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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology
In this comprehensive study, Kenneth Morgan provides an
authoritative account of European exploration and discovery in
Australia. The book presents a detailed chronological overview of
European interests in the Australian continent, from initial
speculations about the 'Great Southern Land' to the major
hydrographic expeditions of the 19th century. In particular, he
analyses the early crossings of the Dutch in the 17th century, the
exploits of English 'buccaneer adventurer' William Dampier, the
famous voyages of James Cook and Matthew Flinders, and the
little-known French annexation of Australia in 1772. Introducing
new findings and drawing on the latest in historiographical
research, this book situates developments in navigation, nautical
astronomy and cartography within the broader contexts of imperial,
colonial, and maritime history.
Afghanistan in the 20th century was virtually unknown in Europe and
America. At peace until the 1970s, the country was seen as a remote
and exotic land, visited only by adventurous tourists or
researchers. Afghan Village Voices is a testament to this
little-known period of peace and captures a society and culture now
lost. Prepared by two of the most accomplished and well-known
anthropologists of the Middle East and Central Asia, Richard Tapper
and Nancy Tapper-Lindisfarne, this is a book of stories told by the
Piruzai, a rural Afghan community of some 200 families who farmed
in northern Afghanistan and in summer took their flocks to the
central Hazarajat mountains. The book comprises a collection of
remarkable stories, folktales and conversations and provides
unprecedented insight into the depth and colour of these people's
lives. Recorded in the early 1970s, the stories range from memories
of the Piruzai migration to the north a half century before, to the
feuds, ethnic strife and the doings of powerful khans. There are
also stories of falling in love, elopements, marriages, childbirth
and the world of spirits. The book includes vignettes of the
narrators, photographs, maps and a full glossary. It is a
remarkable document of Afghanistan at peace, told by a people whose
voices have rarely been heard.
For those interested in continuing the struggle for decolonization,
the word "multiculturalism" is mostly a sad joke. After all,
institutionalized multiculturalism today is a managerial muck of
buzzwords, branding strategies, and virtue signaling that has
nothing to do with real struggles against racism and colonialism.
But Decolonize Multiculturalism unearths a buried history.
Decolonize Multiculturalism focuses on the story of the student and
youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by global
movements for decolonization and anti-racism, who aimed to
fundamentally transform their society, as well as the violent
repression of these movements by the state, corporations, and
university administrations. Part of the response has been sheer
violence-campus policing, for example, only began in the 1970s,
paving the way for the militarized campuses of today-with
institutionalized multiculturalism acting like the velvet glove
around the iron fist of state violence. But this means that today's
multiculturalism also contains residues of the original radical
demands of the student and youth movements that it aims to repress:
to open up the university, to wrench it from its settler colonial,
white supremacist, and patriarchal capitalist origins, and to
transform it into a place of radical democratic possibility.
This book raises the question of what an Indigenous church is and
how its members define their ties of affiliation or separation.
Establishing a pioneering dialogue between Amazonian and Gran Chaco
studies on Indigenous Christianity, the contributions address
historical processes, cosmological conceptions, ritual practices,
leadership dynamics, and material formations involved in the
creation and diversification of Indigenous churches. Instead of
focusing on the study of missionary ideologies and praxis, the book
explores Indigenous peoples' interpretations of Christianity and
the institutional arrangements they make to create, expand, or
dismantle their churches. In doing so, the volume offers a South
American contribution to the theoretical project of the
anthropology of Christianity, especially as it relates to the issue
of denominationalism and inter-denominational relations.
American Boarding School Fiction, 1981-2021: Inclusion and Scandal
is a study of contemporary American boarding-school narratives.
Before the 1980s, writers of American boarding-school fiction
tended to concentrate on mournful teenagers - the center was filled
with students: white, male, Protestant students at boys' schools.
More recently, a new generation of writers-including Richard A.
Hawley, Anita Shreve, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Tobias Wolff-has
transformed school fiction by highlighting issues relating to
gender, race, scandal, sexuality, education, and social class in
unprecedented ways. These new writers present characters who are
rich and underprivileged, white and Black, male and female,
adolescent and middle-aged, conformist and rebellious. By turning
their attention away from the bruised feelings of teenagers, they
have reinvented American boarding-school fiction, writing vividly
about a host of subjects the genre overlooked in the past.
