Social and cultural anthropology Books

Book SynopsisIn Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World archaeologist Catherine M. Cameron provides an eye-opening comparative study of the profound impact that captives of warfare and raiding have had on small- scale societies through time. Cameron provides a new point of orientation for archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars by illuminating the impact that captive-taking and enslavement have had on cultural change, with important implications for understanding the past. Focusing primarily on indigenous societies in the Americas while extending the comparative reach to include Europe, Africa, and Island Southeast Asia, Cameron draws on ethnographic, ethnohistoric, historic, and archaeological data to examine the roles that captives played in small-scale societies. In such societies, captives represented an almost universal social category consisting predominantly of women and children and constituting 10 to 50 percent of the population in Trade Review“In this ambitious and learned work, award-winning archaeologist Catherine Cameron explores how violence against the few may transform the cultures of the many.”—James Brooks, author of Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands “[Captives] could have a significant impact on archaeological studies.”—Eric E. Bowne, Journal of Anthropological Research "Cameron accomplishes exactly what she set out to do: opening up a new space for investigation and laying out an agenda for further research. . . . She makes it clear that Captives is intended not to be the final word but, rather, the opening salvo. Archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and ethnohistorians should heed her call."—Matthew Kruer, Ethnohistory"This is a well-written text. . . . Equally accessible to advanced undergraduate students and researchers, with a wide range of studies and well-structured approach to captives as social beings that are organized in a coherent manner throughout. It should be the starting point for anyone seeking to understand the various facets of captive-taking and the lives of captives in small-scale societies."—Liza Gijanto, Historical Archaeology"[Captives] is useful for scholars in many fields interested in the topic, for classroom use, and the public. It is a significant contribution to the topic of captives and slaves, which remains urgent as we struggle with our own national legacy of slavery, as well human trafficking across the world and down the street."—Kenneth M. Ames, Oregon Historical Quarterly“This moving book helps us understand: What was it like to be a slave? A slave-owner? How does slavery affect society? It demonstrates that archaeology—the social science of the past—can ask big questions about the human experience.”—Michelle Hegmon, professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University and editor of The Archaeology of the Human Experience“Captives challenges archaeologists to broaden their scope of inquiry to recognize the temporal depth, geographical breadth, and nearly universal presence of captives in small-scale societies of the past. Catherine Cameron’s comparative approach to captives lays the groundwork, methodologically and theoretically, for understanding the lives of captives, their social locations, and their significance as agents of change in societies of all scales throughout human prehistory and, indeed, into the present.”—Brenda J. Bowser, associate professor of anthropology at California State University–Fullerton, coeditor of Cultural Transmission and Material Culture: Breaking Down Boundaries "Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World challenges archaeologists to consider captive-taking, an ancient and almost universal practice in human history, as a significant mode of cultural transmission and a source of culture change. . . . Here Cameron provides a framework that enables archaeologists to investigate the nature and scale of the roles that captives have played in small-scale societies."—David H. Dye, American Antiquity"Captives is foremost an invitation to begin to see the past in a new way—to make visible individuals who have long been made invisible in archaeological interpretations but have nonetheless been there all along."cLydia Wilson Marshall, KIVA: Journal of Southwestern Anthropology and History"This book will be an eye-opener for archaeology."—European Journal of ArchaeologyTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments 1. The Captive in Space, Time, and Mind 2. Captive Taking in Global Perspective 3. The Captive as Social Person 4. Captives and the Creation of Power 5. Captives, Social Boundaries, and Ethnogenesis 6. Captives and Cultural Transmission 7. Captives in Prehistory Notes References Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisRegna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the theoretical orientation of the Americanist tradition, centered on the work of Franz Boas, and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology reveals the theory schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell’s fifty-year career entails foundational writings in the four fields of the discipline: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology. Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Claude Lévi-Strauss, Franz Boas, Benjamin Lee Whorf, John Wesley Powell, Frederica de Laguna, Dell Hymes, George Stocking Jr., and Anthony F.C. Wallace, as well as nineteenth-century Native language classifications, ethnography, etTrade Review"Assessing and reassessing the field with 50 years of experience and skill allows Darnell to produce sage insights and demonstrate her progressive thinking on critical anthropological themes, such as the effects of social networks on theory."—N. J. Parezo, Choice“Regna Darnell invites the reader to listen in on the intimate, collaborative, and frequently contentious conversations that formed the basis for North American anthropology. We are gifted with a clearly written and revelatory unpacking of the connections, alliances, and discordant moments of an anthropology practice grounded in humanistic and scholarly precepts. This timely critical history promises to reintroduce anthropology as a fundamentally humanistic scholarly endeavor whose practitioners continue the long tradition of scholarship in the service of social justice.”—Bernard Perley, author of Defying Maliseet Language Death: Emergent Vitalities of Language, Culture, and Identity in Eastern CanadaTable of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgments Editorial Method Introduction List of Abbreviations 1. What Is History? An Anthropologist’s Eye View 2. Applied Anthropology: Disciplinary Oxymoron? 3. The Anthropological Concept of Culture at the End of the Boasian Century 4. Calibrating Discourses across Cultures in Search of Common Ground 5. “Keeping the Faith”: A Legacy of Native American Ethnography, Ethnohistory, and Psychology 6. Anthropological Approaches to Human Nature, Cultural Relativism, and Ethnocentrism 7. Text, Symbol, and Tradition in Northwest Coast Ethnology from Franz Boas to Claude Lévi-Strauss 8. Mind, Body, and the Native Point of View: Boasian Theory at the Centennial of The Mind of Primitive Man 9. Franz Boas as Theorist: A Mentalist Paradigm for the Study of Mind, Body, Environment, and Culture 10. The Powell Classification of American Indian Languages 11. The Revision of the Powell Classification 12. Désveaux, Two Traditions of Anthropology in Mirror: American Geologisms and French Biologism 13. Rationalism, the (Sapir-)Whorf Hypothesis, and Assassination by Anachronism 14. The Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss 15. Obituary for Frederica de Laguna (1906–2004) 16. Obituary for Dell Hathaway Hymes (1927–2009) 17. Obituary for George W. Stocking Jr. (1928–2013) 18. Review of Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in Self-Deconstruction, by George W. Stocking Jr. 19. Obituary for Anthony F. C. Wallace (1923–2015) Index

