This book offers an interactionist perspective on theories of public representation, knowledge and immigration in museum institutions. Examining how a Franco-German museum exhibition represents immigrants and exposes public stereotypes, the analysis follows the process of the production and reception of the exhibition as it travelled from Paris to Berlin. The author proposes a microsociological contextualisation analysis integrating discourse analysis and ethnography to compare formats of museum work, social interaction in the exhibition and mass media debates. Visitor reception of the different exhibition versions reveals the symbolic nature of interactions in museums, for example concerning conflicting political voices and accusations of censorship. Depending on the institutional context, interactions in the museums are geared towards securing immigrants a place in national collective memory, towards carrying out debate on integration, or providing opportunities for personal encounters and reflection beyond national categorisation. This book will appeal to students and researchers interested in work on the intersection of sociology, cultural studies, and discursive psychology, in methods of discourse analysis and ethnography; and to practitioners working in museums.

This book provides a multidisciplinary analysis of the production of Turkish cultural policies in the context of globalization and of the circulation of knowledge and practices. Focusing on circulations, the book proposes an innovative approach to the transfer of cultural policies, considering them in terms of co-production and synchrony. This argument is developed through an examination of circulations at the international, national, and local levels; employing original empirical data and case study analyses. Divided into three parts the book first examines the Kemalist legacy, before turning to the cultural policies developed under the AKP's leadership, and concludes by investigating the production of cultural policies in the outlying regions of Turkey. The authors shed new light on the particular importance of culture to the understanding of the societal upheavals in contemporary Turkey. By considering exchanges as circulations rather than one-way impositions, this book also advances our understanding of how territories are (re)defined by culture and makes a significant contribution to the interrogation of the concept of "Westernization". This book brings into clear focus the reconfigurations currently taking place in Turkish cultural policy, demonstrating that while they are driven by the ruling party, they are also the work of civil society actors. It convincingly argues that an authoritarian turn need not necessarily spell the end of the cultural scene, and highlights the innovative adaptations and resistance strategies used in this context. This book will appeal to students and scholars of public policy, sociology and cultural studies.

Exploring the interactions of the Buddhist world with the dominant cultures of Iran in pre- and post-Islamic times, this book demonstrates that the traces and cross-influences of Buddhism have brought the material and spiritual culture of Iran to its present state. Even after the term 'Buddhism' was eradicated from the literary and popular languages of the region, it has continued to have a significant impact on the culture as a whole. In the course of its history, Iranian culture adopted and assimilated a system of Buddhist art, iconography, religious symbolism, literature, and asceticism due to the open border of eastern Iran with the Buddhist regions, and the resultant intermingling of the two worlds.

In The Netherlands, the arts have gained a sacralized status, while religion is increasingly viewed through the lens of heritage. The dynamic resonance of sacred forms this results in, is exemplary for the postsecular. Exploring this resonance, this book offers a strong counterweight to the popular trope of the arts having replaced religion in secularized societies. Instead it approaches artistic performance, religion, and its heritage as mutually engaging sacred forms. Lieke Wijnia thoroughly connects theoretical perspectives on the sacred with ethnographic research at the annual festival Musica Sacra Maastricht. She explores the continued relevance of a broad conceptual approach to the sacred, as well as the practical side to negotiating the sacred at the festival. The resulting analyses shed new light on topics like musical performance as generator of the sacred, how art and heritage impact the continuity of religion in secularized societies, and the fragility of artistic performance in the contemporary fragmented framework of the sacred. This book offers an innovative and interdisciplinary interpretation of the continuing significant role of art and religion in postsecular societies.

This volume examines emotions and emotional well-being from a rich variety of theological, philosophical and scientific and therapeutic perspectives. To experience emotion is a part of being human; but what are emotions? How can theology, philosophy and the natural sciences unpack the nature and content of emotions? This volume is based on contributions to the 15th European Conference on Science and Theology held in Assisi, Italy. It brings together contributions from scholars of various academic backgrounds from around the world, whose individual insights are made all the richer by their juxtaposition with those from experts in other fields, leading to a unique exchange of ideas.

