Social and cultural anthropology Books

Book SynopsisIntroduction.- The end of reconciliation The Australian Voice referendum in comparative perspective.- Racism Resentment and Divided Support Understanding Australians Votes in the Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum Raymond Foxworth Carew Boulding Edana Beauvais and Sarah Maddison.- Asking the wrong questions Reading racial resentment and settler nationalism in the ANU Referendum Study Kim Alley.- Who killed the Voice referendum Heidi Norman.- The Voice referendum compared Comparative Attitudes toward Indigenous Political Issues and Peoples Raymond Foxworth Carew Boulding Edana Beauvais.- The Indigenous Voice in Australia How a Referendum to change the Australian Constitution Offers Political Science an opportunity to better consider Indigenous politics Raymond Orr.- Settler nationalism and the limits of constitutional reform Dan Tout and Lorenzo Veracini.- The Voice Referendum Deliberative Democracy and Settler Colonialism Justin McCaul.- The dead end of populism the end of reconciliation Sarah Maddison.

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Book SynopsisIntroduction: Amplifying Connection, Care, and Decoloniality.- Part 1: Words of the Land: Renaming, Resistance, and Renewal.- Part 1: Words of the Land: Renaming, Resistance, and Renewal.- How does it all come back now? Re-organising naturalized histories.- Waka Memory: Ancestral Connections.- Gender Responsibility Country: How Aboriginal people define their role in caring for the universe.- Part 2: Unmaking Extraction: Toward Restoration and Repair.- The Root of The Matter: Forests and Colonial Histories in Aotearoa New Zealand.- Cultural Waters: Integrating Indigenous Knowledge and Governance for Justice and Sustainability in Central Queensland.- The River is an Island: (Re)imagining a More-than-human Future for the Waimata Catchment.- Whanau Care: A Model for Equitable Support for Kaitiaki Whanau.- Part 3: Restoring Country, Restoring Justice: Pathways to Transformation.- First Nations Water Holder: The Future for Cultural Water in the Murray Darling Basin.- Djaara Women Returning Food Plants and Healing Country: A Story of Walking Together and Generating Embodied Knowledge.- Securing Water Access: Economic Futures for Victoria’s Traditional Owners.- First Peoples, Living Waters. A Cultural Dialogue.- Reflections.

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Book SynopsisThe Maa of East Africa are a cluster of related pastoral peoples who share a social organization based on age. This groups men into life-long cohorts from their initiation in youth, regardless of family wealth. Historically, this type of pre-market society has been described in every continent, but East Africa provides the principal surviving region of age-based societies, among whom the Maasai are the best known. In this volume, comparison between three branches of Maa highlights different aspects of their society: the dynamics of power with age and gender among the Maasai, of ritual performance and belief among the Samburu, and of historical change among the Chamus. Here it is argued that understanding another culture can only be approached through models derived in the first instance from the representations conveyed by members of that culture. The social anthropologist may then elaborate these images through the choice of analytical parallels, even extending to other disciplines and personal experience. Each chapter in this volume views Maa institutions through a different lens, exploring models relevant to a comprehensive analysis of their social life.

