Anthropology Books

Book SynopsisThe India Mosaic Searching for an Identity... is essentially a collection of writings borne out of deliberate thinking to pen down ones thoughts on the 'Idea' of India. The authors/contributors to this volume together represent a varied cross-section of India's intelligentsia. The 'Idea' of India has been interpreted by different people in different ways. Perhaps there is no single 'Idea' of India at all. Whatever be the interpretation (or interpretations) of Idea of India there is an unambiguous sense that there is an attempt to change the Idea of India...Consciously, to any Indian, the Idea of India triggers a lot of thoughts, some overwhelming feelings maybe, but far too many questions. Perhaps for most, there are not any easy answers. There is plenty of food for thought in these papers about what India stands for and about what it should stand for. The world and India are bullish about the Indian economic performance in the next 20 or even 50 years. A recent Goldman Sachs report (""Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050"") is but one instance. The economy is the easy part. But India stands for much more than the overall economic performance alone. There is much in this volume for India's citizens to think about.

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Book SynopsisContributors explore various forms of shamanism worldwide, comparing practices and roles. Topics include Zande itchdoctors, Bayaka ork, Todas priests, Ainu shamanism, and Guajiro shaman's body. Discusses shamanistic symptoms, symbols, and genuine magic expression.

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Book SynopsisIndigenous societies globally blend faith and economics through rituals and communal practices. Examples include fishing magic in Gold Coast, labor and women's rites in Australia, and remuneration to supernatural beings among the Apache, showcasing spirituality's impact on economic behaviors and social structures.

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Book SynopsisThis book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections suchas marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.

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Book SynopsisThe book critically reviews tribal development in India since British period, focusing on West Bengal. It highlights the failure of development programs and discusses new issues for planned development. Useful for social scientists, researchers, planners, administrators, and students.

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Book SynopsisModernization of Tribal Communities in Assam through adoption of new technology has led to significant improvements in the standard of living for the Mishing and Karbi tribes. This study highlights the positive changes in their mode of life and challenges the stereotype of tribal communities being resistant to modernity.

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Book SynopsisThe work originally published in 1915 is a sociological and anthropological study relating to Musalmans located between the Indus and the Sutlej rivers to the south of the main Himalayan range in the undivided Punjab and North Western Frontier Provinces. It studies the divisions, origin and ancestry of various Punjabi Musalman tribes, sketches the history of Punjab starting from Alexander''s invasion and provides useful statistical data regarding the population and geographical distribution of the tribes besides tracing the history of Islamic religion and its doctrines. It covers their characteristics, religious observances, festivals, food habits, customs and ceremonies relating to marriage and burial, language, manners, gestures, laws of inheritance, amusement, games and superstitions, etc. In addition to the Punjabi Musalman tribes described in details, the book also provides a very useful table of other tribes classed as Rajputs and Jats in the Census of 1911, indicating their names, habitat and population.

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Book SynopsisThe book traces the form, direction and dynamics of the working class rural women''s participation in the peasant movements in West Bengal. The study focuses on the radical (viz. the Tebhaga 1946-47 and Naxalite movements 1967-71) and the reformative' peasant movements of 1970s and 1980s. Based on solid empirical and historical data, this study delineates important commonalities and variations in women's participation in these movements. The author lays his foundation on a sound theoretical perspective and substantiates his conclusions by numerous case studies. He argues that within the ideological framework of the radical peasant movements women are able to manifest their latent discontent not only against the landowners, but also against patriarchy, economic insecurity, restricted access to property, lower social status, illiteracy, and other forms of marginalisation and subjugation that formed the basis of their accumulated deprivation syndrome. However, the ideological frame of reference of the contemporary reformative movements offers very little scope to rural women to manifest such latent discontent.