Read more less

Book Synopsis National Races explores how politics interacted with transnational science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This interaction produced powerful, racialized national identity discourses whose influence continues to resonate in today’s culture and politics. Ethnologists, anthropologists, and raciologists compared modern physical types with ancient skeletal finds to unearth the deep prehistoric past and true nature of nations. These scientists understood certain physical types to be what Richard McMahon calls “national races,” or the ageless biological essences of nations. Contributors to this volume address a central tension in anthropological race classification. On one hand, classifiers were nationalists who explicitly or implicitly used race narratives to promote political agendas. Their accounts of prehistoric geopolitics treated “national races” as the proxies of nations in order to legitimize present-day geopolitiTrade Review"This major scholarly collection explores the history of physical anthropology from intentionally unusual angles that challenge intuitive assumptions. It also charts engagements and altercations with humanistic ethnological scholarship, including folklore, amid a host of revealingly varied nationalist aspirations."—Michael Herzfeld, Journal of Folklore Research"A rich collection about the rise of physical anthropology, ethnology, and race science in the 19th century, National Races emphasizes the importance of placing these disciplines in a transnational, national, and imperial context. By highlighting forgotten mid-19th-century debates about mono- and polygenism, and employing case studies focused on Italy, Greece, Poland, Russia, Korea, and Yugoslavia to decenter the Western European core-focused narratives of these disciplines’ emergence, the volume recovers a rich set of liberal, transnational, and local ideas in their development, thus challenging teleological narratives of a straight road from turn-of-the-century craniometry and serology to the eugenic practices and exclusionary biological racism of interwar fascist regimes."—A. Vari, Choice“In important ways, both implicitly and explicitly, Richard McMahon demonstrates that the fear of immigration and anti-immigration policies in Europe and the United States are tied to previous fears and anxiety about the construction of national races. McMahon provides an extensive overview and impeccable research to describe the transnational science of racial classification during a pivotal century in the modern era.”—Lee Baker, Mrs. Alexander Hehmeyer Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University“National Races is innovative and promising—and fills a significant gap in the international literature. It builds on studies of physical anthropology, nationalism (or national identity politics), imperialism, modernity, and warfare and attempts to bring these into connection. There is every reason to believe that the book will be a standard work in an interdisciplinary and transnational field of studies that has hardly been circumscribed and never been covered in any detail.”—Han F. Vermeulen, Max Planck Institute for Social AnthropologyTable of ContentsList of Figures Series Editors’ Introduction Introduction: Political Identities and Transnational Science Richard McMahon 1. Transnational Network, Transnational Narratives: Scientific Race Classifications and National Identities Richard McMahon 2. The Destiny of Races “Not Yet Called to Civilization”: Giustiniano Nicolucci’s Critique of American Polygenism and Defense of Liberal Racism Maria Sophia Quine 3. A Matter of Place, Space, and People: Cracow Anthropology, 1870–1920 Maria Rhode 4. Yet Another Greek Tragedy? Physical Anthropology and the Construction of National Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century Ageliki Lefkaditou 5. Jews between Volk and Rasse Amos Morris-Reich 6. Classifying Hybridity in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Russian Imperial Anthropology Marina Mogilner 7. Physical Anthropology in Colonial Korea: Science and Colonial Order, 1916–1940 Arnaud Nanta 8. Racial Anthropology on the Eastern Front, 1912 to the Mid-1920s Maciej Górny 9. Racial Politics as a Multiethnic Pavilion: Yugoslavs, Dinarics, and the Search for a Synthetic Identity in the 1920s and 1930s Rory Yeomans Conclusion: From National Races to National Genomes Catherine Nash Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisCharles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum In Race ExpertsLinda Kim examines the complicated and ambivalent role played by sculptor Malvina Hoffman in the Races of Mankind series created for the Chicago Field Museum in 1930. Although Hoffman had training in fine arts and was a protégé of Auguste Rodin and Ivan Meštrovic, she had no background in anthropology or museum exhibits. Nonetheless, the Field Museum commissioned her to make a series of life-size sculptures for the museum’s new racial exhibition, which became the largest exhibit on race ever installed in a museum and one of the largest sculptural commissions ever undertaken by a single artist. Hoffman’s Races of Mankind exhibit was realized as a series of 104 bronzes of racial types from around the world, a unique visual mediation between anthropological expertise and lay ideaTrade Review"Kim's book, well researched and eloquently presented, is a necessary corrective and intervention on the interwar period, when scientists and cultural anthropologists were theorizing race in new, more complex ways."—K. P. Buick, Choice"Throughout her book, Kim’s analysis of the intersection of 1930s “race experts”—scientists, artists, and lay persons—is rich and insightful and it has relevance for understanding the processes through which race is constructed today. It is worth a close reading."—Dr. Mary Jo Arnoldi, New England Quarterly“Race Experts performs a great service to students of American race and racism, revealing in detail the way that twentieth-century race ideology was produced at the nexus of formal systems of thought, aesthetics, and entertainment culture. . . . Meticulously researched and brilliantly narrated, the story Kim tells of the history of race stubbornly asserts itself as contemporary critique. Along the way, Kim makes plain the significant role that world’s fairs and international expositions have played in the staging of race and making of modernity.”—Tracey Jean Boisseau, associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Purdue University and author of White Queen: The Imperial Origins of American Feminist Identity “Innovative and well-documented. . . . Kim deftly explores such important questions as the agency of the artist and her models, scientific ideas of race, and the viewing public’s racialism. It is an ambitious argument in the best sense.”—Alice L. Conklin, Distinguished University Scholar and professor of history at Ohio State University “The question of how and why scientific expertise fails to dislodge popular, antithetical views is very important. Linda Kim’s argument that art served as a mediator is an interesting and original approach to the issue of how scientific knowledge is represented to the public and the vexed relationship between the two. This interdisciplinary work will likely attract readers in many fields, including art history, anthropology, history, and museum studies.”—Julia E. Liss, professor of history at Scripps CollegeTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Series Editors’ Introduction Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One. Racial Know-How: Expertise versus Common Sense Chapter Two. Mediations: Art in the Natural History Museum Chapter Three. Racial Portraiture: Between Typologies and Common Sense Chapter Four. Racial Homelands: Popular Geography and Local Races Chapter Five. Micro-Expertise: Passing for Indian, Passing for White Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis ethnography explores ways in which Amazonian Kichwa narrative, ritual, and concepts of place link extended kin groups into a regional society within Amazonian Ecuador.Trade Review"The text, supplemented with copious endnotes, a substantial index, and a short glossary, will be broadly useful to social scientists focusing on topics relating to kinship and indigenous societies and more specifically valuable to Andeanists."—D. L. Browman, Choice"This historically informed ethnography is a major achievement. It is hoped that the book will stimulate further such approaches in the future."—Mark Harris, Hispanic American Historical Review"Reeve's book provides the next generation of ethnographers with solid ground upon which to build a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of Amazonian kinship and relations over time and space."—Christina Callicott, American Anthropologist“Amazonian Kichwa of the Curaray River offers a way to understand both small-scale Indigenous life and large-scale Indigenous geocultural relationships in a unified framework. This is a major contribution to the field of Indigenous studies, Latin American studies, and Amazonian studies. It will become a must-read.”—Norman E. Whitten Jr., author of Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia“Amazonian Kichwa of the Curaray River presents an original and nuanced argument about kinship that shows how Amazonian people live through relational systems of kinship that span space, time, and ecological relations with the landscape. . . . This book is based on a lifetime of careful study, thought, and fieldwork. . . . The writing style is clear, fluid, and compelling.”—Michael Uzendoski, coauthor of The Ecology of the Spoken Word: Amazonian Storytelling and the Shamanism among the Napo RunaTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Landscape and Kinship in a Regional Society2. Ayllu and Llacta3. Runa on the Curaray River4. The Ritual of Community 5. Ayllu across the Regional Society6. Healing, Song, and Narrative7. The Enduring Regional SocietyGlossaryNotes ReferencesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisRegna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the theoretical orientation of the Americanist tradition, centered on the work of Franz Boas, and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology reveals the theory schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell’s fifty-year career entails foundational writings in the four fields of the discipline: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology. Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Claude Lévi-Strauss, Franz Boas, Benjamin Lee Whorf, John Wesley Powell, Frederica de Laguna, Dell Hymes, George Stocking Jr., and Anthony F.C. Wallace, as well as nineteenth-century Native language classifications, ethnography, etTrade Review"Assessing and reassessing the field with 50 years of experience and skill allows Darnell to produce sage insights and demonstrate her progressive thinking on critical anthropological themes, such as the effects of social networks on theory."—N. J. Parezo, Choice“Regna Darnell invites the reader to listen in on the intimate, collaborative, and frequently contentious conversations that formed the basis for North American anthropology. We are gifted with a clearly written and revelatory unpacking of the connections, alliances, and discordant moments of an anthropology practice grounded in humanistic and scholarly precepts. This timely critical history promises to reintroduce anthropology as a fundamentally humanistic scholarly endeavor whose practitioners continue the long tradition of scholarship in the service of social justice.”—Bernard Perley, author of Defying Maliseet Language Death: Emergent Vitalities of Language, Culture, and Identity in Eastern CanadaTable of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgments Editorial Method Introduction List of Abbreviations 1. What Is History? An Anthropologist’s Eye View 2. Applied Anthropology: Disciplinary Oxymoron? 3. The Anthropological Concept of Culture at the End of the Boasian Century 4. Calibrating Discourses across Cultures in Search of Common Ground 5. “Keeping the Faith”: A Legacy of Native American Ethnography, Ethnohistory, and Psychology 6. Anthropological Approaches to Human Nature, Cultural Relativism, and Ethnocentrism 7. Text, Symbol, and Tradition in Northwest Coast Ethnology from Franz Boas to Claude Lévi-Strauss 8. Mind, Body, and the Native Point of View: Boasian Theory at the Centennial of The Mind of Primitive Man 9. Franz Boas as Theorist: A Mentalist Paradigm for the Study of Mind, Body, Environment, and Culture 10. The Powell Classification of American Indian Languages 11. The Revision of the Powell Classification 12. Désveaux, Two Traditions of Anthropology in Mirror: American Geologisms and French Biologism 13. Rationalism, the (Sapir-)Whorf Hypothesis, and Assassination by Anachronism 14. The Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss 15. Obituary for Frederica de Laguna (1906–2004) 16. Obituary for Dell Hathaway Hymes (1927–2009) 17. Obituary for George W. Stocking Jr. (1928–2013) 18. Review of Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in Self-Deconstruction, by George W. Stocking Jr. 19. Obituary for Anthony F. C. Wallace (1923–2015) Index