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Book SynopsisThe simple fabric face mask is a key agent in the fight against the global spread of COVID-19. However, beyond its role as a protective covering against coronavirus infection, the face mask is the bearer of powerful symbolic and political power and arouses intense emotions. Adopting an international perspective informed by social theory, The Face Mask in COVID Times: A Sociomaterial Analysis offers an intriguing and original investigation of the social, cultural and historical dimensions of face-masking as a practice in the age of COVID. Rather than Beck’s ‘risk society’, we are now living in a ‘COVID society’, the long-term effects of which have yet to be experienced or imagined. Everything has changed. The COVID crisis has generated novel forms of sociality and new ways of living and moving through space and time. In this new world, the face mask has become a significant object, positioned as one of the key ways people can protect themselves and others from infection with the coronavirus. The face mask is rich with symbolic meaning as well as practical value. In the words of theorist Jane Bennett, the face mask has acquired a new ‘thing-power’ as it is coming together with human bodies in these times of uncertainty, illness and death. The role of the face mask in COVID times has been the subject of debate and dissension, arousing strong feelings. The historical and cultural contexts in which face masks against COVID contagion are worn (or not worn) are important to consider. In some countries, such as Japan and other East Asian nations, face mask wearing has a long tradition. Full or partial facial coverings, such as veiling, is common practice in regions such as the Middle East. In many other countries, including most countries in the Global North, most people, beyond health care workers, have little or no experience of face masks. They have had to learn how to make sense of face masking as a protective practice and how to incorporate face masks into their everyday practices and routines. Face masking practices have become highly political. The USA has witnessed protests against face mask wearing that rest on ‘sovereign individualism’, a notion which is highly specific to the contemporary political climate in that country. Face masks have also been worn to make political statements: bearing anti-racist statements, for example, but also Trump campaign support. Meanwhile, celebrities and influencers have sought to advocate for face mask wearing as part of their branding, while art makers, museums, designers and novelty fashion manufacturers have identified the opportunity to profit from this sudden new market. Face masks have become a fashion item as well as a medical device: both a way of signifying the wearer’s individuality and beliefs and their ethical stance in relation to the need to protect their own and others’ health. The Face Mask in COVID Times: A Sociomaterial Analysis provides a short and accessible analysis of the sociomaterial dimensions of the face mask in the age of COVID-19. The book presents seven short chapters and an epilogue. We bring together sociomaterial theoretical perspectives with compelling examples from public health advice and campaigns, anti-mask activism as well as popular culture (news reports, blog posts, videos, online shopping sites, art works) to illustrate our theoretical points, and use Images to support our analysis. Table of ContentsChapter 1: Introduction: The Face Mask as Sociomaterial Artefact This chapter will introduce the rationale for the book, addressing the question of why sociomaterial theories are so important to make sense of the meanings and practices related to the face mask in the age of COVID. It will provide the context for understanding the face mask as a sociocultural artefact, discussing the history of the face mask (and other facial coverings, such as veiling practices) internationally. This chapter also provides an overview of the theoretical perspectives we are using in our analysis. We draw particularly on the vital materialism offered in the work of feminist new materialist scholars and Indigenous and First Nations philosophies as well as domestication theory. These perspectives position material objects such as face masks as contributing to assemblages of people with nonhuman things. It is with and through these combinations of humans and nonhumans that agencies and forces are generated. We ‘think with’ vital materialism in the following chapters to consider how the face mask has taken on the extraordinary meanings, values and affective intensities. This chapter, therefore, provides the basis for elucidating the divergent cultural responses to face masks in contemporary political and geographical contexts that follows in the book. Chapter 2: The Micro and Macro Politics of Masks This chapter will trace the anti-mask and #masks4all movements during the COVID crisis, examining the meanings both groups attached to the mask. We interrogate the process by which masks came to be regarded as a necessity in many countries that had previously been apathetic to mask-wearing as a public health strategy, and how this played out at the level of everyday practices. We interrogate how masks came to be a key site of contestation during the pandemic and a significant symbol of the event. Focusing on several high-profile case studies involving public conflicts around masks, this chapter employs Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action to examine the discourses, objects, bodies, habits, relations of power and affects that intra-act to constitute the divergent meanings of masks that came about during the early months of the pandemic. This chapter draws connections between the micro-level everyday anxieties surrounding mask-wearing in shops to public health messaging at the national level to international tensions surrounding their manufacture and purchase. Chapter 3: Ordinary Objects, Extraordinary Times This chapter explores the way face masks and their (contested) emergence during the pandemic offer us an opportunity to think about our intimacy with ordinary objects. Though intimacy is often conceptualised as emerging in inter-personal relationships, taking up a vital materialist perspective we consider the way it emerges in the relations between humans and nonhuman objects, such as the face mask. Drawing on scholarship from science and technology studies, we contextualise face masks within a history of intimate objects that have become ‘domesticated’, such as glasses and clothing, and, more recently, smartphones and smart watches. In tracing this domestication, this chapter examines establishing of everyday routines and habits, as well as attempts to normalise masks through public health messaging. This chapter will explore the way this intimacy is connected to some initial discomfort with widespread mask wearing during the pandemic. Chapter 4: Bodies, Breath, Boundaries This chapter examines the embodied and affective aspects of wearing a mask and considers how these experiences shift in relation to the sociomaterial contexts and conditions in which they are worn. By attending to the entangled materialities of objects, breath and bodies, this chapter will explore the indeterminacy of bodily boundaries in order to illuminate the often-overlooked leakiness of social life and underline its collective dimensions. Drawing on Karen Barad’s concepts of entanglement and intra-action and Stacy Alaimo’s transcorporeality, we extend understandings of bodies as bounded entities and trace their interconnectedness. We then consider how this interconnectedness matters specifically in pandemic times. Paying attention to the specificities of face masks and the embodied practice of mask wearing, we trace the affective and material flows that move across bodies and environments. Chapter 5: DIY Cultures and the Making of Masks Face masks have quickly emerged as a fashion accessory and key selling point for many retailers, from luxury companies including Louis Vuitton to boutique crafters via platforms such as Etsy. However, due to production delays, issue of cost and accessibility, and limited supplies of available Personal Protective Equipment being necessarily directed to frontline service workers, a notable do-it-yourself (DIY) culture of mask making has emerged. This chapter explores the relational politics and distributed agencies of DIY face masks. With several case studies on the creative exchange of accessible tools and techniques and grassroots social justice supply campaigns, it considers the significance of how face masks are made to matter in the COVID context. This chapter positions these making practices within the broader landscape of contemporary DIY cultures, focusing on the ways in which the profit-resistant, creativity- and community-oriented aesthetic and political ethos of DIY shapes the meaning, materiality and multiplicity of the mask. Chapter 6: Face Masking as An Act of Care As masks and the practices associated with them (wearing, refusing, creating) were positioned at the centre of the COVID crisis in many countries, we consider the ways that mask-wearers and makers emphasise the act of wearing the mask as an act care for others, as well as self-protection. At the same time, those who refuse masks are positioned in opposition, as careless – or potentially hostile to others. We engage the work of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa to think how masks and mask wearing and creation become implicated in the ethical, political and material dimensions of care. Locating ourselves in the rapidly shifting and emerging conditions of the COVID pandemic, masks become central to our ethical and careful responses. Here we consider the way that care and being careful extends towards the minute level of one’s breath. Epilogue Here we offer some concluding comments, reflecting on the themes that thread together the chapters in the book.

