Theorist Clifford Geertz's influence extends far beyond anthropology. Indeed the case could be made that he has been abandoned by anthropology and that his legacy has been transferred to a more diffuse community of scholars interested in interpretation. This volume reflects the breadth of his influence, looking at Geertz as a theorist rather than as an anthropologist. To date, there has been no impartial, comprehensive, and authoritative work published on this critical figure. Contributors include an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars investigating the three core components of contested legacy: theory, method, and writing.

This book studies how people negotiate difficult heritage within their everyday lives, focusing on memory, belonging, and identity. The starting point for the examination is that temporalities lie at the core of understanding this negotiation and that the connection between temporalities and difficult heritage remains poorly understood and theorized in previous research. In order to fully explore the temporalities of difficult heritage, the book investigates places in which the incident of violence originated within different time periods. It examines one example of modern violence (Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina), one example of where the associated incident occurred during medieval times (the Gazimestan monument in Kosovo), and one example of prehistoric violence (Sandby borg in Sweden). The book presents new theoretical perspectives andprovides suggestions for developing sites of difficult heritage, and will thus be relevant for academic researchers, students, and heritage professionals.

A volume in Advances in Cultural Psychology Series Editor: Jaan Valsiner, Clark University The dynamics of trust and distrust are central to understanding modern society. These dynamics are evident at all levels of society, from the child's relation to caregivers to the individual's relation to the state, and they span from taken for granted trusting relationships to highly reflective and negotiated contractual interactions. The collection of papers in this book questions the diverse ways in which the concept of trust has been previously used, and advances a coherent theorisation of the socio-cultural dynamics of trust and distrust. In this volume, trust and distrust are analysed in relation to lay knowledge and situated in historical, cultural and interactional contexts.The contexts analysed include witch-hunting during the Reformation, China before and after the move to capitalism, building close personal relationships in South Korea, the representation of political corruption in Brazil, tourists bargaining for souvenirs in the Himalaya, disclosing being HIV+ in India, the historical shaping of trust in Portugal, and the role of trust and distrust in the economic development of the Baltic States. Throughout these analyses, and in associated commentaries and theoretical chapters, the focus is upon the cultural and social constitution of trust and distrust.

This book presents a systematic approach to the literary analysis of cultural practices. Based on a postcolonial framework of diaspora, the book utilizes literary theory to investigate cultural phenomena such as food preparation and song. Razia Parveen explores various diverse themes, including the female voice, genealogy, space, time, and diaspora, and applies them to the analysis of community identity. This volume also demonstrates how a literary analysis of oral texts helps to provide insight into women's lived narratives. For example, Parveen discusses how the notion of the 'third space' creates a distinctly feminine spatiality.

"Provides us with a masterful account of how socially marginalized segments of the African and Indian communities of Trinidad and Tobago developed trance-based religious cults linked with differing cultural heritages. Penetrating deeply into these two different communities with his careful fieldwork, he then places them within a brilliant account of the overall cultural history of this island nation."--Paul Younger, author of New Homelands: Hindu Communities in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji, and East Africa This comparative study of African and Hindu popular religions in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago charts the development of religion in the Caribbean by analyzing the ways ecstatic forms of worship, enacted through trance performance and spirit mediumship, have adapted to capitalism and reconfigured themselves within the context of modernity. Showing how diasporic traditions of West African Orisha Worship and South Asian Shakti Puja converged in their ritual adaptations to colonialism in the West Indies, as well as diverged politically within the context of postcolonial multiculturalism, Keith McNeal reveals the unexpected ways these traditions of trance performance have become both globalized and modernized. The first book-length work to compare and contrast Afro- and Indo-Caribbean materials in a systematic and multidimensional manner, this volume makes fresh and innovative contributions to anthropology, religious studies, and the historiography of modernity. By giving both religious subcultures and their intersections equal attention, McNeal offers a richly textured account of southern Caribbean cultural history and pursues important questions about the history and future of religion.

Across the globe, people are challenging the agro-industrial food system and its exploitation of people and resources, reduction of local food varieties, and negative health consequences. In this collection leading international anthropologists explore food activism across the globe to show how people speak to, negotiate, or cope with power through food. Who are the actors of food activism and what forms of agency do they enact? What kinds of economy, exchanges, and market relations do they practice and promote? How are they organized and what are their scales of political action and power relations? Each chapter explores why and how people choose food as a means of forging social and economic justice, covering diverse forms of food activism from individual acts by consumers or producers to organized social groups or movements. The case studies embrace a wide geographical spectrum including Cuba, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Mexico, Italy, Canada, France, Colombia, Japan, and the USA. This is the first book to examine food activism in diverse local, national, and transnational settings, making it essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology and other fields interested in food, economy, politics and social change.

