Much of the debate on the future of work has focused on responses to technological trends in the Global North, with little evidence on how these trends are impacting work and workers in the Global South. Drawing on a rich selection of ethnographic studies of precarious work in Africa, this innovative book discusses how globalisation and digitalisation are drivers for structural change and examines their implications for labour. Bringing together global labour studies and inequality studies, it explores the role of digital technology in new business models, and ways in which digitalisation can be harnessed for counter mobilisation by the new worker.

Yuval Noah Harari's bestselling phenomenon now in a beautifully packaged new special edition. Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us. We are the most advanced and most destructive animals ever to have lived. What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens? In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we're going. Sapiens is a thrilling account of humankind's extraordinary history - from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age - and our journey from insignificant apes to rulers of the world. 'Unbelievably good. Jaw dropping from the first word to the last' Chris Evans, BBC Radio 2 PATTERNS OF LIFE: SPECIAL EDITIONS OF GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE BOOKS

Every encounter begins with a greeting. Be it a quick `Hello!' or the somewhat longer and gracious `Sula manchwanta galunga omugobe!' shaking hands or shaking, well, rather more private parts of our anatomy, we have been doing it many times daily for thousands of years. It should be the most straightforward thing in the world, but this apparently simple act is fraught with complications, leading to awkward misunderstandings and occasionally even outright violence. In the illuminating and entertaining One Kiss or Two? Andy Scott goes down the rabbit hole to take a closer look at what greetings are all about. In looking at how they have developed, he discovers a kaleidoscopic world of etiquette, body-language, evolution, neuroscience, anthropology and history. Through in-depth research and his personal experiences, and with the help of experts, Scott takes us on a captivating journey through a subject far richer than we might have expected.

Beyond Clinical Dehumanisation Toward the Other in Community Mental Health Care offers a rare and intimate portrayal of the moral process of a mental health clinician that interrogates the intractable problem of systemic dehumanisation in community mental health care and looks to the notion of "wonder" and the visionary relational ethics of Emmanuel Levinas for a possible cure. An interdisciplinary study with transdisciplinary aspirations, this book contributes an original and compelling voice to the emerging therapeutic conversation attempting to re-imagine and transcend the objectifying constraints of the dominant discourse and the reductive world view that drives it. Chapters bring into dialogue the fields of community mental health care, psychology, psychology and the Other, the philosophy of wonder, Levinasian ethics, clinical ethics, the moral research of autoethnography and the medical humanities, to consider the defilement of the vulnerable help seeker, the moral injury of the clinician and look for answers beyond. This book is an ethical primer for mental health professionals, researchers, educators, advocates and service users working to re-imagine and heal a broken system by challenging the underpinnings of entrenched dehumanisation and standing with those they "serve".

The book is an interdisciplinary work shaped around films made by different workshop participants using film to access personal interpretations of space and place. It is focused on interacting and engaging with remembering through different memory sites.

Travelling along a timeline of memory, Tanja Sakota takes us on a journey through South Africa, Germany, Poland and Bosnia/Herzegovina. Using a camera and short film format, Sakota hosts several workshops in different countries focused on interacting and engaging with remembering through different memory sites. The author sits at the core but the book is an interdisciplinary work shaped around films made by different workshop participants using film to access personal interpretations of space and place.

Questions that underpin the uncovering of memories are: How does one use a camera to make the invisible visible? How does one remember events that one hasn’t necessarily experienced? How does one use film to interrogate the past from the future present?

As the journey evolves, workshop participants and readers alike enter into a conversation around practice-based research, autoethnography and film.

On Becoming Bilingual: Children's Experiences across Homes, Schools, and Communities provides a theoretical and methodological introduction to research on children's participation in and across a multiplicity of activities where they display complex linguistic and sociocultural knowledge. From a perspective that engages intersections of language, race, and class, the book reviews foundational and recent studies highlighting innovations, trends, and future directions for research. The book offers a helpful set of resources, including guiding questions at the start of each chapter, links to online and bibliographic sources, discussion questions and activities, and a glossary of key terms. This book is intended for scholars and students in language-oriented fields of study who are interested in learning about how bilingual children engage with, negotiate, and transform their social worlds.