Rethinking Sage Philosophy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on and
beyond H. Odera Oruka discusses a variety of aspects of Henry Odera
Oruka's sage philosophy project, rethinking it with a view to
current demands and recent debates in scholarship across several
disciplines. Edited by Kai Kresse and Oriare Nyarwath, the
collection engages perspectives and interests from within and
beyond African philosophy and African studies, including especially
anthropology, literature, postcolonial critique, and decolonial
scholarship. The chapters focus on: studies of women sages; sage
philosophy in relation to oral literature; an Acholi poem on 'being
human' in context; takes on aesthetics and gender in Maasai
thought; a comparative discussion of Oruka's and Gramsci's
approaches to the relevance of philosophy in society; a critical
review of method; a comparative discussion dedicated to the project
of decolonization, with a South African case study; and a
conceptual reconsideration of Oruka's understanding of sages,
presenting the 'pragmatic sage' as typical of the late phase of the
sage philosophy project.
Writing Ambition: Literary Engagements between Women in France
analyzes pairs of women writing in French. Through examining pairs
of writers, ranging from Colette and Anne de Pene to Nancy Huston
and Leila Sebbar, Katharine Ann Jensen assesses how their literary
ambitions affected their engagements with each other. Focused on
the psychological aspects of the women's relationships, the author
combines close readings of their works with attention to historical
and biographical contexts to consider how and why one or both women
in the pair express contradictory or anxious feelings about
literary ambition.
Dialogue and the New Cosmopolitanism: Conversations with Edward
Demenchonok stands in opposition to the doctrine that might makes
right and that the purpose of politics is to establish domination
over others rather than justice and the good life for all. In the
pursuit of the latter goal, the book stresses the importance of
dialogue with participants who take seriously the views and
interests of others and who seek to reach a fair solution. In this
sense, the book supports the idea of cosmopolitanism, which-by
contrast to empire-involves multi-lateral cooperation and thus the
quest for a just cosmopolis. The international contributors to this
volume, with their varied perspectives, are all committed to this
same quest. Edited by Fred Dallmayr, the chapters take the form of
conversations with Edward Demenchonok, a well-known practitioner of
international and cross-cultural philosophy. The conversations are
structured in parts that stress the philosophical, anthropological,
cultural, and ethical dimensions of global dialogue. In our
conflicted world, it is inspiring to find so many authors from
different places agreeing on a shared vision.
Contained Empowerment and the Liminal Nature of Feminisms and
Activisms examines the processes by which activist successes are
limited, outlines a theoretical framing of the liminal and temporal
limits to social justice efforts as "contained empowerment." With a
focused lens on the third wave and contemporary forms of feminism,
the author investigates feminist activity from the early 1990s
through responses and reactions to the overturning of Roe v. Wade
in 2022, and contrasts these efforts with anti-feminist, white
supremacist, and other structural normalizing efforts designed to
limit and repress women's, gendered, and reproductive rights. This
book includes analyses of celebrity activism, girl power,
transnational feminist NGOs, digital feminisms, and the feminist
mimicry applied by practitioners of neo-liberal and anti-feminism.
Victoria A. Newsome concludes that the contained nature of feminist
empowerment illustrates how activists must engage directly with
intersectional challenges and address the multiplicities of
structural oppressions in order to breach containment.
Many of Bolivia's poorest and most vulnerable citizens work as
vendors in the Cancha mega-market in the city of Cochabamba, where
they must navigate systems of informality and illegality in order
to survive. In Owners of the Sidewalk Daniel M. Goldstein examines
the ways these systems correlate in the marginal spaces of the
Latin American city. Collaborating with the Cancha's legal and
permanent stall vendors (fijos) and its illegal and itinerant
street and sidewalk vendors (ambulantes), Goldstein shows how the
state's deliberate neglect and criminalization of the Cancha's
poor-a practice common to neoliberal modern cities-makes the poor
exploitable, governable, and consigns them to an insecure
existence. Goldstein's collaborative and engaged approach to
ethnographic field research also opens up critical questions about
what ethical scholarship entails.
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