Pakistani migrant families in Denmark find themselves in a specific ethno-national, post-9/11 environment where Muslim immigrants are subjected to processes of non-recognition, exclusion and securitization. This ethnographic study explores how, why, and at what costs notions of relatedness, identity, and belonging are being renegotiated within local families and transnational kinship networks. Each entry point concerns the destructive-productive constitution of family life, where neglected responsibilities, obligations, and trust lead not only to broken relationships, but also, and inevitably, to the innovative creation of new ones. By connecting the micro-politics of the migrant family with the macro-politics of the nation state and global conjunctures in general, the book argues that securitization and suspicion-launched in the name of "integration"-escalate internal community dynamics and processes of family upheaval in unpredicted ways.

Exploring the experiences of children encountering war and armed conflict, this book draws upon history, ethnography, sociology, literature, media studies, psychology, public policy, and other disciplines to address children as soldiers, refugees, and peace-builders within their social, cultural, and political contexts.

Who was Tertullian, and what can we know about him? This work explores his social identities, focusing on his North African milieu. Theories from the discipline of social/cultural anthropology, including kinship, class and ethnicity, are accommodated and applied to selections of Tertullian's writings. In light of postcolonial concerns, this study utilizes the categories of Roman colonizers, indigenous Africans and new elites. The third category, new elites, is actually intended to destabilize the other two, denying any "essential" Roman or African identity. Thereafter, samples from Tertullian's writings serve to illustrate comparisons of his own identities and the identities of his rhetorical opponents. The overall study finds Tertullian's identities to be manifold, complex and discursive. Additionally, his writings are understood to reflect antagonism toward Romans, including Christian Romans (which is significant for his so-called Montanism), and Romanized Africans. While Tertullian accommodates much from Graeco-Roman literature, laws and customs, he nevertheless retains a strongly stated non-Roman-ness and an African-ity, which is highlighted in the present monograph.

Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book examines how the Islamic community in Java, Indonesia, is actively negotiating both modernity and tradition in the contexts of nation-building, globalisation, and a supposed clash of civilizations. The pesantren community, so-called because it is centered around an educational institution called the pesantren, uses education as a central arena for dealing with globalization and the construction and maintenance of an Indonesian Islamic identity. However, the community's efforts to wrestle with these issues extend beyond education into the public sphere in general and specifically in the area of leadership and politics. The case material is used to understand Muslim strategies and responses to civilizational contact and conflict. Scholars, educated readers, and advanced undergraduates interested in Islam, religious education, the construction of religious identity in the context of national politics and globalization will find this work useful.

Are teenagers in Tokyo more or less mature than teens in Brooklyn? What do Chinese teens do for weekend recreation? What do they value and care about? This volume shows that the lives of teens in prosperous and westernized Asian countries have much in common with those of American teens. Obtaining a good education is paramount, and Asian interests and tastes--in pop culture and sports, for example--are in sync with their American counterparts. In poorer and politically restricted Asian nations, teen life and opportunities are more restricted, however. Greater focus and energy is given to helping the family survive. Yet it is the ancient cultural and religious traditions in Asian life that constitute the fundamental difference between American and Asian teens. This book is an insightful and sweeping introduction to the Asian teen experience--from a typical day to participation in religious ceremonies--in 15 countries.

This compelling volume explores how war magic and warrior religion unleash the power of the gods, demons, ghosts, and the dead. Documenting war magic and warrior religion as they are performed in diverse cultures and across historical time periods, this volume foregrounds embodiment, practice, and performance in anthropological approaches to magic, sorcery, shamanism, and religion. The authors go beyond what magic 'represents' to consider what magic does. From Chinese exorcists, Javanese spirit siblings, and black magic in Sumatra to Tamil Tiger suicide bombers, Chamorro spiritual re-enchantment, tantric Buddhist war magic, and Yanomami dark shamans, religion and magic are re-evaluated not just from the practitioner's perspective but through the victim's lived experience. These original investigations reveal a nuanced approach to understanding social action, innovation, and the revitalization of tradition in colonial and post-colonial societies undergoing rapid social transformation.