Read more less

Book Synopsis Directed by anthropologist Alexander Lesser in 1935, the Santa Fe Laboratory of Anthropology sponsored a field school in southwestern Oklahoma that focused on the neighboring Kiowas. During two months, graduate students compiled more than 1,300 pages of single-spaced field notes derived from cross-interviewing thirty-five Kiowas. These eyewitness and first-generation reflections on the horse and buffalo days are undoubtedly the best materials available for reconstructing pre-reservation Kiowa beliefs and rituals. The field school compiled massive data resulting in a number of publications on this formerly nomadic Plains tribe, though the planned collaborative ethnographies never materialized. The extensive Kiowa field notes, which contain invaluable information, remained largely unpublished until now. In Kiowa Belief and Ritual, Benjamin R. Kracht reconstructs Kiowa cosmology during the height of the horse and buffalo culture from field notes pertaining to coTrade Review"Kiowa Belief and Ritual is a thought-provoking contribution to the study of religion and spirituality within the Kiowa nation in Oklahoma."—Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote, Canadian Journal of Native Studies“[An] encyclopedic and yet still surprisingly personalized . . . rendition of Kiowa religion. The result is what could hardly be imagined as a more complete summary of a people’s beliefs and rituals at a particular moment in time—a moment that had just ended when the data were collected and that, despite all of the tribulations and losses faced by the Kiowa, continues not only to be remembered but to reverberate through their culture.”—Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database"[Kiowa Belief and Ritual] makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Plains Indigenous religion, and offers Kiowa community members an engaging link to their Indigenous heritage."—Andrew McKenzie, Great Plains Quarterly"Benjamin R. Kracht's Kiowa Belief and Ritual is a welcome, important contribution to the literature on Plains Indian Religions, specifically the Kiowa. . . . Kracht has accomplished excellent, dedicated work in providing his assessment of these incredibly important fieldnotes from, it should be recognized, an exceptionally special group of honored elders."—Inés Hernández-Ávila, Reading Religion“Benjamin Kracht provides keen insight into the belief system and worldview of the Kiowa people. This ethnographic window reveals what is sacred, powerful, and spiritual among this warrior people of the southern plains. Kracht’s scholarship advances our understanding of the true reality of the Kiowas.”—Donald L. Fixico, Distinguished Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University and author of Call for Change: The Medicine Way of American Indian History, Ethos, and Reality“Kiowa Belief and Ritual offers a meticulously researched and richly detailed account of pre-reservation Kiowa religious life. Benjamin Kracht makes extensive use of interviews conducted with Kiowa elders in 1935, and their recollections and experiences make for compelling reading. This is a significant contribution to the literature on Native North America.”—Michael Paul Jordan, assistant professor of ethnology at Texas Tech UniversityTable of Contents List of Illustrations Kiowa Pronunciations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Ethnographic Studies of Plains Indian Religions 1. Kiowa History, 1832–1868 2. Kiowa Beliefs and Concepts of the Universe 3. Acquiring, Maintaining, and Manifesting Power 4. Bundles, Shields, and Societies 5. The Kiowa Sun Dance Conclusion: The Collapse of the Horse and Buffalo Culture and the Sun Dance Appendix: Kiowa Sun Dance Chronology, 1833–1890 Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisA Maverick Boasian explores the often contradictory life of Alexander Goldenweiser (1880–1940), a scholar considered by his contemporaries to be Franz Boas’s most brilliant and most favored student. The story of his life and scholarship is complex and exciting as well as frustrating. Although Goldenweiser came to the United States from Russia as a young man, he spent the next forty years thinking of himself as a European intellectual who never felt entirely at home. A talented ethnographer, he developed excellent rapport with his Native American consultants but cut short his fieldwork due to lack of funds. An individualist and an anarchist in politics, he deeply resented having to compromise any of his ideas and freedoms for the sake of professional success. A charming man, he risked his career and family life to satisfy immediate needs and wants. A number of his books and papers on the relationship between anthropology and other social sciences helped foTrade Review"Kan's excellent biography is deeply researched, easy to read, and economically written. It does a good job of telling the story of an important but little-known figure in the history of folklore and anthropology."—Alex Golub, Journal of Folklore Research“Alexander A. Goldenweiser is a unique figure among American anthropologists. A Maverick Boasian is a valuable contribution to the history of anthropology, specifically to the study of the first generation of Franz Boas’s students and the establishment of professionalized anthropology in the United States.”—Robert Brightman, author of Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships“An authoritative contribution to the history of anthropology.”—Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, author of Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social JusticeTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Series Editors’ Introduction Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Russian Beginning and the Early American Years 2. Early Scholarship, the Iroquois Fieldwork, and Columbia 3. The New School, Academic and Popular Writing, and a Devastating Divorce 4. The West Coast Exile 5. The End Notes References Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisHoarding New Guinea provides a new cultural history of colonialism that pays close attention to the millions of Indigenous artifacts that serve as witnesses to Europe’s colonial past in ethnographic museums. Rainer F. Buschmann investigates the roughly two hundred thousand artifacts extracted from the colony of German New Guinea from 1870 to 1920. Reversing the typical trajectories that place ethnographic museums at the center of the analysis, he concludes that museum interests in material culture alone cannot account for the large quantities of extracted artifacts. Buschmann moves beyond the easy definition of artifacts as trophies of colonial defeat or religious conversion, instead employing the term hoarding to describe the irrational amassing of Indigenous artifacts by European colonial residents. Buschmann also highlights Indigenous material culture as a bargaining chip for its producers to engage with the imposed colonial regime. In addition, by ceTrade Review"This book will fascinate scholars in museum studies, postcolonial studies, memory studies, cultural geography, and anyone interested in tracing the history of material culture. Beyond the case study and geographic focus, this scholarship will also inform explorations into local colonial collections in other parts of the world, from Africa to Canada. By making space for Indigenous actions and reactions, the study will become a model for the decentering of historical studies on colonial artifacts."—Hélène B. Ducros, EuropeNow“Hoarding New Guinea manages to be both historically grounded and also attuned to contemporary recognitions of Indigenous agency. The book’s findings and conclusions are sobering, surprising, and illuminating in equal measure, and a refreshing corrective to much superficial postcolonial writing that simplifies and flattens the complexities of the colonial encounter.”—Conal McCarthy, author of Museums and Māori: Heritage Professionals, Indigenous Collections, Current Practice“This book establishes its topical focus—the hoarding of New Guinea—in a sound analysis of colonial ethnographic collection histories, thus grounding the critique of the present and potential reimagination of the future in a nuanced understanding of the past. Such careful and detailed work is much needed, long overdue, and highly important. It will be of interest to museum scholars as well as professionals and students.”—Philipp Schorch, author of Refocusing Ethnographic Museums through Oceanic LensesTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Series Editors’ Introduction Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Itinerant Yet Stubbornly Stable European Value of Material Culture, Circa 1870–1920 2. Ethnographic Resident Collection Networks in German New Guinea 3. Contested Indigenous Borderlands 4. Artifact Exchanges along the Ethnographic Borderlands Conclusion Appendix: Three Ways of Estimating Artifact Extraction from German New Guinea Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisSensing Others explores the lives of Indigenous Batek people in Peninsular Malaysia amid the strange and the new in the borderland between protected national park and oil palm plantation. As their ancestral forests disappear around them, Batek people nevertheless attempt to live well among the strange Others they now encounter: out-of-place animals and plants, traders, tourists, poachers, and forest guards. How Batek people voice their experiences of the good and the strange in relation to these Others challenges essentialized notions of cultural and species difference and the separateness of ethical worlds. Drawing on meticulous, long-term ethnographic research with Batek people, Alice Rudge argues that as people seek to make habitable a constantly changing landscape, what counts as Otherness is always under negotiation. Anthropology's traditional dictum to make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange creates a binary between the familiar and the Other, often encapsulating Indigenous lives as the archetypal Other to the modern worldview. Yet living well amid precarity involves constantly negotiating Otherness's ambivalences, as people, plants, animals, and places can all become familiar, strange, or both. Sensing Others reveals that when looking from the boundary, what counts as Otherness is impossible to pin down.Trade Review“Sensing Others is one of the richest, most textured, and most innovative ethnographies I have read in recent years. Through her acute and deeply informed account, Alice Rudge compellingly conveys the complex nexus of emotion, experience, identity, and ethics entangled in Batek life and its scholarly representation. This is a remarkable book, a signal accomplishment, and a likely classic.”—Donald Brenneis, coeditor of Law and Empire in the Pacific: Fiji and Hawai‘i“In her exceptionally high-quality fieldwork, Alice Rudge noticed and understood unusually subtle levels of Batek life practice in the midst of profound change, and she conveys those understandings eloquently here. Sensing Others is a fundamental contribution to anthropology, Southeast Asian studies, linguistic anthropology, hunter-gatherer studies, and environmental studies, and to global popular understanding of Indigenous rainforest people in the Anthropocene.”—Rupert Stasch, author of Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan PlaceTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Prelude: Friends and Strangers Author’s Note List of Abbreviations Introduction: Living with Others Chapter 1. Closeness and Loss, Longing as Archive Interlude 1. Story of the pompakoh Bird, in Which a Father Becomes a Bird Chapter 2. Alone and Together, Wrongdoing and the Ethical Self Interlude 2. Story of the Batak Cannibal, in Which a Woman Escapes Chapter 3. Like and Different, Hidden Likenesses in Everyday Speech Interlude 3. Story of the caŋkãy Frog, in Which Frogs and Leaves Become Batek Chapter 4. Known and Unknown, Sensing the Intentions of Others Interlude 4. Story of a sarɔt Who Flicks His “Fruit” Chapter 5. Attachment and Detachment, Sharing with Strange Others Interlude 5. Story of Hiding from Batak in the Treetops Coda: The Politics of Being Alone Appendix 1: Grammar Appendix 2: Selected Lexicon Notes References Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisComing of Age in Chicago explores a watershed moment in American anthropology, when an unprecedented number of historians and anthropologists of all subfields gathered on the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition fairgrounds, drawn together by the fair's focus on indigenous peoples. Participants included people making a living with their research, sporadic backyard diggers, religiously motivated researchers, and a small group who sought a scientific understanding of the lifeways of indigenous peoples. At the fair they set the foundation for anthropological inquiry and redefined the field. At the same time, the American public became aware, through their own experiences at the fair, of a global humanity, with reactions that ranged from revulsion to curiosity, tolerance, and kindness.Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox combine primary historical texts, modern essays, and rarely seen images from the period to create a volume essential for understanding the significance of this event. These Trade Review"[Coming of Age in Chicago] will be of interest to historians of anthropology, of course, but also to scholars grappling with visual and material representations, museums and cultural institutions, and the politics of cultural exhibition."—Adam Fulton Johnson, History of Anthropology Newsletter"Coming of Age in Chicago is a handsome volume that adds to our understanding of the Columbian Exposition's considerable importance."—Roger Biles, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society"A fascinating contribution to the history of anthropology in America."—American Archaeology"Coming of Age in Chicago is an essential read for all interested in the history of anthropology, world's fairs, and turn-of-the century racial thinking in the United States. It offers an invaluable combination of analysis and original sources that allow the reader to see the intimate connections between the Columbian exposition and the cultural and social history of the field of anthropology."—Abigail M. Markwyn, Pacific Historical Review“Coming of Age in Chicago is at once a major contribution to the burgeoning literature on Chicago’s 1893 World Columbian Exposition as well as a critical examination of a crucial phase in the development of American anthropology. . . . Such notable personalities as Frederic Ward Putnam, Franz Boas, Daniel Garrison Brinton, and especially Frank Hamilton Cushing, as well as lesser luminaries, all come alive and shine forth in this sparkling, multifaceted volume.”—Raymond D. Fogelson, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Chicago“In this richly detailed account of anthropology at the fair—and of the fair’s exhibits in the minds of anthropologists—the authors deepen our understanding of the cultural origins of the anthropology profession.”—Robert W. Rydell, professor of history at Montana State University and author of All the World’s a Fair“Coming of Age in Chicago presents an account of the interplay of anthropology and the public spectacle of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair that is both authoritative and engaging. Original documents and photo essays heighten the reading experience and help convey the material realities of anthropology at the fair, just as the discipline was coalescing.”—Frederic W. Gleach, curator of the Anthropology Collections at Cornell University and founding coeditor of Histories of Anthropology AnnualTable of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Tables Introduction: The Chicago Fair and American Anthropology in 1893 Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox Abbreviations Essay 1. Anthropology as Education and Entertainment: Frederic Ward Putnam at the World’s Fair Curtis M. Hinsley Document A. Franz Boas, “Ethnology at the Exposition” (1893) Document B. Frederic Ward Putnam, “The Columbus Memorial Museum: Address to the Commercial Club of Chicago” (1891) Document C. “Man and His Works: Ethnological Exhibit at the Fair” (1893) Essay 2. Ambiguous Legacy: Daniel Garrison Brinton at the International Congress of Anthropology Curtis M. Hinsley Appendix: Analysis of Registered Members of the International Congress of Anthropology, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893 David R. Wilcox Document D. William Henry Holmes, “The World’s Fair Congress of Anthropology” (1893) Essay 3. Anthropology in a Changing America: Interpreting the Chicago “Triumph” of Frank Hamilton Cushing David R. Wilcox Document E. Excerpts from the Diary of Frank Hamilton Cushing at the World’s Fair (June 16–September 12, 1893) Document F. Monthly Report of Mr. Frank Hamilton Cushing (September 1893) Document G. “The Pueblos at Home” (September 1894) A Visual Interlude: Popular Images of Anthropology and Its Subjects at the Fair Curtis M. Hinsley Essay 4. Refracting Images: Anthropological Display at the Chicago World’s Fair, 1893 Ira Jacknis Essay 5. Relic Hunters in the White City: Artifacts, Authority, and Ambition at the World’s Columbian Exposition James E. Snead Document H. Cushing’s Analysis of the Hazzard Cliff Dweller Collection (1895) Document I. Warren King Moorehead, “The Ancient Man: The Anthropological Exhibit at the World’s Fair” (June 22, 1893) Essay 6. Patrons, Popularizers, and Professionals: The Institutional Setting of Late Nineteenth-Century Anthropology in Chicago Donald McVicker Document J. “Heir of the Big Fair: Field Columbian Museum Opened” (1894) Essay 7. Going National: American Anthropology Successfully Redefines Itself as an Accepted Academic Domain David R. Wilcox Appendix: Comparison of Primary Contributors to the American Anthropologist, 1888–1925 David R. Wilcox Document K. Daniel Garrison Brinton, “The Aims of Anthropology” (1895) Document L. Franz Boas, “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology” (1896) Afterword: The Ironies of the Fair, the Uncertainties of Anthropology Curtis M. Hinsley Acknowledgments Bibliography Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisGerhard Kubik extends and expands the epic exploration he began in Jazz Transatlantic, Volume I. This second volume amplifies how musicians influenced by swing, bebop, and post-bop influenced musicians in Africa from the end of World War II into the 1970s were interacting with each other and re-creating jazz.