This textbook is written by well-established anthropology professors for, and with, their undergraduate students. It explores what anthropological thinking is, what anthropological approaches are, and how these are applied in real-world settings. It provides a thorough introduction to key methods, theories and the disciplinary value of contemporary anthropology. This book deliberately steps beyond the standard textbook format. Undergraduate students reveal the processes by which they came to understand and apply anthropological knowledge using everyday experiences and common life events as examples, while also showcasing the research that student authors produced as a result of understanding and operationalising those processes. This fresh take showcases what can be done with anthropological knowledge, not what you can do with anthropology when you've achieved the rank of professor. This book is accompanied by practical exercises, and podcasts that relate to each of the chapters. Podcasts extend beyond the textbook as live resources, with episodes on a regular basis. This is an accessible, lively, active text that prepares students to outbound disciplinary knowledge. This unique and engaging textbook will be core reading for undergraduate anthropology students, as well as a source of teaching inspiration for lecturers of undergraduate anthropology units. It would also be a useful text for undergraduate students conducting ethnographic research.

From sneaker ads and the "solidarity hijab" to yoga classes and secular hikes along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route, the essential guide to the murky ethics of religious appropriation. We think we know cultural appropriation when we see it. Blackface or Native American headdresses as Halloween costumes-these clearly give offense. But what about Cardi B posing as the Hindu goddess Durga in a Reebok ad, AA's twelve-step invocation of God, or the earnest namaste you utter at the end of yoga class? Liz Bucar unpacks the ethical dilemmas of a messy form of cultural appropriation: the borrowing of religious doctrines, rituals, and dress for political, economic, and therapeutic reasons. Does borrowing from another's religion harm believers? Who can consent to such borrowings? Bucar sees religion as an especially vexing arena for appropriation debates because faiths overlap and imitate each other and because diversity within religious groups scrambles our sense of who is an insider and who is not. Indeed, if we are to understand why some appropriations are insulting and others benign, we have to ask difficult philosophical questions about what religions really are. Stealing My Religion guides us through three revealing case studies-the hijab as a feminist signal of Muslim allyship, a study abroad "pilgrimage" on the Camino de Santiago, and the commodification of yoga in the West. We see why the Vatican can't grant Rihanna permission to dress up as the pope, yet it's still okay to roll out our yoga mats. Reflecting on her own missteps, Bucar comes to a surprising conclusion: the way to avoid religious appropriation isn't to borrow less but to borrow more-to become deeply invested in learning the roots and diverse meanings of our enthusiasms.

Betafo, a rural community in central Madagascar, is divided between the descendants of nobles and descendants of slaves. Anthropologist David Graeber arrived for fieldwork at the height of tensions attributed to a disastrous communal ordeal two years earlier. As Graeber uncovers the layers of historical, social, and cultural knowledge required to understand this event, he elaborates a new view of power, inequality, and the political role of narrative. Combining theoretical subtlety, a compelling narrative line, and vividly drawn characters, Lost People is a singular contribution to the anthropology of politics and the literature on ethnographic writing.

1. This book contemporizes the citizenship debate in India and highlights the ramifications of such a process by bringing in scholars from different disciplinary background, age and experience, to analyze 'citizenship' in India in contemporary times and enrich the existing repository. 2. The book will have an international appeal as debates surrounding citizenship have once again gripped the world. Although primarily rooted in contemporary India, this book provides rich reference material on understanding the changing interpretation of the state in terms of identifying a citizen and thereby its ramifications for various religious and linguistic communities in the country, which when compared with experiences from other parts of the world certainly promises to add to the repository of academic literature. 3. It will be of interest to departments of sociology, social anthropology, political science, human geography, demography, history and economics across the US/UK. It will also appeal to policy makers, think-tanks, researchers, and human rights activists.

