This book investigates how women's power and caste cleavages often continue to transcend and crosscut the boundaries of caste/tribe, gender, age, class and religion in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh It examines the gendered divisions of labor in rural communities and how countervailing forces have restricted women's status and roles in South Asia.

This bold and illuminating study examines the role of archaeology in the formation of the modern Japanese nation and explores the processes by which archaeological practice is shaped by national social and intellectual discourse. Leading Japanese archaeologist Koji Mizoguchi argues that an understanding of the past has been a central component in the creation of national identities and modern nation states and that, since its emergence as a distinct academic discipline in the modern era, archaeology has played an important role in shaping that understanding. By examining in parallel the uniquely intense process of modernisation experienced by Japan and the history of Japanese archaeology, Mizoguchi explores the close interrelationship between archaeology, society and modernity, helping to explain why we do archaeology in the way that we do. This book is essential reading for anybody with an interest in the history of archaeology or modern Japan.

Mobile money, e-commerce, cash cards, retail credit cards, and more-as new monetary technologies become increasingly available, the global South has cautiously embraced these mediums as a potential solution to the issue of financial inclusion. How, if at all, do new forms of dematerialized money impact people's everyday financial lives? In what way do technologies interact with financial repertoires and other socio-cultural institutions? How do these technologies of financial inclusion shape the global politics and geographies of difference and inequality? These questions are at the heart of Money at the Margins, a groundbreaking exploration of the uses and socio-cultural impact of new forms of money and financial services.

Tongan barkcloth, made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, still features lavishly in Polynesian ceremonies all over the world. Yet despite the attention paid to this textile by anthropologists and art historians alike, little is known about its history. Providing a unique insight into Polynesian material culture, this book explores barkcloth's rich cultural history, and argues that its manufacture, decoration and use are vehicles of creativity and female agency. Based on twelve years of extensive ethnographic and archival research, the book uncovers stories of ceremony, gender, the senses, religion and nationhood, from the 17th century up to the present-day. Placing the materiality of textiles at the heart of Tongan culture, Veys reveals not only how barkcloth was and continues to be made, but also how it defines what it means to be Tongan. Extending the study to explore the place of barkcloth in the European imagination, she examines international museum collections of Tongan barkcloth, from the UK and Italy to Switzerland and the USA, addressing the bias of the European 'gaze' and challenging traditional gendered understandings of the cloth. A nuanced narrative of past and present barkcloth manufacture, designs and use, Unwrapping Tongan Barkcloth demonstrates the importance of the textile to both historical and contemporary Polynesian culture.

This book explores the concept of cyberplace as a mode of inhabiting the contemporary world. As a result, it suggests that, for many communities, unlocking cyberspace and inhabiting cyberplaces is now an integral part of their coming-to-the-globalised-world. Boos reviews in the detail the existing academic literature from cultural anthropology, human geography, and sociology on "cyberspace", concluding that a phenomenological perspective on cyberspace provides the possibility of gaining a deep understanding of our contemporary lifeworlds, in which on- and offline practices constantly intermingle. In four chapters, he applies the developed theoretical and methodological approaches to the case of Siena's neighbourhoods, the contrade, analysing their websites and discussing the implications of his findings for understanding contemporary processes of community building and for future research on cyberspace. This concise and accessible book will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in cultural anthropology, human geography, media studies and sociology.

The quadrennial summer Olympic Games are renowned for producing the world's biggest single-city cultural event. This mega-event attracts a live audience of millions, a television audience of billions, and generates incredible scrutiny before, during, and after each installment. This is due to the fact that underpinning the 17 days of spectacular sporting events is approximately a decade worth of planning, preparing, and politicking. It is during this decade that prospective host cities must plan and win their bids before embarking upon seven years of urban upheaval and social transformation in order to stage the world's premier sporting event. This book draws on seven years of ethnographic inquiry around the London 2012 Olympics and contrasts the rhetoric and reality of mega-event delivery. Lindsay argues that in its current iteration the twin notions of beneficial Olympic legacies and Olympic delivery benefits for hosting communities are largely incompatible.

