In a world of finite resources, expanding populations and widening structural inequalities, the ownership of things is increasingly contested. Not only are the commons being rapidly enclosed and privatized, but the very idea of what can be owned is expanding, generating conflicts over the ownership of resources, ideas, culture, people, and even parts of people. Understanding processes of ownership and appropriation is not only central to anthropological theorizing but also has major practical applications, for policy, legislative development and conflict resolution.
"Ownership and Appropriation" significantly extends anthropology's long-term concern with property by focusing on everyday notions and acts of owning and appropriating. The chapters document the relationship between ownership, subjectivities and personhood; they demonstrate the critical consequences of materiality and immateriality on what is owned; and they examine the social relations of property. By approaching ownership as social communication and negotiation, the text points to a more dynamic and processual understanding of property, ownership and appropriation.

What is Anthropology? Why should you study it? What will you learn? And what can you do with it? "What Anthropologists Do" answers all these questions. And more. Anthropology is an astonishingly diverse and engaged field of study that seeks to understand human social behavior. "What Anthropologists Do" presents a lively introduction to the ways in which anthropology's unique research methods and cutting edge thinking contribute to a very wide range of activities: environmental issues, aid and development, advocacy, human rights, social policy, the creative arts, museums, health, education, crime, communications technology, design, marketing, and business. In short, a training in Anthropology provides highly transferable skills of investigation and analysis. The book will be ideal for any readers who want to know what Anthropology is all about and especially for students coming to the study of Anthropology for the first time.

Why should you study anthropology? How will it enable you to understand human behaviour? And what will you learn that will equip you to enter working life? This book describes what studying anthropology actually means in practice, and explores the many career options available to those trained in anthropology. Anthropology gets under the surface of social and cultural diversity to understand people's beliefs and values, and how these guide the different lifeways that these create. This accessible book presents a lively introduction to the ways in which anthropology's unique research methods and conceptual frameworks can be employed in a very wide range of fields, from environmental concerns to human rights, through business, social policy, museums and marketing. This updated edition includes an additional chapter on anthropology and interdisciplinarity. This is an essential primer for undergraduates studying introductory courses to anthropology, and any reader who wants to know what anthropology is about.

Why should you study anthropology? How will it enable you to understand human behaviour? And what will you learn that will equip you to enter working life? This book describes what studying anthropology actually means in practice, and explores the many career options available to those trained in anthropology. Anthropology gets under the surface of social and cultural diversity to understand people's beliefs and values, and how these guide the different lifeways that these create. This accessible book presents a lively introduction to the ways in which anthropology's unique research methods and conceptual frameworks can be employed in a very wide range of fields, from environmental concerns to human rights, through business, social policy, museums and marketing. This updated edition includes an additional chapter on anthropology and interdisciplinarity. This is an essential primer for undergraduates studying introductory courses to anthropology, and any reader who wants to know what anthropology is about.

Beautiful artist’s book about Tin Drum’s MR installation, Medusa. A meditation on emergent technologies, nature and architecture amidst the climate crisis with contributions from celebrated writers, academics and thinkers. The mixed reality Medusa installation began with the questions: is there even such a thing as non-physical architecture? What is the function of architecture without physical form? Directed by Yoyo Munk and produced by Tin Drum, it headlined the 2021 London Design Festival at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Yoyo Munk’s first book is an exploration into Medusa’s themes, reflecting on our changing relationship with architecture within the context of rapidly advancing technology and ongoing mass extinction. Featuring original artwork by Tin Drum, Medusa is a timely and moving artist’s book about climate grief. Medusa includes fascinating conversations between Munk and Sou Fujimoto, the renowned architect and Medusa collaborator, James Bridle, author of Ways of Being; Veronica Strang, cultural anthropologist; and Seirian Sumner, author of Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps. A dazzling poetic contribution from Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal is interspersed throughout the book. Medusa is an art object to be treasured, employing multiple inks, foils, papers and processes.

