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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology

DIY Style - Fashion, Music and Global Digital Cultures (Hardcover): Brent Luvaas DIY Style - Fashion, Music and Global Digital Cultures (Hardcover)
Brent Luvaas
R3,548 Discovery Miles 35 480 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Armed with cheap digital technologies and a fiercely independent spirit, millions of young people from around the world have taken cultural production into their own hands, crafting their own clothing lines, launching their own record labels, and forging a vast, collaborative network of impassioned amateurs more interested in making than consuming.
"DIY Style" tells the story of this international do-it-yourself (DIY) movement through a major case study of one of its biggest, but least known contingents: the "indie" music and fashion scene of the predominantly Muslim Southeast Asian island nation of Indonesia. Through rich ethnographic detail, in-depth historical analysis, and cutting-edge social theory, the book chronicles the rise of DIY culture in Indonesia, and also explores the phenomenon in Europe and the United States, painting an evocative portrait of vibrant communities who are not only making and distributing popular culture on their own terms, but working to tear down the barriers between production and consumption, third and first world, global and local. What emerges from the book is a cautiously optimistic view of the future of global capitalism - a creative, collectivist alternative built from the ground up.
This exciting and original study is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, fashion, media studies, cultural studies and sociology.

Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance - Anthropologies of Sound and Movement (Hardcover): Evangelos Chrysagis, Panas... Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance - Anthropologies of Sound and Movement (Hardcover)
Evangelos Chrysagis, Panas Karampampas
R3,021 Discovery Miles 30 210 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Across spatial, bodily, and ethical domains, music and dance both emerge from and give rise to intimate collaboration. This theoretically rich collection takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the collective dimension of sound and movement in everyday life, drawing on genres and practices in contexts as diverse as Japanese shakuhachi playing, Peruvian huayno, and the Greek goth scene. Highlighting the sheer physicality of the ethnographic encounter, as well as the forms of sociality that gradually emerge between self and other, each contribution demonstrates how dance and music open up pathways and give shape to life trajectories that are neither predetermined nor teleological, but generative.

Sharing This Walk - An Ethnography of Prison Life and the PCC in Brazil (Hardcover): Karina Biondi Sharing This Walk - An Ethnography of Prison Life and the PCC in Brazil (Hardcover)
Karina Biondi; Translated by John F. Collins
R2,887 Discovery Miles 28 870 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The Primeiro Comando do Capital (PCC) is a Sao Paulo prison gang thatsince the 1990s has expanded into the most powerful criminal network inBrazil. Karina Biondi's rich ethnography of the PCC is uniquely informedby her insider-outsider status. Prior to his acquittal, Biondi's husband wasincarcerated in a PCC-dominated prison for several years. During the periodof Biondi's intense and intimate visits with her husband and her extensivefieldwork in prisons and on the streets of Sao Paulo, the PCC effectively controlledmore than 90 percent of Sao Paulo's 147 prison facilities. Available for the first time in English, Biondi's riveting portrait of thePCC illuminates how the organisation operates inside and outside of prison,creatively elaborating on a decentered, non-hierarchical, and far-reachingcommand system. This system challenges both the police forces againstwhich the PCC has declared war and the methods and analytic concepts traditionallyemployed by social scientists concerned with crime, incarceration,and policing. Biondi posits that the PCC embodies a "politics of transcendence,"a group identity that is braided together with, but also autonomousfrom, its decentralized parts. Biondi also situates the PCC in relation toredemocratization and rampant socioeconomic inequality in Brazil, as wellas to counter-state movements, crime, and punishment in the Americas.

Anti-Americanism in European Literature (Hardcover): J. Gulddal Anti-Americanism in European Literature (Hardcover)
J. Gulddal
R1,521 Discovery Miles 15 210 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Pursues the hypothesis that fictional literature has been instrumental in the development and dissemination of European anti-Americanism from the early 1800s to today. Focusing on Britain, France and Germany, it offers analyses of a range of canonical literary works in which resentful hostility towards the United States is a predominant feature.