Read more less

Book SynopsisComfort Food explores this concept with examples taken from Atlantic Canadians, Indonesians, the English in Britain, and various ethnic, regional, and religious populations as well as rural and urban residents in the United States. This volume includes studies of particular edibles and the ways in which they comfort or in someinstances cause discomfort. The contributors focus on items ranging from bologna to chocolate, including sweet and savory puddings, fried bread with an egg in the center, dairy products, fried rice, cafeteria fare, sugary fried dough, soul food, and others. Several essays consider comfort food in the context of cookbooks,films, blogs, literature, marketing, and tourism. Of course what heartens one person might put off another, so the collection also includes takes on victuals that prove problematic. All this fare is then related to identity, family, community, nationality, ethnicity, class, sense of place, tradition, stress, health, discomfort, guilt, betrayal, and loss, contributing to and deepening our understanding of comfort food. This book offers a foundation for further appreciation of comfort food. As a subject of study, the comfort food is relevant to a number of disciplines, most obviously food studies, folkloristics, and anthropology, but also American studies, cultural studies, global and international studies, tourism, marketing, and public health. With contributions by: Barbara Banks, Sheila Bock, Susan Eleuterio, Jillian Gould, Phillis Humphries, Michael Owen Jones, Alicia Kristen, William G. Lockwood, Yvonne R. Lockwood, Lucy M. Long, LuAnne Roth, Rachelle H. Saltzman, Charlene Smith, Annie Tucker, and Diane Tye.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDerived from the nationalist writings of Jose Marti, the concept of Cubanidad (Cubanness) has always imagined a unified hybrid nation where racial difference is nonexistent and nationality trumps all other axes identities. Scholars have critiqued this celebration of racial mixture, highlighting a gap between the claim of racial harmony and the realities of inequality faced by Afro-Cubans since independence in 1898. In this book, Rebecca M. Bodenheimer argues that it is not only the recognition of racial difference that threatens to divide the nation, but that popular regional sentiment further contests the hegemonic national discourse. Given that the music is a prominent symbol of Cubanidad, musical practices play an important role in constructing regional, local, and national identities.This book suggests that regional identity exerts a significant influence on the aesthetic choices made by Cuban musicians. Through the examination of several genres, BodenheTrade ReviewAn insightful and well theorized contribution to existing literature, Rebecca Bodenheimer’s book is the first on Cuban music to explore the topic of regionalism in detail, discursively and musically, as well as its intersections with hybridity and racial conflict. A fascinating study."" - Robin Moore, professor of ethnomusicology, the University of Texas at Austin""By avoiding a Havana-centric approach, Bodenheimer examines the presence of significant cultural and musical distance between eastern and western Cuba as well as the different meanings of ‘blackness’ in various parts of the island. She lays bare the contradiction that eastern Cuba, widely regarded in Havana as the ‘blackest’ region of the island, is simultaneously celebrated as the cradle of the ‘mestizo’ Son genre. Bodenheimer documents in impressive detail the rise in the last forty years of two new rumba styles, the batarumba and the guarapachangueo. This is a truly refreshing book about Cuban music and culture which, by connecting notions of race and place, explores the way in which musical practices define regional identities in the island."" - Raul Fernandez, author of From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz

Read more less

Book SynopsisExplores the role of folklore, folklore archives, and folklore studies in the contemporary history of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Sadhana Naithani combines the study of written works, archival documents, life-stories, and conversations with folklorists, ethnologists, archivists, and historians in Tartu, Riga, and Vilnius.

Read more less

Book SynopsisExplores the impact of neoliberalism and welfare reform on depictions of poverty. Sarah Robertson examines representations of southern poor whites across various types of literature, including travel writing, photo-narratives, life-writing, and eco-literature, and reveals a common interest in communitarianism.

Read more less

Book SynopsisExplores the impact of neoliberalism and welfare reform on depictions of poverty. Sarah Robertson examines representations of southern poor whites across various types of literature, including travel writing, photo-narratives, life-writing, and eco-literature, and reveals a common interest in communitarianism.

Read more less

Book SynopsisOffers an overview of posthumanism as it applies to folklore studies and an investigation of ""vernacular posthumanisms"" - the ways in which people are increasingly performing the posthuman. Posthumanism calls for a close investigation of what is meant by the term ""human"" and a rethinking of this, our most basic ontological category.

Read more less

Book SynopsisMinas Gerais is a state in southeastern Brazil deeply connected to the nation’s slave past and home to many traditions related to the African diaspora. Addressing a range of traditions helping to define the region, Jonathon Grasse examines the complexity of Minas Gerais by exploring the intersections of its history, music, and culture.

Read more less

Book SynopsisTackles topics often overlooked in foodways. Michael Owen Jones explains how we communicate through what we eat, the connection between food choice and who we are or want to appear to be, the ways that many of us self-medicate moods with foods, and the nature of disgust.

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrustrated by her students' performance, her relationships with them, and her own daughter's problems in school, Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology, set out to understand why her students found their educational experience at a top-tier institution so profoundly difficult and unsatisfying. Through her research and in conversations with her students, she discovered a troubling mismatch between the goals of the university and the needs of students. In I Love Learning; I Hate School, Blum tells two intertwined but inseparable stories: the results of her research into how students learn contrasted with the way conventional education works, and the personal narrative of how she herself was transformed by this understanding. Blum concludes that the dominant forms of higher education do not match the myriad forms of learning that help studentspeople in generalmaster meaningful and worthwhile skills and knowledge. Students are capable of learning huge amounts, but the Trade ReviewAs I read 'I Love Learning; I Hate School,' I sprained my neck from nodding in vigorous agreement. The book casts an anthropological lens on education in general and higher education in particular, and the result is a catalog of many of the things that I believe ail us when it comes to teaching and learning. -- John Warner * Inside Higher Ed *We should take very seriously the critique of higher education offered by Susan Blum; the book is excellent, and I highly recommend it. Blum does the profession a service by drawing our attention to the ways in which traditional educational structures put barriers in the way of our students and their learning. She has a powerful command of educational history and theory, and her insights and anecdotes rang true to me throughout the book. * Chronicle of Higher Education *Table of ContentsIntroduction: What the Good Student Did Not Know Part I. Trouble in Paradise 1. Complaints: Crisis or Moral Panic? 2. The Myriad and Muddied Goals of College Part II. Schooling and Its Oddities 3. Seeing the Air: The Nature and Spread of Higher Education 4. Wagging the Dog: Learning for Schooling 5. "What Do I Have to Do to Get an A?": The Real Skinny on Grades 6. Campus Delights: Nonacademic Engagement and Responsibility Part III. How and Why Humans Learn: Explaining the Mismatch 7. Beyond Cognition and Abstraction: Notes on Human Nature and Development8. Learning in the Wild, Learning in the Cage 9. Motivation Comes in at Least Two Flavors, Intrinsic and Extrinsic 10. On Happiness, Flourishing, Well-Being, and Meaning Part IV. A Revolution in Learning 11. Both Sides Now of a Learning Revolution Conclusion: Learning versus Schooling: A Professor's Reeducation Appendix: A New Metaphor: Permaculture, or Twelve Principles of Human Cultivation