What is a lighthouse? What does it mean? What does it do? This book shows how exchanging knowledge across disciplinary boundaries can transform our thinking. Adopting an unconventional structure, this book involves the reader in a multivocal conversation between scholars, poets and artists. Seen through their individual perspectives, lighthouses appear as signals of safety, beacons of enlightenment, phallic territorial markers, and memorials of historical relationships with the sea. However, the interdisciplinary conversation also reveals underlying and sometimes unexpected connections. It elucidates the human and non-human evolutionary adaptations that use light for signalling and warning; the visual languages created by regularity and synchronicity in pulses of light; how lighthouses have generated a whole 'family' of related material objects and technologies; and the way that light flows between social and material worlds.

What is Anthropology? Why should you study it? What will you learn? And what can you do with it? "What Anthropologists Do" answers all these questions. And more. Anthropology is an astonishingly diverse and engaged field of study that seeks to understand human social behavior. "What Anthropologists Do" presents a lively introduction to the ways in which anthropology's unique research methods and cutting edge thinking contribute to a very wide range of activities: environmental issues, aid and development, advocacy, human rights, social policy, the creative arts, museums, health, education, crime, communications technology, design, marketing, and business. In short, a training in Anthropology provides highly transferable skills of investigation and analysis. The book will be ideal for any readers who want to know what Anthropology is all about and especially for students coming to the study of Anthropology for the first time.

Looking to the vast human history of water worship, a crucial study of our broken relationship with all things aquatic - and how we might mend it. Early human relationships with water were expressed through beliefs in serpentine aquatic deities: rainbow-coloured, feathered or horned serpents, giant anacondas and dragons. Representing the powers of water, these beings were bringers of life and sustenance, world creators, ancestors, guardian spirits and law makers. Worshipped and appeased, they embodied people's respect for water and its vital role in sustaining all living things. Yet today, though we still recognise that 'water is life', fresh- and saltwater ecosystems have been critically compromised by human activities. This major study of water beings, and what has happened to them in different cultural and historical contexts, demonstrates how and why some - but not all - societies have moved from worshipping water to wreaking havoc upon it, and asks what we can do to turn the tide. 'A far-ranging and gorgeously illustrated study, Water Beings explores humanity's enduring but always transforming connections to the wellsprings of life. A profound and entertaining book for a time when reimagining humanity's future has never been more vital.' - Caspar Henderson, author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings 'With passion, rigor and creative depth, Strang eloquently takes readers across the world to further our understanding of water's natural, cultural, and symbolic qualities. Water beings are brought to life alongside relational beliefs and practices. This is a magnificent work that reflects a rich human/water/culture relationship, and explores possibilities to avoid a climate crisis future.' - Sandy Toussaint, University of Western Australia 'A spellbinding anthropological itinerary through the winding ways of serpentine water beings as they have manifested through history and across cultures. Luminously illustrated, ingeniously researched, and beautifully narrated, Strang's book is a treasure, a store of revelatory stories about how materiality, meaning, and myth have intertwined to create the aqueous spirits and deities that have accompanied human being and becoming.' - Stefan Helmreich, Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Around the world, intensifying development and human demands for fresh water are placing unsustainable pressures on finite resources. Countries are waging war over transboundary rivers, and rural and urban communities are increasingly divided as irrigation demands compete with domestic desires. Marginal groups are losing access to water as powerful elites protect their own interests, and entire ecosystems are being severely degraded. These problems are particularly evident in Australia, with its industrialised economy and arid climate. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to examine the social and cultural complexities that underlie people's engagements with water. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in two major Australian river catchments (the Mitchell River in Cape York, and the Brisbane River in southeast Queensland), this book examines their major water using and managing groups: indigenous communities, farmers, industries, recreational and domestic water users, and environmental organisations. It explores the issues that shape their different beliefs, values and practices in relation to water, and considers the specifically cultural or sub-cultural meanings that they encode in their material surroundings. Through an analysis of each group's diverse efforts to 'garden the world', it provides insights into the complexities of human-environmental relationships.