A Study of Personal and Cultural Values - American, Japanese, and Vietnamese (Hardcover, First): R. D'andrade A Study of Personal and Cultural Values - American, Japanese, and Vietnamese (Hardcover, First)
R. D'andrade
R1,504 Discovery Miles 15 040 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This study analyzes American, Vietnamese, and Japanese personal values, attempting to understand how it can be ethnographers find large differences in values between cultures, yet empirical surveys find relatively small differences in personal values between cultures. D'Andrade argues that people live in two distinct value worlds; the world of "personal values" and the world of "institutionalized values." Assessing these value worlds, D'Andrade is able to explain the contrast between ethnography and survey data, while making vital commentary on American, Vietnamese, and Japanese culture. With insight and precision, this book contributes to the important debate that the Culture, Mind, and Society series has initiated.

Attachment Reconsidered - Cultural Perspectives on a Western Theory (Hardcover, New): N. Quinn, J. Mageo Attachment Reconsidered - Cultural Perspectives on a Western Theory (Hardcover, New)
N. Quinn, J. Mageo
R3,770 R2,019 Discovery Miles 20 190 Save R1,751 (46%) Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Attachment theory has massively influenced contemporary psychology. While intended to be general, this western theory harbors a number of culturally biased assumptions and is devoted to decontextualized experimental procedures that fail to challenge this ethnocentrism. The chapters in this volume rethink attachment theory by examining it in the context of local cultural meanings, including the meanings of childrearing practices, the cultural models of virtue that shape those practices, and the translation of shared childhood experience into adult cultural understandings through developmental and psychodynamic processes. The current volume is not only a challenge to attachment theorists, but also an object lesson for psychologists of many other stripes.

Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2016): Sven Brodmerkel, Nicholas Carah Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2016)
Sven Brodmerkel, Nicholas Carah
R2,894 R1,930 Discovery Miles 19 300 Save R964 (33%) Ships in 12 - 19 working days

This study argues that the defining feature of contemporary advertising is the interconnectedness between consumer participation and calculative media platforms. It critically investigates how audience participation unfolds in an algorithmic media infrastructure in which brands develop media devices to codify, process and modulate human capacities and actions. With the shift from a broadcast to an interactive media system, advertisers have reinvented themselves as the strategic interface between computational media systems and the lived experience and living bodies of consumers. Where once advertising relied predominantly on symbolic appeals to affect consumers, it now centres on the use of computational devices that codify, monitor, analyse and control their behaviours. Advertisers have worked to stimulate and harness consumer participation for several generations. Consumers undertook the productive work of making brands a part of their cultural identities and practices. With the emergence of a computational mode of advertising consumer participation extends beyond the expressive activity of creating and circulating meaning. It now involves making the lived experience and the living body available to the experimental capacities of media platforms and devices. In this mode of advertising brands become techno-cultural processes that integrate calculative and cultural functions. Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture conceptualises and theorises these significant changes in advertising. It takes consumer participation and its interconnectedness with calculative media platforms as the fundamental aspect of contemporary advertising and critically investigates how advertising, consumer participation and technology are interrelated in creating and facilitating lived experiences that create value for brands.

Anthropology: Society and Culture (Volume I) (Hardcover): Gwen Smith Anthropology: Society and Culture (Volume I) (Hardcover)
Gwen Smith
R3,434 R3,104 Discovery Miles 31 040 Save R330 (10%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days
Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies (Paperback): Casper Bruun Jensen, Atsuro Morita Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies (Paperback)
Casper Bruun Jensen, Atsuro Morita
R769 Discovery Miles 7 690 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

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.

The Essential Jazz Records, Volume I - Ragtime to Swing (Hardcover): Harrison The Essential Jazz Records, Volume I - Ragtime to Swing (Hardcover)
Harrison
R2,528 Discovery Miles 25 280 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

"This is a very good book which will certainly become one of the essential works of reference for the jazz enthusiast. It covers the ragtime to swing period by way of 250 LPs, each of which is afforded full discographical information on dates, titles, and personnels. . . . The quality of the writing is extemely high, as indeed one has a right to expect from authors of this calibre. . . . Harrison, Fox, and Thacker have produced some beautifully composed essays on artistes such as Billie Holliday, Roy Eldridge, Duke Ellington, etc. . . . It is a book which needs to be dipped into frequently, a volume to keep close to one's record collection. . . . It will increase immeasurably anyone's knowledge of, and appreciation for, jazz." The Gramophone

