Anthropology, Culture and Society
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New Directions in Economic Anthropology
by Susana Narotzky
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Using an historical perspective, Narotzky highlights the interdependent nature of the contemporary world economy, and includes case studies of Western societies. She gives special emphasis to current issues such as the anthropology of work, the informal economy, and the cultures of industrialisation.
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Humans and Other Animals
Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions
by Samantha Hurn
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
What are our attitudes towards other animals, and how does this affect our humanity?
This work of anthrozoology explores the myriad and evolving ways in which humans and animals interact, the divergent cultural constructions of humanity and animality found around the world, and individual experiences of other animals.
This book looks at case studies covering blood sports (such as hunting, fishing and bull fighting), pet keeping and 'petishism', eco-tourism and wildlife conservation, working animals and animals as food. It addresses the idea of animal exploitation raised by the animal rights movements, as well as the anthropological implications of changing attitudes towards animal personhood, and the rise of a posthumanist philosophy in the social sciences more generally.
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Fredrik Barth
An Intellectual Biography
by Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Fredrik Barth is one of the towering figures of twentieth-century anthropology. This intellectual history traces the development of Barth's ideas and explores the substance of his contributions. In an accessible style, Thomas Hylland Eriksen's biographical study reveals the magic of ethnography to professional anthropologists and non-practitioners alike.
Exploring his six decade career, it follows Barth from early ecological studies in Pakistan, to political studies in Iran, to groundbreaking fieldwork in Norway, New Guinea, Bali and Bhutan. Eriksen argues that Barth's voracious appetite for fieldwork holds the key to understanding his remarkable intellectual development and the insights it produced. The book raises many of the same questions that emerge from Barth's own work - of unity and diversity, of culture and relativism, of art and science.
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Cultivating Development
An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice
by David Mosse
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
What if development agencies and researchers are not driven by policy? Suppose that the things that make for 'good policy' - policy that legitimises and mobilises political support - in reality make it impossible to implement?
By focusing in detail on the unfolding activities of a development project in western India over more than ten years, as it falls under different policy regimes, this book takes a close look at the relationship between policy and practice in development. David Mosse shows how the actions of development workers are shaped by the exigencies of organisations and the need to maintain relationships rather than by policy; but also that development actors work hardest of all to maintain coherent representations of their actions as instances of authorised policy. Raising unfamiliar questions, Mosse provides a rare self-critical reflection on practice, while refusing to endorse current post-modern dismissal of development.
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Discordant Development
Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh
by Katy Gardner
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
What happened when Chevron, a multinational mining company, opened a gas plant right next to densely populated villages in rural Bangladesh?
This book reveals contradictory ways that local people attempt to connect to, and are disconnected by, foreign capital. Commentators on the situation have different frameworks, whether of dispossession and scarcity, the success of Corporate Social Responsibility, or imperialist exploitation and corruption. Yet as Gardner argues, what really matters in the struggles over resources is which of these stories are heard, and the power of those who tell them.
Based on the narratives of dispossessed land owners, urban activists, mining officials and the rural landless, Discordant Development shows the real picture behind the effect multinational capital has on indigenous communities.
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Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production
by Maruska Svasek
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
This book provides an introduction to anthropological perspectives on art.
Svasek defines art as a social process. We study not only the artefacts themselves and the values attributed to them, but also the process of production and its wider context.
Providing a critical overview of various anthropological theories of art, Svasek offers a new perspective which centres on the analysis of commoditisation, aestheticisation and object agency. She explores the process of collecting and exhibiting art works and how this relates to art's production, distribution and consumption in an increasingly global market.
The book outlines the significance of art and aesthetics in everyday life, and examines the shifting boundaries between art and other categories such as kitsch, souvenirs, propaganda and pornography.
Finally, Svasek argues for an anthropological perspective that links the production and consumption of artefacts to political, religious and other cultural processes.
Ideal as a teaching text, this book gives a detailed overview of themes that are central to the fields of art history, art sociology and cultural studies.