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Book SynopsisThe state of Meghalaya, formed on 21 January 1972, is a state of fascinating socio-cultural significance. Its heritage can be traced from the prehistoric times of Stone Age upto the present. Though comprising mainly of the matrilineal Khasi, Garo, and Jaintia tribes the state also houses many other lesser known communities such as the Hajong, Sakachep, Biate, Koch, Dalu, Margnar and the Nepali. All these communities find voice in this volume. The Cultural Heritage of Meghalaya looks at the state of Meghalaya exhaustively from the perspective of heritage documentation and maintenance.

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Book SynopsisThe problem of social change in the largely traditional societies of South Asia has been the focus of wide ranging studies by sociologists, yet the implications of change for the place of women in the social, cultural, economic and political life of these societies in transition is a neglected field of sociological inquiry. The Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India notes the paucity of data' on important social and economic variables affecting the presonality structure and patterns of social behaviour of Indian women. This landmark book offers a fresh perspective on women and social change through empirical studies of the interaction between the traditional images of women and their new social roles in the family and the wider society. The first section of the book presents an overview of the actual situation of women in India and outlines a realistic scenario for the integration of women in the process of national development.

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Book SynopsisSince its start in 1967 Ethnologia Europaea has acquired a central position in the international cooperation between ethnologists in the different European countries. It is, however, a journal of topical interest not only for ethnologists but also for anthropologists, social historians and others studying the social and cultural forms of everyday life in recent and historical European societies. This journal appears twice a year, sometimes as a thematic issue.

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Book SynopsisThis volume starts out with two contrasting studies of monuments. How does the seemingly stability of stone and bronze hide a constantly changing cultural use? Anne Eriksen looks at the history of ruins in Norway. The murmur of ruins turns out to be a speech of modernity, a way of emotionalising place and history. Viktoriya Hryaban discusses the fate of socialist monuments in Ukraine and shows how the attempts to create alternative post-socialist memorials reproduce a traditional Soviet cultural grammar. Lace is a dominating decorative element in many Turkish Dutch homes. It has become a sign of Turkishness but as Hilje van der Horst points out, people''s relations to this mundane domestic element mirror some important conflicts and ideas about modernity and ethnicity. From the cultural media of monuments and lace, the discussion moves on to two more classic mass media and their role in identity politics. Stijn Reijnders explores a popular Dutch game show that has managed to survive for decades, becoming something of a national institution for some, an example of an outmoded genre for others. How does the involvement mirror ideas of an imagined national community? Finally, Silke Meyer looks at an 18th century national stereotype of The German quack in English popular debate and mass media. How did this caricature of Germanness become an alter ego of the English?

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Book SynopsisArticles included: Emotional Geography. Authenticity, Embodiment and Cultural Heritage; Anniversaries and Jubilees. Changing Celebratory Customs in Modern Times; The Meaning of Weaving. Textiles in a Museum Magazine; Contested Modernities. Politics, Culture and Urbanisation in Portugal: A Case Study from the Greater Lisbon Area; The Outsider''s Gaze as Part of the Methodological Toolkit?; Reflections on the Research Project the Musikantenstadl; The Camino de Santiago. The Interplay of European Heritage and New Traditions.

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Book SynopsisA rapidly growing number of double homes connect different parts of Europe in new ways. The second home can be a cottage in the woods, an apartment in the Costa del Sol or a restored farm house in Tuscany. However, other forms of double homes must be added to these landscapes of leisure. There are long distance commuters who spend most of their week in an overnight flat, in a caravan on a dreary parking lot or at a construction site. Economic migrants dream of a house ''back home'' for vacations or retirement. Dual homes come in all shapes and sizes -- from the caravans of touring circus artists to people turning sailboats into a different kind of domestic space. This special issue of Ethnologic Europaea captures some dimensions of lives that are anchored in two different homes. How are such lives organised in time and space in terms of identification, belonging and emotion? How do they, in very concrete terms, render material transnational lives? The next issue of the journal (2008:1) will take such a comparative perspective into another direction as the authors will consider different kinds of research strategies to achieve European comparisons and to gain new cultural perspectives on European societies and everyday life.

