Conviviality has lately become a catchword not only in academia but also among political activists. This open access book discusses conviviality in relation to the adjoining concepts cosmopolitanism and creolisation. The urgency of today's global predicament is not only an argument for the revival of all three concepts, but also a reason to bring them into dialogue. Ivan Illich envisioned a post-industrial convivial society of 'autonomous individuals and primary groups' (Illich 1973), which resembles present-day manifestations of 'convivialism'. Paul Gilroy refashioned conviviality as a substitute for cosmopolitanism, denoting an ability to be 'at ease' in contexts of diversity (Gilroy 2004). Rather than replacing one concept with the other, the fourteen contributors to this book seek to explore the interconnections - commonalities and differences - between them, suggesting that creolisation is a necessary complement to the already-intertwined concepts of conviviality and cosmopolitanism. Although this volume takes northern Europe as its focus, the contributors take care to put each situation in historical and global contexts in the interests of moving beyond the binary thinking that prevails in terms of methodologies, analytical concepts, and political implementations.

Russell W. Ramsey, Ph.D., D. Min., is the nation's longest standing scholar who writes about the Latin American military and security forces. He offers here a compilation of his best published work on this admittedly controversial topic, dating from 1963 to 2002."

The Juan Fernandez Archipelago is located in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile at 33 Degrees S latitude. Robinson Crusoe Island is 667 km from the continent and approximately four million years old; Alejandro Selkirk Island is an additional 181 km west and only one million years old. The natural impacts of subsidence and erosion have shaped the landscapes of these islands, resulting in progressive changes to their subtropical vegetation. The older island has undergone more substantial changes, due to both natural causes and human impacts. After the discovery of Robinson Crusoe Island in 1574, people began cutting down forests for lumber to construct boats and homes, for firewood, and to make room for pastures. Domesticated plants and animals were introduced, some of which have since become feral or invasive, causing damage to the local vegetation. The wealth of historical records on these activities provides a detailed chronicle of how human beings use their environment for survival in a new ecosystem. This book offers an excellent case study on the impacts that people can have on the resources of an oceanic island.

At one time there were almost as many different versions of the Quechan creation story as there were Quechan families. Now few people remember them. This volume, presented in the Quechan language with facing-column translation, provides three views of the origins of the Quechan people. One synthesizes narrator George Bryant's childhood memories and later research. The second is based upon J. P. Harrington's A Yuma Account of Origins (1908). The third provides a modern view of the origins of the Quechan, beginning with the migration from Asia to the New World and ending with the settlement of the Yuman tribes at their present locations.

This book tries to answer the question how different communities in such an arid area as the Iranian central plateau could have shared their limited water resources in a perfect harmony and peace over the course of history. They invented some indigenous technologies as well as cooperative socio-economic systems in order to better adapt themselves to their harsh environment where the scarce water resources had to be rationed among the different communities as sustainably as possible. Those stories hold some lessons for us on how to adjust our needs to our geographical possibilities while living side by side with other people. This work gives insight into the indigenous adaptation strategies through the territorial water cooperation, and describes how water can appear as a ground for cooperation. It explains the water supply systems and social aspects of water in central Iran. Topics include the territorial water cooperation, qanat's, the traditional water management and sustainability, the socio-economic context, the sustainable management of shared aquifers system and more.

Race, religion, language, culture, and national character are full of contradictions. Brazil, the largest country in South America, embodies so much paradox that it defies neat description. This book will help students and general readers dispel stereotypes of Brazil and begin to understand what country's "bigness" means in terms of its land, people, history, society, and cultural expressions. This is the only authoritative yet accessible volume on Brazil that surveys a wide range of important topics, from geography, to social customs, art, architecture, and more. Highlights include discussions of the fluid definitions of race, rituals of candomble, the importance of extended family networks, beach culture, and soccer madness. A chronology and glossary supplement the text.

