Every year, countless young adults from affluent, Western nations travel to Brazil to train in capoeira, the dance/martial art form that is one of the most visible strands of the Afro-Brazilian cultural tradition. In Search of Legitimacy explores why "first world" men and women leave behind their jobs, families, and friends to pursue a strenuous training regimen in a historically disparaged and marginalized practice. Using the concept of apprenticeship pilgrimage-studying with a local master at a historical point of origin-the author examines how non-Brazilian capoeiristas learn their art and claim legitimacy while navigating the complexities of wealth disparity, racial discrimination, and cultural appropriation.

Liminality has the potential to be a leading paradigm for understanding transformation in a globalizing world. As a fundamental human experience, liminality transmits cultural practices, codes, rituals, and meanings in situations that fall between defined structures and have uncertain outcomes. Based on case studies of some of the most important crises in history, society, and politics, this volume explores the methodological range and applicability of the concept to a variety of concrete social and political problems.

What can anthropology and political science learn from each other? The authors argue that collaboration, particularly in the area of concepts and methodologies, is tremendously beneficial for both disciplines, though they also deal with some troubling aspects of the relationship. Focusing on the influence of anthropology on political science, the book examines the basic assumptions the practitioners of each discipline make about the nature of social and political reality, compares some of the key concepts each field employs, and provides an extensive review of the basic methods of research that "bridge" both disciplines: ethnography and case study. Through ethnography (participant observation), reliance on extended case studies, and the use of "anthropological" concepts and sensibilities, a greater understanding of some of the most challenging issues of the day can be gained. For example, political anthropology challenges the illusion of the "autonomy of the political" assumed by political science to characterize so-called modern societies. Several chapters include a cross-disciplinary analysis of key concepts and issues: political culture, political ritual, the politics of collective identity, democratization in divided societies, conflict resolution, civil society, and the politics of post-Communist transformations.

Despite the wide interest in material culture, art, and aesthetics, few studies have considered them in light of the importance of the social imagination - the complex ways in which we conceptualize our social surroundings. This collection engages the "material turn" in the arts, humanities, and social sciences through a range of original contributions on creativity in diverse global and contemporary social settings. The authors engage with everyday objects, art, rituals, and ethnographic exhibitions to analyze the relationship between material culture and the social imagination. What results is a better understanding of how the material embodies and influences our idea of the social world.

This book traces the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) across its three decades in exile through rich, local histories of the camps where Namibian exiles lived in Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola. Christian A. Williams highlights how different Namibians experienced these sites, as well as the tensions that developed within SWAPO as Namibians encountered one another and as officials asserted their power and protected their interests within a national community. The book then follows Namibians who lived in exile into post-colonial Namibia, examining the extent to which divisions and hierarchies that emerged in the camps continue to shape how Namibians relate to one another today, undermining the more just and humane society that many had imagined. In developing these points about SWAPO, the book draws attention to Southern African literature more widely, suggesting parallels across the region and defining a field of study that examines post-colonial Africa through 'the camp'.

Drawing on research from eleven countries across four continents, the 16 chapters in the volume bring perspectives from various specialties in anthropology and human ecology, institutional analysis, historical and political ecology, geography, archaeology, and land change sciences. The four sections of the volume reflect complementary approaches to HEI: health and adaptation approaches, land change and landscape management approaches, institutional and political-ecology approaches, and historical and archaeological approaches.

Primarily on the basis of ethnographic case-studies from around the world, this volume links investigations of work to questions of personal and professional identity and social relations. In the era of digitalized neoliberalism, particular attention is paid to notions of freedom, both collective (in social relations) and individual (in subjective experiences). These cannot be investigated separately. Rather than juxtapose economy with ethics (or the profitable with the good), the authors uncover complex entanglements between the drudgery experienced by most people in the course of making a living and ideals of emancipated personhood.

A key intervention in the growing critical literature on race, this volume examines the social construction of race in contemporary Australia through the lenses of Indigenous sovereignty, nationhood, and whiteness. Informed by insights from white Australians in rural contexts, Koerner and Pillay attempt to answer how race shapes those who identify as white Australian; how those who self-identify thusly relate to the nation, multiculturalism, and Indigenous Sovereignties; and how white Australians understand and experience their own racialized position and its privilege. This "insider perspective" on the continuing construction of whiteness in Australia is analyzed and challenged through Indigenous Sovereign theoretical standpoints and voices. Ultimately, this investigation of the social construction of race not only extends conceptualizations of multiculturalism, but also informs governance policy in the light of changing national identity.