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How We Struggle
A Political Anthropology of Labour
by Sian Lazar
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
When it comes to labour movements, unionised industrial workers on the factory floor have only ever been part of the picture. Across so many different workplaces, sectors of the economy and geographical contexts, the question of how working people struggle in the day-to-day has no single answer.
Here Sian Lazar offers a unique anthropological perspective on labour agency that takes in examples from across the globe, from heavy industry and agriculture, to the service and informal sectors. She asks: how do people strive to improve their lives and working conditions? How are they constrained and enabled in that struggle by the nature of the work they do, and by their own positionality in local histories, cultures and networks?
“How We Struggle” explores worker action across the spectrum from organised trade unionism to individualised strategies of accommodation, resistance and escape. The book marries a discussion of global political economy and Marxist feminist theories of labour with ethnographic approaches that begin from a perspective of human experience, kinship and radical heterogeneity.
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Caring Cash
Free Money and the Ethics of Solidarity in Kenya
by Tom Neumark
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
The idea of giving cash, no-strings-attached, to the poor has become popular in the 21st century. While hardly a radical form of global redistribution, these cash grants, often known as unconditional cash transfers, claim to offer a new type of care that is less paternalistic than other forms of assistance.
“Caring Cash” explores the caring practices that these grant experiments produced in the Nairobi ghetto of Korogocho. After receiving the grants, people there did not only look after themselves and their family, friends, lovers, clients and patrons, but also maintained the bonds that held them all together.
Putting his interlocutors' lives in conversation with ideas around care, ethics and economies, Tom Neumark argues that for those in the ghetto, caring for relationships is as important as the care that takes place within relationships. Seeing care in this way reveals the importance of managing one's proximity, distance and detachment to others, and raises questions about the disquieting decisions that allow people to live together amidst violence and poverty.
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Grassroots Economies
Living with Austerity in Southern Europe
by Various Authors
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
The austerity crisis has radically altered the economic landscape of Southern Europe. But alongside the decimation of public services and infrastructure lies the wreckage of a generation's visions for the future. In Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, there is a new, difficult reality of downward mobility.
Grassroots Economies interrogates the effects of the economic crisis on the livelihood of working people, providing insight into their anxieties. Drawing on a wide range of ethnographic material, it is a distinctive comparative analysis that explores the contradictions of their coping mechanisms and support structures.
With a focus on gender, the book explores values and ideologies, including dispossession and accumulation. Ultimately it demonstrates that everyday interactions on the local scale provide a significant sense of the global.
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Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque
A Collaborative Ethnography of War and Peace
by Jonathan Spencer
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Is religion best seen as only a cause of war, or is it a source of comfort for those caught up in conflict? In Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque six senior figures in Anthropology, Sociology, Geography and Development Studies set out to answer this question.
Based on fieldwork conducted in Sri Lanka's most religiously diverse and politically troubled region during the country's civil war (1983-2009), it provides a series of new and provocative arguments about the promise of a religiously based civil society, and the strengths and weaknesses of religious organisations and religious leaders in conflict mediation.
The authors argue that for people trapped in long and violent conflicts, religion ultimately plays a contradictory role, and that its institutions are themselves profoundly affected by war - producing a complex picture in which Catholic priests engage with Buddhist monks and new Muslim leaders, and where Hindu temples and Pentecostal churches offer the promise of healing.
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Power and Its Disguises
Anthropological Perspectives on Politics
by John Gledhill
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
This book explores both the complexities of local situations and the power relations that shape the global order. He shows how historically informed anthropological perspectives can contribute to debates about democratisation by incorporating a 'view from below' and revealing forces that shape power relations behind the formal facade of state institutions.
Examples are drawn from Brazil, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Sri Lanka, amongst others.
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Organisational Anthropology
Doing Ethnography in and Among Complex Organisations
by Various Authors
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Organisational Anthropology is a pioneering analysis of doing ethnographic fieldwork in different types of complex organisations, focusing on the process of initiating contact, establishing rapport and gaining the trust of an organisation's members.