Ideas of 'Race' in the History of the Humanities (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2017): Amos Morris-Reich, Dirk Rupnow Ideas of 'Race' in the History of the Humanities (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2017)
Amos Morris-Reich, Dirk Rupnow
R2,899 Discovery Miles 28 990 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This volume is concerned with the hitherto neglected role of the humanities in the histories of the idea of race. Its aim is to begin to fill in this significant lacuna. If, in the decades following World War II and the Holocaust - years that witnessed European decolonization and the African-American civil rights movement - the concept of 'race' slowly but surely lost its legitimacy as a cultural, political and scientific category, for much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century concepts of race enjoyed widespread currency in numerous fields of knowledge such as the history of art, history, musicology, or philosophy. Bringing together some of the most distinguished scholars in their respective fields, this is the first collective attempt to address the history of notions of race in the humanities as a whole.

Indexing 'Chav' on Social Media - Transmodal Performances of Working-Class Subcultures (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2022):... Indexing 'Chav' on Social Media - Transmodal Performances of Working-Class Subcultures (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2022)
Emilia Di Martino
R2,908 Discovery Miles 29 080 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The book sets out to examine the concept of 'chav', providing a review of its origins, its characterological figures, the process of enregisterment whereby it has come to be recognized in public discourse, and the traits associated with it in traditional media representations. The author then discusses the 'chav' label in light of recent re-appropriations in social network activity (particularly through the video-sharing app TikTok) and subsequent commentary in the public sphere. She traces the evolution of the term from its use during the first decade of the twenty-first century to make sense of class, status and cultural capital, to its resurgence and the ways in which it is still associated with appearance in gendered and classed ways. She then draws on recent developments in linguistic anthropology and embodied sociocultural linguistics to argue that social media users draw on communicative resources to perform identities that are both situated in specific contexts of discourse and dynamically changing, challenging the idea that geo-sociocultural varieties and mannerisms are the sole way of indexing membership of a community. This volume contends that equating 'chav' with 'underclass' in the most recent uses of the concept on social networks may not be the whole story, and the book will be of interest to sociocultural linguistics and identity researchers, as well as readers in anthropology, sociology, British studies, cultural studies, identity studies, digital humanities, and sociolinguistics.

Wittgenstein's Anthropological Philosophy (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2017): Gunter Gebauer Wittgenstein's Anthropological Philosophy (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2017)
Gunter Gebauer
R3,194 Discovery Miles 31 940 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

This book explores how Wittgenstein's personal life provided more of a reference point for his philosophical work than has been previously thought. Focusing on two key phases in Wittgenstein's life during which he dramatically changed his philosophical orientation and reinvented both his intellectual methods and himself, the author presents and alternative understanding of Wittgenstein and his work. The book firstly addresses the period of his "anthropological turn" (1929-1932), in which Wittgenstein developed one of his central arguments concerning the role of the body in the acquisition of language and the rules of social practice. The second key phase, commencing after the end of the Second World War, was one of introspection, during which Wittgenstein became intensely preoccupied by inner events, sensations, and his own personality. As his work evolved, the anthropological aspects became the primary focus of his work by the end of his life. Providing an accessible and novel insight into Wittgenstein's work and his interest in 'continental' philosophy, this translation will appeal to a wide audience.

'City of the Future' - Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana (Hardcover): Mateusz Laszczkowski 'City of the Future' - Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana (Hardcover)
Mateusz Laszczkowski
R3,016 Discovery Miles 30 160 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Astana, the capital city of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan, has often been admired for the design and planning of its futuristic cityscape. This anthropological study of the development of the city focuses on every-day practices, official ideologies and representations alongside the memories and dreams of the city's longstanding residents and recent migrants. Critically examining a range of approaches to place and space in anthropology, geography and other disciplines, the book argues for an understanding of space as inextricably material-and-imaginary, and unceasingly dynamic - allowing for a plurality of incompatible pasts and futures materialized in spatial form.

