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.

Today's international trade regime explicitly rejects cultural perceptions of what is safe to eat, overturning millennia of tradition. The World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) enshrines "science" as the arbiter in resolving disputes involving this vital human need. This mandate, however, is under attack from many quarters. Critics cite environmental and ethical concerns, unpredictably changing technology, taste, food preferences, local culture, adequacy of governmental implementation of WTO standards, and the reliability of scientific opinion. A basic conflict has crystallized: food as culture versus food as commerce. The WTO/SPS approach is increasingly challenged for its balance in favour of economic considerations, and for its visible undermining of unique cultural identities. This book explores the relationship between the SPS Agreement, food traditions, science, and technology. It deliberately confronts those trade experts who refuse to allow other social sciences to influence their economics-based trade theory. The author investigates the local perception of food and food safety from the anthropological and historical points of view, the evolution of food production technologies, and the medicinal, proscriptive (taboo) and security aspects of food that continue to prevail in nearly all cultures today. She succeeds in demonstrating that, no matter how strong the faith in science and economics, it is unwise to flagrantly dismiss the deeply rooted beliefs of billions of people, a huge majority of the world's population. The beef hormones case; the remaining sovereignty related to food safety measures; the increasing significance of "appropriate levels of protection" and "the precautionary principle"; the redefinition of "food hazard" to include production processes as well as food itself; genetically modified seeds and food products; the concept of "risk" in the science-based context of the Codex Alimentarius - these are among the issues and topics covered in depth. The author concludes that, although quick "legal" resolutions of trade disputes about what people should or should not eat might provide a "win" for open trade, support for the entire structure and rationale of the WTO is undermined unless (at the least) some flexibility of interpretation is introduced into the WTO Dispute Resolution System in order to recognize the weight and validity of public opinion.

Throughout the world's arid regions, and particularly in northern and eastern Africa, formerly nomadic pastoralists are undergoing a transition to settled life. Pastoral sedentarization represents a response to multiple factors, including loss of livestock due to drought and famine, increased competition for range land due to growing populations, land privatization or appropriation for commercial farms, ranches, and tourist game parks, and to fear of increasing violence, ethnic conflict, and civil war. Although pastoral settlement is often encouraged by international development agencies and national governments as solutions to food insecurity, poor health care and problems of governance, the social, economic and health concomitants of sedentism are not inevitably beneficial. Biosocial studies presented in this volume, for example, point to greater nutritional and health benefits among nomadic livestock keepers, but increased opportunities in education, employment, and food security in towns.
This book examines from an interdisciplinary perspective pastoral sedentarization in one region of Africa - Marsabit District in northern Kenya - an isolated and arid region bordering Ethiopia and which contains multiple pastoral groups including Rendille, Samburu, Ariaal, Borana and Gabra peoples. Within this locale, we present recent studies conducted by cultural and biological anthropologists, veterinary biologists, economists, geographers and medical and community health personnel, linked by the common goal of delineating the consequences, both positive and negative, of settlement for formerly nomadic pastoral populations. For many of these former pastoralists, settled life does notnecessarily constitute a break with their pastoral kin and neighbors, but represents one more opportunity with which to survive in a difficult physical and social environment.
This edited work is a collection of international contributors from North America, Africa and Europe and focuses on a dilemma that affects many parts of the indigenous world. This book will be essential reading for professionals and students of social change in the developing world particularly in applied anthropology, development economics, rural sociology, environment and ecology, and medicine and public health

Amerindian societies have an iconic status in classical political thought. For Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Rousseau, the native American 'state of nature' operates as a foil for the European polity. Challenging this tradition, The Imbalance of Power demonstrates ethnographically that the Carib speaking indigenous societies of the Guiana region of Amazonia do not fit conventional characterizations of 'simple' political units with 'egalitarian' political ideologies and 'harmonious' relationships with nature. Marc Brightman builds a persuasive and original theory of Amerindian politics: far from balanced and egalitarian, Carib societies are rife with tension and difference; but this imbalance conditions social dynamism and a distinctive mode of cohesion. The Imbalance of Power is based on the author's fieldwork in partnership with Vanessa Grotti, who is working on a companion volume entitled Living with the Enemy: First Contacts and the Making of Christian Bodies in Amazonia.

