The power of embodied ritual performance to constitute agency and transform subjectivity are increasingly the focus of major debates in the anthropology of Christianity and Islam. They are particularly relevant to understanding the way transnational women migrants from South and South East Asia, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists, who migrate to Asia, Europe and the Middle East to work as carers and maids, re-imagine and recreate themselves in moral and ethical terms in the diaspora. This timely collection shows how women international migrants, stereotypically represented as a nation of servants', reclaim sacralised spaces of sociality in their migration destinations, and actively transform themselves from mere workers into pilgrims and tourists on cosmopolitan journeys. Such women struggle for dignity and respect by re-defining themselves in terms of an ethics of care and sacrifice. As co-worshippers they recreate community through fiestas, feasts, protests, and shared conviviality, while subverting established normativities of gender, marriage and conjugality; they renegotiate their moral selfhood through religious conversion and activism. For migrants the place of the church or mosque becomes a gateway to new intellectual and experiential horizons as well as a locus for religious worship and a haven of humanitarian assistance in a strange land. This book was published as a special issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations. Taking Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year period, the book shows, the ‘customary’ is robustly enduring, central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the country’s past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British colonial period of indirect rule to the postcolonial state’s present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of legal subjectivities. The book will be valuable to Africanists but also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change, public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of politics and judicial decision making.

Throughout India and Bangladesh, Sufi shrines exist in both the rural and urban areas, from the remotest wilderness to the modern city. This collection of essays examines the resilience of South Asian Sufi saints and their cults in the face of radical economic and political dislocations. It addresses recent debates on the encounter between Islam and modernity, presents comparative ethnographic material, and discusses topics ranging from historical analysis of the colonial and post-colonial period to the management of shrines and religious centres.

The continued vitality of Sufism as a living embodied postcolonial reality challenges the argument that Sufism has 'died' in recent times. Throughout India and Bangladesh, Sufi shrines exist in both the rural and urban areas, from the remotest wilderness to the modern Asian city, lying opposite banks and skyscrapers.
This book illuminates the remarkable resilience of South Asian Sufi saints and their cults in the face of radical economic and political dislocations and breaks new ground in current research. It addresses the most recent debates on the encounter between Islam and modernity and presents important new comparative ethnographic material.
Embodying Charisma re-examines some basic concepts in the sociology and anthropology of religion and the organization of religious movements.

Europe has become a novel experiment in multiple, tiered and mediated multiculturalisms. It is now a supranational community of cultures, sub-cultures and trans-cultures inserted differentially into radically different political cultural traditions. The consequences of this re-imagining and re-making of a new Europe are variously seen to be threatening or utopian. In a post-Communist, post-national era, multiculturalism has been theorized as a paternalistic, top-down solution to the 'problem' of minorities, a dangerous reification of 'culture', or a new way forward to a politics of 'recognition' and 'authenticity'.
But is multiculturalism simply a novel project of social engineering, devised for the twenty-first century by well-meaning liberals or communitarians? The authors of this book reject this view by demonstrating that multiculturalism is the political outcome of ongoing power struggles and collective negotiations of cultural, ethnic and racial differences.

This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations. Taking Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year period, the book shows, the 'customary' is robustly enduring, central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the country's past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British colonial period of indirect rule to the postcolonial state's present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of legal subjectivities. The book will be valuable to Africanists but also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change, public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of politics and judicial decision making.

Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism inaugurates a new, situated, cosmopolitan anthropology. It examines the rise of postcolonial movements responsive to global rights movements, which espouse a politics of dignity, cultural difference, democracy, dissent and tolerance. The book starts from the premise that cosmopolitanism is not, and never has been, a 'western', elitist ideal exclusively. The book's major innovation is to show the way cosmopolitans beyond the North--in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Malaysia, India, Africa, the Middle East and Mexico--juggle universalist commitments with roots in local cultural milieus and particular communities.Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism breaks new ground in theorizing the role of social anthropology as a discipline that engages with the moral, economic, legal and political transformations and dislocations of a globalizing world. It introduces the reader to key debates surrounding cosmopolitanism in the social sciences, and is written clearly and accessibly for undergraduates in anthropology and related subjects.

Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism inaugurates a new, situated, cosmopolitan anthropology. It examines the rise of postcolonial movements responsive to global rights movements, which espouse a politics of dignity, cultural difference, democracy, dissent and tolerance. The book starts from the premise that cosmopolitanism is not, and never has been, a 'western', elitist ideal exclusively. The book's major innovation is to show the way cosmopolitans beyond the North--in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Malaysia, India, Africa, the Middle East and Mexico--juggle universalist commitments with roots in local cultural milieus and particular communities.Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism breaks new ground in theorizing the role of social anthropology as a discipline that engages with the moral, economic, legal and political transformations and dislocations of a globalizing world. It introduces the reader to key debates surrounding cosmopolitanism in the social sciences, and is written clearly and accessibly for undergraduates in anthropology and related subjects.