This book explores the contours of a transformational sociology which seeks to reconsider the horizons of sociological imagination. It questions accepted modernist assumptions such as the equation of society and nation-state, the dualism of individual and society and that of ontology and epistemology. Arguing that contemporary sociology suffers from what Ulrich Beck calls the Nato-like fire power of western sociology, it argues that sociology has to open itself to transcivilizational dialogues and planetary conversations about self, culture and society. The book also challenges scholars to go beyond a privileging of the post-traditional telos of modernist sociology and puts forward a foundational interrogation of modernist sociology. It underscores the limitations of established conventions of sociology and considering an alternative sociology based upon Confucian vision and practice of self-transformation. This collection offers a way to go beyond dominant structures of modern sociology and contemporary dominant ways of thinking about and doing sociology helping us cultivate a transdisciplinary sociology.

These astute essays describe the way ordinary people value human relationships and reason through the commonplace contradictions of their local way of life in a global age, rather than measure the actions of their subjects as evidence of either universal rationality or shared cultural beliefs. Each contributor conveys the ways in which people challenge the ascribed moral standards of custom, religious belief, bureaucratic policies through passionate words such as anecdotes, joke, rumors, and gossip. By evaluating moral reasoning at a local level, contributors work to answer the question, what is a good life?

This book offers an ethnographic study of the lives of girls in the juvenile justice system. Based on rich, narrative accounts, the girls at the center of the study are viewed as confronted with the power of simultaneous race, class, and gender hierarchies. Through this framework, we see how the girls navigate this challenge by seeking status in their everyday lives: in their families; juvenile justice institutions; and neighborhood organizations, including gangs. Through analyzing the ways that the girls strive for higher social status, this book provokes debate about how policies and programs may be creatively rethought to incorporate this pursuit. Girls and Juvenile Justice offers a glimpse into the hearts, minds, and souls of adolescent girls. It will be of great interest for scholars of criminal justice, sociology, women's studies, and social-psychology.

Cultural theorist Mica Nava makes an original and significant contribution to the study of cosmopolitanism by exploring everyday English urban cosmopolitanism and foregrounding the gendered, imaginative and empathetic aspects of positive engagement with cultural and racial difference. By looking at a wide range of texts, events and biographical narratives, she traces cosmopolitanism from its marginal status at the beginning of the twentieth century to its relative normalisation today. Case studies include the promotion of cosmopolitanism by Selfridges before the first world war; relationships between white English women and 'other' men -- Jews and black GIs -- during the 1930s and 1940s; literary, cinematic and social science representations of migrants in postcolonial Britain; and Diana and Dodi's interracial romance in the 1990s. In the final chapter, the author draws on her own complex family history to illustrate the contemporary cosmopolitan London experience.Scholars have tended to ignore the oppositional cultures of antiracism and social inclusivity. This groundbreaking study redresses this imbalance and offers a sophisticated account of the uneven history of vernacular cosmopolitanism.

What did South African AIDS activists contribute, politically, to early international advocacy for free HIV medicines for the world's poor? Mandisa Mbali demonstrates that South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) gave moral legitimacy to the international movement which enabled it to effectively push for new models of global health diplomacy and governance. The TAC rapidly acquired moral credibility, she argues, because of its leaders' anti-apartheid political backgrounds, its successful human rights-based litigation and its effective popularization of AIDS-related science.The country's arresting democratic transition in 1994 enabled South African activists to form transnational alliances. Its new Constitution provided novel opportunities for legal activism, such as the TAC's advocacy against multinational pharmaceutical companies and the South African government. Mbali's history of the TAC sheds light on its evolution into an influential force for global health justice.

Landscape studies provide a crucial perspective into the interaction between humans and their environment, shedding insight on social, cultural, and economic topics. The research explores both the way that natural processes have affected the development of culture and society, as well as the ways that natural landscapes themselves are the product of historical and cultural processes.

Most previous studies of the landscape selectively focused on either the natural sciences or the social sciences, but the research presented in African Landscapes bridges that gap. This work is unique in its interdisciplinary scope. Over the past twelve years, the contributors to this volume have participated in the collaborative research center ACACIA (Arid Climate Adaptation and Cultural Innovation in Africa), which deals with the relationship between cultural processes and ecological dynamics in Africa's arid areas.

The case studies presented here come from mainly Sahara/Sahel and southwestern Africa, and are all linked to broader discussions on the concept of landscape, and themes of cultural, anthropological, geographical, botanical, sociological, and archaeological interest. The contributions in this work are enhanced by full color photographs that put the discussion in context visually.

Occasional Paper No. 44 of the Royal Anthropological Institute Published in association with the Anglo-Finnish Society Westermarck was a remarkable man, but one who has received little credit for the significant part he played in the creation of modern anthropology. He spanned two worlds: the comparative anthropological endeavours of the nineteenth century, and the establishment of social anthropology at the LSE, in which he played a major role. One of Malinowski's principal teachers, he was himself an outstanding fieldworker. His work on Morocco has, even today, hardly been surpassed. Yet, his theories on the nature of human marriage and the origins of the incest taboo place him firmly in the earlier, generalist camp, and the controversies to which they have given rise have hardly settled down to this day. In this volume, Westermarck's place in anthropology is discussed, along with detailed descriptions of his very active academic life in Finland and in Britain, whilst other chapters consider his equally pioneering writings in morals and ethics. Westermarck's own writings are featured by way of illustration of his ideas, including his LSE inaugural lecture, his Huxley lecture, and a hitherto unpublished paper on ritual and survivals. This volume shows, indeed, that Westermarck is a 'missing link' in today's history of anthropology, and our understanding of that history will be profoundly changed by a better appreciation of his role within it.