This edited collection explores family relations in two types of 'migrant families' in Europe: mixed families and transnational families. Based on in-depth qualitative fieldwork and large surveys, the contributors analyse gender and intergenerational relations from a variety of standpoints and migratory flows. In their examination of family life in a migratory context, the authors develop theoretical approaches from the social sciences that go beyond migration studies, such as intersectionality, the solidarity paradigm, care circulation, reflexive modernization and gender convergence theory. Making Multicultural Families in Europe will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including migration and transnationalism studies, family studies, intergenerational studies, gender studies, cultural studies, development studies, globalization studies, ethnic studies, gerontology studies, social network analysis and social work.

The world's "great" religions depend on traditions of serious scholarship, dedicated to preserving their key texts but also to understanding them and, therefore, to debating what understanding itself is and how best to do it. They also have important public missions of many kinds, and their ideas and organizations influence many other important institutions, including government, law, education, and kinship. Anthropology of Eastern Religions: Ideas, Organizations, and Constituencies is a comparative survey of the world's major religious traditions as professional enterprises and, often, as social movements. Documenting the principle ideas behind eastern religious traditions from an anthropological perspective, Murray J. Leaf demonstrates how these ideas have been used in building internal organizations that mobilize or fail to mobilize external support.

This book is open access under a CC BY license. This interdisciplinary book contains 22 essays and interventions on rest and restlessness, silence and noise, relaxation and work. It draws together approaches from artists, literary scholars, psychologists, activists, historians, geographers and sociologists who challenge assumptions about how rest operates across mind, bodies, and practices. Rest's presence or absence affects everyone. Nevertheless, defining rest is problematic: both its meaning and what it feels like are affected by many socio-political, economic and cultural factors. The authors open up unexplored corners and experimental pathways into this complex topic, with contributions ranging from investigations of daydreaming and mindwandering, through histories of therapeutic relaxation and laziness, and creative-critical pieces on lullabies and the Sabbath, to experimental methods to measure aircraft noise and track somatic vigilance in urban space. The essays are grouped by scale of enquiry, into mind, body and practice, allowing readers to draw new connections across apparently distinct phenomena. The book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines in the social sciences, life sciences, arts and humanities.

This book tells the remarkable story of the friendship between Liria Hernandez, a Roma woman from Madrid, and Paloma Gay y Blasco, a non-Roma anthropologist. In this unique reciprocal experiment, the former informant returns the gaze to write about the anthropologist, her life and her environment. Through finely crafted and deeply moving text, Hernandez and Gay y Blasco suggest new ways of doing and writing anthropology. The dialogue between Hernandez and Gay y Blasco provides a courageous account of the entanglements and rewards of anthropological research. Drawing on letters, conversations, and fieldnotes gathered over twenty-five years, each of the authors talks about herself, the other, and the impact of anthropology on their two lives. They examine their intertwined trajectories as Spanish women and reflect on the challenges of devising their own reciprocal genre. Blending ethnography, life story and memoir, they undermine the dichotomy between author and subject around which scholarship still revolves.

This book examines the competing regimes of law and religion an offers a multidisciplinary approach to demonstrate the global scope of their influence. It argues that the tension between these two institutions results from their disagreements about the kinds of rule that should govern human life and society, and from where they should be derived.

Christians in the Middle East have come under increasing pressure in recent years with the rise of radical Islam. In Egypt, the large Coptic Christian community has traditionally played an important political and historical role. This book examines Egyptian Christians' responses to sectarian pressures in both national and local contexts.

This book reveals how school memories offer not only a tool for accessing the school of the past, but also a key to understanding what people today know (or think they know) about the school of the past. It describes, in fact, how historians' work does not purely and simply consist in exploring school as it really was, but also in the complex process of defining the memory of school as one developed and revisited over time at both the individual and collective level. Further, it investigates the extent to which what people "know" reflects the reality or is in fact a product of stereotypes that are deeply rooted in common perceptions and thus exceedingly difficult to do away with. The book includes fifteen peer-reviewed contributions that were presented and discussed during the International Symposium "School Memories. New Trends in Historical Research into Education: Heuristic Perspectives and Methodological Issues" (Seville, 22-23 September, 2015).

