Voluntary associations have been ubiquitous in our society for hundreds of years. Efforts to develop a classification scheme have often overlooked one important segment: membership-based organizations (MBOs). MBOs are created voluntarily by a group of like-minded individuals who seek to advance their interests by organizing to promote and protect a specific domain. A number have earned the reputation for operating as "special interests." To accept that notion would not be telling the full story and would overlook the many contributions they have made. A central thesis of Special Interest Society: How Membership-based Organizations Shape America is that no modern democratic society can function without them. With a focus on how they emerge and the steps they take to advance their mutual interests, the book also provides a sober account of how MBOs can be slow to accept important and necessary changes. It also reveals the less flattering role they have played in denying access or limiting acceptance to eligible individuals based on their race, gender, ethnicity, and more. In Special Interest Society, James R. Hudson analyzes over 400 published histories of MBOs to report on their emergence, growth, and development. Many provide essential services within our society of which we are unaware that we have come to rely upon. Employing several sociological theories, he explains why their actions have enabled these organizations to thrive in a democratic society as well as affect significant social change. Throughout, he demonstrates how open and democratic societies provide a fertile ground for their continued emergence. He explains why their numbers have increased over the last two hundred years as occupations and personal interests have become more specialized and complex. Written for students and scholars working in sociology, public policy, business, community development, and nonprofit management, as well as association professionals and their staff, this book provides an unparalleled insight into the history, purpose, and challenges of associations in America.

We habitually categorize the world in binary logics of 'animate' and 'inanimate', 'natural' and 'supernatural', 'self' and 'other', 'authentic' and 'inauthentic'. The Inbetweenness of Things rejects such Western classificatory traditions - which tend to categorize objects using bounded notions of period, place and purpose - and argues instead for a paradigm where objects are not one thing or another but a multiplicity of things at once. Adopting an 'object-centred' approach, with contributions from material culture specialists across various disciplines, the book showcases a series of objects that defy neat classification. In the process, it explores how 'things' mediate and travel between conceptual worlds in diverse cultural, geographic and temporal contexts, and how they embody this mediation and movement in their form. With an impressive range of international authors, each essay grounds explorations of cutting-edge theory in concrete case studies. An innovative, thought-provoking read for students and researchers in anthropology, archaeology, museum studies and art history which will transform the way readers think about objects.

This book highlights the expansion of the influential Pentecostal Hillsong Church global megachurch network from Australia across global cities. Ethnographic research in Amsterdam and New York City shows that global cities harbor nodes in transnational religious networks in which media play a crucial role. By taking a lived religion approach, media is regarded as integral part of everyday practices of interaction, expression and consumption of religion. Key question raised is how processes of mediatization shape, alter and challenge this thriving cosmopolitan expression of Pentecostalism. Current debates in the study of religion are addressed: religious belonging and community in global cities; the interrelation between media technology, religious practices and beliefs; religion, media and social engagement in global cities; media and emerging modes of religious leadership and authority. In this empirical study, pressing societal issues like institutional responses to sexual abuse of children, views on gender roles, misogyny and mediated constructions of femininity are discussed.

Nearly one hundred thousand newly enfranchised blacks voted against race-baiting Eugene Talmadge in Georgia's 1946 Democratic primary. His opponent won the popular vote by a majority of sixteen thousand. Talmadge was elected anyway, thanks to the malapportioning county unit system, but died before he could be inaugurated, whereupon the General Assembly chose his son Herman to take his place. For the next sixty-three days, Georgia waited in shock for the state supreme court to decide whether Herman or the lieutenant governor-elect would be seated. What had happened to so suddenly reverse four years of progressive reform under retiring governor Ellis Arnall? To find out, Calvin Kytle and James A. Mackay sat through the tumultuous 1947 assembly, then toured Georgia's 159 counties asking politicians, public officials, editors, businessmen, farmers, factory workers, civic leaders, lobbyists, academicians, and preachers the question "Who runs Georgia?" Among those interviewed were editor Ralph McGill, novelist Lillian Smith, defeated gubernatorial candidate James V. Carmichael, powerbroker Roy Harris, pollwatcher Ira Butt, and more than a hundred others--men and women, black and white, heroes and rogues--of all stripes and stations. The result, as Dan T. Carter says in his foreword, captures "the substance and texture of political life in the American South" during an era that historians have heretofore neglected--those years of tension between the end of the New Deal and the explosive start of the civil rights movement. What's more, Who Runs Georgia? has much to tell us about campaign finance and the political influence of Big Money, as relevant for the nation today as it was then for the state.