Read more less

Book SynopsisWorking and living as an authentic Muslimcomporting oneself in an Islamically appropriate wayin the global economy can be very challenging. How do middle-class Muslims living in the Middle East navigate contemporary economic demands in a distinctly Islamic way? What are the impacts of these efforts on their Islamic piety? To what authority does one turn when questions arise? What happens when the answers vary and there is little or no consensus? To answer these questions, Everyday Piety examines the intersection of globalization and Islamic religious life in the city of Amman, Jordan.Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Amman, Sarah A. Tobin demonstrates that Muslims combine their interests in exerting a visible Islam with the opportunities and challenges of advanced capitalism in an urban setting, which ultimately results in the cultivation of a neoliberal Islamic piety. Neoliberal piety, Tobin contends, is created by both Islamizing economic practices and ecTrade ReviewThrough her examination of Islamic banking, Tobin explores the role that piety plays in the commercial interactions of middle-class Muslims in Jordan's capital, Amman.... Her stylish, ambitious, and pragmatic interlocutors undermine any stale conceptions readers might have of contemporary Muslims, and her treatment of the workplace as a space where moral debates are negotiated points to the social significance of work relationships and their related social dynamics. The book's accessible and sensitive treatment of urban Jordanians and the role of morality in their economic choices make it a fine choice for students as well as scholars interested in the topics of work, identity, religion, and global finance. -- Susan MacDougall, Oxford University * Anthropology of Work Review *Provides vivid insight into people's complex engagements with piety across a range of contexts.... Its subject matter, theoretical sophistication, and detailed fieldwork make this book a valuable resource for scholars and students of the Middle East, economic anthropology, and the anthropology of Islam. * Contemporary Islam *Table of Contents1 A Muslim Plays the Slot Machines 2 The History of Amman: "I Don't Recognize It Anymore" 3 Making It Meaningful: Ramadan 4 Love, Sex, and the Market: The Hijab 5 Making It Real: Adequation 6 Uncertainty Inside the Islamic Bank: "Is This the Real Islam?" 7 Consuming Islamic Banking: "They Say They’re Islamic, So They Are." 8 Branding Islam: Jordan’s Arab Spring, Middle Class, and Islam

Read more less

Book SynopsisWorking and living as an authentic Muslimcomporting oneself in an Islamically appropriate wayin the global economy can be very challenging. How do middle-class Muslims living in the Middle East navigate contemporary economic demands in a distinctly Islamic way? What are the impacts of these efforts on their Islamic piety? To what authority does one turn when questions arise? What happens when the answers vary and there is little or no consensus? To answer these questions, Everyday Piety examines the intersection of globalization and Islamic religious life in the city of Amman, Jordan.Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Amman, Sarah A. Tobin demonstrates that Muslims combine their interests in exerting a visible Islam with the opportunities and challenges of advanced capitalism in an urban setting, which ultimately results in the cultivation of a neoliberal Islamic piety. Neoliberal piety, Tobin contends, is created by both Islamizing economic practices and ecTrade ReviewThrough her examination of Islamic banking, Tobin explores the role that piety plays in the commercial interactions of middle-class Muslims in Jordan's capital, Amman.... Her stylish, ambitious, and pragmatic interlocutors undermine any stale conceptions readers might have of contemporary Muslims, and her treatment of the workplace as a space where moral debates are negotiated points to the social significance of work relationships and their related social dynamics. The book's accessible and sensitive treatment of urban Jordanians and the role of morality in their economic choices make it a fine choice for students as well as scholars interested in the topics of work, identity, religion, and global finance. -- Susan MacDougall, Oxford University * Anthropology of Work Review *Provides vivid insight into people's complex engagements with piety across a range of contexts.... Its subject matter, theoretical sophistication, and detailed fieldwork make this book a valuable resource for scholars and students of the Middle East, economic anthropology, and the anthropology of Islam. * Contemporary Islam *Table of Contents1 A Muslim Plays the Slot Machines 2 The History of Amman: "I Don't Recognize It Anymore" 3 Making It Meaningful: Ramadan 4 Love, Sex, and the Market: The Hijab 5 Making It Real: Adequation 6 Uncertainty Inside the Islamic Bank: "Is This the Real Islam?" 7 Consuming Islamic Banking: "They Say They’re Islamic, So They Are." 8 Branding Islam: Jordan’s Arab Spring, Middle Class, and Islam

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn India over the past century, electrification has meant many things: it has been a colonial gift of modern technology, a tool of national integration and political communication, and a means of gauging the country''s participation in globalization. Electric lights have marked out places of power, and massive infrastructures have been installed in hopes of realizing political promises. In A Moral Technology, the grids and wires of an urban public utility are revealed to be not only material goods but also objects of intense moral concern. Leo Coleman offers a distinctive anthropological approach to electrification in New Delhi as more than just an economic or industrial process, or a gridding of social and political relations. It may be understood instead as a ritual action that has formed modern urban communities and people's sense of citizenship, and structured debates over state power and political legitimacy.Coleman explores three historical and ethnographic case studiesTrade Review"Developing nuanced and valuable readings of critical moments in the story of electrification in Delhi/New Delhi, Leo Coleman suggests that electricity far exceeds its formal role as infrastructure. He persuasively argues that the ideological burden and meaning of electricity informs its physical distribution (from where it is introduced and who gets it first to how the grid is controlled or the ownership of electric meters understood), while demonstrating how political associations, relationships, and networks are imagined, cast, and reconfigured through the distribution of electricity." -- Ritika Prasad, University of North Carolina–Charlotte, author of Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial IndiaTable of ContentsIntroduction: Electricity ActsPart I. Imperial Installations1. The Machinery of Government2. Ritual Center and Divided CityPart II. National Grids3. The Lifeblood of the Nation4. Broadcast MantrasPart III. Urban Transformations5. The Life of Property6. A Model Colony Conclusion: The Art of a Free Society