"This book discusses the meaning and practice of British community cohesion policies, youth identities in racially-tense areas and the British government's attempts to "prevent violent extremism" amongst young Muslims"--

Providing an expansive view of the making and meaning of African American conservatism, this volume examines the phenomenon in four spheres: the political realm, the academic world, the black church, and grass-roots activism movements. In his analysis of their activities in these realms, Louis Prisock examines the challenges African American conservatives face as they operate within the context of (largely white) conservatism. At the same time that African American conservatives challenge the white conservative movement's principle of "color blindness," they are accused of being "racial mascots," or "tokens" from those outside of it. Prisock unwinds the intricacies of black conservatives' relationships to both the wider conservative movement and the everyday life experiences of black Americans, showing that they are as vulnerable to the "inescability of race" as any other individual in a racialized America.

The world's "great" religions depend on traditions of serious scholarship, dedicated to preserving their key texts but also to understanding them and, therefore, to debating what understanding itself is and how best to do it. They also have important public missions of many kinds, and their ideas and organizations influence many other important institutions, including government, law, education, and kinship. The Anthropology of Western Religions: Ideas, Organizations, and Constituencies is a comparative survey of the world's major religious traditions as professional enterprises and, often, as social movements. Documenting the principle ideas behind Western religious traditions from an anthropological perspective, Murray J. Leaf demonstrates how these ideas have been used in building internal organizations that mobilize or fail to mobilize external support.

This book questions the simplistic view that convenience food is unhealthy and environmentally unsustainable. By exploring how various types of convenience food have become embedded in consumers' lives, it considers what lessons can be learnt from the commercial success of convenience food for those who seek to promote healthier and more sustainable diets. The project draws on original findings from comparative research in the UK, Denmark, Germany and Sweden (funded through the ERA-Net Sustainable Food programme). Reframing Convenience Food avoids moral judgments about convenience food, and instead provides a refreshingly novel perspective guided by an understanding of everyday consumer practice. It will appeal to those with an interest in the sociology and politics behind health, consumerism, sustainability and society.

This is an excellent book that adds to the anthropological and historical literature on shared sacred sites. The majority of the articles are very well written, present strong arguments that are revealed with important research. The result is that the book adds to and clarifies some of the debates about the sacred sites, how they are shared as well as the role of the various actors involved in the process. The cases are varied, rich and evocative. Furthermore they are of contemporary importance and relevance. . Karen Barkey, Columbia University

"Shared" sites, where members of distinct, or factionally opposed, religious communities interact-or fail to interact-is the focus of this volume. Chapters based on fieldwork from such diverse sites as India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, China, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and Vietnam demonstrate how sharing and tolerance are both more complex and multifaceted than they are often recognized to be. By including both historical processes (the development of Chinese funerals in late imperial Beijing or the refashioning of memorial commemoration in the wake of the Vietnam war) and particular events (the visit of Pope John Paul II to shared shrines in Sri Lanka or the Al-Qaeda bombing of an ancient Jewish synagogue on the Island of Djerba in Tunisia), the volume demonstrates the importance of understanding the wider contexts within which social interactions take place and shows that tolerance and intercommunalism are simultaneously possible and perpetually under threat.

Glenn Bowman is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent where he directs the postgraduate program in the Anthropology of Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Identity. He has done extensive field research on Jerusalem pilgrimages as well as on intercommunal shrine practices in the Middle East and the Balkans. In addition to this research on holy places he has worked in Jerusalem and the West Bank on issues of nationalism and resistance for nearly thirty years and has carried out fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia on political mobilization and the politics of contemporary art.

This book explores the concept of cyberplace as a mode of inhabiting the contemporary world. As a result, it suggests that, for many communities, unlocking cyberspace and inhabiting cyberplaces is now an integral part of their coming-to-the-globalised-world. Boos reviews in the detail the existing academic literature from cultural anthropology, human geography, and sociology on "cyberspace", concluding that a phenomenological perspective on cyberspace provides the possibility of gaining a deep understanding of our contemporary lifeworlds, in which on- and offline practices constantly intermingle. In four chapters, he applies the developed theoretical and methodological approaches to the case of Siena's neighbourhoods, the contrade, analysing their websites and discussing the implications of his findings for understanding contemporary processes of community building and for future research on cyberspace. This concise and accessible book will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in cultural anthropology, human geography, media studies and sociology.