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Book SynopsisWhat is Europe? Where is Europe? And what is Europe in the discipline of European ethnology? This issue of Ethnologic Europaea celebrates the journal''s 40th birthday by looking at future paths for research on Europe. For a long time the disciplines grouped under the label of European ethnology were mainly national ethnologies. The need for European com-parisons lived more in the Sunday rhetoric of the discipline than in actual research, but with a new interest in transnational processes the perspectives have widened. The processes of economic unification also gave rise to research on facets of a Euro-pean culture, conditioned, for instance, by the administrative implementation of European economic and, increasingly, cultural policies. Local, regional and national cultural dimen-sions do not vanish in this development, of course, and neither do borders and boundaries, physical and mental. Processes of EU integration as well as globalisation may both weaken and strengthen national and regional borders, as we have seen during the last decades, but such developments call for a rethinking of Europe as a research field and also a questioning of ideas about Europe or European cultural homogeneity. The EU rhetoric about unity hides a more complex picture, where European integration and disintegration emerges in often surprising settings and forms.

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Book SynopsisThough a seemingly stable concept in ethnological work, "family" as a lived reality took and takes on innumerable forms shaped by economic pressures, mobility and attendant social transformations, and biotechnical interventions. The case studies in this special issue focus on the ways in which social actors seek to concretize as well as control what family could or should be. While (bio-)technological innovation proves vital to fulfill traditional imaginaries of a nuclear family, communication technology is a key to keep transnationally situated families in contact. Still, transnational work opportunities conflict with traditional imaginaries of the wholesome families and impact particularly women seeking to cross both borders and established family norms. Popular genealogy as a hobby and passion uncovers evidence that counters established narratives: instead of long-term sedentary family lineages, evidence of migration muddies the waters. Family metaphor, finally, serves, in one of the case studies, as vocabulary to materialize imaginary kinship ties among nuns. The five case studies are complemented by four commentaries, exploring paths along which these themes can be developed further.

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Book SynopsisEthnicized border economies and tourist emotions, urban witchcraft and working lives, predictive genetic testing and vaccination programmes - the present issue of Ethnologia Europaea assembles a range of topics that demonstrate the vitality of the field in highly diverse arenas. David Picard probes the personal transformations of Germans touring the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion. Shifts and continuities in the border economies of the sub-Carpathian Hungarian social world are explored in Anne Marie Losonczy's contribution. Manuela Cunha and Jean-Yves Durand examine vaccine acceptability and the production of dissent as it emerges in routine vaccination in French and Portuguese settings, whereas Niclas Hagen traces the impact of potential genetic knowledge, taking a case of Huntington's disease as his point of departure. Scrutinizing the diversity of work lives, Irene Götz questions the viability of the term post-Fordism in the new ethnography of work. Victoria Hegner analyses the ways in which neo-pagan witches interact with urban terrain. Finally, Carina Ren and Morten Krogh Petersen take a look at the sprouting cross-fertilizations between ethnology and Actor-Network Theory and how these intersections impact the study of culture.

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Book SynopsisDisorder and order are among the principles through which the articles in this issue are connected. Peter Jan Margry grasps the exuberant excesses surrounding the Dutch monarch's birthday with the term "mobocracy" and sees in the suspension of rules a means to reconcile Dutch republicanism with the anachronism of a monarchical system. Ongoing disorder of a rather different nature is experienced by migrant workers from Poland in Denmark. Niels Jul Nielsen and Marie Sandberg accompany them at work and in their different home settings and analyse the divergent interplay of the Polish labour niche and family dynamics on different constructions of "orderly work conditions". Stefan Groth uncovers the structuring power of new tools and events to measure performance in recreational cycling; competitive norms are shown to permeate a leisure activity. Old age, too, is not free from the structuring arm of social and health regimes. Through his analysis of billiards a game favoured by the older men he studies Aske Juul Lassen critiques aging policies striving to "activate" the elderly and overlooking the rhythms inherent to a traditional game and activity. The issue concludes with Tuuli Lähdesmäki's comparison of how local heritage actors choose to narrate the transnationally launched European Heritage Label. Within an initiative to foster Europeanization, she finds actors formulating European identities in different moulds.

