the risk of a return to totalitarian tendencies, to the global rise of the far-right, and anti-feminist conceptions of motherhood. Subsequent chapters outline the ways in which Adorno's thought can also be seen to redress the challenges of modern societies, such as the critical function of artworks, and the subversive potential of slow-food and popular music. The important underlying concern of the book is to highlight the continuing relevance of Adorno, both in dealing with the failures of neo-liberal capitalist societies, and in his applicability to a wide range of disciplines.

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.

The Islamist attacks of 9/11, the Danish cartoon affair and rioting by Muslim youths in France are just some of the events that have caused the 'Muslim question' to become a key issue of public debate in many western democracies. Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship argues that the Muslim case raises important questions about how we understand western secularism and respond to new religious claims in multicultural democracies. The contributors challenge prevailing assumptions about the history and practice of western secularism and recover the pragmatism behind liberal principles in negotiating new conditions. By situating the Muslim experience in relation to western secularism and liberal democratic practice, and through examining a variety of national contexts (including Britain, Germany, France, Denmark, the United States, Australia and India), this book extends thinking about our contemporary condition and considers the broader significance for multicultural liberal democracies.

A comprehensive, state-of-the-art reference collection, bringing together an authoritative and international line-up of scholars to examine key social and political issues related to the Olympics. An essential, 'one-stop' volume for a wide range of academics, students and researchers.

The question of ignorance occupies a central place in anthropological theory and practice. This volume argues that the concept of ignorance has largely been pursued as the opposite of knowledge or even its obverse. Though they cover wide empirical ground - from clients of a fertility treatment center in New York to families grappling with suicide in Greenland - contributors share a commitment to understanding the concept as a productive, social practice. Ultimately, The Anthropology of Ignorance asks whether an academic commitment to knowledge can be squared with lived significance of ignorance and how taking it seriously might alter anthropological research practices.

Near to the heart of the human predicament are impulses to avenge - what most of us will recognize to be negative, counterproductive reactions against others who pose a threat. By contrast, nothing re-establishes our faith in humanity more than extraordinary acts of concession, such as peace-making, generosity and sacrifice. In this study Garry Trompf shows how various aspects of 'payback', both negative and positive, provide the best indices to an understanding of Melanesian views of life. The book explores the reasons why people 'pay back' and opens up a whole dimension in the cross-cultural study of human consciousness. The author conducts his readers through the most complex anthropological pageant on earth, illustrating his arguments from western New Guinea to Fiji.