There is surprisingly little fieldwork done on the United States by anthropologists from abroad. America Observed fills that gap by bringing into greater focus empirical as well as theoretical implications of this phenomenon. Edited by Virginia Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, the essays collected here offer a critique of such an absence, exploring its likely reasons while also illustrating the advantages of studying fieldwork-based anthropological projects conducted by colleagues from outside the U.S. This volume contains an introduction written by the editors and fieldwork-based essays written by Helena Wulff, Jasmin Habib, Limor Darash, Ulf Hannerz, and Moshe Shokeid, and reflections on the broad issue written by Geoffrey White, Keiko Ikeda, and Jane Desmond. Suitable for introductory and mid-level anthropology courses, America Observed will also be useful for American Studies courses both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Development interventions often generate contradictions around questions of who benefits from development and which communities are targeted for intervention. This book examines how the Baka, who live in Eastern Cameroon, assert forms of belonging in order to participate in development interventions, and how community life is shaped and reshaped through these interventions. Often referred to as 'forest people', the Baka have witnessed many recent development interventions that include competing and contradictory policies such as 'civilize', assimilate and integrate the Baka into 'full citizenship', conserve the forest and wildlife resources, and preserve indigenous cultures at the verge of extinction.

Based on fieldwork in Kinshasa and Paris, Breaking Rocks examines patronage payments within Congolese popular music, where a love song dedication can cost 6,000 dollars and a simple name check can trade for 500 or 600 dollars. Tracing this system of prestige through networks of musicians and patrons - who include gangsters based in Europe, kleptocratic politicians in Congo, and lawless diamond dealers in northern Angola - this book offers insights into ideologies of power and value in central Africa's troubled post-colonial political economy, as well as a glimpse into the economic flows that make up the hidden side of the globalization.

There is surprisingly little fieldwork done on the United States by anthropologists from abroad. America Observed fills that gap by bringing into greater focus empirical as well as theoretical implications of this phenomenon. Edited by Virginia Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, the essays collected here offer a critique of such an absence, exploring its likely reasons while also illustrating the advantages of studying fieldwork-based anthropological projects conducted by colleagues from outside the U.S. This volume contains an introduction written by the editors and fieldwork-based essays written by Helena Wulff, Jasmin Habib, Limor Darash, Ulf Hannerz, and Moshe Shokeid, and reflections on the broad issue written by Geoffrey White, Keiko Ikeda, and Jane Desmond. Suitable for introductory and mid-level anthropology courses, America Observed will also be useful for American Studies courses both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

This book offers a case study of four of the most influential contemporary Chinese writers and 'cultural bastards' - Duoduo, an underground 'misty' poet; Wang Shuo, a 'hooligan' writer; Zhang Chengzhi, an old 'Red Guard' and new 'cultural heretic'; and Wang Xiaobo, a chronicler of Rabelaisian modern history.

This book investigates the role of citizen journalism in railroading social and political changes in sub-Saharan Africa. Case studies are drawn from research conducted by leading scholars from the fields of media studies, journalism, anthropology and history, who uniquely probe the real impact of technologies in driving change in Africa.

Updated with a new Preface, this seminal work challenges the routine ways in which anthropologists have thought about the complexity and quantity of their materials. Marilyn Strathern focuses on a problem normally regarded as commonplace; that of scale and proportion. She combines a wide-ranging interest in current theoretical issues with close attention to the cultural details of social life, attempting to establish proportionality between them. Strathern gives equal weight to two areas of contemporary debate: The difficulties inherent in anthropologically representing complex societies, and the future of cross-cultural comparison in a field where 'too much' seems known. The ethnographic focus of this book emphasizes the context through which Melanesianists have managed the complexity of their own accounts, while at the same time unfolding a commentary on perception and the mixing of indigenous forms. Revealing unexpected replications in modes of thought and in the presentation of ambiguous images, Strathern has fashioned a unique contribution to the anthropological corpus. This book was originally published under the sponsorship of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania.

The Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, have often been portrayed in reductive, polarized terms; either as saintly activists or dangerous rebels. Cultural anthropologists Duncan Earle and Jeanne Simonelli, drawing on decades-long relationships and fieldwork, attained a collegiality with the Zapatistas that reveals a more complex portrait of a people struggling with self-determination on every level. Seeking a new kind of experimental ethnography, Earle & Simonelli have chronicled a social experiment characterized by resistance, autonomy and communality. Combining their own compelling narrative as participant-observers, and those of their Chiapas compadres, the authors effectively call for an activist approach to research. The result is a unique ethnography that is at once analytical and deeply personal. Uprising of Hope will be compelling reading for scholars and general readers of anthropology, social justice, ethnography, Latin American history and ethnic studies.