The thirteen contributors work from the premise that doing fieldwork in an organisation shares essential characteristics with fieldwork in more 'classical' anthropological environments, but that it also poses some particular challenges to the ethnographer, with barriers including the ideological or financial interests of the organisations, protection of resources and competition between organisations.
A number of organisational contexts - including corporations, EU policy arenas, think tanks and the public sector - are explored in case studies from the UK, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Mexico and the USA.
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Cultures of Fear
A Critical Reader
by Various Authors
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
This collection of essays explores the formation and normalisation of fear in the context of war and terrorism.
Freedom from fear is a universal right and fundamental for human well-being. People often look to governments, humanitarian agencies, and other institutions to further this aim. However, this book shows that these organisations often use the same logic of fear to monitor, control, and contain human beings in zones of violence.
This is an excellent interdisciplinary reader for students of anthropology, sociology and politics. Contributors include Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, Jean Baudrillard, Catharine MacKinnon, Neil Smith, Cynthia Enloe, David L. Altheide, Cynthia Cockburn and Carolyn Nordstrum.
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The Rise of Nerd Politics
Digital Activism and Political Change
by John Postill
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
The irruption of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Snowden and other tech-savvy actors onto the global political stage raises urgent questions about the impact of digital activism on political systems around the world. The Rise of Nerd Politics is an anthropological exploration of the role that such actors play in sparking and managing new processes of political change in the digital age.
Drawing from long-term ethnographic research in Spain and Indonesia - as well as case studies from the United States, Iceland, Tunisia, Taiwan, Brazil and elsewhere - Postill tracks the rise of techno-political 'nerds' as a new class of political brokers with growing influence. The book identifies and explores four domains of 'nerd politics' that have dramatically expanded since 2010: data activism, digital rights, social protest and formal politics.
A lively and engaging intervention at the conjuncture of anthropology, media studies and sociology, The Rise of Nerd Politics offers a pertinent reflection on the future of political change in the digital age.
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Contesting Publics
Feminism, Activism, Ethnography
by Lynne Phillips
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Through ethnographic case studies and activists' narratives, Contesting Publics analyses the challenges feminists face as they seek to engage with new spaces of participatory democracy in Latin America.
Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole analyse how new silences, exclusions and re-inscriptions of inequalities have emerged alongside these new spaces of participation. They re-examine the relationship between public and private and address a larger theoretical question: what is the meaning of 'the public' within democracy projects?
Contesting Publics considers current debates among feminists from different generations on the merits of a variety of strategies, goals and issues, drawing out vital lessons for students, researchers and activists in anthropology, gender studies and Latin American studies.
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Watershed Politics and Climate Change in Peru
by Astrid B. Stensrud
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
This book travels to the heart of power, inequality and injustice in water politics. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Peru, Astrid B. Stensrud explores the impact of climate change and extractivist neoliberal policies – including Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), a global paradigm that views water as a finite resource in need of management.
Engaging with the many different actors and entities participating in the constitution of the watershed – from engineers, bureaucrats and farmers, to mountains, springs and canals – Stensrud shines light on different yet entangled water practices and water worlds and how both the watershed and our understanding of water itself have changed.
Challenging hegemonic understandings, the book moves beyond conventional perspectives of political ecology and political economy to achieve a decolonial perspective.
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Flip-Flop
A Journey Through Globalisation's Backroads
by Caroline Knowles
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
*Shortlisted for the BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed Award for Ethnography 2015*
This book follows the global trail of one of the world's most unremarkable and ubiquitous objects - flip-flops. Through this unique lens, Caroline Knowles takes a ground level view of the lives and places of globalisation's back roads, providing new insights that challenge contemporary accounts of globalisation.
Rather than orderly product chains, the book shows that globalisation along the flip-flop trail is a tangle of unstable, shifting, ad hoc and contingent connections. This book displays both the instabilities of the 'chains' and the complexities, personal topographies and skills with which people navigate these global uncertainties.
Flip-Flop provides new ways of thinking about globalisation from the vantage point of the shifting landscape crossed by a seemingly ordinary and everyday commodity.
