This book draws on ethnographic studies in Southeast Asia to provide new insights into human-environmental relationships and ecologies, together with a set of theoretical innovations. Contextualizing ecologies in this region as pluralizing or hegemonic, conflictive or cooperative, the case studies in these chapters bring into dialogue ontological approaches, the issue of distinct worldviews and concepts of nature on the one hand and political ecology and power relations on the other. They discuss plural ecologies in diverse settings, reaching from urban Vietnam to the Javanese coast and the dense forests of the Southeast Asian highlands. Southeast Asia is one of the most biodiverse and culturally diverse regions in the world. Thus, what occurs in this region is vitally important to the future of Earth. Documenting the plurality and dynamics of ecologies in Southeast Asia, this book provides prime examples for the potentials of alternative human-environmental relationships and sustainable development. It will be of interest to academics studying political ecology, environmental anthropology, sustainability sciences, political sciences, development studies, human geography, human ecology, Southeast Asian studies, and Asian studies.

Contents:
Introduction: International Treaties; 1. The Changing Alliances and Alignments before World War I; 2. Secret Agreements and Treaties of World War I; 3. The Peace Settlements 1919-23; 4. France, Britain, Italy and Germany 1921-33; 5. France and her Eastern Allies, 1921-39; 6. The Soviet Union and her Neighbours; 7. The Collapse of the Terrritorial Settlements of Versailles, 1931-7; 8. From Peace to World War in Europe and Asia, 1937-41; 9. The Grand Alliance, 1941-5; 10. The Wartime Conferences and the Surrender of Japan, 1943-5; 11. The Peace Treaties, 1945-51; 12. The United Nations; 13. The United States Treaty System; 14. The Soviet Treaty System; 15. The German Question; 16. The Irish Question, 1920-1999; 17. European Integration, 1947-85; 18. European Union, 1985-99; 19. Asia after 1947; 20. Independent Africa; 21 The Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean since 1945; 22. The Americas, 1960-99; 23 Détente and Arms Control, 1963-86; 24. Human Rights; 25. The Environment; 26. The Break-Up of the Soviet Empire; 27. The Disintegration of Yugoslavia; 28. New World Order, 1986-99.

In an era of changing demographics and values, this volume provides a cross-national and interdisciplinary perspective on the question of who cares for and about the elderly. The contributors reflect on research studies, experimental programmes and personal experience in Japan and the United States to explicitly compare how policies, practices and interpretations of elder care are evolving at the turn of the century.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203464478

"Surprising. Impressive. Cannibalism restores my faith in humanity." --Sy Montgomery, The New York Times Book Review For centuries scientists have written off cannibalism as a bizarre phenomenon with little biological significance. Its presence in nature was dismissed as a desperate response to starvation or other life-threatening circumstances, and few spent time studying it. A taboo subject in our culture, the behavior was portrayed mostly through horror movies or tabloids sensationalizing the crimes of real-life flesh-eaters. But the true nature of cannibalism--the role it plays in evolution as well as human history--is even more intriguing (and more normal) than the misconceptions we've come to accept as fact. In Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, zoologist Bill Schutt sets the record straight, debunking common myths and investigating our new understanding of cannibalism's role in biology, anthropology, and history in the most fascinating account yet written on this complex topic. Schutt takes readers from Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains, where he wades through ponds full of tadpoles devouring their siblings, to the Sierra Nevadas, where he joins researchers who are shedding new light on what happened to the Donner Party--the most infamous episode of cannibalism in American history. He even meets with an expert on the preparation and consumption of human placenta (and, yes, it goes well with Chianti). Bringing together the latest cutting-edge science, Schutt answers questions such as why some amphibians consume their mother's skin; why certain insects bite the heads off their partners after sex; why, up until the end of the twentieth century, Europeans regularly ate human body parts as medical curatives; and how cannibalism might be linked to the extinction of the Neanderthals. He takes us into the future as well, investigating whether, as climate change causes famine, disease, and overcrowding, we may see more outbreaks of cannibalism in many more species--including our own. Cannibalism places a perfectly natural occurrence into a vital new context and invites us to explore why it both enthralls and repels us.