This edited volume presents thirteen contributions that reflect upon the practical, ethical, theoretical and methodological challenges that researchers face when conducting fieldwork in settings that are characterized with deteriorating security situations, increasing state control and conflicting inter-ethnic relations. More precisely, they shed light to the intricacies of conducting fieldwork on highly politicized and sensitive topics in the region of Kurdistan in Iraq, Syria and Turkey as well as among Kurdish diaspora members in Europe. This volume is multidisciplinary in its focus and approach. It includes contributions from scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, ranging from sociology and political science to social psychology and anthropology. The complexity of security situations, and the atmospheres of distrust and suspicion have led the contributors to be creative and to adapt their research methods in ways that at times transcend disciplinary boundaries and conventions. Relatedly, the contributions also open the often-considered Pandora's box of discussing the failures in what is often a "messy" research field, and how to adopt one's methods to rapidly changing political circumstances. This necessitates greater reflexivity in existing power relations of the surrounding context and how those affect not only the interaction situations between the researcher and the participants, but also raise questions for the overall research process, concerning namely social justice, representation and knowledge production. The contributions unravel this by unpacking positionalities beyond ethnicities, discussing how gendered and other positionalities are constructed in fieldwork interactions and by illustrating how the surrounding structures of power and dominance are present in every-day fieldwork. What differentiates this book from the existing literature is that it is the first academic endeavor that solely focuses on methodological reflections aimed to the field of Kurdish Studies. It offers a comprehensive and multidisciplinary account of scholars' fieldwork experiences in the Kurdish regions and as such, it is also of value to scholars conducting or about to conduct fieldwork in conflict regions elsewhere.

This book presents oral histories, collective dialogues, and analyses of rural and indigenous livelihoods facing global socio-environmental regime change in Latin America (LA). Since the late twentieth century, rural and indigenous producers in LA, including agriculturists, coffee-growers, as well as small-scale farmers/fishers, and others, have had to resist, cope with, or adapt to a range of neoliberal socio-environmental regimes that impact their territories and associated resources, including water, production systems and ultimately their cultural traditions. In response, rural producers are using local visions and innovation niches to decide what, when, and how to resist, cope with uncertainty, and still be successful in using their customary laws to retain their land rights and livelihoods. This book presents a range of ethnically diverse case studies from LA, which addresses socio-environmental, educational, and law regimes' effects using transdisciplinary research approaches in rural, traditional and indigenous production systems. Based on both, the results and insights gained into how producers are resisting and adapting to these regimes, as well as decades of research carried out in LA rural territories by the participating authors, the book puts forward a baseline for devising new public policies that are better suited to the real challenges of livelihoods, poverty, and environmental degradation in LA. These recommendations are rooted in post-development thinking; they promote territorial public policy with social inclusion and a human's rights approach. The book draws on over 20 years of research carried out by LA's academics and their undergraduate and graduate students who have addressed collaborative work, participatory research, and transdisciplinary approaches with rural commons and communities in LA. It features 19 case studies, with contributions from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, and Mexico.

Kazakhstan is one of the best-known success stories of Central Asia, perhaps even of the entire Eurasian space. It boasts a fast growing economy-at least until the 2014 crisis-a strategic location between Russia, China, and the rest of Central Asia, and a regime with far-reaching branding strategies. But the country also faces weak institutionalization, patronage, authoritarianism, and regional gaps in socioeconomic standards that challenge the stability and prosperity narrative advanced by the aging President Nursultan Nazarbayev. This policy-oriented analysis does not tell us a lot about the Kazakhstani society itself and its transformations. This edited volume returns Kazakhstan to the scholarly spotlight, offering new, multidisciplinary insights into the country's recent evolution, drawing from political science, anthropology, and sociology. It looks at the regime's sophisticated legitimacy mechanisms and ongoing quest for popular support. It analyzes the country's fast changing national identity and the delicate balance between the Kazakh majority and the Russian-speaking minorities. It explores how the society negotiates deep social transformations and generates new hybrid, local and global, cultural references.