This book focuses on Akan-speaking Ghanaians in London and explores in detail the experience of African migrants living in Britain, investigating how they construct their British citizenship through their membership of the church. Building on extensive ethnographic research in London and Ghana, the author explores the relationship between religion and citizenship, the emergence of transnational subjectivities, and the making of diaspora aesthetics among African migrants. Starting from the understanding that citizenship is dialogical, a status mediated by a subject's multiple and intersecting identities, the author highlights the limitations of existing conceptualisations of migrant citizenship. Anchored in a case study of the British/Ghanaian Methodist Church as a transnational religious organisation and cultural polity, the book explores diasporic religious subjectivities as both cosmopolitan and transnational, while being configured in emotionally and morally significant ways by the Methodist Church, as well as family, ethnicity, and nation. Interdisciplinary by nature, this book will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and scholars across the social sciences and humanities working in the fields of anthropology, religion, sociology, postcolonial studies, and African studies, and additionally policy makers interested in diaspora and migration studies.

Based on almost eight years of fieldwork in a town and a village in South China, this book analyzes contradictions among various dimensions of the peasant economy, social relationships, popular religion, and local politics in rural China. Compared to many anthropological, sociological, and political studies of rural China, which regard Chinese peasants as one-dimensionally materialistic, politically conservative, egocentric (lacking public-mindedness, as in anthropologist Yan Yunxiang's notion of the "uncivil individual"), with collapsed beliefs, and thinking only of the present (or the "today-ness of today" according to anthropologist Liu Xin), this book shows that people in contemporary rural China are actually "two-dimensional": trying to combine the calculation of self-interest with affective networks of reciprocity, but often falling into awkwardness or cynicism, in a paradoxical symbiosis between nihilism and transcendence. While Marcuse used the words of Benjamin to analyze "one-dimensional man," writing "Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope," this book writes of two-dimensional people, "Only when the vast majority of ordinary people can find hope in everyday life can we finally be given hope!" This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Sociology, Anthropology and East Asian Studies. It will also be a great read to those who are interested in contemporary China in general.

* This book explores the issues of political representation, rights and identity of indigenous communities in Bangladesh. * It analyses the diverse articulations of indigeneity through ethnographic narratives, including the evolution of traditions and the right's discourse. * It will be of interest to researchers and students of sociology, social ethnography, indigenous studies, development studies, political sociology and South Asian studies in the UK and US.

This book describes and analyzes the transformation of Indian economy taking into account historical changes and present dynamics of the rural-urban nexus. India has recently experienced a period as a high-performing economy, with the great improvement of indices of human development, including literacy rates, life expectancy, child mortality rates and others. In contrast to this bright outlook, features such as the retarded growth of women's average height, the noticeable gap between male and female population, the overwhelming proportion of informal employment in the manufacturing sector, or increasing pollution overshadow India's future, in some cases pose a threat to lifestyle and environment. Examining the rural-urban nexus where the new transformative dynamics of Indian socio-economy is most conspicuous, the contributors to this book shed light on the actual changes taking place at the bottom of Indian society through regional comparisons and spatial differentiation. The book offers unique perspectives on the topic produced mostly by Japanese scholars, including analysis of original data, that have hitherto been unavailable and inaccessible to an international audience. As the first book published on the rural-urban nexus in India, this book will be of interest to researchers studying South Asian History, Economics, Politics, Geography, Sociology and Anthropology, Development Studies and Economic History.