Subversive Spiritualities - How Rituals Enact the World (Hardcover, New): Frederique Apffel Marglin Subversive Spiritualities - How Rituals Enact the World (Hardcover, New)
Frederique Apffel Marglin
R2,030 Discovery Miles 20 300 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Even in the twenty-first century some two-thirds of the world's peoples-the world's social majority-quietly live in non-modern, non-cosmopolitan places. In such places the multitudinous voices of the spirits, deities, and other denizens of the other-than-human world continue to be heard, continue to be loved or feared or both, continue to accompany the human beings in all their activities. In this book, Frederique Apffel-Marglin draws on a lifetime of work with the indigenous peoples of Peru and India to support her argument that the beliefs, values, and practices of such traditional peoples are ''eco-metaphysically true.'' In other words, they recognize that human beings are in communion with other beings in nature that have agency and are kinds of spiritual intelligences, with whom humans can be in relationship and communion. Ritual is the medium for communicating, reciprocating, creating and working with the other-than-humans, who daily remind the humans that the world is not for humans' exclusive use. Apffel-Marglin argues moreover, that when such relationships are appropriately robust, human lifeways are rich, rewarding, and in the contemporary jargon, environmentally sustainable. Her ultimate objective is to ''re-entangle'' humans in nature-she is, in the final analysis, promoting a spirituality and ecology of belonging and connection to nature, and an appreciation of animistic perception and ecologies. Along the way she offers provocative and poignant critiques of many assumptions, including of the ''development'' paradigm as benign (including feminist forms of development advocacy), of the majority of anthropological and other social scientific understandings of indigenous religions, and of common views about peasant and indigenous agronomy. She concludes with a case study of the fair trade movement, illuminating both its shortcomings (how it echoes some of the assumptions in the development paradigms) and its promise as a way to rekindle community between humans as well as between humans and the other-than-human world.

Initiating Change in Highland Ethiopia - Causes and Consequences of Cultural Transformation (Hardcover): Dena Freeman Initiating Change in Highland Ethiopia - Causes and Consequences of Cultural Transformation (Hardcover)
Dena Freeman
R2,701 Discovery Miles 27 010 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

There are two types of rituals performed by the same people in a rural community in Southern Ethiopia. One appears to be remarkably stable, while the other has undergone massive transformations over the years. Focusing on new ethnographical and historical data from the Gamo Highlands of Southern Ethiopia, Dena Freeman analyzes these rituals and provides fascinating insight into the cultural transformations of a little-known region of the world.

Framing Africa - Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema (Hardcover, New): Nigel Eltringham Framing Africa - Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema (Hardcover, New)
Nigel Eltringham
R3,009 Discovery Miles 30 090 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a proliferation of North American and European films that focus on African politics and society. While once the continent was the setting for narratives of heroic ascendancy over self (The African Queen, 1951; The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1952), military odds (Zulu, 1964; Khartoum, 1966) and nature (Mogambo, 1953; Hatari!,1962; Born Free, 1966; The Last Safari, 1967), this new wave of films portrays a continent blighted by transnational corruption (The Constant Gardener, 2005), genocide (Hotel Rwanda, 2004; Shooting Dogs, 2006), 'failed states' (Black Hawk Down, 2001), illicit transnational commerce (Blood Diamond, 2006) and the unfulfilled promises of decolonization (The Last King of Scotland, 2006). Conversely, where once Apartheid South Africa was a brutal foil for the romance of East Africa (Cry Freedom, 1987; A Dry White Season, 1989), South Africa now serves as a redeemed contrast to the rest of the continent (Red Dust, 2004; Invictus, 2009). Writing from the perspective of long-term engagement with the contexts in which the films are set, anthropologists and historians reflect on these films and assess the contemporary place Africa holds in the North American and European cinematic imagination.

Reproductive Disruptions - Gender, Technology, and Biopolitics in the New Millennium (Paperback): Marcia C. Inhorn Reproductive Disruptions - Gender, Technology, and Biopolitics in the New Millennium (Paperback)
Marcia C. Inhorn
R887 Discovery Miles 8 870 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Reproductive disruptions, such as infertility, pregnancy loss, adoption, and childhood disability, are among the most distressing experiences in people s lives. Based on research by leading medical anthropologists from around the world, this book examines such issues as local practices detrimental to safe pregnancy and birth; conflicting reproductive goals between women and men; miscommunications between pregnant women and their genetic counselors; cultural anxieties over gamete donation and adoption; the contested meanings of abortion; cultural critiques of hormone replacement therapy; and the globalization of new pharmaceutical and assisted reproductive technologies. This breadth - with its explicit move from the local to the global, from the realm of everyday reproductive practice to international programs and policies - illuminates most effectively the workings of power, the tensions between women s and men s reproductive agency, and various cultural and structural inequalities in reproductive health. Marcia C. Inhorn is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies. A specialist on infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in the Muslim Middle East, she is the author or editor of four books on the subject. Her publications include Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994, winner of Eileen Basker Prize for outstanding research in gender and health), Infertility and Patriarchy: The Cultural Politics of Gender and Family Life in Egypt (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) and Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, Religion, and In Vitro Fertilization in Egypt (Routledge Press, 2003)."