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Small Places, Large Issues
An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology
by Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
This introduction to social and cultural anthropology has become a modern classic, revealing the rich global variation in social life and culture across the world.
Presenting a clear overview of anthropology, it focuses on central topics such as kinship, ethnicity, ritual and political systems, offering a wealth of examples that demonstrate the enormous scope of anthropology and the importance of a comparative perspective. Unlike other texts on the subject, Small Places, Large Issues incorporates the anthropology of complex modern societies. Using reviews of key works to illustrate his argument, Thomas Hylland Eriksen's lucid and accessible overview remains an established introductory text in anthropology.
This fourth edition is updated throughout and increases the emphasis on the interdependence of human worlds. It incorporates recent debates and controversies, ranging from globalisation and migration research to problems of cultural translation, and discusses the challenges of interdisciplinarity in a lucid way.
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Anthropology of the Self
The Individual in Cultural Perspective
by Brian Morris
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Western society is individualised; we feel at ease talking about individuals and we study individual behaviour through psychology and psychoanalysis. Yet anthropology teaches us that an individual approach is only one of many ways of looking at ourselves.
In this wide-ranging text Morris explores the origins, doctrines and conceptions of the self in Western, Asian and African societies passing though Greek philosophy, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confuscism, Tao and African philosophy and ending with contemporary feminism.
Scholarly and written in a lucid style, free of jargon, this work is written from an anthropological perspective with an interdisciplinary approach. Morris emphasises the varying conceptions of the self found cross-culturally and contrasts these with the conceptions found in the Western intellectual traditions.
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Dream Zones
Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India
by Jamie Cross
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Dream Zones explores the dreamed of and desired futures that constitute, sustain and disrupt capitalism in contemporary India.
Drawing on five years of research in and around India's Special Economic Zones (SEZs), the book follows the stories of regional politicians, corporate executives, rural farmers, industrial workers and social activists to show how the pursuit of growth, profit and development shapes the politics of industrialisation and liberalisation.
This book offers a timely reminder that the global economy is shaped by sentiment as much as reason and that un-realised expectations are the grounds on which new hopes for the future are sown.
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Ethnicity and Nationalism
Anthropological Perspectives
by Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Is ethnicity a result of cultural differences? Is ethnicity dependent on the practical use and belief in cultural differences? Drawing on a wide-range of classic and recent studies in anthropology and sociology, Thomas Hylland Eriksen examines the relationship between ethnicity, class, gender and nationhood.
Using the question 'What is ethnicity?' as his starting point, Eriksen examines the interplay between ideology and ethnicity, how the Internet impacts understanding of ethnicity, identity politics, and the commercialisation of identity. Through this, he reveals that far from being an immutable property of groups, ethnicity is a dynamic and shifting aspect of social relationships.
A core text for all students of social anthropology and related subjects, Ethnicity and Nationalism has been a leading introduction to the field since its original publication in 1993. This new edition - expanded and thoroughly revised - is indispensable to anyone seriously interested in understanding ethnic phenomena.
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Fair Trade and a Global Commodity
Coffee in Costa Rica
by Peter Luetchford
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Fair trade is widely regarded as a universal good. This fascinating anthropological study takes a closer look at a coffee-growing community and cooperatives in Costa Rica - and subjects the fair trade movement to critical scrutiny.
As with conventional coffee, Western demand for organic fair trade produce is largely met by more affluent individuals with larger landholdings. As a result, it is caught up in the conflicts of interest and resentments that are part of the coffee industry as a whole. Ultimately fair trade fails to escape divisions that characterise other forms of production and consumption.
All growers are united in their criticism of the high margins accumulated by regional and transnational processors and exporters. Sustainability, just rewards and social cohesion have formed part of the world view of these agricultural communities for decades. This book shows how there is much common ground between the worlds of the commodity grower and the priorities of the fair trade movement - if not necessarily always in the ways we might suppose.