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe book is ambitious and easy to read, has many rich descriptions, that would be good for undergraduates and graduate students interested in mindfulness, Southeast Asian Theravada Buddhism, and the anthropology of Buddhism. ? Religious Studies ReviewWhat is mindfulness, and how does it vary as a concept across different cultures? How does mindfulness find expression in practice in the Buddhist cultures of Southeast Asia? What role does mindfulness play in everyday life? J. L. Cassaniti answers these fundamental questions and more through an engaged ethnographic investigation of what it means to remember the present in a region strongly influenced by Buddhist thought.Focusing on Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, Remembering the Present examines the meanings, practices, and purposes of mindfulness. Using the experiences of people in Buddhist monasteries, hospitals, markets, and homes in the region, Cassaniti shows how an attention to memTrade ReviewThe book is ambitious and easy to read, has many "rich descriptions," that would be good for undergraduates and graduate students interested in mindfulness, Southeast Asian Theravada Buddhism, and the anthropology of Buddhism * Religious Studies Review *The book is very clearly laid out, written in an engaging and accessible style, and it is appropriate for undergraduate classes and up. * MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY *Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Terms Introduction Part I. Thailand 1. Monks' Mindfulness 2. The Feeling of Mindfulness in Meditation 3. The Ghosts of Insanity in Lay Thai Life Part II. Burma and Sri Lanka 4. Burma 5. Sri Lanka Conclusion Notes Glossary References Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe French scholar Marc Abélès is one of the leading political and philosophical anthropologists of our time. He is perhaps the leading anthropologist writing on the state and globalization. Thinking beyond the State, a distillation of his work to date, is a superb introduction to his contributions to both anthropology and political philosophy. Abélès observes that while interdependence and interconnection have become characteristic features of our globalized era, there is no indication that a concomitant evolution in thinking about political systems has occurred. The state remains the shieldfor both the Right and the Leftagainst the turbulent effects of globalization. According to Abélès, we live in a geopolitical universe that, in many respects, reproduces alienating logics. His book, therefore, is a primer on how to see beyond the state. It is also a testament to anthropology's centrality and importance in any analysis of the global human predicament. Thinking beyond the STrade ReviewHis message is that social scientists need to broaden their organizing perspective in order to capture the dynamics of all the local, national, and international forces at play in contemporary society. He draws on traditional political philosophy and a broad scope of social sciences. In elevated but precise language, Abélès challenges contemporary social scientists to develop this inclusive framework, which mirrors more accurately the contemporary 21st-century world. Most useful for university libraries with graduate programs. * Choice *[German language review] * Anthropos *Table of ContentsForeword Introduction 1. Society against the State 2. The Stalemate of Sovereignty 3. Biopolitics and the Great Return of Anthropos 4. Infrapolitics and the Ambivalence of Compassion 5. Scenes from Global Politics 6. The Anthropology of Globalization References Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe French scholar Marc Abélès is one of the leading political and philosophical anthropologists of our time. He is perhaps the leading anthropologist writing on the state and globalization. Thinking beyond the State, a distillation of his work to date, is a superb introduction to his contributions to both anthropology and political philosophy. Abélès observes that while interdependence and interconnection have become characteristic features of our globalized era, there is no indication that a concomitant evolution in thinking about political systems has occurred. The state remains the shieldfor both the Right and the Leftagainst the turbulent effects of globalization. According to Abélès, we live in a geopolitical universe that, in many respects, reproduces alienating logics. His book, therefore, is a primer on how to see beyond the state. It is also a testament to anthropology's centrality and importance in any analysis of the global human predicament. Thinking beyond the STrade ReviewHis message is that social scientists need to broaden their organizing perspective in order to capture the dynamics of all the local, national, and international forces at play in contemporary society. He draws on traditional political philosophy and a broad scope of social sciences. In elevated but precise language, Abélès challenges contemporary social scientists to develop this inclusive framework, which mirrors more accurately the contemporary 21st-century world. Most useful for university libraries with graduate programs. * Choice *[German language review] * Anthropos *Table of ContentsForeword Introduction 1. Society against the State 2. The Stalemate of Sovereignty 3. Biopolitics and the Great Return of Anthropos 4. Infrapolitics and the Ambivalence of Compassion 5. Scenes from Global Politics 6. The Anthropology of Globalization References Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisHearing Allah's Call changes the way we think about Islamic communication. In the city of Bandung in Indonesia, sermons are not reserved for mosques and sites for Friday prayers. Muslim speakers are in demand for all kinds of events, from rites of passage to motivational speeches for companies and other organizations. Julian Millie spent fourteen months sitting among listeners at such events, and he provides detailed contextual description of the everyday realities of Muslim listening as well as preaching. In describing the venues, the audience, and preachersmany of whom are womenhe reveals tensions between entertainment and traditional expressions of faith and moral rectitude. The sermonizers use in-jokes, double entendres, and mimicry in their expositions, playing on their audiences' emotions, triggering reactions from critics who accuse them of neglecting listeners' intellects. Millie focused specifically on the listening routines that enliven everyday life for MuslTrade ReviewA richly-textured and critically insightful ethnography of Islamic preaching in contemporary Indonesia.... [The book succeeds in] stimulating critical reflections on modes of cultural production and religious communication that are potentially important for scholars working on contemporary Muslim societies well beyond the borders of Indonesia. * Reading Religion *Offers much more than a thorough analysis of Islamic preaching, as it provides inspiring reflections on today's emerging Muslim publics that a readership interested in the development of Islamic societies generally will find highly relevant. * Anthropological Forum *Hearing Allah's Call is certainly an original, inspiring, and thought-provoking book and an important contribution to the study of Indonesia and the anthropology of Islam. It deserves a wide readership. * Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia *Currently, the nation with the most Muslims in the world is Indonesia, but it has drawn far less attention from scholars of Islam than it merits. Julian Millie's fascinating study of popular preaching is an invaluable contribution to this overlooked field. * The Journal of Religion *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Transcription Introduction 1. Preaching Diversity in Bandung 2. The Unique Voice... and Its Travails 3. Preaching "without Performing" 4. The Languages of Preaching in the Islamic Public Sphere 5. The Listening Audience Laughs and Cries, the Writing Public Thinks 6. A Feminized Domain 7. Public Contest and the Pragmatics of Performance 8. Standing Up for Listening Conclusion Appendixes A. Wedding Sermon by Al-Jauhari B. Sunday Study Sermon by Shiddiq Amien C. Translation of Excerpt of Sermon by A. F. Ghazali Notes Works Cited Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisSex, Love, and Migration goes beyond a common narrative of women''s exploitation as a feature of migration in the early twenty-first century, a story that features young women from poor countries who cross borders to work in low paid and often intimate labor. Alexia Bloch argues that the mobility of women is marked not only by risks but also by personal and social transformation as migration fundamentally reshapes women''s emotional worlds and aspirations. Bloch documents how, as women have crossed borders between the former Soviet Union and Turkey since the early 1990s, they have forged new forms of intimacy in their households in Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, but also in Istanbul, where they often work for years on end. Sex, Love, and Migration takes as its subject the lives of post-Soviet migrant women employed in three distinct spheressex work, the garment trade, and domestic work. Bloch challenges us to decouple images of women on the move from simTrade ReviewThese estimable monographs on postsocialist space reflect upon the plight of families as they seek ethical and economic identities and develop care-giving practices and strategies in landscapes haunted by globalization. * Slavic Review *Sex, Love, and Migration makes a significant contribution to the anthropologies of postsocialism, migration, and gendered labor. Using the concepts of affect, emotional labor, and structures of feeling, Alexia Bloch skillfully and engagingly guides readers through many of the positionalities comprising multinational and multigenerational networks of migrant women and those they leave behind. * American Ethnologist *Captivatingly written and rich with thick descriptions that virtually transport the reader to the featured locations and people, Sex, Love, and Migration makes an impressive contribution to the scholarship on gender and transnational migration in postsocialist societies. * REGION *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Translation Part 1 Introduction 1. Magnificent Centuries and Economies of Desire Part 2 2. Gender, Labor, and Emotion in a Global Economy 3. "We Are Like Slaves—Who Needs Capitalism?" Part 3 4. Strategic Intimacy, "Real Love," and Marriage 5. Intimate Currencies 6. "Other Mothers," Grandmothers, and the State Conclusion Appendix Bibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Singlewide, Sonya Salamon and Katherine MacTavish explore the role of the trailer park as a source of affordable housing. America's trailer parks, most in rural places, shelter an estimated 12 million people, and the authors show how these parks serve as a private solution to a pressing public need. Singlewide considers the circumstances of families with school-age children in trailer parks serving whites in Illinois, Hispanics in New Mexico, and African Americans in North Carolina. By looking carefully at the daily lives of families who live side by side in rows of manufactured homes, Salamon and MacTavish draw conclusions about the importance of housing, community, and location in the families' dreams of opportunities and success as signified by eventually owning land and a conventional home. Working-poor rural families who engage with what Salamon and MacTavish call the mobile home industrial complex may become caught in an expensive trap starting with their purcTrade ReviewThe book realistically portrays trailer living in each unique area chosen by the authors. * Pasatiempo *The authors discuss four research questions involving the lasting effects on a family from living in a trailer park, financial payoffs, sense of belonging in a community, and the possibility that children and youth can improve their life chances. They also summarize the role of mobile home manufacturers, dealers, financers, park operators, and nearby communities. * Choice *Singlewide provides a rich and valuable picture of mobile-home park life, and the lessons learned spread well beyond these contexts. Scholars of poverty, housing, exploitation, families and communities, and child development will have much to gain from this important work. * Journal of Children and Poverty *This book addresses an important aspect of rural communities that have been understudied. Its strength is the in-depth stories drawn from the field studies that detail how families enter into trailer park living, and more importantly, how they become trapped there. It also effectively demonstrates how the stigmatized rural landscapes of trailer parks can impact youth opportunities and social networks.... This book represents a welcome exploration of mobile home park communities, and scholars who focus on a wide array of rural issues will find it interesting and useful. * Social & Cultural Geography *Singlewide provides a thoughtful sample of the millions of families living and raising children in rural or small-town mobile home parks. * Planning *Singlewide is an excellent addition to the rural sociology literature because it provides a rich account of the role of trailer parks in rural areas and of low-income households' housing strategies.... This book is enjoyable to read since it is well researched, well written, and well organized. Beyond rural scholars interested in housing and the wider topics mentioned above, this book should be suitable for many audiences. In particular, it should be approachable for undergraduate students and could be useful in a class on poverty or even in an introduction to sociology class to illustrate social mobility and structure versus agency. This book could also be useful in a graduate research methods seminar because it is a good example of approachable yet rigorous scholarship that draws on multiple data sources and types. Last, with a chapter focused on implications and recommendations, this book should be of interest to housing advocates, service providers, and policy makers. * Rural Sociology *Singlewide blazes a trail for future researchers to follow, opening our eyes to the limited housing options available in rural America. * American Journal of Sociology *This extensive study addresses a largely neglected subject and provides an important contribution to our understanding of class and place in America. Recommended for scholars in community, family, and policy studies. * Contemporary Sociology *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Mobile Home Industrial Complex 2. Making Ends Meet 3. The Illinois Park 4. The North Carolina Parks 5. The New Mexico Parks 6. Youth and Trailer-Park Life 7. Reforming the Mobile Home Industrial Complex Conclusion Acknowledgments Appendix A Appendix B Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIndia and the Patent Wars contributes to an international debate over the costs of medicine and restrictions on access under stringent patent laws showing how activists and drug companies in low-income countries seize agency and exert influence over these processes. Murphy Halliburton contributes to analyses of globalization within the fields of anthropology, sociology, law, and public health by drawing on interviews and ethnographic work with pharmaceutical producers in India and the United States.India has been at the center of emerging controversies around patent rights related to pharmaceutical production and local medical knowledge. Halliburton shows that Big Pharma is not all-powerful, and that local activists and practitioners of ayurveda, India's largest indigenous medical system, have been able to undermine the aspirations of multinational companies and the WTO. Halliburton traces how key drug prices have gone down, not up, in low-income countries under the neTrade ReviewHalliburton ably describes the arcana of patent law while at the same time keeping his sights on the daunting, critical stakes of the issue: the continued accessibility of therapeutic know ledge for global public health. For this achievement, India and the Patent Wars is a crucial read for anyone interested in the global politics of health. * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *

Read more less

Book SynopsisHow do you prove that you''re Muslim? This is not a question that most believers ever have to ask themselves, and yet for members of India''s Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, it poses an existential challenge. The Ahmadis are the minority of a minoritypeople for whom simply being Muslim is a challenge. They must constantly ask the question: What evidence could ever be sufficient to prove that I belong to the faith? In Far from the Caliph''s Gaze Nicholas H. A. Evans explores how a need to respond to this question shapes the lives of Ahmadis in Qadian in northern India. Qadian was the birthplace of the Ahmadiyya community''s founder, and it remains a location of huge spiritual importance for members of the community around the world. Nonetheless, it has been physically separated from the Ahmadis'' spiritual leaderthe caliphsince partition, and the believers who live there now and act as its guardians must confront daily the reality of this separation even while attempTrade ReviewThis book opens new horizons... [it] is solidly researched and makes valuable contributions to several fields. * JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY *Table of ContentsIntroduction: A Troubled Relationship with Truth 1. The History of the Ahmadi-Caliph Relationship 2. An Enchanting Bureaucracy 3. A Failure to Doubt? Polemics and Sectarianism in Qadian 4. Prayer Duels to the Death: The Mubahala 5. Televising Islam: The Aesthetics of Caliphate Conclusion: The Problem with Proof

Read more less

Book SynopsisHow do you prove that you''re Muslim? This is not a question that most believers ever have to ask themselves, and yet for members of India''s Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, it poses an existential challenge. The Ahmadis are the minority of a minoritypeople for whom simply being Muslim is a challenge. They must constantly ask the question: What evidence could ever be sufficient to prove that I belong to the faith? In Far from the Caliph''s Gaze Nicholas H. A. Evans explores how a need to respond to this question shapes the lives of Ahmadis in Qadian in northern India. Qadian was the birthplace of the Ahmadiyya community''s founder, and it remains a location of huge spiritual importance for members of the community around the world. Nonetheless, it has been physically separated from the Ahmadis'' spiritual leaderthe caliphsince partition, and the believers who live there now and act as its guardians must confront daily the reality of this separation even while attempTrade ReviewThis book opens new horizons... [it] is solidly researched and makes valuable contributions to several fields. * JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY *Table of ContentsIntroduction: A Troubled Relationship with Truth 1. The History of the Ahmadi-Caliph Relationship 2. An Enchanting Bureaucracy 3. A Failure to Doubt? Polemics and Sectarianism in Qadian 4. Prayer Duels to the Death: The Mubahala 5. Televising Islam: The Aesthetics of Caliphate Conclusion: The Problem with Proof