Order and Disorder - Anthropological Perspectives (Hardcover, New): Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Fernanda Pirie Order and Disorder - Anthropological Perspectives (Hardcover, New)
Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Fernanda Pirie
R3,012 Discovery Miles 30 120 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Disorder and instability are matters of continuing public concern. Terrorism, as a threat to global order, has been added to preoccupations with political unrest, deviance and crime. Such considerations have prompted the return to the classic anthropological issues of order and disorder. Examining order within the political and legal spheres and in contrasting local settings, the papers in this volume highlight its complex and contested nature. Elaborate displays of order seem necessary to legitimate the institutionalization of violence by military and legal establishments, yet violent behaviour can be incorporated into the social order by the development of boundaries, rituals and established processes of conflict resolution. Order is said to depend upon justice, yet injustice legitimates disruptive protest. Case studies from Siberia, India, Indonesia, Tibet, West Africa, Morocco and the Ottoman Empire show that local responses are often inconsistent in their valorization, acceptance and condemnation of disorder.

Keebet von Benda-Beckmann is head of the project group 'Legal Pluralism' at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle, Germany. She is Professor of Anthropology of Law at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Honorary Professor at the universities of Leipzig and Halle. Her research focuses on legal pluralism, disputing, decentralization, social security and natural resources in Indonesia and the Netherlands. Publications include "Changing Properties of Property," co-edited with Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Melanie Wiber (Berghahn 2006).

Fernanda Pirie is Lecturer in Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. She has carried out research into conflict and its resolution in both Ladakh and among the nomads of Amdo in eastern Tibet. Her writings focus on order and disorder and the relations between law and religion. She is the author of the forthcoming "Peace and conflict in Ladakh: the construction of a fragile web of order" (Brill 2006).

Post-Ottoman Topologies - The Presence of the Past in the Era of the Nation-State (Hardcover): Nicolas Argenti Post-Ottoman Topologies - The Presence of the Past in the Era of the Nation-State (Hardcover)
Nicolas Argenti
R2,666 Discovery Miles 26 660 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

How are historians and social scientists to understand the emergence, the multiplicity, and the mutability of collective memories of the Ottoman Empire in the political formations that succeeded it? With contributions focussing on several of the nation-states whose peoples once were united under the aegis of Ottoman suzerainty, this volume proposes new theoretical approaches to the experience and transmission of the past through time. Developing the concept of topology, contributors explore collective memories of Ottoman identity and post-Ottoman state formation in a contemporary epoch that, echoing late modernity, we might term "late nationalism".

Bedouin of Mount Sinai - An Anthropological Study of their Political Economy (Paperback): Emanuel Marx Bedouin of Mount Sinai - An Anthropological Study of their Political Economy (Paperback)
Emanuel Marx
R883 Discovery Miles 8 830 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

The Sinai Peninsula links Asia and Africa and for millennia has been crossed by imperial armies from both the east and the west. Thus, its Bedouin inhabitants are by necessity involved in world affairs and maintain a complex, almost urban, economy. They make their home in arid mountains that provide limited pastures and lack arable soils and must derive much of their income from migrant labor and trade. Still, every household maintains, at considerable expense, a small orchard and a minute flock of goats and sheep. The orchards and flocks sustain them in times of need and become the core of a mutual assurance system. It is for this social security that Bedouin live in and retire to the mountains. Based on fieldwork over ten years, this book builds on the central theoretical understanding that the complex political economy of the Mount Sinai Bedouin is integrated into urban society and part of the modern global world.

Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2021): Elisabeth Tauber, Dorothy L. Zinn Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2021)
Elisabeth Tauber, Dorothy L. Zinn
R3,890 Discovery Miles 38 900 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

This book provides new insights into an intense and long-standing debate on women, gender, and masculinity with an explicit focus on ethnographic writing. The six contributors to this book investigate and discuss the multiple connections between ethnographic writing and gender in both the history of anthropology and contemporary anthropology, underlining problems, potentialities, stereotypes, experiments, continuities, changes, and challenges. Building on a prologue by two Malinowski grandchildren and an exploration of the role that Bronislaw Malinowski's first wife, Elsie Masson, played in his literary presentation, the anthropologists collected here problematize writing gender and gendered writing in ethnography, revealing how these twin themes touch the history of the discipline itself and the classics of anthropology. Has the legacy of Writing Culture and Women Writing Culture obviated the need to consider gender in writing? Or could it be that the very mechanics of ethnographic writing are still imbued with hidden gendered divisions of labor? Following the editors' extensive overview of the question, the contributing authors tackle gender and ethnographic writing from various vantages: with a view to the past, but also to the influence of previous feminist critiques in the present, and with accounts of the issues they themselves have faced and the solutions they have devised.

Explaining Social Life - A Guide to Using Social Theory (Hardcover): John Parker, Hilary Stanworth Explaining Social Life - A Guide to Using Social Theory (Hardcover)
John Parker, Hilary Stanworth
R4,591 Discovery Miles 45 910 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

This distinctive text makes social theory accessible to and usable by students. Whereas social theory is often seen as abstract, esoteric and separate from our understanding of the social world, here it is shown to be a flexible and practical resource for anyone wanting to explain social phenomena. This expanded and updated second edition actively encourages readers to develop and practice their own capacities for social explanation: - Providing readers with a powerful 'tool kit' of five social theoretical concepts - Individuals, Nature, Culture, Action and Social Structure - that are fundamental to social explanation; - Drawing on a historically and geographically wide range of examples of social phenomena to show how these theoretical concepts operate and why they're important; - Offering end of chapter questions that enable readers to put theory into practice and begin theorising for themselves. Explaining Social Life is ideal for anyone interested in social theory, including students of sociology, anthropology and related social sciences - both those engaging with social theory for the first time, and more advanced students looking to build upon their understanding.

The Sacred Void - Spatial Images of Work and Ritual among the Giriama of Kenya (Hardcover, New): David Parkin The Sacred Void - Spatial Images of Work and Ritual among the Giriama of Kenya (Hardcover, New)
David Parkin
R3,402 Discovery Miles 34 020 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

In this innovative study, David Parkin shows how indigenous African rites and beliefs may be reworked to accommodate a variety of economic systems, new spatial and ecological relations among communities, and the locally variable influences of Islam and Christianity. The Giriama people of Kenya include pastoralists living in the hinterland; farmers, who work land closer to the coast; and migrants, who earn money as laborers or fisherman on the coast itself. Wherever they live, they revere an ancient and formerly fortified capital, located in the pastoralist hinterland, which few of them ever see or visit. It is the site of occasional large-scale ceremonies and becomes especially important at times of national crisis. It then acts as a moral core of Giriama society, and a symbolic defense against total domination and assimilation.

Understanding Cultural Transmission in Anthropology - A Critical Synthesis (Paperback): Roy Ellen, Stephen J. Lycett, Sarah E.... Understanding Cultural Transmission in Anthropology - A Critical Synthesis (Paperback)
Roy Ellen, Stephen J. Lycett, Sarah E. Johns
R1,012 Discovery Miles 10 120 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

The concept of cultural transmission is central to much contemporary anthropological theory, since successful human reproduction through social systems is essential for effective survival and for enhancing the adaptiveness of individual humans and local populations. Yet, what is understood by the phrase and how it might best be studied is highly contested. This book brings together contributions that reflect the current diversity of approaches - from the fields of biology, primatology, palaeoanthropology, psychology, social anthropology, ethnobiology, and archaeology - to examine social and cultural transmission from a range of perspectives and at different scales of generalization. The comprehensive introduction explores some of the problems and connections. Overall, the book provides a timely synthesis of current accounts of cultural transmission in relation to cognitive process, practical action, and local socio-ecological context, while linking these with explanations of longer-term evolutionary trajectories.

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