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Ground Down by Growth
Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India
by Alpa Shah
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Why has India's astonishing economic growth not reached the people at the bottom of its social and economic hierarchy? Travelling the length and breadth of the subcontinent, this book shows how India's 'untouchables' and 'tribals' fit into the global economy.
India's Dalit and Adivasi communities make up a staggering one in twenty-five people across the globe and yet they remain amongst the most oppressed. Conceived in dialogue with economists, Ground Down by Growth reveals the impact of global capitalism on their lives. It shows how capitalism entrenches, rather than erases, social difference and has transformed traditional forms of identity-based discrimination into new mechanisms of exploitation and oppression.
Through studies of the working poor, migrant labour and the conjugated oppression of caste, tribe, region, gender and class relations, the social inequalities generated by capitalism are exposed.
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Food for Change
The Politics and Values of Social Movements
by Jeff Pratt
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Concern about our food system is growing, from the costs of industrial farming to the dominant role of supermarkets and recurring scandals about the origins and content of what we eat.
Food for Change documents the way alternative food movements respond to these concerns by trying to create more closed economic circuits within which people know where, how, and by whom their food is produced.
Jeff Pratt, Peter Luetchford and other contributors explore the key political and economic questions of food through the everyday experience and vivid insights of farmers and consumers, using fieldwork from case studies in four European countries: France, Spain, Italy and England. Food for Change is an insightful consideration of connections between food and wider economic relations and draws on a rich vein of anthropological writing on the topic.
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Anthropology and Development
Challenges for the Twenty-First Century
by Katy Gardner
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Western aid is in decline. Non-traditional development actors from the developing countries and elsewhere are in the ascendant. A new set of global economic and political processes are shaping the twenty-first century.
This book engages with nearly two decades of continuity and change in the development industry. In particular, it argues that while the world of international development has expanded since the 1990s, it has become more rigidly technocratic. The authors insist on a focus upon the core anthropological issues surrounding poverty and inequality, and thus sharply criticise what are perceived as problems in the field.
Anthropology and Development is a completely rewritten edition of the best-selling and critically acclaimed Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge (1996). It serves as both an innovative reformulation of the field, as well as a textbook for many undergraduate and graduate courses at leading international universities.
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The Aid Effect
Giving and Governing in International Development
by Various Authors
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Today international development policy is converging around ideas of neoliberal reform, democratisation and poverty reduction. What does this mean for the local and international dimensions of aid relationships?
The Aid Effect demonstrates the fruitfulness of an ethnographic approach to aid, policy reform and global governance. The contributors provide powerful commentary on hidden processes, multiple perspectives or regional interests behind official aid policy discourses. The book raises important questions concerning the systematic social effects of aid relationships, the nature of sovereignty and the state, and the working of power inequalities built through the standardisations of a neoliberal framework.
The contributors take on new challenges to anthropology presented by a 'global aid architecture' which no longer operates through discrete projects but has moved on to sector wide approaches, budgetary support and other macro-level instruments of development; but they remain faithful to the fieldwork methodology that is anthropology's strength and the source of rare insight.
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The Heritage Machine
Fetishism and Domination in Maragateria, Spain
by Pablo Alonso Gonzalez
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
This book upturns the conventional understanding of heritage, challenging widespread notions about how we relate to and why we preserve the past.
Heritage research is often based on the assumption that heritage is something 'given' to us, that it is good and valuable in its own right. However, by looking at the historical and cultural roots of heritage and its development through the Enlightenment, modernity and capitalism, Pablo Alonso Gonzalez shows that it is in fact a system pervaded by fetishistic social relationships, embedded in capitalism, and not as benign as it appears.
Focusing on a case study in the region of Maragatería, Spain, Alonso Gonzalez explores the ethnic and racial discrimination towards the local population in the context of Spanish nationalism, and how this formed the region's heritage today. By challenging mainstream scholarship in the field, The Heritage Machine rethinks the relations between heritage, ideology and capitalism.
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Children of the Welfare State
Civilising Practices in Schools, Childcare and Families
by Laura Gilliam
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
This original ethnographic study looks at how children are 'civilised' within child institutions, such as schools, day care centres and families, under the auspices of the welfare state.