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn School of Europeanness, Dace Dzenovska argues that Europe's political landscape is shaped by a fundamental tension between the need to exclude and the requirement to profess and institutionalize the value of inclusion. Nowhere, Dzenovska writes, is this tension more glaring than in the former Soviet Republics.Using Latvia as a representative case, School of Europeanness is a historical ethnography of the tolerance work undertaken in that country as part of postsocialist democratization efforts. Dzenovska contends that the collapse of socialism and the resurgence of Latvian nationalism gave this Europe-wide logic new life, simultaneously reproducing and challenging it. Her work makes explicit what is only implied in the 1977 Kraftwerk song, Europe Endless: hierarchies prevail in European public and political life even as tolerance is touted by politicians and pundits as one of Europe's chief virtues.School of Europeanness shows how postCold War lTrade ReviewDzenovska employs a deceptively simple, yet illuminating, tool for her study of the well-worn subject matter of the last thirty years of Latvia's political and social relations.... her masterful book belongs on the shelves of academics from many disciplines. * Slavonic and East European Review *Dzenovska's critique is worth bearing in mind as increased migration has led to arise in right-wing nativism in Europe and the United States. * Foreign Affairs *Dzenovska's ethnographically rich discussions show how nationalism and a liberal form of statism are also intertwined in identifying and disciplining subjects who are not-yet European enough, in the context of a Europeanizing Latvia. The conceptually driven analyses provide larger insights beyond Latvia for anyone working on liberal values, nationalism and the minority question in Europe. * PoLAR *Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Pride and Shame 2. The State People and Their Minorities 3. Knowing Subjects and Partial Understandings 4. Building Up and Tearing Down 5. Language Sacred and Language Injurious 6. Repression and Redemption Epilogue Notes References Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisWith essays covering diverse topics, from seafood trade across the Vietnam-China border, to street traders in Hanoi, to gold shops in Ho Chi Minh City, Traders in Motion spans the fields of economic and political anthropology, geography, and sociology to illuminate how Vietnam''s rapidly expanding market economy is formed and transformed by everyday interactions among traders, suppliers, customers, family members, neighbors, and officials.The contributions shed light on the micropolitics of local-level economic agency in the paradoxical context of Vietnam''s socialist orientation and its contemporary neoliberal economic and social transformation. The essays examine how Vietnamese traders and officials engage in on-the-ground contestations to define space, promote or limit mobility, and establish borders, both physical and conceptual. The contributors show how trading experiences shape individuals'' notions of self and personhood, not just as economic actors, but also in termsTrade ReviewThis edited volumen successfully presents its arguments and analyses with clear contextualization aand well-organized theoretical frameworks... I highly reccomend this book * Sojourn *Inarguably an exceptional collection on Vietnam's contemporary political economy, the book provides a comprehensive and critical update of how post socialism and neo- liberalism interplay (and clash) in Vietnam, and how powerful macrostructures and ideologies shape, and in return, become shaped by grassroots actors through their everyday practices. * Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography *

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe theory of evolution has clearly altered our views of the biological world, but in the study of human beings, evolutionary and preevolutionary views continue to coexist in a state of perpetual tension. The Taming of Evolution addresses the questions of how and why this is so. Davydd Greenwood offers a sustained critique of the nature/nurture debate, revealing the complexity of the relationship between science and ideology. He maintains that popular contemporary theories, most notably E. O. Wilson's human sociobiology and Marvin Harris's cultural materialism, represent pre-Darwinian notions overlaid by elaborate evolutionary terminology. Greenwood first details the humoral-environmental and Great Chain of Being theories that dominated Western thinking before Darwin. He systematically compares these ideas with those later influenced by Darwin's theories, illuminating the surprising continuities between them. Greenwood suggests that it would be neither difficult nor socially

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn astonishingly rich oral epic that chronicles the early history of a Bedouin tribe, the Sirat Bani Hilal has been performed for almost a thousand years. In this ethnography of a contemporary community of professional poet-singers, Dwight F. Reynolds reveals how the epic tradition continues to provide a context for social interaction and commentary. Reynolds's account is based on performances in the northern Egyptian village in which he studied as an apprentice to a master epic-singer. Reynolds explains in detail the narrative structure of the Sirat Bani Hilal as well as the tradition of epic singing. He sees both living epic poets and fictional epic heroes as figures engaged in an ongoing dialogue with audiences concerning such vital issues as ethnicity, religious orientation, codes of behavior, gender roles, and social hierarchies.Trade ReviewThe richness of Reynolds’s text and his scholarly accomplishment serve as poignant reminders of how little we know about Arab folk performances and how difficult it is to teach these great traditions to our students. -- Virginia Danielson * Middle East Studies Association Bulletin *Reynolds’s book both complements the works of his predecessors and surpasses them in the area on which he focuses. With it, we have a full and methodologically sophisticated treatment of the social poetics of Sirat Bani Hilal performance that is a model of how such research should be conducted. -- Peter Heath * International Journal of Middle East Studies *

Read more less

Book SynopsisBattling the Buddha of Love is a work of advocacy anthropology that explores the controversial plans and practices of the Maitreya Project, a transnational Buddhist organization, as it sought to build the world''s tallest statue as a multi-million-dollar gift to India. Hoping to forcibly acquire 750 acres of occupied land for the statue park in the Kushinagar area of Uttar Pradesh, the Buddhist statue planners ran into obstacle after obstacle, including a full-scale grassroots resistance movement of Indian farmers working to Save the Land.Falcone sheds light on the aspirations, values, and practices of both the Buddhists who worked to construct the statue, as well as the Indian farmer-activists who tirelessly protested against the Maitreya Project. Because the majority of the supporters of the Maitreya Project statue are converts to Tibetan Buddhism, individuals Falcone terms non-heritage practitioners, she focuses on the spectacular collision of cultural values betweeTrade ReviewFalcone draws on fieldwork and her own personal engagement with the resistance to describe the struggle over the creation of what would have been the largest-ever Buddha image. * Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly *Falcone's advocacy does not compromise the rigor or balance of her analysis. She draws on more than a decade of site observation and personal interviews to produce nuanced ethnographies of the various groups as they struggle with the unintended consequences of Buddhism's globalization.... It will be a valuable resource for serious scholars of contemporary Buddhism and for those studying Buddhism and anthropology. * Choice *As the title of this absorbing book Battling the Buddha of Love: A Cultural Biography of the Greatest Statue Never Built aptly describes, this lucid ethnography by Jessica Falcone explores the transnational life of a globalizing Tibetan Buddhist organization. * Reading Religion *This book is a fruitful intellectual effort that challenges the stereotypical narration of protests... The end notes are extremely illuminative. The strength of the work is the rigor shown by the author in the blending of religious studies, history, social and cultural anthropology, and interviews with people, both members of the FPMT and farmers. * H- Net (H-Diplo) *Dr. Falcone offers compelling insights into the concepts of temporality and futurity, grassroots activism in the face of a transnational organization, and the ethics of engaged anthropological practice. * New Books in Anthropology *The book opens the eyes of the readers as blind devotion blocks the critical mind and compassion, and can be lost in unrealistic, pink thinking. I highly reccomend it. * Buddhismus Aktuell *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Meditation/DHYANA: Focusing on the Maitreya Project Part One: The Transnational Buddhist Statue-Makers 1. Community/SANGHA: FPMT's Transnational Buddhists 2. The Teachings/DHARMA: Religious Practice in a Global Buddhist Institution 3. The Statue/MURTI: Planning a Colossal Maitreya 4. The Relics/SARIRA: Worship and Fundraising with the Relic Tour 5. Aspirations/ASHA: Hope, the Future Tense, and Making (Up) Progress on the Maitreya Project Part Two: The Kushinagari Resistance 6. Holy Place/TIRTHA: Living in the Place of the Buddha's Death 7. Steadfastness/ADITTHANA: Indian Farmers Resist the Buddha of Love 8. Loving-Kindness/MAITRI: Contested Notions of Ethics, Values, and Progress 9. Compassion/KARUNA: Reflections on Engaged Anthropology Conclusion: Faith/SHRADDHA: Guru Devotion, Authority, and Belief in the Shadow of the Maitreya Project Epilogue: Rebirth/SAMSARA: The Future of the Maitreya Project

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn 2017, nearly six thousand people were killed in suicide attacks across the world.In The Smile of the Human Bomb, Gideon Aran dissects the moral logic of the suicide terrorism that led to those deaths. The book is a firsthand examination of the bomb site at the moment of the explosion, during the first few minutes after the explosion, and in the last moments before the explosion. Aran uncovers the suicide bomber's final preparations before embarking on the suicide mission: the border crossing, the journey toward the designated target, penetration into the site, and the behavior of both sides within it. The book sheds light on the truth of the human bomb.Aran's gritty and often disturbing account is built on a foundation of participant observation with squads of pious Jewish volunteers who gather the scorched fragments of the dead after terrorist attacks; newly revealed documents, including interrogation protocols; interviews with Palestinian armed resistance mTrade ReviewBy departing from the traditional political, military, economic, and theological analyses of terrorism, Aran presents an intriguing and novel view of the issue. * Publishers Weekly *A conceptually innovative examination of suicide terrorism.... One of the book's unique contributions is its analysis of suicide terrorism from an anthropological-sociological perspective, based on the author's extensive field research in Israel and the West Bank.... An important contribution to the literature on suicide bombing attacks. * Perspectives on Terrorism *