This edited book covers many topics in musicological literature, gathering various approaches to music studies that encapsulate the vivid relation music has to society. It focusses on repertoires and geographical areas that have not previously been well frequented in musicology. As readers will see, music has many roles to play in society. Music can be a generator of social phenomena, or a result of them; it can enhance or activate social actions, or simply co-habit with them. Above all, music has a stable position within society, in that it actively participates in it. Music can either describe or prescribe social aspects; musicians may have a certain position/role in society (e.g., the "popstar" as fashion leader, spokesman for political issues, etc.). Depending on the type of society, music may have a certain "meaning" or "function" (music does not mean the same thing everywhere in the world). Lastly, music can define a society, and it is not uncommon for it to best define a particular historical moment. Case-studies in this work provide visibility for musical cultures that are rarely exposed in the dominant musicological discourse. Several contributions combine musicological analysis with "insider-musician" points of view. Some essays in the collection address the cultural clash between certain types of music/musicians and the respective institutional counterparts, while certain contributing authors draw on experimental research findings. Throughout this book we see how musics are socially significant, and - at the same time - that societies are musically significant too. Thus the book will appeal to musicologists, cultural scholars and semioticians, amongst others.

Capturing a dimension of the dominance and power of a Nigerian woman, Matriarchy and Power in Africa shows the diverse ways in which women controlled a variety of people in their society, asserted their power, and maintained their authority in spite of the hurdles erected by a patriarchal system that minimizes women's role. In exercising her matriarchal authority, Aneji Eko defined the manner of domestic relationships, influenced the statuses of individuals within and beyond her household, established the character of the relationship between men and women, adults and children, and facilitated the balance between the temporal and secular domains of members of her household. This book fuses the underlying importance of women in Nigeria with issues of social class relations, gender construction, child-raising ideology, and their implications for prestige both in the traditional past and in the contemporary present. Many readers will recognize the woman, Aneji Eko, on whose social philosophy this account is based, as her story mirrors what they may remember or have heard concerning a parent or a relative, and even non-Africans will be familiar with the pattern of relationships the story of Aneji recounts.

This book offers insightful analysis of cultural representation in Japanese cinema of the early 21st century. The impact of transnational production practices on films such as Dolls (2002), Sukiyaki Western Django (2007), Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009), and 13 Assassins (2010) is considered through textual and empirical analysis. The author discusses contradictory forms of cultural representation - cultural concealment and cultural performance - and their relationship to both changing practices in the Japanese film industry and the global film market. Case studies take into account popular genres such as J Horror and jidaigeki period films, as well as the work of renowned filmmakers Takeshi Kitano, Takashi Miike, Shinya Tsukamoto and Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Grounded in extensive and original ethnographic fieldwork, this book makes a novel contribution to migration studies by examining a European labour migration to the Global South, namely contemporary Portuguese migration to Angola in a postcolonial context. In doing so, it explores everyday encounters at work between the Portuguese migrants and their Angolan "hosts", and it analyses how the Luso-African postcolonial heritage interplays with the recent Portuguese-Angolan migration in the (re-)construction of power relations and identities. Based on ethnographic interviews, the book describes the Angolan-Portuguese relationship as characterized not only by hierarchies of power, but also by ambivalence and hybridity. This research demonstrates that the identities of the ex-colonized Angolan and the Portuguese ex-colonizer are shaped by a history of unequal and violent power relations. Further, it reveals how this history has produced a sense of intimacy between the two, and the often fraught nature of this relationship. Combining a strong connection to the field of migration studies with a postcolonial perspective, this original work will appeal to students and scholars of migration, postcolonial studies, the sociology of work and African Studies.