Part ethnography, part memoir, and part critical reflection on the Anthropocene, this book examines the ways that islands form and inform human experiences of the everyday and the extraordinary. Utilizing carefully considered anthropological perspectives drawn from over a decade of anthropological fieldwork, the author employs islands as a complex set of lenses to examine the ways that we are intimately connected, separated, and divided from ourselves, one another, and the planet. Moving across time, place and disciplinary boundaries, this book traces a narrative route from the remote islands of Micronesia to the subarctic expanses of northern Iceland, all in service of gaining a deeper understanding of the cultural resonance of islands. This book offers the reader a type of ideological travel guide, one that exchanges restaurant reviews and hotel recommendations for pathways of reflection and new modes of seeing and being in the world. It will be of interest to scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and readers from human geography, cultural studies, sociology, philosophy and American studies.

This book considers secularism and its narrative expressions. It shows how secularism is articulated, and transmitted ubiquitously within state institutions and outside of them. Abdelmajid Hannoum does this by dissecting, in a series of essays, a variety of narrative forms, interrogating modes of their constitution and production, the dynamics of their translatability, the politics of their use, the struggle over their status of truth, and the conditions that make secular narration so central to our existence. The book ranges from a medieval narrative of the secular to a modern narrative, to anthropological secularism and religious experiences, to narratives of translation produced by what the author calls translation ideology, to historical narratives regulated by archival power and state secrecy, to narratives of violence, to narratives of recollection, as well as narratives of silence. Particular attention is paid to postcolonial French contemporary cultures and politics. Transdisciplinary approaches are deployed to not only reframe old questions in new ways but to posit new questions out of old ones. In doing so this innovative work opens up fresh discursive possibilities that cross traditional disciplines. It will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, history, and beyond.

Karl Marx is buried in London, John Keats in Rome and Leon Trotsky in Mexico. Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris is today known for the graves of Jim Morrison, Victor Hugo and Oscar Wilde, but when it opened in the early 19th century the owners felt that they needed some star names to make it a desired burial site - and so they had Moliere's body transferred there. Arranged thematically into 75 entries, Graves of the Great and Famous tours the world exploring the resting places of leading artists, thinkers, scientists, sportspeople, revolutionaries, politicians and pioneers. Some, such as communist leaders Ho Chi Minh and Vladimir Lenin, are interred in great mausoleums, where they are visited by millions each year; others are buried in little-known country graveyards. From lives cut short through assassinations - Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln - to those who suffered terrible accidents (Princess Diana), from mobsters such as Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel and John Gotti to Napoleon and his mistress Marie Walewska, from Nelson Mandela to Eva Peron, Graceland to Highgate Cemetery, the book provides a guide to some of the most famous and unusual graves of the great and the good. Featuring 150 photographs of graves, cemeteries, graveyards and mausoleums, Graves of the Great and Famous is a compact guide to the final resting place of the famous - and infamous.