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Book SynopsisThis issue opens with Katarzyna Wolanik Boström and Magnus Öhlander's inquiry into mobile physicians and their pragmatic use of proto-ethnographic insights so as to facilitate their day to day work with culturally diverse patients. Gabriella Nilsson uncovers how school nurses, too, habitually draw on their knowledge of class and family background while implementing normative medical guidelines on childhood obesity. Maria Zackariasson seeks to show how members in a faith-based youth organization experience and handle the pull and push of faith and peer group sociability. Ewa Klekot examines different traces and registers of memorialization of recent Polish history in two districts of Warsaw. Disciplinary memory is augmented through Konrad J. Kuhn's analysis of Swiss scholars' participation in the Europeanization of Volkskunde. With Laura Hirvi's observations among young Finnish artists in Berlin, the issue concludes with another set of transnationally mobile actors.

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Book SynopsisContributions to this special issue take a back-door approach to the study of cultural practices by exploring various modes and forms of silence and silencing in daily life. Joining Gregory Bateson and scholars inspired by his concept of noncommunication, the articles examine situations and circumstances where communication is avoided, or deemed undesirable, because it would somehow alter the nature of the idea, relationship or situation in question. Authors also draw attention to the unspoken and the unspeakable as they emerge in ethnographic fieldwork and the research process, discussing the challenges of doing fieldwork on silence and pushing the boundaries of silence as an analytical category. Silence emerges from this special issue as a productive and performative force constitutive of agency, power and the margins of society and language. Case studies from Estonia, Finland and the north-western and north-eastern part of European Russia trace the roles silence plays in "doing old age" (Karoliina Ojanen), "doing family" (Pihla Maria Siim), and sustaining co-existence in societies divided by ethnic lines (Elo-Hanna Seljamaa). By exploring the symbolic meanings of silence among Evangelicals, two articles (Tuija Hovi and Piret Koosa) add to the growing body of scholarship that questions the fundamental role of language in Evangelical Christianity and seeks to broaden perspectives on understanding conversion. This volume also includes one open issue contribution by Anne Eriksen, who on the basis of British and Nordic examples explores the entangled genealogies of the notions of history and tradition as the twin products of a uniquely modern temporality.

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Book SynopsisOn the occasion of the 50th year since the publication of the first issue of Ethnologia Europaea in 1967, this issue is dedicated to reflection on the past half-century. It presents five articles, one from each decade of the journal's publication, on the one hand showcasing classic articles and on the other highlighting the shifts and re-orientations the journal has undergone along the way. These changes are addressed in the comments on each article by a wide range of scholars as well as in the overarching reflections on 50 years of Ethnologia Europaea by two of its former editors, Regina F. Bendix and Orvar Löfgren.

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Book SynopsisThis issue opens with an in-depth analysis by Antti Lindfors of the ways that satire is intertwined with moral understandings, bringing recent discussions from the anthropology of ethics as well as emotions to the stand-up comedian's stage in Finland and elsewhere. Ethical issues are also at stake in Britta Lundgrens's examination of how Swedish health-care providers involved in the threat of an epidemic as well as adverse side-effects of vaccinations face double-bind situations and deal with their own doubts. Then Niels Jul Nielsen and Janus Jul Olsen explain how the neoliberal transformations in Denmark's social welfare system have resulted from the loss of a perception of the working class as a potential threat to societal stability and peace. Anastasiya Astapova's article which provides the inspiration for this issue's cover art, looks at the folklore of Potemkinism in Belarus, local attitudes and narratives around the "façade" performance. And finally, Jernej Mleku explores the symbolic complexity and material significance of the burek in Solvenia, one of the country's most popular and yet disrespected foods.