Working at the intersections of cultural anthropology, human geography, and material culture, Tina Harris explores the social and economic transformations taking place along one trade route that winds its way across China, Nepal, Tibet, and India.
How might we make connections between seemingly mundane daily life and more abstract levels of global change? Geographical Diversions focuses on two generations of traders who exchange goods such as sheep wool, pang gdan aprons, and more recently, household appliances. Exploring how traders "make places," Harris examines the creation of geographies of trade that work against state ideas of what trade routes should look like. She argues that the tensions between the apparent fixity of national boundaries and the mobility of local individuals around such restrictions are precisely how routes and histories of trade are produced.
The economic rise of China and India has received attention from the international media, but the effects of major new infrastructure at the intersecting borderlands of these nationstates--in places like Tibet, northern India, and Nepal--have rarely been covered. "Geographical Diversions" challenges globalization theories based on bounded conceptions of nation-states and offers a smaller-scale perspective that differs from many theories of macroscale economic change.

In this book Tatiana Zachar Podolinska explores how post-modern Marian devotion represents both the continuation and restoration of tradition in the modern world. Podolinska illuminates how Mary as a Great Enchantress has colonised the modern world and survived mandatory atheism in communist countries. The resilience of Marian devotion in the face of the secularising forces of modernity is due to how fluidly it mixes pre-modern and ultra-modern elements of beliefs and practices with the grassroot current of post-modern Christianity. At the same time, Podolinska elucidates how Mary has become the voice of peripheral ethnic groups and nations. This book specifically explains the devotion of the post-modern Mary among the Roma in Slovakia and explores how this community copes with marginalisation, creating islands of marginal centrality. By approaching the ethnicised and enculturated forms of the Virgin Mary (i.e. Chocolate Marys), the book illuminates her potential for helping the Slovak Roma on their own path from the periphery to the center.

Exploring a hitherto unexamined aspect of San cosmology, Mathias Guenther's two volumes on human-animal relations in San cosmology link "new Animism" with Khoisan Studies, providing valuable insights for Khoisan Studies and San culture, but also for anthropological theory, relational ontology, folklorists, historians, literary critics and art historians. In Volume I, therianthropes and transformations, two manifestations of ontological mutability that are conceptually and phenomenologically linked, are contextualized in broader San myth. Guenther explores the pervasiveness of human-animal hybridity and transformation in San expressive culture (myth, stories and storytelling, ludic dancing and art, ancestral rock art and contemporary easel art), ritual (trance dance curing, female and male rites of passage) and hunting. Transformation is shown to be experienced by humans, particularly via rituals and dancing that evoke animal identity mergers, but also by hunters who may engage with their prey animals in terms of sympathy and inter-subjectivity, particularly through the use of "hunting medicines."

Radio is the most widespread electronic medium in the world today. As a form of technology that is both durable and relatively cheap, radio remains central to the everyday lives of billions of people around the globe. It is used as a call for prayer in Argentina and Appalachia, to organize political protest in Mexico and Libya, and for wartime communication in Iraq and Afghanistan. In urban centres it is played constantly in shopping malls, waiting rooms, and classrooms. Yet despite its omnipresence, it remains the media form least studied by anthropologists. Radio Fields employs ethnographic methods to reveal the diverse domains in which radio is imagined, deployed, and understood. Drawing on research from six continents, the volume demonstrates how the particular capacities and practices of radio provide singular insight into diverse social worlds, ranging from aboriginal Australia to urban Zambia. Together, the contributors address how radio creates distinct possibilities for rethinking such fundamental concepts as culture, communication, community, and collective agency.

This book explores how Pacific Island communities are responding to the challenges wrought by climate change-most notably fresh water accessibility, the growing threat of disease, and crop failure. The Pacific Island nations are not alone in facing these challenges, but their responses are unique in that they arise from traditional and community-based understandings of climate and disaster. Knowledge sharing, community education, and widespread participation in decision-making have promoted social resilience to such challenges across the Pacific. In this exploration of the Pacific Island countries, Bryant-Tokalau demonstrates that by understanding the inter-relatedness of local expertise, customary resource management, traditional knowledge and practice, as well as the roles of leaders and institutions, local "knowledge-practice-belief systems" can be used to inform adaptation to disasters wherever they occur.

This edited collection explores the multiple ways in which ethnography and health emerge and take form through the research process. There is now a plethora of disciplinary engagements with ethnography around the topic of health, including anthropology, sociology, geography, science and technology studies, and in health care professions such as nursing and occupational therapy. This dynamic and evolving landscape means ethnography and health are entangled in new and different ways, providing a timely opportunity to explore what these entanglements do and affect in the social production of knowledge. Rather than discussing the strengths (and limitations) of ethnography for engaging with health, the book asks: what does ethnography enable, make visible and possible for knowing and doing health in contemporary research settings and beyond?