From the Preface When I first went to Africa in the 1960s, I was bowled over by African art. What really got under my skin were the bangles, principally the bronze bangles from West and Central Africa. They were tactile, weighty and full of design and form. Later, when I lived in Ghana and Togo, I built up my own collection of bangles. In recent years this collection was seen by past and present curators of the British Museum and I was encouraged to work up the expertise to comment on and possibly help classify the Museum's collection of African bangles. They recognised that they have thousands of these bangles lying mostly untouched and unloved because they could not be given a story, a context, a meaning. They were so enthusiastic and helpful that I secured introductions to many major museums around the world, to study their substantial and interesting collections. Museums in Europe and on the East and West Coasts of the United States gave me access to the rich material they had accumulated. I had the rare privilege of spending days in their storerooms in the course of which I could see and compare many thousands of bangles. The curators who accompanied me in the inspection of their bangles were aware that these beautiful artefacts had lain undisturbed because they could not be explained or set in a wider context. The bangles were attractive but seldom came with a meaningful provenance. To their great credit, these highly-qualified specialists would listen enthusiastically as my wife and I noted bangles which we had encountered elsewhere. Seeing all these bangles and thus, over time, gradually building up a picture of their types, uses and probable areas of origin, I began to realise that I was looking at a decorative culture which was self-generated, wholly unlike the decorative cultures of the rest of the world. It was unique. Astonishingly, it was to be found in almost every inhabited part of the vast semi-continental area of sub-Saharan Africa. Gold and silver were of little consequence. Copper was their "precious metal". The style - instantly recognisable - was chunky, solid, weighty. Rarity was not a concern; the Eurasians' "precious stones" were unknown. Rings had no great meaning. It was bangles that were the standard means of conveying status, attraction and readiness for marriage. Most importantly, as I read the stories of explorers and the later accounts of African life in the 19th and 20th centuries while I worked through the museums' storerooms, it became clear to me, that for centuries, the bangle had been the one and only defining material culture shared by all Africans south of the Sahara. At last, an overall picture was emerging and there was now a chance of describing it before it was too late. The bangle culture that had unified Africans, through which and in which they had lived much of their lives, was fading fast. In their heartland of West and Central Africa the tactile bronze bangles that everyone wore in the 19th century - and which I saw occasionally in northern Ghana in the 1980s - were now encountered more in museums than on the bodies of inhabitants of those regions. This book will follow the art-historical practice of using "bronze" to describe all forms of copper alloys, including brass, when the composition is not directly relevant and retain "copper" for occasions when the pure metal is being discussed. "Bangle" will be used as the generic term for all forms of jewellery applied to the human body. This bangle culture is still an unselfconscious part of daily life in a few isolated African tribes and used quite naturally to send messages. But, in a few decades, this bangle culture will survive only in less traditional forms and only in limited areas in East and Southern Africa. At its height, it was an admirable system of great importance to social intercourse, replete with significance, great beauty and craftsmanship. It deserves to be recorded and I will try to do this in this book. I will set out why this bangle culture was so different from anything else in the world; the skill with which the bangles were made; and how the bangle culture spread throughout all Africa south of the Sahara; I will have to admit that the industrial world and its products have led to the Eurasian hierarchy of gold and silver overtaking bronze in Africa and, indeed, eliminating it as a "precious metal". But I will end on a note of hope, that there are indications that the sense of solidity of form and the respect for copper that was evident in classical African bangles may still live on among African Americans.

This book provides an inventory of modes of inquiry for ethnographic research and presents fieldwork as an act of relational invention. It advances contemporary debates in ethnography by arguing that the empirical practice of anthropology is and has always been an inventive activity. Bringing together contributions from scholars across the world, the volume offers an expansive vision of the resourcefulness that anthropologists unfold in their empirical investigations by compiling inventive social and material techniques, or field devices, for anthropological inquiry. The chapters seek to inspire both novel and experienced practitioners of ethnography to venture into the many possibilities of fieldwork, to demonstrate the essential creative and inventive practices neglected in traditional accounts of ethnography, and to invite anthropologists to confidently engage in inventive fieldwork practices.

In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of Southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness, and oil refinery smoke. His informants' stories cover a wide swath of experiences, from histories of LGBTQ+ life and the local petrochemical industries to religiosity among health food store employees and the suffering of cancer patients living in the Refinery Belt. Russo frames their hard-luck stories as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative that render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism. He shows that in this severe world, questions of politics and history are not cut and dry, and its denizens are not simply backward victims of circumstances. Russo demonstrates that by challenging classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant, and uneducated, his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Siberian World provides a window onto the expansive and diverse world of Siberian society, offering valuable insights into how local populations view their environments, adapt to change, promote traditions, and maintain infrastructure. Siberian society comprises more than 30 Indigenous groups, old Russian settlers, and more recent newcomers and their descendants from all over the former Soviet Union and Russian Federation. The chapters examine a variety of interconnected themes, including language revitalization, legal pluralism, ecology, trade, religion, climate change, and co-creation of practices and identities with state programs and policies. The book's ethnographically-rich contributions highlight Indigenous voices, important theoretical concepts, and practices. The material connects with wider discussions of perception of the environment, climate change, cultural and linguistic change, urbanization, Indigenous rights, Arctic politics, globalization, and sustainability/resilience. The Siberian World will be of interest to scholars from many disciplines, including, Indigenous studies, anthropology, archaeology, geography, environmental history, political science, and sociology.

This book looks at various syncretic traditions in India, such as Bhakti, Nath Yogi, Sufi, Imam Shahi, Ismailis, Khojas, and others, and presents an elaborate picture of a redefined cultural space through them. It also investigates different syncretisms—Hindu–Muslim, Hindu– Muslim–Christian and Aboriginal-Ethnic—to understand diverse aspects of hybridity within the Indian nation space. It discusses how Indian nationalism was composed of different opinions from its inception, reflecting its rich diversity and pluralistic traditions. The book traces the emergence of multiple contours of Indian nationalism through the historical trajectory of religious diversity, lingering effects of colonialism, and experimentation with secularism. This volume caters to scholars and students interested in cultural studies, religion studies, pilgrimage studies, history, social anthropology, historical sociology, historical geography, religion, and art history. It will also be of interest to political theorists and general readers.