By the end of the 20th century, the ethnic question had resurfaced in public debate. Every country had been affected by what is commonly known as cultural pluralism, as a result of conflicts interpreted from an ethnic perspective, for instance, in the Balkans and central Africa; nationalist struggles, such as the Basque country, Quebec and Belgium; and demands for recognition and political representation by new ethnic minorities. This resurgence or extension of the salience of ethnicity in most of the societies around the world can now be found not only in public discourse, policy making, scientific literature and popular representation, but also in the pivotal realm of statistics. This volume explores the ethnic and racial classification in official statistics as a reflection of the representations of population, and as an interpretation of social dynamics through a different lens. Spanning all continents, a wide range of international authors discuss how ethnic and racial classifications are built, their (lack of) accuracy and their contribution to the representation of ethnic and racial diversity of multicultural societies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

In 1994, the Pacific island village of Matupit was partially destroyed by a volcanic eruption. This study focuses on the subsequent reconstruction and contests over the morality of exchanges that are generative of new forms of social stratification. Such new dynamics of stratification are central to contemporary processes of globalization in the Pacific, and more widely. Through detailed ethnography of the transactions that a displaced people entered into in seeking to rebuild their lives, this book analyses how people re-make sociality in an era of post-colonial neoliberalism without taking either the transformative power of globalization or the resilience of indigenous culture as its starting point. It also contributes to the understanding of the problems of post-disaster reconstruction and development projects.

First published in 1994, this in-depth and long-term study presents an ethnography which is comprised of personal narratives of victims of domestic abuse and homelessness. Drawing on these stories, the book addresses a number of issues surrounding the provision of services for homeless women and domestic abuse victims, including the effectiveness of assistance programs and laws and potential solutions to the problems of both domestic abuse and homelessness. This book will be of interest to those studying social work, health care and mental health, sociology and women's studies.

This book challenges the widely held view that inmates create prison gangs to promote racism and violence. On the contrary, gangs form to create order. Most people assume that violent inmates left to themselves will descend into a chaotic anarchy, but that's not necessarily the case. This book studies the hidden order of the prison underworld to understand how order arises among outlaws. It uses economics to explore the secret world of the convict culture, inmate hierarchy, and prison gang politics. Inmates engaged in illegal activity cannot rely entirely on state-based governance institutions, such as courts of law and the police, to create order. Correctional officers will not resolve a dispute over a heroin deal gone wrong or help kill a predatory rapist. Yet, the inmate social system is relatively orderly and underground markets flourish. In today's prisons, gangs play a pivotal role in protecting inmates and facilitating illicit commerce. They have sophisticated internal structures and often rely on elaborate written constitutions. To maintain social order, gangs adjudicate conflicts and orchestrate strategic acts of violence to negotiate the competing demands of inmates, gang members, and correctional officers. This book uses economics to explain why prison gangs form, how formal institutions affect them, and why they have a powerful influence even over crime beyond prison walls. Economics explains the seemingly irrational, truly astonishing, and often tragic world of life among the society of captives.

This book sheds light on the phenomenon of consecutive interpreting. It combines phenomenological and empirical analyses to build a communication theory of interpreting. The author begins by reviewing mainstream research on consecutive interpreting and then dissociates himself from it, conducting a three-tier analysis of interpreting data. He concludes by presenting an alternative theory of consecutive interpreting. As he makes clear from the outset, a new and combined methodology for consecutive interpreting needs to be constructed to satisfy both the relation of the phenomenon to experience as well as its social foundation. He also stresses the potential within the humanities for wider employment of the phenomenological empirical method. This book will appeal to students and scholars of linguistics, translation, phenomenology, social interaction and communication

Based on long-term medical anthropological research in northern Ghana, the author analyses issues of health and healing, of gender, and of the control and use of money in a changing rural African setting. He describes the culture of medical pluralism, so typical for neo-colonial states, and people's choices of "traditional" (local) medicine (plants and sacrifices), Islamic medicine (charms and various written solutions) and "modern" therapy (biomedicine, in particular western pharmaceuticals). He concludes that the rural-urban divide is a fiction, that demarcations between these areas are frequently blurred, linked by a postcolonial, capitalist discourse of local markets, regional economies and national structures, which frequently emerge in local African settings but often originate in global and multinational markets.