This volume gives an in-depth account of cultural heritage of Nagaland covering important themes like cultural beliefs, traditional knowledge, material culture, and social institutions. Contributors from diverse dis ciplines and backgrounds have delved into the cultural heritage of the state's variegated tribes. Nagaland a hilly state in North-East India had been the centre of British colonialism and American Baptist mission. This cultural contact is significantly reflected in the socio-cultural life, and the contributors have shed light on the continuities and changes. This volume highlights the multiplicity of cultural traditions that are specific to various tribes inhabiting sixteen districts of Nagaland, since their experiences of modernity and cultural contact with 'others' have been diverse. The contributors have mainly focussed on the cultural heritage of the majority Naga tribes, but other tribes like the Kukis and Kacharis are part and parcel of the cultural melting pot of Nagaland, and this volume in a way underscores the cultural exchange and interactions. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print version of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Winner of the 2016 ICQI Outstanding Qualitative Book Award Acclaimed qualitative scholar Jane Speedy's world was upended completely after suffering a severe stroke when only in her late 50s. After returning home from the hospital, Speedy took to her iPad to write and draw as a way of making sense of her experience and to aid her recovery. The stunning, fragmented, poetic text and images comprising Staring at the Park depict the events of this difficult journey. It provides an alternative model of engaging the self in a research project in an evocative and artistic way. This highly original book: -uses the seemingly ordinary motif of the park opposite the author's house as the catalyst for a wildly creative autoethnography;-includes three narratives of the author's experience of staring at the park-an imagined murder mystery in the park, a realist ethnography of the park, and the life story (both imagined and real) of her facing her illness and recovery; -offers readers a poetic and performative inquiry into the author's new reality.

This compilation of original research articles highlight the important cross-regional, cross-chronological, and comparative approaches to political and economic landscapes in ancient South Asia and its neighbors. Focusing on the Indus Valley period and Iron Age India, this volume incorporates new research in South Asia within the broader universe of archaeological scholarship. Contributions focus on four major themes: reinterpreting material culture; identifying domains and regional boundaries; articulating complexity; and modeling interregional interaction. These studies develop theoretical models that may be applicable researchers studying cultural complexity elsewhere in the world.

This innovative text reinvigorates argumentation studies by exploring the experience of argument across cultures, introducing an anthropological perspective into the domains of rhetoric, communication, and philosophy. The Anthropology of Argument fills an important gap in contemporary argumentation theory by shifting the focus away from the purely propositional element of arguments and onto how they emerge from the experiences of peoples with diverse backgrounds, demonstrating how argumentation can be understood as a means of expression and a gathering place of ideas and styles. Confronting the limitations of the Western tradition of logic and searching out the argumentative roles of place, orality, myth, narrative, and audience, it examines the nature of multi-modal argumentation. Tindale analyzes the impacts of colonialism on the field and addresses both optimistic and cynical assessments of contextual differences. The results have implications for our understanding of contemporary argumentative discourse in areas marked by deep disagreement, like politics, law, and social policy. The book will interest scholars and upper-level students in communication, philosophy, argumentation theory, anthropology, rhetoric, linguistics, and cultural studies.

Tropes of Intolerance is a Baedeker of bigotry, a short course on xenophobic racism and populist nationalism - both enduring threats to the social fabric of democratic societies. Each chapter is a self-contained commentary and a building block. In the first, the author considers the concepts of pride and prejudice and discusses patterns of discrimination and strategies of resistance. This is following by an illustrated consideration of the emblems of enmity - words, signs, symbols and other verbal and visual expressions of both chauvinism and intolerance. Linking the first two, the third chapter explores the nature of American Nativism and its contemporary expression. This is followed by an assessment of the exploitation of anxiety among particularly vulnerable sectors of society by skillful, manipulative leaders and their agents and the exacerbation of social divisions by the use of stereotyping, stigmatizing, and labeling. Chapter Five, "Trumped Up," narrows the focus to the present day, the president himself, and his exacerbation of polarizing particularism. A sixth chapter examines two of the most malignant ideologies -- resurgent anti-Semitism and the rise of Islamophobia -- bringing readers full circle. In addition to a brief Coda and a glossary of key terms related to the principal topic, there is a post-election Afterword written in late November, 2020.

This book examines the social world of the cat fancy, or the leisure activity of breeding and exhibiting pedigree cats. Based on multispecies ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in the United Kingdom, it explores the process and performance of exhibiting cats at shows, the breeding practices and discourses integral to the creation of pedigree breeds, and the relations that these practices generate between human guardians, the pedigree cat population, and non-pedigree cats. Through observation with cat fanciers and their interactions with their cats, the author investigates the social dynamics and relationships that form within the fancy, considering the interconnections between biopower and eugenics in pedigree breeding, the practices of pet keeping and the complexities of more-than-human care, and the implications of involvement for the cats themselves. As such, Cat People: Human-Cat Interrelatedness in the Cat Fancy will appeal to scholars from across the social sciences and humanities interested in human-animal interactions, multispecies leisure, anthrozoology, and more-than-human care.