The publication of Fredrik Barth's Ethnic Groups and Boundaries marked a milestone in the conceptualization of ethnicity and ethnic groups and opened a new field of enquiry in the social scientific study of ethnicity. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries Today: A Legacy of Fifty Years demonstrates the enduring significance of the work, identifying its shortcomings and showcasing the state of the art today, fifty years after the publication of the groundbreaking original. Bringing together a team of leading contributors, all of whom have been inspired by Barth's theory and have made significant contributions of their own to the theorisation and research of ethnicity, this volume assesses the theoretical approach presented in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, both in the context of its time and with the hindsight of the developments in the social sciences since then. It emphasizes the legacy of the original text and determines its significance, whilst identifying and elaborating on the main lines of the subsequent developments of the concept of ethnicity that were influenced by Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, but that have since developed and superseded the original. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in the concept and study of ethnicity.

Encounters involving different cultures and languages are increasingly the norm in the era of globalization. While considerable attention has been paid to how languages and cultures transform in the era of globalization, their characteristic features prior to transformation are frequently taken for granted. This pioneering book argues that globalization offers an unprecedented opportunity to revisit fundamental assumptions about what distinguishes languages and cultures from each other in the first place. It takes the case of global Korea, showing how the notion of 'culture' is both represented but also reinvented in public space, with examples from numerous sites across Korea and Koreatowns around the world. It is not merely about locating spaces where translingualism happens but also about exploring the various ways in which linguistic and cultural difference come to be located via translingualism. It will appeal to anyone interested in the globalization of language and culture.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In recent years, social scientists have turned their critical lens on the historical roots and contours of their disciplines, including their politics and practices, epistemologies and methods, institutionalization and professionalization, national development and colonial expansion, globalization and local contestations, and their public presence and role in society. The Social Sciences in the Looking Glass offers current social scientific perspectives on this reflexive moment. Examining sociology, anthropology, philosophy, political science, legal theory, and religious studies, the volume's contributors outline the present transformations of the social sciences, explore their connections with critical humanities, analyze the challenges of alternate paradigms, and interrogate recent endeavors to move beyond the human. Throughout, the authors, who belong to half a dozen disciplines, trace how the social sciences are thoroughly entangled in the social facts they analyze, and are key to helping us understand the conditions of our world. Contributors. Chitralekha, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Didier Fassin, Johan Heilbron, Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, Kristoffer Kropp, Nicolas Langlitz, John Lardas Modern, Alvaro Morcillo Laiz, Amin Perez, Carel Smith, George Steinmetz, Peter D. Thomas, Bregje van Eekelen, Agata Zysiak

This book theorizes the role of optimism in anthropological thinking, research, writing, and practice. It sets out to explore optimism's origins and implications, its conceptual and practical value, and its capacity to contribute to contemporary anthropological aims. In an era of extensive ecological disruption and social distress, this volume contemplates how an optimistic anthropology can energize the discipline while also contributing to bettering the lives, communities, and environments of those we study. It brings together scholars diverse in background, career stage, and theoretical approach in a collective attempt to comprehend the myriad intersections of anthropology and optimism. The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have recently underscored the larger, longer-term catastrophes of climate change, ecosystemic collapse, social injustice, and antipathy towards scientific knowledge and those who produce it. In this context, exceedingly few anthropologists feel comfortable observing and documenting passively while their research communities face unrelenting waves of (un)natural disasters. We need to act. But we also need to hope. Discontent with the state of the world and cultural anthropology's turn to increasingly positive, future-oriented, and engaged work have converged to unleash a courageously optimistic anthropology. This book is a timely springboard for this impactful and emergent approach.

This book reflects on the methodological challenges and possibilities encountered when researching practices that have been historically defined and classified as 'craft.' It fosters an understanding of how methodology, across disciplines, contributes to analytical frameworks within which the subject-matter of craft is defined and constructed. The contributions are written by scholars whose work focuses on different craft practices across geographies. Each chapter contains detailed case study material along with theoretical analysis of the research challenges confronted. They provide valuable insight into how methodologies emerge in response to particular research conditions and contexts, addressing issues of decolonization, representation, institutionalization, and power. Informed by anthropology, art history and design, this volume facilitates interdisciplinary discussion and touches on some of the most critical issues related to craft research today.