Water is the most valuable resource and the most passionately contested. Drought has become an increasingly extreme problem in many parts of the world, and it is predicted that 60% of the major cities in Europe will run short of water in the next decade. In industrialized countries per capita water usage continues to rise intractably, despite strenuous efforts by environmentalists and resource managers to encourage conservation. Conflicts over water and environmental degradation from the overuse of resources are intensifying. Water is not merely a physical resource: in every cultural context it is densely encoded with social, spiritual, political and environmental meanings, and these have a powerful effect upon patterns of water use and upon the relationships between water users and suppliers. This book makes an in-depth analysis of the meanings of water and considers how they are experienced and formed at an individual and societal level. Focusing on the River Stour in Dorset, Strang draws upon a wide range of data: ethnographic research, cultural mapping, local archives and folklore. She explores the controversies surrounding water ownership and management, and the social and political questions raised by water privatization in the UK. The topical nature of these issues and their global relevance make this book a vital contribution to contemporary research on water and an essential read for anyone with an interest in getting under the surface of one of the worlds most important social and environmental issues.

Water is the most valuable resource and the most passionately contested. Drought has become an increasingly extreme problem in many parts of the world, and it is predicted that 60% of the major cities in Europe will run short of water in the next decade. In industrialized countries per capita water usage continues to rise intractably, despite strenuous efforts by environmentalists and resource managers to encourage conservation. Conflicts over water and environmental degradation from the overuse of resources are intensifying. Water is not merely a physical resource: in every cultural context it is densely encoded with social, spiritual, political and environmental meanings, and these have a powerful effect upon patterns of water use and upon the relationships between water users and suppliers. This book makes an in-depth analysis of the meanings of water and considers how they are experienced and formed at an individual and societal level. Focusing on the River Stour in Dorset, Strang draws upon a wide range of data: ethnographic research, cultural mapping, local archives and folklore. She explores the controversies surrounding water ownership and management, and the social and political questions raised by water privatization in the UK. The topical nature of these issues and their global relevance make this book a vital contribution to contemporary research on water and an essential read for anyone with an interest in getting under the surface of one of the worlds most important social and environmental issues.

- What makes people care about the environment? - Why and how do different cultural groups value land in different ways? With increasing international concern about green issues, and the apparent failure of mechanistic solutions to complex problems, Uncommon Ground provides a timely understanding of the cultural values that underpin human-environmental relations. Through a comparison of two very different groups, the Aboriginal people and the white cattle farmers in Far North Queensland, Uncommon Ground explores how the human-environmental relationship is culturally constructed. This highly topical study also examines the long-term conflicts over land in Australia, which have brought to the surface each group's environmental values. The author considers how these values are acquired, and the universal and cultural factors that lead to their development. Major emphasis is put on the cultural forms that create and express environmental values for the Aborigines and the white pastoralists, such as: - historical background - land use and economic modes - socio-spatial organization - language, knowledge and methods of socialization - oral and visual representation - cosmological beliefs and systems of law This book is very accessible and should be widely used on anthropology, environmental studies and geography courses.]

- What makes people care about the environment? - Why and how do different cultural groups value land in different ways? With increasing international concern about green issues, and the apparent failure of mechanistic solutions to complex problems, Uncommon Ground provides a timely understanding of the cultural values that underpin human-environmental relations. Through a comparison of two very different groups, the Aboriginal people and the white cattle farmers in Far North Queensland, Uncommon Ground explores how the human-environmental relationship is culturally constructed. This highly topical study also examines the long-term conflicts over land in Australia, which have brought to the surface each group's environmental values. The author considers how these values are acquired, and the universal and cultural factors that lead to their development. Major emphasis is put on the cultural forms that create and express environmental values for the Aborigines and the white pastoralists, such as: - historical background - land use and economic modes - socio-spatial organization - language, knowledge and methods of socialization - oral and visual representation - cosmological beliefs and systems of law This book is very accessible and should be widely used on anthropology, environmental studies and geography courses.]