Read more less

Book SynopsisBy focusing on the social and cultural life of post-1965 Taiwan immigrants in Queens, New York, this book shifts Chinese American studies from ethnic enclaves to the diverse multiethnic neighborhoods of Flushing and Elmhurst. As Hsiang-shui Chen documents, the political dynamics of these settlements are entirely different from the traditional closed Chinese communities; the immigrants in Queens think of themselves as living in worldtown, not in a second Chinatown. Drawing on interviews with members of a hundred households, Chen brings out telling aspects of demography, immigration experience, family life, and gender roles, and then turns to vivid, humanistic portraits of three families. Chen also describes the organizational life of the Chinese in Queens with a lively account of the power struggles and social interactions that occur within religious, sports, social service, and business groups and with the outside world.Trade ReviewChinatown No More is an informative addition to the urban, immigrant, and ethnic community literature. -- Sharon M. Lee * Contemporary Sociology *Chen's readable ethnography brings together his insights as both participant in and observer of an extraordinarily significant segment of America's changing ethnic landscape. Teachers from advanced high school onward should welcome this excellent introduction to Taiwan immigrants in Flushing, Queens. Academic specialists focusing on ethnic relations, on the complexities of class in the United States, or on the 'overseas Chinese' will also find Chen's study informative and thought provoking. -- Hill Gates * American Ethnologist *

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this landmark account, Nur Amali Ibrahim paints a nuanced, detailed portrait of students seeking to reconcile some of the major social forces that inflect everyday life across the Muslim world—Islam, liberalism, radicalism, and secularism—as they strive to both find and define their place in a fast-changing, democratizing nation. Ibrahim demonstrates the critical importance of scholarly attention in both anthropology and religious studies to this vibrant country—the world’s largest Muslim nation.?Daromir Rudnyckyj, Associate Professor, University of Victoria, and author of the award-winning Spiritual EconomiesImprovisational Islam is about novel and unexpected ways of being Muslim, where religious dispositions are achieved through techniques that have little or no precedent in classical Islamic texts or concepts.Nur Amali Ibrahim foregrounds two distinct autodidactic university student organizations, each Trade ReviewSituated in the body of work on Islam in Indonesia, Nur Amali's approach in Improvisational Islam is refreshing. Nur Amali uses a strong anthropological research method, conducting in-depth interviews with youths, participant observation and lengthy field research. * SOJOURN - Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Prologue Introduction 1. The Tremblingness of Youths 2. Religion Unleashed 3. Accounting for the Soul 4. Playing with Scriptures 5. From Moderate Indonesia to Indonistan Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this landmark account, Nur Amali Ibrahim paints a nuanced, detailed portrait of students seeking to reconcile some of the major social forces that inflect everyday life across the Muslim world—Islam, liberalism, radicalism, and secularism—as they strive to both find and define their place in a fast-changing, democratizing nation. Ibrahim demonstrates the critical importance of scholarly attention in both anthropology and religious studies to this vibrant country—the world’s largest Muslim nation.?Daromir Rudnyckyj, Associate Professor, University of Victoria, and author of the award-winning Spiritual EconomiesImprovisational Islam is about novel and unexpected ways of being Muslim, where religious dispositions are achieved through techniques that have little or no precedent in classical Islamic texts or concepts.Nur Amali Ibrahim foregrounds two distinct autodidactic university student organizations, each Trade ReviewSituated in the body of work on Islam in Indonesia, Nur Amali's approach in Improvisational Islam is refreshing. Nur Amali uses a strong anthropological research method, conducting in-depth interviews with youths, participant observation and lengthy field research. * SOJOURN - Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Prologue Introduction 1. The Tremblingness of Youths 2. Religion Unleashed 3. Accounting for the Soul 4. Playing with Scriptures 5. From Moderate Indonesia to Indonistan Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisTaiwan's working class has been shaped by Chinese tradition, by colonialism, and by rapid industrialization. This book defines that class, explores that history, and presents with sensitive honesty the life experiences of some of its women and men. Hill Gates first provides a solid and informative introduction to Taiwan's history, showing how mainland China, Japan, the convulsions of twentieth-century wars, and the East Asian economic expansion interacted in forming Taiwanese urban life. She introduces nine individuals from Taiwan's three major ethnic groups to tell the stories of their lives in their own words. The narrators include a fortuneteller, a woman laborer, and a retired air force mechanic. A former spirit medium and a janitor are among the others who speak.Trade ReviewWords and phrases that best describe this book are ‘absorbing,’ ‘insightful,’ ‘straightforward,’ and ‘it makes you wish you had done it yourself.’ Through effectively telling nine life histories of mostly middle-aged people, Hill Gates gives the reader a comprehensive picture of working-class life on Taiwan in the 1980s. Gates has sought to present a range of types in some depth—thus portraying very clearly the life and cultures of this class on this island. -- Mark C. Thelin * Contemporary Sociology *Gates’s life-history method gains strength as it places the individual in concentric circles, overlapping groups, networks, and fragments of relationship to society. The reader learns about the structure of society from the bottom up, as it is seen and experienced by its participants. This is rich material drawn from the experiences of ordinary people, and its strength is to be found in both its rarity and its reality. -- Janet W. Salaff * Journal of Asian Studies *

Read more less

Book SynopsisDistant Companions tells the fascinating story of the lives and times of domestic servants and their employers in Zambia from the beginning of white settlement during the colonial period until after independence. Emphasizing the interactive nature of relationships of domination, the book is useful for readers who seek to understand the dynamics of domestic service in a variety of settings. In order to examine the servant- employer relationship within the context of larger political and economic processes, Karen Tranberg Hansen employs an unusual combination of methods, including analysis of historical documents, travelogues, memoirs, literature, and life histories, as well as anthropological fieldwork, survey research, and participant observation.Trade ReviewUtilizing an impressive array of research methods—from historical archives to social surveys—Hansen provides both historical depth and current insights into this most contentious of employer-employee relationships. She discovers that the intimacy of the home as a workplace, with its daily contact between servant and employer, requires elaborate rituals to maintain and preserve social distance between employer and employee. Class conflict and tension, often intertwined with race and gender, have a special drama in the household, making this form of labor peculiarly revealing for the study of these issues. Distant Companions is a superb book—carefully crafted, broadly researched, and deeply committed to improving the conditions of domestic labor. It has important implications for the comparative study of domestic work and should be required reading for Africanists and feminists alike. -- Janet L. Parpart * African Economic History *

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhen thousands of women gathered in 1983 to protest the stockpiling of nuclear weapons at a rural upstate New York military depot, the area was shaken by their actions. What so disturbed residents that they organized counterdemonstrations, wrote hundreds of letters to local newspapers, verbally and physically harassed the protestors, and nearly rioted to stop one of the protest marches? Louise Krasniewicz reconstructs the drama surrounding the Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice in Seneca County, New York, analyzing it as a clash both between and within communities. She shows how debates about gender and authorityincluding questions of morality, patriotism, women's roles, and sexualitycame to overshadow arguments about the risks of living in a nuclear world. Vivid ethnography and vibrant social history, this work will engage readers interested in American culture, women's studies, peace studies, and cultural anthropology.Trade ReviewNuclear Summer cuts through conceptual chain-link fences and applies the rich intersection of feminist and poststructural analyses to unravel complicated tensions that exploded during the summer of 1983 at the Seneca Women's Peace Encampment. Krasniewicz leads the reader through historical contexts of the county, the formation of the encampment, initial perceptions of the peace camp by the local community, and the development of the relationship between camp women and members of the local community. Analysis of conversations, videotapes, brochures, clothing, songs and ritual, protest events, posters, and editorial letters make it clear that the emergent clashes did not necessarily arise from differing opinions over whether the United States should produce, store, and deploy nuclear weapons but instead were linked intimately to Foucauldian-type wars concerning notions of 'real women' and 'good Americans.' -- Lynn Wilson * Man *

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn the 2000s, Laos was treated as a model country for the efficacy of privatized, sustainable hydropower projects as viable options for World Bank-led development. By viewing hydropower as a process that creates ecologically uncertain environments, Jerome Whitington reveals how new forms of managerial care have emerged in the context of a privatized dam project successfully targeted by transnational activists. Based on ethnographic work inside the hydropower company, as well as with Laotians affected by the dam, he investigates how managers, technicians and consultants grapple with unfamiliar environmental obligations through new infrastructural configurations, locally-inscribed ethical practices, and forms of flexible experimentation informed by American management theory.Far from the authoritative expertise that characterized classical modernist hydropower, sustainable development in Laos has been characterized by a shift from the risk politics of the 1990s to an ontologicaTrade ReviewWhitington's book analyses a period of unprecedented hydropower development during which the country effectively doubled its major dams. The book is daunting in its complexity, but it essentially con- ceptualises the administration of water from its practices * Australian Book Review *Bursting with insights about dams as an ecological response in the contemporary moment, Anthropogenic Rivers will be required reading for environmental anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and science and technology studies scholars with an interest in enviro-technical landscapes. This book also adds to the burgeoning literature on rivers and waters in Asia tackling what it means to do environmental scholarship in late industrial and post-socialist landscapes in the global South. Finally, this book breaks fresh ground in ethnography of the statist development by rethinking how we define expertise and uncertainty. Every reader will come away from the book to look at rivers and dammed waterscapes with a new lens. * H-Net *Through the ethnographic study of an unusual, experimental collaboration between a hydropower company constructing dams in Laos and a transnational activist group, Whitington's Anthropogenic Rivers examines the purposeful production of uncertainty as a strategic political ontology and as a form of knowledge. Anthropogenic Rivers is an exciting contribution to the study of uncertainty and a slightly rebel addition to the by now well established subgenre of analyses of the Anthropocene. * Anthropos *Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Introduction: The Production of Uncertainty Interlude. On the Postcolony (Engineering) Hydropower's Circle of Influence Interlude. What Is a Dam? Vulnerable at Every Joint Interlude. Intimacy (Vetting) 3. Performance-Based Management Interlude. The Method of Uncertainty 4. The Ethics of Document Engineering Interlude. Interview Notes (Lightly Edited) 5. Anthropogenic Rivers Conclusion: Figuring the Anthropogenic Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less