Muhidin Maalim Gurumo and Hassan Rehani Bitchuka are two of Tanzania's most well-known singers in the popular music genre known as muziki wa dansi (literally, 'music for dancing'), a variation of the Cuban-based rhumba idiom that has been enormously impactful throughout central, eastern, and western Africa in the contemporary era. This interview-based dual biography investigates the lives and careers of these two men from an ethnomusicological and historical perspective. Gurumo had a career spanning fifty years before his death in 2014. Bitchuka has been singing professionally for forty-five years. The two singers, affectionately called mapacha ("the twins") by their colleagues, worked together as partners for thirty years from 1973-2003. This study situates these exemplary individuals as creative agents in a local cultural context, showcasing interviews, narratives, and nostalgic reminiscences about musical life lived under Colonialism, state Socialism, and current politics in the global neoliberal democratic milieu. The book adds to a growing body of work about popular music in Dar es Salaam and shines a light on these artists' creative processes, the choices they have made regarding rare resources, their styles and efficacy in conflict resolution, and their own memories regarding the musical art they have created.

Follows the life of French anthropologist Francoise Heritier, who had a lasting impact on a generation of French anthropologists that continues to this day. A great intellectual figure, Francoise Heritier succeeded Claude Levi-Strauss as the Chair of Anthropology at the College de France in 1982. She was an Africanist, author of magnificent works on the Samo population, the scientific progenitor of kinship studies, the creator of a theoretical base to feminist thought and an activist for many causes. "I read this intellectual biography of Francoise Heritier with great pleasure. Though highly regarded in France, she is not yet well known in English-language academic circles, but she certainly should be. This book will be a revelation to many anthropologists and feminist scholars."-Adam Kuper, London School of Economics From the Forword by Michelle Perrot: I came to know her at the National Council for HIV, that she chaired from 1989 to 1994.... Her theoretical concerns were also crucial to the understanding of pandemics, but we did not then realise that HIV/AIDS was also a precursor and a warning of pandemics to come. She grasped the importance of conceptions of bodily 'humours'-blood, semen, milk-that seemed to play a role in the horrific spread of an epidemic of which we knew nothing, except that it resulted in an appalling mortality rate, particularly among young men.... she was a remarkable chair, concerned to share her insights into the illness and to anchor-necessary-interventions within a framework that would be respectful of human rights.

This book addresses the numerous national movements of ethnic groups around the world seeking independence, more self-rule, or autonomy-movements that have proliferated exponentially in the 21st century. In the last 15 years, globalization, religious radicalization, economic changes, endangered cultures and languages, cultural suppression, racial tensions, and many other factors have stimulated the emergence of autonomy and independence movements in every corner of the world-even in areas formerly considered immune to self-government demands such as South America. Researching the numerous ethnic groups seeking autonomy or independence worldwide previously required referencing many specialized publications. This book makes this difficult-to-find information available in a single volume, presented in a simple format accessible to everyone, from high school readers to scholars in advanced studies programs. The book provides an extensive update to Greenwood's Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations: Ethnic and National Groups around the World that was published more than a decade earlier. Each ethnic group receives an alphabetically organized entry containing information such as alternate names, population figures, flag or flags, geography, history, culture, and languages. All the information readers need to understand the motivating factors behind each movement and the current situation of each ethnic group is presented in a compact summary. Fact boxes at the beginning of each entry enable students to quickly access key information, and consistent entry structure makes for easy cross-cultural comparisons. Provides readers with an understanding of a global phenomenon that continues even today Presents specific, hard-to-find information on the many ethnic and national groups seeking greater self-government in an easy-to-access format with up-to-date facts and histories Provides further reading suggestions, an index, and an appendix of dates of independence declarations by nation

Tourism has become the world's largest industry, according to the World Tourism Organization; no surprise when one considers that it incorporates the world's oldest profession. In some developing regions, such as the Caribbean or the South Pacific, tourism is the primary sector in which significant economic growth takes place. In other regions, including areas of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and formerly communist eastern Europe, tourism is just beginning to take off. In all of these areas, tourisM's impact has been decidedly mixed. Nowhere is this more visible than in the context of women's roles in tourism. The contributors demonstrate the many ways in which gender determines the roles they play as both tourists and providers of tourism as product and service. A valuable contribution to tourism studies, women's studies, and the literature of economic development.