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Book SynopsisCommunities worldwide are critically re-examining their seasonal cultures and calendars. As cultural frameworks, seasons have long patterned community life and provided repertoires for living by annual rhythms. In a chaotic world, the seasons – winter, the monsoon and so on – can feel like stable cultural landmarks for reckoning time and orienting our communities. Seasons are rooted in our pasts and reproduced in our present. They act as schemes for synchronising community activities and professional practices, and as symbol systems for interpreting what happens in the world. But on closer inspection, seasons can be unstable and unreliable. Their meanings can change over time. Seasonal cultures evolve with environments and communities’ worldviews, values, technologies and practices, affecting how people perceive seasonal patterns and behave accordingly. Calendars are contested, especially now. Communities today find themselves in a moment of accelerated and intersecting changes – from climate to social, political, and technological – that are destabilizing seasonal cultures. How they reorient themselves to shifting patterns may affect whether seasonal rhythms serve as resources, or lead people down maladaptive pathways. A focus on seasonal cultures builds on multi-disciplinary work. The social sciences, from anthropology to sociology, have long studied how seasons order people’s sense of time, social life, relationship to the environment, and politics. In the humanities, seasons play an important role in literature, art, archaeology and history. This book advances scholarship in these fields, and enriches it with extrascientific insights from practice, to open up exiting new directions in climate adaptation.

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Book SynopsisThis book interrogates how new digital-visual techniques and technologies are being used in emergent configurations of research and intervention. It discusses technological change and technological possibility; theoretical shifts toward processual paradigms; and a respectful ethics of responsibility. The contributors explore how new and evolving digital-visual technologies and techniques have been utilized in the development of research, and reflect on how such theory and practice might advance what is “knowable” in a world of smartphones, drones, and 360-degree cameras. Table of Contents​1. Introduction2. Refiguring Techniques: Technologies, Possibilities, Emergence and an Ethics of Responsibility in Visual-digital Research3. Drone Bodies: Sensual Amalgamations of the Vertical4. For a Non-Linear Visual Ethnography: Reflections on the Use of i-docs as a Tool for Scientific Research5. Empathetic Visuality: Go-Pros and the Video Trace6. Careful Surveillance at Play: Human-Animal Relations and Mobile Media in the Home7. Being There, Feeling There: Using 360 Cameras in Ethnographic Fieldwork8. Ethnography through the Digital Eye: What Do We See When We Look?9. Visual Documentation in Hybrid Spaces: Ethics, Publics, and Transition10. At the Edges of the Visual Culture of Exile

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Book SynopsisTheoretical-methodological reflections on the concepts of diversity and ethnography.- Knowledge orders of foreignness(es).- Appropriation and use of knowledge.- Knowledge - communication - identity.

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Book SynopsisDieses kompakte Lehrbuch führt in die Grundlagen der Organisationswissenschaft ein. Die interdisziplinäre Betrachtung behandelt soziologische, volks- und betriebswirtschaftliche sowie psychologische und pädagogische Erkenntnisse zum Gegenstand der Organisation. Einführend wird die Funktion von Organisationen in modernen Gesellschaften analysiert und die Entwicklung der Organisationsidee und -theorie dargestellt. Die zentralen Gestaltungsparameter wie Strukturen, Prozesse und Projekte werden im Hauptteil ausführlich behandelt. Eine Besonderheit ist die Betrachtung der Veränderungsperspektive durch Change Agents im Schlußteil des Lehrbuchs. Zahlreiche Übungen und Fallstudien vermitteln die Inhalte im Kontext und helfen das Erlernte auf Anwendungssituationen zu übertragen.Trade Review“… Das Buch stellt für den Leser aus der Projektmanagement-Community dadurch einen Mehrwert dar, dass es einen umfassenden Einblick gibt in die Organisationswissenschaft, in deren Historie ebenso wie in deren moderne Blickwinkel. Es thematisiert die Projektorganisation als wichtige Gestaltungsform der Organisation, gleichberechtigt neben den Themen der Aufbauorganisation bzw. der Ablauforganisation. Es weist auch auf die wachsende Bedeutung der Projektorganisation hin …” (Dorothee Feldmüller, in: Project Management aktuell, Jg. 27, Heft 5, 2016)Table of ContentsVorwort.- Abbildungs- und Tabellenverzeichnis.- 1. Organisation und Kooperation.- 2. Geschichte, Theorien und Moden.- 3. Gestaltung I: Organisationsstrukturen.- 4. Gestaltung II: Organisationsprozesse.- 5. Gestaltung III: Projektorganisation.- 6. Beratung I: Ansätze der Organisationsberatung.- 7. Beratung II: Verstehende Beratung.- 8. Zum Schluss: Perspektiven der Temporären Organisation.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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