It is now 50 years since E.P. Thompson published his classic, The Making of the English Working Class. The Making of an African Working Class follows Thompson in exploring the formation of working class identity among low-paid African workers. In arguing for a radical public anthropology of worker identity, the book seeks to analyse the cultural, legal, ideological and experiential dimensions of labour activism often neglected in other labour studies. Pnina Werbner shows that by fusing cosmopolitan and local popular cultural forms of protest, unionists have created a distinctive, vernacular way of being a worker in Botswana: one that does not deny workers' roots at home or in the countryside, while being cognisant of a wider world of cosmopolitan labour rights. The assertion of working class dignity, honour and respect, Pnina argues, is a powerful motivating force for manual workers. Against legal-sceptical approaches, The Making of an African Working Class argues that in challenging the government - their employer - in court, manual workers' protests and mobilisation are deeply embedded in ethics, social justice and the law.

It is now 50 years since E.P. Thompson published his classic, The Making of the English Working Class. The Making of an African Working Class follows Thompson in exploring the formation of working class identity among low-paid African workers. In arguing for a radical public anthropology of worker identity, the book seeks to analyse the cultural, legal, ideological and experiential dimensions of labour activism often neglected in other labour studies. Pnina Werbner shows that by fusing cosmopolitan and local popular cultural forms of protest, unionists have created a distinctive, vernacular way of being a worker in Botswana: one that does not deny workers' roots at home or in the countryside, while being cognisant of a wider world of cosmopolitan labour rights. The assertion of working class dignity, honour and respect, Pnina argues, is a powerful motivating force for manual workers. Against legal-sceptical approaches, The Making of an African Working Class argues that in challenging the government - their employer - in court, manual workers' protests and mobilisation are deeply embedded in ethics, social justice and the law.

This book makes an important contribution towards an understanding of citizenship as mediated by other collective, historically determined identities: of gender, ethnicity, class and national status. It brings together a group of prominent international scholars from moral philosophy, law, political science and sociology to offer a major reconceptualization of the idea of citizenship. Throughout, the book is concerned with the current dismantling of welfare states, the attack on civil society and the rise in state terror and religious and cultural findamentalisms. The contributors demonstrate how the growing ambivalence of state sovereignty in the face of multi-national capitalism and the absence of political accountability structures are complicit in the definitions of gendered citizenship. Against these, women's communal mobilization and political activism are considered in terms of their power effects and political potentialities; the book as a whole shows the need to negotiate and transcend difference and to find means for creating alliances across differences. The most comprehensive, comparative statement on the present state of the gender and citizenship debate available, this book will be necessary reading for students and academics of nationalism, citizenship, human rights, globalization and women's studies.

Europe has become a novel experiment in multiple, tiered and mediated multiculturalisms. It is now a supranational community of cultures, sub-cultures and trans-cultures inserted differentially into radically different political cultural traditions. The consequences of this re-imagining and re-making of a new Europe are variously seen to be threatening or utopian. In a post-Communist, post-national era, multiculturalism has been theorized as a paternalistic, top-down solution to the 'problem' of minorities, a dangerous reification of 'culture', or a new way forward to a politics of 'recognition' and 'authenticity'.
But is multiculturalism simply a novel project of social engineering, devised for the twenty-first century by well-meaning liberals or communitarians? The authors of this book reject this view by demonstrating that multiculturalism is the political outcome of ongoing power struggles and collective negotiations of cultural, ethnic and racial differences.

Why is it still so difficult to negotiate differences across cultures? In what ways does racism continue to strike at the foundations of multiculturalism? Bringing together some of the world's most influential postcolonial theorists, this classic collection examines the place and meaning of cultural hybridity in the context of growing global crisis, xenophobia and racism. Starting from the reality that personal identities are multicultural identities, Debating Cultural Hybridity illuminates the complexity and the flexibility of culture and identity, defining their potential openness as well as their closures, to show why anti-racism and multiculturalism are today still such hard roads to travel.

This explores the aesthetic dimensions of the Arab Spring and the worldwide protest movements that followed. From Egypt to India, and from Botswana to London, worker, youth and middle class rebellions have taken on the political and bureaucratic status quo. When most people can no longer earn a decent wage, they pit themselves against the privilege of small, wealthy and often corrupt elites. A remarkable feature of the protests from the Arab Spring onwards has been the importance of images, songs, videos, humour, satire and dramatic performances. This book explores the central role the aesthetic played in energising the massive mobilisations of young people, the disaffected, the middle classes and the apolitical silent majority. Discover how it fuelled solidarities and alliances among democrats, workers, trade unions, civil rights activists and opposition parties. It includes over 150 colour illustrations showing how visual media is used in protest movements across the globe. It offers a diversity of perspectives from political, media, visual, economic and linguistic anthropology, and the anthropology of work, art, social organisation and social movement.