In Unmanageable Care, anthropologist Jessica M. Mulligan goes to work at an HMO and records what it's really like to manage care. Set at a health insurance company dubbed Acme, this book chronicles how the privatization of the health care system in Puerto Rico transformed the experience of accessing and providing care on the island. Through interviews and participant observation, the book explores the everyday contexts in which market reforms were enacted. It follows privatization into the compliance department of a managed care organization, through the visits of federal auditors to a health plan, and into the homes of health plan members who recount their experiences navigating the new managed care system. In the 1990s and early 2000s, policymakers in Puerto Rico sold off most of the island's public health facilities and enrolled the poor, elderly and disabled into for-profit managed care plans. These reforms were supposed to promote efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and high quality care. Despite the optimistic promises of market-based reforms, the system became more expensive, not more efficient; patients rarely behaved as the expected health-maximizing information processing consumers; and care became more chaotic and difficult to access. Citizens continued to look to the state to provide health services for the poor, disabled, and elderly. This book argues that pro-market reforms failed to deliver on many of their promises.The health care system in Puerto Rico was dramatically transformed, just not according to plan.

Society is continually moving towards global interaction, and nations often contain citizens of numerous cultures and backgrounds. Bi-culturalism incorporates a higher degree of social inclusion in an effort to bring about social justice and change, and it may prove to be an alternative to the existing dogma of mainstream Europe-based hegemonic bodies of knowledge. The Handbook of Research on Indigenous Knowledge and Bi-Culturalism in a Global Context is a collection of innovative studies on the nature of indigenous bodies' knowledge that incorporates the sacred or spiritual influence across various countries following World War II, while exploring the difficulties faced as society immerses itself in bi-culturalism. While highlighting topics including bi-cultural teaching, Africology, and education empowerment, this book is ideally designed for academicians, urban planners, sociologists, anthropologists, researchers, and professionals seeking current research on validating the growth of indigenous thinking and ideas.

The Egungun society is one of the least-studied and written-about aspects of African diasporic spiritual traditions. It is the society of the ancestors, the society of the dead. Its primary function is to facilitate all aspects of ancestor veneration. Though it is fundamental to Yoruba culture and the Ifa?u/Oriss?ua tradition of the Yoruba, it did not survive intact in Cuba or the US during the forced migration of the Yoruba in the Middle Passage. Taking hold only in Brazil, the Egungun cult has thrived since the early 1800s on the small island of Itaparica, across the Bay of Saints from Salvador, Bahia. Existing almost exclusively on this tiny island until the 1970s (migrating to Rio de Janeiro and, eventually, Recife), this ancient cult was preserved by a handful of families and flourished in a strict, orthodox manner. Brian Willson spent ten years in close contact with this lineage at the Candomble temple Xango Ca Te Espero in Rio de Janeiro and was eventually initiated as a priest of Egungun. Representing the culmination of his personal involvement, interviews, research, and numerous visits to Brazil, this book relates the story of Egungun from an insider's view. Very little has been written about the cult of Egungun, and almost exclusively what is written in English is based on research conducted in Africa and falls into the category of descriptive and historical observations. Part personal journal, part metaphysical mystery, part scholarly work, part field research, and part reportage, In Search of Ancient Kings illuminates the nature of Egungun as it is practiced in Brazil.

This edited book documents practices of learning-oriented language assessment through practitioner research and research syntheses. Learning-oriented language assessment refers to language assessment strategies that capitalise on learner differences and their relationships with the learning environments. In other words, learners are placed at the centre of the assessment process and its outcomes. The book features 17 chapters on learning-oriented language assessment practices in China, Brazil, Turkey, Norway, UK, Canada, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Spain. Chapters include teachers' reflections and practical suggestions. This book will appeal to researchers, teacher educators, and language teachers who are interested in advancing research and practice of learning-oriented language assessment.

The spread of the Internet is remaking marriage markets, altering the process of courtship and the geographic trajectory of intimacy in the 21st century. For some Latin American women and U.S. men, the advent of the cybermarriage industry offers new opportunities for re-making themselves and their futures, overthrowing the common narrative of trafficking and exploitation. In this engaging, stimulating virtual ethnography, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer follows couples' romantic interludes at "Vacation Romance Tours," in chat rooms, and interviews married couples in the United States in order to understand the commercialization of intimacy. While attending to the interplay between the everyday and the virtual, Love and Empire contextualizes personal desires within the changing global economic and political shifts across the Americas. By examining current immigration policies and the use of Mexican and Colombian women as erotic icons of the nation in the global marketplace, she forges new relations between intimate imaginaries and state policy in the making of new markets, finding that women's erotic self-fashioning is the form through which women become ideal citizens, of both their home countries and in the United States. Through these little-explored, highly mediated romantic exchanges, Love and Empire unveils a fresh perspective on the continually evolving relationship between the U.S. and Latin America.