Historical Ethnography and Peasant Societies: McKim Marriott, James Scott and Maurice Bloch is a collection of interviews that is being published as a book for the first time. These interviews have been conducted by a leading British social anthropologist and historian, Professor Alan Macfarlane. Filmed over a period of several years, the three conversations in this volume are a part of the series Creative Lives and Works. These transcriptions cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences and the sciences to the performing and visual arts. The current volume is on three of the world's most eminent sociologists and anthropologists - McKim Marriott, James Scott and Maurice Bloch. These interviews extend the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, moving on from when fieldwork was somewhat limited to the concentration of a civilization or community's past, and how it fits within the historical context of the discipline. Since then, it has expanded to one where peasant cultures and communities have become the focal point of study. McKim Marriott, James Scott and Maurice Bloch talk about both overcoming and understanding the importance of fieldwork-considering linguistic, historical, economic and cultural elements in the study of these societies through their engaging conversations and occasional anecdotes. Immensely riveting as conversations, this collection gives a flavour of the many different societies and cultures in far-flung reaches of the world encompassing several continents, often with no knowledge of each other's existence, and of how expansive the disciple of sociology and social anthropology is. The book will be of enormous value not just to those interested in the subject of Sociology, Social Anthropology and Ethnography, but also to those with an avid interest in History, Culture Studies as well as those with a general interest in learning about other societies. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan).

Labouring to Learn examines academic mobility pathways among ethnic minority Tamil youths in public secondary schools and vocational institutions in Singapore. This book qualitatively examines the interactive effects of race and class on the educational performance of these youths through the lens of social capital. Despite their numerical majoritarian position within the Indian population in Singapore, the foreclosed access for Tamils to diverse class networks within the ethnic community as well as limited inter-ethnic interactions has historically truncated the means to resources and opportunities for social mobility. In schools, the narratives shared by Tamil boys and girls from the lower academic streams and economically disadvantaged backgrounds reveal that they typically experience exclusion on account of racial, economic and academic marginalisation in their everyday lives. Turning to bonding ties among peers and family members provides social support resources that offer some respite from marginalisation. On the flipside, articulations of resistance ensue among Tamil youths that tangibly take time away from learning, and run the danger of strengthening the cultural deficit rhetoric for mainstream society to explain the poor academic performance among ethnic minorities. This account of educational marginalisation amongst Singaporean Tamil youths contributes towards understanding social inequality in a non-liberal multicultural context where marginalisation is differentially experienced across ethnic minority groups and traced to broader socio-historical contexts of migration, assimilation and minority-majority relations. Furthermore, it also articulates the utility of a social capital framework in historically revealing how educational inequality emerged and continues to be sustained in a postcolonial context.

This collection brings together a carefully curated selection of researchers from law, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, social ontology and international relations, in order to examine how law and custom interact within specific material and spatial contexts. Normativity develops within these contexts, while also shaping them. This complex relationship exists within all physical places from traditional agrarian spaces to the modern shifting post-industrial workplace. The contributions gathered together in this volume explore numerous examples of such spaces from different disciplinary perspectives to interrogate the dynamic relationship between custom and law, and the material spaces they inhabit. While there are a dynamic series of conclusions regarding this relationship in different material realities, a common theme is pursued throughout: a proper understanding of law and custom stems from their material locatedness within the power dynamics of particular spaces, which, in turn, are reflexively shaped by that same normativity. The book thus generates an account of the locatedness of law and custom, and, indeed, of custom as a source of law. In this way, it provides a series of linked explorations of normative spaces, but, more fundamentally, it also furnishes a cross-disciplinary toolkit of concepts and critical tools for understanding law and custom, and their relationship. As the diversity of the contributors indicates, this book will be of great interest to legal theorists of different traditions, also legal historians and anthropologists, as well as sociologists, historians, geographers and developmental economists.