This original collection brings islands to the fore in a growing body of scholarship on the Indian Ocean, examining them as hubs or points of convergence and divergence in a world of maritime movements and exchanges. Straddling history and anthropology and grounded in the framework of connectivity, the book tackles central themes such as smallness, translocality, and "the island factor." It moves to the farthest reaches of the region, with a rich variety of case studies on the Swahili-Comorian world, the Maldives, Indonesia, and more. With remarkable breadth and cohesion, these essays capture the circulations of people, goods, rituals, sociocultural practices, and ideas that constitute the Indian Ocean world. Together, they take up "islandness" as an explicit empirical and methodological issue as few have done before.

This collection of previously out-of-print titles brings togther some key texts from the early study of the anthropology of religion. An important reference collection, these books will prove invaluable to students of religion and anthropology.

By adopting oral history and fieldwork methods and exploring historical data, this book chronologically depicts the development of the schools and education in a village in North China over a century. The book reveals how education and school life in the rural village are being impacted not only by its own history and traditions, but also by external powers; more specifically, the development of rural schools is influenced by the tensions between Chinese and Western culture, between history and reality, between countryside and cities, and between national and local powers. In essence, villagers' educational experience is actually a battlefield for school education and local tradition - the children's lives are dominated by school education, leaving local traditions few opportunities to exert an influence. The study also discusses how school education and local traditions have influenced villagers' social mobility, a topic that has rarely been studied in previous literature. In summary, rural schools have been developing within an interactive network composed of various actors. With the fading of national power since the 1980s, local rural actors have enjoyed a much more liberal social and political space and thus now play a more active role in rural education. Presenting a microcosm that reflects the historical development of rural education in China, the book is a valuable resource for researchers in the field of in rural education, educational history, and educational anthropology, as well as for readers interested in rural education in China.

In the Afro-Cuban Lukumi religious tradition - more commonly known in the United States as Santeria - entrants into the priesthood undergo an extraordinary fifty-three-week initiation period. During this time, these novices - called iyawo - endure a host of prohibitions, including most notably wearing exclusively white clothing.A Year in White, sociologist C. Lynn Carr, who underwent this initiation herself, opens a window on this remarkable year-long religious transformation. In her intimate investigation of the ""year in white"", Carr draws on fifty-two in-depth interviews with other participants, an online survey of nearly two hundred others, and almost a decade of her own ethnographic fieldwork, gathering stories that allow us to see how cultural newcomers and natives thought, felt, and acted with regard to their initiation. She documents how, during the iyawo year, the ritual slowly transforms the initiate's identity. For the first three months, for instance, the iyawo may not use a mirror, even to shave, and must eat all meals while seated on a mat on the floor using only a spoon and their own set of dishes. During the entire year, the iyawo loses their name and is simply addressed as ""iyawo"" by family and friends. Carr also shows that this year-long religious ritual - which is carried out even as the iyawo goes about daily life - offers new insight into religion in general, suggesting that the sacred is not separable from the profane and indeed that religion shares an ongoing dynamic relationship with the realities of everyday life. Religious expression happens at home, on the streets, at work and school. Offering insight not only into Santeria but also into religion more generally, A Year in White makes an important contribution to our understanding of complex, dynamic religious landscapes in multicultural, pluralist societies and how they inhabit our daily lives.

An ethnographical study of the Orokaiva people of Papua -New Guinea.