This volume offers a comprehensive guide to methods used in the sociocultural, linguistic and historical research of food use. This volume is unique in offering food-related research methods from multiple academic disciplines, and includes methods that bridge disciplines to provide a thorough review of best practices. In each chapter, a case study from the author's own work is to illustrate why the methods were adopted in that particular case along with abundant additional resources to further develop and explore the methods.

Nutritional Anthropology and public health research and programming have employed similar methodologies for decades; many anthropologists are public health practitioners while many public health practitioners have been trained as medical or biological anthropologists. Recognizing such professional connections, this volume provides in-depth analysis and comprehensive review of methods necessary to design, plan, implement and analyze public health programming using anthropological best practices. To illustrates the rationale for use of particular methods, each chapter elaborates a case study from the author's own work, showing why particular methods were adopted in each case.

How do you make taxpayers comply? This ethnography offers a vivid, yet nuanced account of knowledge making at one of Sweden's most esteemed bureaucracies - the Swedish Tax Agency. In its aim to collect taxes and minimize tax faults, the Agency mediates the application of tax law to ensure compliance and maintain legitimacy in society. This volume follows one risk assessment project's passage through the Agency, from its inception, through the research phase, in discussions with management to its final abandonment. With its fiscal anthropological approach, Shaping Taxpayers reveals how diverse knowledge claims - legal, economic, cultural - compete to shape taxpayer behaviour.

This volume examines significant social transformations engendered by the ongoing Syrian conflict in the lives of Syrian Armenians. The authors draw on documentary material and fieldwork carried out in 2013-2019 among Syrian Armenians in Armenian and Lebanese urban settings. The stories of Syrian Armenians reveal how contemporary events are seen to have direct links to the past and to reproduce memories associated with the Armenian genocide; the contemporary involvement of Turkey in the Syrian war, for example, is seen on the ground as an attempt to control the Armenian presence in Syria. Today, the Syrian Armenian identity encapsulates the complex intersection of memory, transnational links to the past, collective identity and lived experience of wartime "everydayness." Specifically, the analysis addresses the role of memory in key events, such as the bombing of Armenian historical sites during the commemorations of 24 April in the Eastern Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor; the (perceived) shift from destroying Syrian Armenians' material culture to attempting to destroy the Armenian community in urban Aleppo; and the informal transactions that take place in the border area of Kessab. This carefully-researched ethnography will appeal to scholars of anthropology, sociology, and political science who specialize in studies of conflict, memory and diaspora.

The turn to the nonhuman in the humanities and social sciences has arguably been mobilized through a washing away of political violence, its histories, and its traces. Reverberations aims to redress this problem by methodologically and conceptually placing political violence and nonhuman entities side by side. The volume generates a new framework for the study of political violence and its protracted aftermath by attending, through innovative ethnographic and historical studies, to its distribution, extension, and endurance across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and imaginations. Collectively, in the study of political violence, the contributions focus on human agencies and experiences in engagement with nonhuman entities such as objects, land, fields, houses, buildings, treasures, trees, spirits, saints, and prophets. In a variety of contexts, the scholars herein ask the crucial question: What can be learned about political violence by analyzing it in the terrain of relationality between human beings and nonhuman entities? How are things such as objects, spaces, natural phenomena, or spiritual beings entwined in histories of political violence? And vice versa-how are histories of political violence implicated in nonhuman things?

This collection brings together leading thinkers on human beings in urban spaces and inequalities therein. The contributors eschew conceptual confusion between equality - of opportunity, of access, of the right to compete for whatever goal one chooses to pursue - and levelling. The discussions develop in the belief that old and emerging forms of inequality in urban settings need to be understood in depth, as does the machinery that, as masterfully elucidated by Hannah Arendt, operates behind oppression to sustain power and inequality. Anthropologists and fellow ethnographically-committed social scientists examine socio-economic, cultural and political forms of urban inequality in different settings, helping to address comparatively these dynamics.

Biocultural and archaeological research on food, past and present, often relies on very specific, precise, methods for data collection and analysis. These are presented here in a broad-based review. Individual chapters provide opportunities to think through the adoption of methods by reviewing the history of their use along with a discussion of research conducted using those methods. A case study from the author's own work is included in each chapter to illustrate why the methods were adopted in that particular case along with abundant additional resources to further develop and explore those methods.

In the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, medical patients engage a variety of healing practices to seek cures for their ailments. Patients use the expanding biomedical network and a growing number of traditional healthcare units, while also seeking alternative practices, such as shamanism and other religious healing, or even more provocative practices. The Patient Multiple delves into this healthcare complexity in the context of patients' daily lives and decision-making processes, showing how these unique mountain cultures are finding new paths to good health among a changing and multifaceted medical topography.