In this book, an international team of urban anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers argue that politics, intergroup relations, and development in cities cannot be understood without reference to the local contexts that endow each city with specific characteristics. They also show how local urban economic, social, and cultural lives are influenced by powerful external forces. In these 'glocal' regards, the authors demonstrate how city images, borders, and social processes such as migration, tourism, and local development must be seen in broader contexts. The contributors examine them through the lenses of foreign investment, migration, and history. The volume takes an interdisciplinary approach and employs a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. Contributors' multidisciplinary expertise and insights about spaces and places are applied to nine unique cities across three continents.

Over time, the role of nature in anthropology has evolved from being a mere backdrop for social and cultural diversity to being viewed as an integral part of the ontological entanglement of human and nonhuman agents. This transformation of the role of nature offers important insight into the relationships between diverse anthropological traditions. By highlighting natural-cultural worlds alongside these traditions, Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies explores the potential for creating more sophisticated conjunctions of anthropological knowledge and practice.

New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman ignited a ferocious controversy in 1983 when he denounced the research of Margaret Mead, a world-famous public intellectual who had died five years earlier. Freeman's claims caught the attention of popular media, converging with other vigorous cultural debates of the era. Many anthropologists, however, saw Freeman's strident refutation of Mead's best-selling Coming of Age in Samoa as the culmination of a forty-year vendetta. Others defended Freeman's critique, if not always his tone. Truth's Fool documents an intellectual journey that was much larger and more encompassing than Freeman's attack on Mead's work. It peels back the prickly layers to reveal the man in all his complexity. Framing this story within anthropology's development in Britain and America, Peter Hempenstall recounts Freeman's mission to turn the discipline from its cultural-determinist leanings toward a view of human culture underpinned by biological and behavioral drivers. Truth's Fool engages the intellectual questions at the center of the Mead Freeman debate and illuminates the dark spaces of personal, professional, and even national rivalries.

Lipsi is a small Greek island in the southeast Aegean Sea. There, the local oral tradition weaves the island's history from the mythical Calypso to this day, relating stories of people from a distant past and of those who are still leaving their mark, until the day they become memories and stories as well. This eternal time of an endless repetition, as perceived by today's inhabitants, is projected onto space making a narrative landscape through material constructions, collective bodily movements, and supernatural apparitions. The result of long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this book refers to the community of Lipsi as an example of the correlations between popular cosmologies, official religion, and the development of a symbolic landscape, along with the formation of collective identities and representations in the context of a "cultural and social experience of the world."

The "extensive wilderness" of Zambia's central Luangwa Valley is the homeland of the Valley Bisa whose cultural practices have enriched this environment for centuries. Beginning with the intrusions of warlords and later British colonials, successive generations have experienced the callousness and challenges of colonialism. Their homeland, a slender corridor surrounded by three national parks and an escarpment, is a microcosm of the political, economic and cultural battlefields surrounding most African protected areas today. The story of the Valley Bisa diverges from the myths that conservationists, administrators, and philanthropists, tell about Africa's environmental and wildlife crises.

Despite the wide interest in material culture, art, and aesthetics, few studies have considered them in light of the importance of the social imagination - the complex ways in which we conceptualize our social surroundings. This collection engages the "material turn" in the arts, humanities, and social sciences through a range of original contributions on creativity in diverse global and contemporary social settings. The authors engage with everyday objects, art, rituals, and ethnographic exhibitions to analyze the relationship between material culture and the social imagination. What results is a better understanding of how the material embodies and influences our idea of the social world.

American anthropologists have long advocated cultural anthropology as a tool for cultural critique, yet seldom has that approach been employed in discussions of major events and cultural productions that impact the lives of tens of millions of Americans. This collection of essays aims to refashion cultural analysis into a hard-edged tool for the study of American society and culture, addressing topics including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, abortion, sports doping, and the Jonestown massacre-suicides. Grounded in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the essays advance an inquiry into the nature of culture in American society.