This book explores the value of duoethnography to the study of interdisciplinary practice. Illustrating how dialogic and relational forms of research help to facilitate deeply emic, personal, and situated understandings of practice, the editors and contributors promote personal reflexivity and changes in practice. Education, drama, nursing counselling, and art in classroom, university, and larger professional spaces are examined by students, teachers, and practitioners using duoethnography to become more aware, dialogic, imaginative, and relational in their teaching.

Anthropology and the United States Military is a fascinating edited collection of ethnographic research that seeks to provide visions of and for US military culture from a solid anthropological base. The volume explores several important but relatively unknown cultural variations in the defense community through a variety of lenses. A strong list of contributors highlight important issues such as: anthrax vaccines, the "Golden Age" culture of the military, gender roles among army spouses, weight control and physical readiness, the military advisor, and the USNA.

With the exception of a few iconic moments such as Rosa Parks's 1955 refusal to move to the back of a Montgomery bus, we hear little about what black women activists did prior to 1960. Perhaps this gap is due to the severe repression that radicals of any color in America faced as early as the 1930s, and into the Red Scare of the 1950s. To be radical, and black and a woman was to be forced to the margins and consequently, these women's stories have been deeply buried and all but forgotten by the general public and historians alike. In this exciting work of historical recovery, Dayo F. Gore unearths and examines a dynamic, extended community of black radical women during the early Cold War, including established Communist Party activists such as Claudia Jones, artists and writers such as Beulah Richardson, and lesser-known organizers such as Vicki Garvin and Thelma Dale. These women were part of a black left that laid much of the groundwork for both the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and later strains of black radicalism. Radicalism at the Crossroads offers a sustained and in-depth analysis of the political thought and activism of black women radicals during the Cold War period and adds a new dimension to our understanding of this tumultuous and violent time in United States history.

In Death, Materiality and Mediation, Barbara Graham analyzes a diverse range of objects associated with remembrance in both the public and private arenas through ethnography of communities on both sides of the Irish border. In doing so, she explores the materially mediated interactions between the living and the dead, revealing the physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual roles of the dead in contemporary communities. Through this study, Graham expands the concept of materiality to include narrative, song, senses, emotions, ephemera and embodied experience. She also examines how modern practices are informed by older beliefs and folk religion.

Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author Anselma Gallinat shows, such memory work-initially undertaken after fundamental regime change-inevitably shapes citizenship and democracy in the present.

This book illustrates the role of researchers' affects and emotions in understanding and making sense of the phenomena they study during ethnographic fieldwork. Whatever methods ethnographers apply during field research, however close they get to their informants and no matter how involved or detached they feel, fieldwork pushes them to constantly negotiate and reflect their subjectivities and positionalities in relation to the persons, communities, spaces and phenomena they study. The book highlights the idea that ethnographic fieldwork is based on the attempt of communication, mutual understanding, and perspective-taking on behalf of and together with those studied. With regard to the institutionally silenced, yet informally emphasized necessity of ethnographers' emotional immersion into the local worlds they research (defined as "emic perspective," "narrating through the eyes of the Other," "seeing the world from the informants' point of view," etc.), this book pursues the disentanglement of affect-related disciplinary conventions by means of transparent, vivid and systematic case studies and their methodological discussion. The book provides nineteen case studies on the relationship between methodology, intersubjectivity, and emotion in qualitative and ethnographic research, and includes six section introductions to the pivotal issues of role conflict, reciprocity, intimacy and care, illness and dying, failing and attuning, and emotion regimes in fieldwork and ethnography. Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography is a must-have resource for post-graduate students and researchers across the disciplines of social and cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, cultural psychology, critical theory, cultural phenomenology, and cultural sociology.

Oprah's Book Club sparked a revolution among readers by bringing serious contemporary novels to the attention of a wider audience. The Oprah's Book Club seal on a book led to instant fame and bestseller status for authors--but, how did Oprah change the way America reads and values books? Reading Oprah suggests that Oprah initiated an all-important mantra--trust readers. Not only did the public start reading accessible novels, but they also would snatch up formidable titles and read them with a growing confidence and skill. Then, they would talk about them, giving them a life beyond the reader and text.