In a world of finite resources, expanding populations and widening structural inequalities, the ownership of things is increasingly contested. Not only are the commons being rapidly enclosed and privatized, but the very idea of what can be owned is expanding, generating conflicts over the ownership of resources, ideas, culture, people, and even parts of people. Understanding processes of ownership and appropriation is not only central to anthropological theorizing but also has major practical applications, for policy, legislative development and conflict resolution.Ownership and Appropriation significantly extends anthropology's long-term concern with property by focusing on everyday notions and acts of owning and appropriating. The chapters document the relationship between ownership, subjectivities and personhood; they demonstrate the critical consequences of materiality and immateriality on what is owned; and they examine the social relations of property. By approaching ownership as social communication and negotiation, the text points to a more dynamic and processual understanding of property, ownership and appropriation.

What is a lighthouse? What does it mean? What does it do? This book shows how exchanging knowledge across disciplinary boundaries can transform our thinking. Adopting an unconventional structure, this book involves the reader in a multivocal conversation between scholars, poets and artists. Seen through their individual perspectives, lighthouses appear as signals of safety, beacons of enlightenment, phallic territorial markers, and memorials of historical relationships with the sea. However, the interdisciplinary conversation also reveals underlying and sometimes unexpected connections. It elucidates the human and non-human evolutionary adaptations that use light for signalling and warning; the visual languages created by regularity and synchronicity in pulses of light; how lighthouses have generated a whole 'family' of related material objects and technologies; and the way that light flows between social and material worlds.

Around the world, intensifying development and human demands for fresh water are placing unsustainable pressures on finite resources. Countries are waging war over transboundary rivers, and rural and urban communities are increasingly divided as irrigation demands compete with domestic desires. Marginal groups are losing access to water as powerful elites protect their own interests, and entire ecosystems are being severely degraded. These problems are particularly evident in Australia, with its industrialised economy and arid climate. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to examine the social and cultural complexities that underlie people's engagements with water. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in two major Australian river catchments (the Mitchell River in Cape York, and the Brisbane River in southeast Queensland), this book examines their major water using and managing groups: indigenous communities, farmers, industries, recreational and domestic water users, and environmental organisations. It explores the issues that shape their different beliefs, values and practices in relation to water, and considers the specifically cultural or sub-cultural meanings that they encode in their material surroundings. Through an analysis of each group's diverse efforts to 'garden the world', it provides insights into the complexities of human-environmental relationships.

In two volumes, the SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology provides the definitive overview of contemporary research in the discipline. It explains the what, where, and how of current and anticipated work in Social Anthropology. With 80 authors, contributing more than 60 chapters, this is the most comprehensive and up-to-date statement of research in Social Anthropology available and the essential point of departure for future projects. The Handbook is divided into four sections: -Part I: Interfaces examines Social Anthropology's disciplinary connections, from Art and Literature to Politics and Economics, from Linguistics to Biomedicine, from History to Media Studies. -Part II: Places examines place, region, culture, and history, from regional, area studies to a globalized world -Part III: Methods examines issues of method; from archives to war zones, from development projects to art objects, and from ethics to comparison -Part IV: Futures anticipates anthropologies to come: in the Brain Sciences; in post-Development; in the Body and Health; and in new Technologies and Materialities Edited by the leading figures in social anthropology, the Handbook includes a substantive introduction by Richard Fardon, a think piece by Jean and John Comaroff, and a concluding last word on futures by Marilyn Strathern. The authors - each at the leading edge of the discipline - contribute in-depth chapters on both the foundational ideas and the latest research. Comprehensive and detailed, this magisterial Handbook overviews the last 25 years of the social anthropological imagination. It will speak to scholars in Social Anthropology and its many related disciplines.