The exchange of ideas, goods, and people between Pakistan and the far-flung reaches of the world shape the experience of Pakistani Muslims beyond geographical and cultural continuity with reference to global political representations. Based on empirical research conducted by scholars from across disciplines, this collection investigates the political public sphere, Kashmir, religious leadership, and women. It demonstrates the multidirectional flow of ideas and people creating the social landscape of Pakistanis and Diaspora globally.

In this book, based on intensive fieldwork in a major French provincial city (Lyon), Grillo shows how an anthropological perspective enhances our understanding of institutional processes and ideological forces in industrial society, presenting a detailed account of relations between the indigenous French population and immigrant workers and their families of non-French origin. The framework of the book is provided by two linked themes. First, the study shows how the situation of immigrants is represented ideologically by various elements of French society, as well as by the immigrants themselves, in different ways as 'problematic'. Dr Grillo examines this ideological dimension initially by contrasting the discourses of the political Right and Left concerning a range of immigrant 'problems', for example in the fields of housing, family life, school, language use and work. He then shows that not only are there significant ideological differences within both Right and Left, but also similarities between them which stem from certain basic cultural preoccupations of French thought.

Exploring Twins presents an analysis of twinship considered as a specifically social phenomenon. Drawing upon a wide range of interdisciplinary, historical and cross-cultural data, Dr Stewart argues that in both traditional and modern societies, twinship represents a recurrent anomaly which calls into question the assumptions around which different types of society are organized. Part One identifies and analyses the fascinating range of cultural and disciplinary approaches to the interpretation of twinship, while Part Two considers the possibilities for a distinctively social analysis of twinship.

This book explores how modernity, the urban, and the sacred overlap in fundamental ways in contemporary Spain. Urban spaces have traditionally been seen as the original sites of modernity, history, progress, and a Weberian systematic disenchantment of the world, while the sacred has been linked to the natural, the rural, mythical past origins, and exemption from historical change. This collection problematizes such clear-cut distinctions as overlaps between the modern urban and the sacred in Spanish culture are explored throughout the volume. Placed in the periphery of Europe, Spain has had a complex relationship with the concept of modernity and commonly understood processes of modernization and secularization, thus offering a unique case-study of the interaction between the modern and the sacred in the city.

This monograph is an exploration of the historical legacy of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, in particular in Goa, Macau, Melaka, and Malabar. Instead of fixing the gaze on either the colonial or the indigenous, it attempts to scrutinise a creole space that is rooted in Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism.

Many voices clamor to be heard in debates about whether shamans cure, and whether shamanic spirituality is worth continuing or recovering in the 21rst century. This book represents my personal and analytical forays into shamanic studies, based on extensive, periodic fieldwork in several areas of Siberia and Inner Asia, beginning in 1976 in the Ob River (Khanty-Mansi) Region, sustained by long-term research in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), and including trips to Tuva (Tyva) and Buriatia of the Russian Federation. It is historical and current, ethnographic and reflexive, geographically specific and theoretical when appropriate. New insights into the fascinating resurgence of shamanism are gained through exploration of political repression of religion and its transcendence. Literature representing eclectic claims to expertise is reviewed and interpreted in light of Siberian experiences. ""

Using initiatives by non-governmental organizations to promote women's empowerment in rural India, this book draws new conclusions about the three-way relationship between neoliberalism, women's education, and spatialization of the state. Sharma gets to the heart of the assumptions and blindspots inherent in these programs and makes an important contribution to the debate about the institutionalization of women's education.

This book analyses the instruments and approaches offered by public international law to resolve cultural heritage related disputes and facilitate the return of illicitly transferred objects to their countries of origin. In addition to assessing the instruments themselves, their origins, and their advantages and disadvantages, it also examines the roles and interests of the actors involved. Lastly, the book explores the interaction between hard and soft law approaches, the reasons for and importance of this interaction, as well as its consequences.