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Book SynopsisIn many Mediterranean countries we observe newcomers to the political arena: new forms of social networking, growing opposition, and protest articulated by local communities or locally active social movements. In this special issue we present fresh research on localized practices of resistance by protest groups, solidarity initiatives, and cultural projects, which have arisen in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Based on ethnological fieldwork, the volume offers insights into the media-based protest against the commodification of the historic Marseille district Panier (Philip Cartelli); urban gardening in Ljubljana as a practice opposing the growing neoliberal market economy (Saa Poljak Istenič); and the movement Genuino Clandestino, a solidarity network of small-scale farmers in Italy (Alexander Koensler). Three case studies deal with social movement in Greece: a solidarity network in Volos, where citizens developed an alternative exchange and trading system (Andreas Streinzer); grassroots mobilizations as resistant practices in the inner urban neighbourhood of Exarchia in Athens (Monia Cappuccini); and finally rural solidarity networks on the Peloponnese peninsula (James Verinis). A comparative discussion of Mediterranean protest movements (Jutta Lauth Bacas and Marion Näser-Lather) identifies underlying common features in these clearly different, yet relatable practices of protest: among others, the major role of face-to-face interaction and mutual trust.

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Book SynopsisThe object of the present work is to develop a method for a structural analysis of European chain and round dance patterns with a view to establishing a categorisation of these dances according to their basic step patterns. This attempt has never been made before as surprisingly few works have been published on this subject. The first of the three volumes contains an introduction to chain and round dances in Europe and describes the collected data used for the analysis. The second volume explains how to read the catalogues and presents the groupings of the material. The third volume contains the complete material as tables and examples. The study concludes that a series of main categories can be established on the basis of the theoretical models suggested here.

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Book SynopsisThe language described in this monograph is spoken by a small hilltribe in Northern Indochina. Its existence has attracted considerable attention because of the legendary and intriguing primitiveness of the Mlabri or ''Spirits of the Yellow Leaves'', as they are traditionally called, but reliable information about the cultural heritage and particularly the language is sparse. This is true in particular of an ethnic subgroup whose culture and language are now close to extinction: the group is referred to as the ''Minor Mlabri''. This monograph is based on field notes from 1988 and later years in which the author visited the ''Minor-Mlabri''. The Mlabri are traditionally hunter-gatherers and seem to have been so for a long time. Until recently this was more or less the lifestyle of the small group under study here. They now associate with Hmongs in remote villages because they were for several years trapped in the war zone between Laos and Thailand and the few survivors of the ''Minor-Mlabri'' had to settle down in safer environments. Deforestation has made it increasingly difficult for them to live their traditional life in the area where they belong. Up to now, the Mlabri language (in all its varieties) has been unknown.

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Book SynopsisEthnologia Europaea (Volume 24/1) - Journal of European Ethnology

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Book SynopsisEthnologia Europaea (Volume 26/1) - Journal of European Ethnology

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Book SynopsisEthnologia Europaea (Volume 24/2) - Journal of European Ethnology

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Book SynopsisEthnologia Europaea is an interdisciplinary, peer reviewed journal with a focus on European cultures and societies. It carries material of great interests not only for European ethnologists and anthropologists but also sociologists, social historians and scholars involved in cultural studies. The journal was started in 1967 and since then it has acquired a central position in the international and interdisciplinary cooperation between scholars inside and outside Europe. Ethnologia Europaea is an A ranked journal according to the European Science Foundation journal evaluation (European Reference Index for the Humanities initial list).

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Book SynopsisEthnologia Europaea is an interdisciplinary, peer reviewed journal with a focus on European cultures and societies. It carries material of great interests not only for European ethnologists and anthropologists but also sociologists, social historians and scholars involved in cultural studies. The journal was started in 1967 and since then it has acquired a central position in the international and interdisciplinary cooperation between scholars inside and outside Europe. Ethnologia Europaea is an A ranked journal according to the European Science Foundation journal evaluation (European Reference Index for the Humanities initial list).

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