Embodying Ecological Heritage in a Maya Community: Health, Happiness, and Identity provides an ethnographic account of life in a rural farming village in southern Belize, focusing on the connections between traditional ecological practices and the health and wellness of the Maya community living there. It discusses how complex histories, ecologies, and development practices are negotiated by individuals of all ages, and the community at large, detailing how they interact with their changing environments. The study has wide applicability for indigenous communities fighting for rights to manage their lands across the globe, as well as for considering how health is connected to heritage practices in communities worldwide.

This is a collection of key essays about the Akan Peoples, their history and culture. The Akans are an ethnic group in West Africa, predominately Ghana and Togo, of roughly 25 million people. From the twelfth century on, Akans created numerous states based largely on gold mining and trading of cash crops. This brought wealth to numerous Akan states, such as Akwamu, which stretched all the way to modern Benin, and ultimately led to the rise of the best known Akan empire, the Empire of Ashanti. Throughout history, Akans were a highly educated group; notable Akan people in modern times include Kwame Nkrumah and Kofi Annan. This volume features a new array of primary sources that provide fresh and nuanced perspectives. This collection is the first of its kind.

Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India: Tempest in Teapot is a unique book that brings together a holistic theoretical approach on the subject of witchcraft accusations, specifically those taking place inside a tea workers' community in India. Using a combination of in-depth and extensive qualitative methods, and drawing on sociological, anthropological, and historical perspectives, Chaudhuri explores how adivasi (tribal) migrant workers use witchcraft accusations to deal with worker-management conflict. Chaudhuri argues that witchcraft accusations can be interpreted as a periodic reaction of the adivasi worker community against their oppression by the plantation management. The typical avenues of social protest are often unavailable to marginalized workers due to lack of organizational and political representation and resources. As a result, the dain (witch) becomes a scapegoat for the malice of the plantation economy. Within this discourse, witch hunts can be seen not as exotic and primitive rituals of a backward community, but rather as a powerful protest by a community against its oppressors. The book attempts to understand the complex network of relationships--ties of friendship, family, politics, and gender--that provide the necessary legitimacy for the witch hunt to take place. In most cases examined here, seemingly petty conflicts within the villagers often escalate to a hunt. At the height of the conflict, the exploitative relationship between the plantation management and the adivasi migrant workers often gets hidden. The book demonstrates how witchcraft accusations should be interpreted within this backdrop of labor-planters relationship, characterized by rigidity of power, patronage, and social distance. Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India should appeal to criminologists, sociologists, anthropologists, labor historians, gender scholars, labor migration scholars, witch hunt and witchcraft accusation global scholars, adivasi scholars, South Asian scholars, and anyone interested in India s tribes, witchcraft accusations, gender in a global world, labor conflict, and Indian tea plantations."

The world's "great" religions depend on traditions of serious scholarship, dedicated to preserving their key texts but also to understanding them and, therefore, to debating what understanding itself is and how best to do it. They also have important public missions of many kinds, and their ideas and organizations influence many other important institutions, including government, law, education, and kinship. The Anthropology of Western Religions: Ideas, Organizations, and Constituencies is a comparative survey of the world's major religious traditions as professional enterprises and, often, as social movements. Documenting the principle ideas behind Western religious traditions from an anthropological perspective, Murray J. Leaf demonstrates how these ideas have been used in building internal organizations that mobilize or fail to mobilize external support.

This book uses visual psychological anthropology to explore trauma, gendered violence, and stigma through a discussion of three ethnographic films set in Indonesia: 40 Years of Silence (Lemelson 2009), Bitter Honey (Lemelson 2015), and Standing on the Edge of a Thorn (Lemelson 2012). This exploration "widens the frame" in two senses. First, it offers an integrative analysis that connects the discrete topics and theoretical concerns of each film to crosscutting themes in Indonesian history, society, and culture. Additionally, it sheds light on all that falls outside the literal frame of the screen, including the films' origins; psychocultural and interpersonal dynamics and constraints of deep, ongoing collaborations in the field; narrative and emotional orientations toward editing; participants' relationship to their screened image; the life of the films after release; and the ethics of each stage of filmmaking. In doing so, the authors widen the frame for psychological anthropology as well, advocating for film as a crucial point of engagement for academic audiences and for translational purposes. Rich with critical insights and reflections on ethnographic filmmaking, this book will appeal to both scholars and students of visual anthropology, psychological anthropology, and ethnographic methods. It also serves as an engrossing companion to three contemporary ethnographic films.