The book sets out to examine the concept of 'chav', providing a review of its origins, its characterological figures, the process of enregisterment whereby it has come to be recognized in public discourse, and the traits associated with it in traditional media representations. The author then discusses the 'chav' label in light of recent re-appropriations in social network activity (particularly through the video-sharing app TikTok) and subsequent commentary in the public sphere. She traces the evolution of the term from its use during the first decade of the twenty-first century to make sense of class, status and cultural capital, to its resurgence and the ways in which it is still associated with appearance in gendered and classed ways. She then draws on recent developments in linguistic anthropology and embodied sociocultural linguistics to argue that social media users draw on communicative resources to perform identities that are both situated in specific contexts of discourse and dynamically changing, challenging the idea that geo-sociocultural varieties and mannerisms are the sole way of indexing membership of a community. This volume contends that equating 'chav' with 'underclass' in the most recent uses of the concept on social networks may not be the whole story, and the book will be of interest to sociocultural linguistics and identity researchers, as well as readers in anthropology, sociology, British studies, cultural studies, identity studies, digital humanities, and sociolinguistics.

Islam in Europe delves into the daily routines of European Muslim communities in order to provide a better understanding of what it means to be a European Muslim today. Instead of positing particular definitions of being Muslim, this volume invites and encourages a diverse body of 735 informants from Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK to reflect on who they are and on the meaning and place Islam has in such considerations. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and suggesting novel ways of seeing the phenomenon of European Islam and the continent's Muslim communities, Islam in Europe examines how through their practices, discourses, face to face and mediated interaction, European Muslims construct notions or identity, agency, solidarity and belonging, or how they negotiate and redefine religion, tradition, authority and cultural authenticity. Theoretically and methodologically innovative, Islam in Europe makes a significant contribution to better understanding European Islam and Europe's Muslims.

Purpose of the Study The study runs through 8 chapters, Their purpose is to: (1) present evidence to show that since the 19th century colonial policy in southern Africa, that part of the continent south of the Equator, caused conflict between colonial governments and Africans (2) present materials to show that colonial governments formulated policy in five key areas of national life to control Africans more effectively so that the resources of the sub-continent could be exploited successfully (3) remind national leaders in southern Africa of their solemn responsibility to serve the best interests of their people and countries, not to exploit the positions they hold for their own personal gain. (4) show that the response of Africans to colonial policy was a natural reaction of a people who were under colonial oppression. (5) show that colonial policy was quite consistent with traditionally negative views of Africans and their place in colonial society. Rationale of the Study Nations of southern Africa, like other countries in the Third World, are experiencing enormous problems caused by the failure of their national leaders to develop and implement policies that are based on clear ideology, which, when put into practice, would result in national development and avoid conflict. When national leaders remain in office too long they no longer respect the wishes of the people. They should retire before this happens. Chapter Organization of the Study The organization of the study will be structured to reflect the study as follows: The Settlement of Europeans in Southern Africa and Reaction of Africans Colonial Policy on African Culture and the Beginning of Conflict Colonial Policy TowardAcquisition of Land and the Nature of Conflict Colonial Socioeconomic Policy and the Extent of Conflict Colonial Educational Policy and Crisis of Conflict Colonial Policy Toward Political Participation and the Ulti

What is-and what was-"the world"? Though often treated as interchangeable with the ongoing and inexorable progress of globalization, concepts of "world," "globe," or "earth" instead suggest something limited and absolute. This innovative and interdisciplinary volume concerns itself with this central paradox: that the complex, heterogeneous, and purportedly transhistorical dynamics of globalization have given rise to the idea and reality of a finite-and thus vulnerable-world. Through studies of illuminating historical moments that range from antiquity to the era of Google Earth, each contribution helps to trace the emergence of the world in multitudinous representations, practices, and human experiences.

Tracing the boom of local NGOs since the 1990s in the context of the global political economy of aid, current trends of neoliberal state restructuring, and shifting post-Cold War hegemonies, this book explores the "associational revolution" in post-socialist, post-conflict Serbia. Looking into the country's "transition" through a global and relational analytical prism, the ethnography unpacks the various forms of dispossession and inequality entailed in the democracy-promotion project.