This book explores the philanthropy of Brazilian elites during a key period in recent Brazilian history, from Workers Party president Lula's last term in office through to the election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. Against this backdrop of political upheaval, the book asks what philanthropy can reveal about the role of corporate and wealth elites in upholding the structures of socioeconomic inequality that continue to define Brazilian society. The book argues that around the world the private sector's growing engagement in international development has led to the emergence of a global philanthropic project centred on practices of "philanthrocapitalism" and "social finance," which ultimately seeks to legitimise global capitalism and the elite interests it serves. Drawing on an in-depth and wide-ranging ethnographic study among philanthropists and their advisors in over 30 Brazilian foundations and intermediary organisations, the book combines a structural critique of the capitalist ideologies underlying philanthropic practice with a robust exploration into the ways in which wealthy Brazilians appropriate philanthropy directly to legitimise elite reproduction and the accumulation of wealth. Researchers across Latin American studies, development studies and the anthropology of development will find this book a timely contribution to the under-researched areas of elite studies and the study of philanthropy.

A highly accessible text grounded in social theory and in new the recent politics of transition. Explains the history of Soviet art and how post-Soviet art has been shaped artistically and socially. Highlights the challenges globalization poses for the broader recognition of art in Russia The study of transitional politics makes for a poignant classroom supplement in courses on art and society, social aspects of art, the politics of art, Russian Studies, and many other courses.

"Magnificent [and] wondrous." The Spectator "Rich and illuminating." Literary Review "Phenomenally accurate." History Today "Stunning." The Morning Star "Sweeping." The New European "A wonderful book." Current World Archaeology "In a class of its own." The Caspian Post A landscape of high mountains and narrow valleys stretching from the Black to the Caspian Seas, the Caucasus region has been home to human populations for nearly 2 million years. In this richly illustrated 2-volume series, historian and explorer Christoph Baumer tells the story of the region's history through to the present day. It is a story of encounters between many different peoples, from Scythians, Turkic and Mongol peoples of the East to Greeks and Romans from the West, from Indo-European tribes from the West as well as the East, and to Arabs and Iranians from the South. It is a story of rival claims by Empires and nations and of how the region has become home to more than 50 languages that can be heard within its borders to this very day. This first volume charts the period from the emergence of the earliest human populations in the region - the first known human populations outside Africa - to the Seljuk conquests of 1050CE. Along the way the book charts the development of Neolithic, Iron and Bronze Age cultures, the first recognizable Caucasian state and the arrival of a succession of the great transnational Empires, from the Greeks, the Romans and the Armenian to competing Christian and Muslim conquerors. The History of the Caucasus: Volume 1 also includes more than 200 full colour images and maps bringing the changing cultures of these lands vividly to life.

Roots of Power tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, St. Vincent, and Tanzania, dracaena and cordyline plants are simultaneously property rights institutions, markers of social organization, and expressions of life-force and vitality. In addition to their localized roles in forming landscapes and societies, these plants mark multiple boundaries and demonstrate deep historical connections across much of the planet's tropics. These plants' deep roots in society and culture have made them the routes through which postcolonial agrarian societies have negotiated both social and cultural continuity and change. This book is a multi-sited ethnographic political ecology of ethnobotanical institutions. It uses five parallel case studies to investigate the central phenomenon of "boundary plants" and establish the linkages among the case studies via both ancient and relatively recent demographic transformations such as the Bantu expansion across tropical Africa, the Austronesian expansion into the Pacific, and the colonial system of plantation slavery in the Black Atlantic. Each case study is a social-ecological system with distinctive characteristics stemming from the ways that power is organized by kinship and gender, social ranking, or racialized capitalism. This book contributes to the literature on property rights institutions and land management by arguing that tropical boundary plants' social entanglements and cultural legitimacy make them effective foundations for development policy. Formal recognition of these institutions could reduce contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity between resource managers and states in postcolonial societies and contribute to sustainable livelihoods and landscapes. This book will appeal to scholars and students of environmental anthropology, political ecology, ethnobotany, landscape studies, colonial history, and development studies, and readers will benefit from its demonstration of the comparative method.