The premises of this unique collection of research are that women's roles in tourism are gendered, just as are their other roles in gendered societies; that tourism affects women differently than it affects men; and that women themselves are affected in different ways by tourism depending on such factors as race, region, and class (leisured consumer vs. working producer, or guest vs. host). The contributors cover theoretical perspectives, including those provided by feminists and economic development analysts; women's roles in tourism in the mature industries of the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific; women's roles in the less-developed tourist destinations of the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and eastern Europe; and implications for the future of economic development policy and of gender relations in tourism.

In ancient China, the preparation of food and the offering up of food as a religious sacrifice were intimately connected with models of sagehood and ideas of self-cultivation and morality. Drawing on received and newly excavated written sources, Roel Sterckx's book explores how this vibrant culture influenced the ways in which the early Chinese explained the workings of the human senses, and the role of sensory experience in communicating with the spirit world. The book, which begins with a survey of dietary culture from the Zhou to the Han and offers some intriguing insights into the ritual preparation of food some butchers and cooks were highly regarded and would rise to positions of influence as a result of their culinary skills and the sacrificial ceremony itself. As a major contribution to the study of early China and to the development of philosophical thought, the book will be essential reading for students of the period, and for anyone interested in ritual and religion in the ancient world."

This book presents a multidisciplinary overview of a little known interethnic conflict in the southernmost part of the Americas: the tensions between the Mapuche indigenous people and the settlers of European descent in the Araucania region, in southern Chile. Politically autonomous during the colonial period, the Mapuche had their land confiscated, their population decimated and the survivors displaced and relocated as marginalized and poor peasants by Chilean white settlers at the end of the nineteenth century, when Araucania was transformed in a multi-ethnic region marked by numerous tensions between the marginalized indigenous population and the dominant Chileans of European descent. This contributed volume presents a collection of papers which delve into some of the intercultural dilemmas posed by these complex interethnic relations. These papers were originally published in Spanish and French and provide a sample of the research activities of the Nucleo de Estudios Interetnicos e Interculturales (NEII) at the Universidad Catolica de Temuco, in the capital of Araucania. The NEII research center brings together scholars from different fields: sociocultural anthropology, sociolinguistics, ethno-literature, intercultural education, intercultural philosophy, ethno-history and translation studies to produce innovative research in intercultural and interethnic relations. The chapters in this volume present a sample of this work, focusing on three main topics: The ambivalence between the inclusion and exclusion of indigenous peoples in processes of nation-building. The challenges posed by the incorporation of intercultural practices in the spheres of language, education and justice. The limitations of a functional notion of interculturality based on eurocentric thought and neoliberal economic rationality. Intercultural Studies from Southern Chile: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches will be of interest to anthropologists, linguists, historians, philosophers, educators and a range of other social scientists interested in intercultural and interethnic studies.

The 547 Buddhist jatakas, or verse parables, recount the Buddha's lives in previous incarnations. In his penultimate and most famous incarnation, he appears as the Prince Vessantara, perfecting the virtue of generosity by giving away all his possessions, his wife, and his children to the beggar Jujaka. Taking an anthropological approach to this two-thousand-year-old morality tale, Katherine A. Bowie highlights significant local variations in its interpretations and public performances across three regions of Thailand over 150 years. The Vessantara Jataka has served both monastic and royal interests, encouraging parents to give their sons to religious orders and intimating that kings are future Buddhas. But, as Bowie shows, characterizations of the beggar Jujaka in various regions and eras have also brought ribald humor and sly antiroyalist themes to the story. Historically, these subversive performances appealed to popular audiences even as they worried the conservative Bangkok court. The monarchy sporadically sought to suppress the comedic recitations. As Thailand has changed from a feudal to a capitalist society, this famous story about giving away possessions is paradoxically being employed to promote tourism and wealth.