The social-research organization Mass-Observation was founded in 1937. In this book, the true extent and significance of Mass-Observation's unique role in the formation of postwar Britain's idea of itself through the examination of everyday life across the long twentieth century. An excellent guide to Mass-Observation and the period generally, this scholarly work also provides surprising insights into the role social research has played in the development of policy and mass democracy.

The body is at the same time a place where we express duration and/or discontinuity in history, a witness of radical social changes, and a factor of stabilization, but also of the transformation of human life - and therefore an eminent challenge for every human being. This book will contribute in a decisively interdisciplinary and cross-cultural way to a better understanding of the place, role, and connection of the body within social, political, and cultural shifts.

Cameroon, in Central Africa, has been called "Africa in miniature." It is characterized by exceptional social and ethnic diversity, with more than 250 ethnicities now forming five major regional-culture groupings. This volume is the first to encapsulate Cameroon's rich indigenous and modern customs and traditions in depth. The narrative emphasizes those aspects that define its modern nation, its peoples, the unique societies, their institutions, and various lifestyles. The origins of Cameroon's diverse culture are traced back to the various ethnic groups and languages as well as the influence of European colonialism, Christianity, Islam, and other external factors, including globalization. In each topical chapter, examples from ethnic groups are presented to give some sense of the variety of experiences. Cameroon has had a turbulent and eventful modern history with German, English, and French incursions, and students and general readers will be able to understand the current struggle for democracy post independence. The history colors the substantial coverage of the many topics examined, from education, to marriage and women's roles, sports, and holidays, daily life, the arts, and much more. This volume will stand as the definitive, accessible introduction to Cameroon and will be essential for building a well-rounded Africa collection.

Globalization of trade and organizational change increase the impact of markets in people's lives. But in what ways do markets matter? This book is about how financial analysts, marketing people, corporate leaders and other actors in Western market economies perceive, model, and use markets. It provides an ethnographic window into the cultural processes of contemporary markets; how people employ the market to solve problems, create capital, gain political ends, challenge economic processes, and delineate moral values and responsibilities.

Tracing embodied transformation in the context of Gaga, the Israeli dance improvisation practice, this book demystifies what Lina Aschenbrenner coins as "neo-spiritual aesthetics." This book takes the reader on an analytical journey through a Gaga class, outlining the effective aesthetics of Gaga as an example for the broader field of neo-spiritualities. It distinguishes a threefold effect of Gaga practice-from a momentary extraordinary experience, to a lasting therapeutic effect, and finally Gaga's worldview potential. It situates the effect in an assemblage of interrelating aesthetics of environment, movement, and bodies. The book shows why seemingly leisure time activities such as Gaga form fruitful research objects to an academic study of religion and opens up research on neo-spiritual practices. In understanding the sensory effect of practice and its cultural and social implications, the book follows an Aesthetics of Religion approach. It departs from the idea that cognition is embodied and that the body is thus central to understanding cultural and social phenomena. Drawing upon a wide array of data gathered in the context of Gaga at the Suzanne Dellal Center in Tel Aviv, the book weaves together different methods of discourse, ritual, movement, body knowledge, and narrative analysis, while acknowledging insights from neuroscience and cognitive science.

Inhuman Thoughts is a philosophical exploration of the possibility of increasing the physiological and psychological capacities of humans to the point that they are no longer biologically, psychologically, or socially human. The movement is from the human through the trans-human, to the post-human. The tone is optimistic; Seidel argues that such an evolution would be of positive value on the whole. Seidel's initial argument supports the need for a comprehensive ethical theory, the success of which would parallel that of a large-scale scientific revolution, such as Newtonian mechanics. He elaborates the movement from the improved-but-still-human to the post-human, and philosophically examines speculated examples of post-human forms of life, including indefinitely extended life-span, parallel consciousness, altered perception, a-sociality, and a-sexuality. Inhuman Thoughts is directed at those interested in philosophical questions on human nature and the best life given the possibilities of that nature. Seidel's overall argument is that the most satisfactory answer to the latter question involves a transcendence of the present confines of human nature.