Children born and raised on the religious fringe are a distinctive yet largely unstudied social phenomenon -they are irreversibly shaped by the experience having been thrust into a radical religious culture by birth. The religious group is all encompassing. It accounts for their family, their school, social networks, and everything that prepares them for their adult life. The inclusion of a second generation of participants raises new concerns and legal issues. Perfect Children examines the ways new religious movements adapt to a second generation, how children are socialized, what happens to these children as they mature, and how their childhoods have affected them. Amanda van Twist conducted over 50 in-depth interviews with individuals born into new religious groups, some of whom have stayed in the group, some of whom have left. She also visited the groups, their schools and homes, and analyzed support websites maintained by those who left the religious groups that raised them. She also attended conferences held by NGOs concerned with the welfare of children in "cults." The main groups she studies include the Bruderhof, Scientology, the Family International, the Unification Church, and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Children born into new religions often start life as "special children" believed to be endowed with heightened spiritual capabilities. But as they mature into society at large they acquire other labels. Those who stay in the group are usually labeled as "goodies" and "innovators". Those who leave tend to be labeled as "baddies" or seen as "troubled." Whether they stay or leave, children raised on the religious fringe experience a unique form of segregation in adulthood. Van Twist analyzes group behavior on an organizational/institutional level as well as individual behavior within groups, and how these affect one another. Her study also raises larger questions about religious freedom in the light of the State's responsibility towards children, and children's rights against the rights of parents to raise their children within their religion.

This book explores the role of religion in the everyday, transnational lives of Brazilian migrants in London and on their return to Brazil. It contributes to an emerging body of work that recognizes the importance of religion within transnational processes and foregrounds the experiences of Brazilians in London, a growing yet still largely invisible new migrant group in London. It works with the notion of religion as lived experience to give due weight to the perspectives of migrants themselves and examines the ways in which migrants negotiate their religious beliefs and practices in different places and create new connections between them. While focusing on the experience of Brazilian migrants - both in London and on their return - as a case study, it provides significant empirical and conceptual contributions to existing research through its innovative exploration of the interconnections between migration and religion, and moreover, through its inclusion of the return setting into its field of enquiry. Both these areas - religion and return - have been hitherto largely neglected within existing migration research.

This book provides comparative, multi-disciplinary research on the surplus food distribution in Europe and its relation to food poverty, with a focus on the interaction of for-profit and non-profit organisations. It offers an informed and rich discussion in understanding the collaboration between profit and non-profit organisations involved in food recovery dynamics, and provides understanding as to how the two types of players create effective, innovative and sustainable processes. Building on sociology, food justice, and sustainable management fields, the book will be of interest to a diverse range of scholars, policy makers and practitioners inspiring innovation in how to address food poverty through surplus food recovery.

This volume explores theoretical discourses in which religion is used to legitimize political violence. It examines the ways in which Christianity and Islam are utilized for political ends, in particular how violence is used (or abused) as an expedient to justify political action. This research focuses on premodern as well as contemporary discourses in the Middle East and Latin America, identifying patterns frequently used to justify the deployment of violence in both hegemonic and anti-hegemonic discourses. In addition, it explores how premodern arguments and authorities are utilized and transformed in order to legitimize contemporary violence as well as the ways in which the use of religion as a means to justify violence alters the nature of conflicts that are not otherwise explicitly religious. It argues that most past and present conflicts, even if the discourses about them are conducted in religious terms, have origins other than religion and/or blend religion with other causes, namely socio-economic and political injustice and inequality. Understanding the use and abuse of religion to justify violence is a prerequisite to discerning the nature of a conflict and might thus contribute to conflict resolution.

Are human tendencies toward religious and spiritual thoughts, feelings, and actions outcomes of "natural" cognition? This volume revisits the "naturalness theory of religious cognition" through discussion of new qualitative and quantitative studies examining the psychological foundations of religious and spiritual expression in historical and contemporary China. Naturalness theory has been challenged on the grounds that little of its supporting developmental and experimental research has drawn on participants from predominantly secular cultural environments. Given China's official secularity, its large proportion of atheists, and its alleged long history of dominant, nonreligious philosophies, can any broad claim for religion's psychological "naturalness" be plausible? Addressing this empirical gap, the studies discussed in this volume support core naturalness theory predictions for human reasoning about supernatural agency, intelligent design, the efficacy of rituals, and vitalistic causality. And yet each study elucidates, expands upon, or even challenges outright the logical assumptions of the naturalness theory. Written for a non-specialist audience, this volume introduces the naturalness theory and frames the significance of these new findings for students and scholars of cultural psychology, the psychology of religion, the anthropology of religion, and Chinese Studies.