This is the first book to consider the major implications for culture of the new science of biosemiotics. The volume is mainly aimed at an audience outside biosemiotics and semiotics, in the humanities and social sciences principally, who will welcome elucidation of the possible benefits to their subject area from a relatively new field. The book is therefore devoted to illuminating the extent to which biosemiotics constitutes an 'epistemological break' with 'modern' modes of conceptualizing culture. It shows biosemiotics to be a significant departure from those modes of thought that neglect to acknowledge continuity across nature, modes which install culture and the vicissitudes of the polis at the centre of their deliberations. The volume exposes the untenability of the 'culture/nature' division, presenting a challenge to the many approaches that can only produce an understanding of culture as a realm autonomous and divorced from nature.

The Gwich'in Natives of Arctic Village, Alaska, have experienced intense social and economic changes for more than a century. In the late 20th century, new transportation and communication technologies introduced radically new value systems; while some of these changes may be seen as socially beneficial, others suggest a weakening of what was once a strong and vibrant Native community. Using quantitative and qualitative data gathered since the turn of the millennium, this volume offers an interdisciplinary evaluation of the developments that have occurred in the community over the past several decades.

This book presents a challenging view of the adoption and co-option of multiculturalism in Latin America from six scholars with extensive experience of grassroots movements and intellectual debates. It raises serious questions of theory, method, and interpretation for both social scientists and policymakers on the basis of cases in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Multicultural policies have enabled people to recover the land of their ancestors, administer justice in accordance with their traditions, provide recognition as full citizens of the nation, and promote affirmative action to enable them to take the place in society which is theirs by right. The message of this book is that while the multicultural response has done much to raise the symbolic recognition of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples nationally and internationally, its application calls for a profound reappraisal in spheres such as land, gender, institutional design, and equal opportunities. Written by scholars with long-term and in-depth engagement in Latin America, the chapters show that multicultural theories and policies, which assume racial and cultural boundaries to be clear-cut, overlook the pervasive reality of racial and cultural mixture and place excessive confidence in identity politics.

For the Orang Rimba of Sumatra - and tropical foragers in general - life in the forest engenders a kind of "connectedness" that is contingent not only on harmonious relations between people, but also between people and the non-human environment, including those supernatural agencies of the forest that people depend on for their spiritual and emotional wellbeing. Exploring this world, anthropologist Ramsey Elkholy treats embodied action and perception as the basis of shared experience and shows how various forms of embodied experience constitute the very foundations of human culture. In a unique methodological contribution, Elkholy adopts a set of body-centered approaches that reflect and capture the day-to-day, moment-to-moment ways in which people engage with the world. Being and Becoming is an important contribution to phenomenological anthropology, hunter-gatherer studies, and to Southeast Asian ethnography more generally.

Jean Muteba Rahier examines the cultural politics of Afro-Ecuadorian populations within the context of the Andean region's recent pivotal history and the Latin American 'multicultural turn" of the past two decades, bringing contemporary political trends together with questions of race, space, and sexuality. Organized around eight ethnographic vignettes, the book looks at race and Ecuadorian popular culture; Afro-Ecuadorian cultural politics, cultural traditions, and political activism; "mestizaje" and the non-inclusion of blackness in official imaginations of national identity ('the ideological biology of national identity'); race, gender relations, and anti-black racism; stereotypes of black female hypersexuality and sexual self-constructions; blackness and beauty contest politics; the passage from 'monocultural "mestizaje"' to multiculturalism in the 1990s, which got a second life following the "revolucion ciudadana" (citizen revolution) and the election of Rafael Correa to the Ecuadorian presidency in late 2006; and blackness, racism, sports, and national pride in multicultural Ecuador.

This book deals with the concept of leisure and the everyday leisure practices of a group of diverse single women in an urban setting-Mannheim, Germany. Vania Sandoval focuses on how social structure and individual choices relate to each other in the local context. Initially, the book considers the women as a relatively homogenous group, analyzing how they conceive, organize and experience their leisure in a similar manner with individual nuances. It then proceeds to highlight some of the processes that lead, in this particular case, to migration-based differences in their leisure practices.