As part of a general discussion on civilising projects and the role of state institutions, the authors focus on Denmark, a country characterised by the extent of time children use in public institutions from an early age. They look at the extraordinary amount of attention and effort put into the process of upbringing by the state, as well as the widespread co-operation in this by parents across the social spectrum.
Taking as its point of departure the sociologist Norbert Elias' concept of civilising, Children of the Welfare State explores the ideals of civilised conduct expressed through institutional upbringing and examine how children of different age, gender, ethnicity and social backgrounds experience and react to these norms and efforts. The analysis demonstrates that welfare state institutions, though characterised by a strong egalitarian ideal, create distinctions between social groups, teach children about moral hierarchies in society and prompts them to identify as more or less civilised citizens of the state.
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The Trouble With Community
Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity
by Vered Amit
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Community' is one of social science's longest-standing concepts. The assumption of much social science has been that humans belong in communities, as social and cultural beings.
The trouble with 'community' is that this is not necessarily so; the personal social networks of individuals' actual experience crosscut collective categories, situations and institutions. Communities can prove unviable or imprisoning; the reality of community life and identity can often be very different from the ideology and the ideal.
In this book, the authors draw on their ethnographic experiences to reappraise the concept and the reality of 'community', in the light of globalisation, religious fundamentalism, identity politics, and renascent localisms. How might anthropology better apprehend social identities which are intrinsically plural, transgressive and ironic? What has anthropology to say about the way in which civil society might hope to accommodate the ongoing construction and the rightful expression of such migrant identities?
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Race, Nature and Culture
An Anthropological Perspective
by Peter Wade
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Since the controversial scientific race theories of the 1930s, anthropologists have generally avoided directly addressing the issue of race, viewing it as a social construct. Challenging this tradition, Peter Wade proposes that anthropologists can in fact play an important role in the study of race.
Wade is critical of contemporary theoretical studies of race formulated within the contexts of colonial history, sociology and cultural studies. Instead he argues for a new direction; one which anthropology is well placed to explore. Taking the study of race beyond Western notions of the individual, Wade argues for new paradigms in social science, in particular in the development of connections between race, sex and gender. An understanding of these issues within an anthropological context, he contends, is vital for defining personhood and identity.
Race is often defined by its reference to biology, 'blood,' genes, nature or essence. Yet these concepts are often left unexamined. Integrating material from the history of science, science studies, and anthropological studies of kinship and new reproductive technologies, as well as from studies of race, Peter Wade explores the meaning of such terms and interrogates the relationship between nature and culture in ideas about race.
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Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Human Commonality
by Vered Amit
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Do notions of community remain central to our sense of who we are, or can we see beyond community closures to a human whole?
This volume explores the nature of contemporary sociality. It focuses on the ethical, organisational and emotional claims and opportunities sought or fashioned for mobilising and evading social collectivities in a world of mobile subjects.
Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport present an examination of the tensions and interactions between everyday forms of fluid fellowship, culturally normative claims to identity, and opportunities for realising a universal humanity.
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On the Game
Women and Sex Work
by Sophie Day
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
***Winner of the Eileen Basker Prize and the Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems***
On the Game is an ethnographic account of prostitutes and prostitution. Sophie Day has followed the lives of individual women over fifteen years, and her book details their attempts to manage their lives against a backdrop of social disapproval. The period was one of substantial change within the sex industry.
Through the lens of public health, economics, criminalisation and human rights, Day explores how individual sex workers live, in public and in private. This offers a unique perspective on contemporary capitalist society that will be of interest both to a broad range of social scientists.
The author brings a unique perspective to her work -- as both an anthropologist and the founder of the renowned Praed Street Project, set up in 1986, as a referral and support centre for London prostitutes.
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Bearing Witness
Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa
by Fiona C. Ross
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
People who witness acts of terror and violence are often called after the event to bear witness to what they saw. In cases where this violence is inflicted by the state upon its own people, the process of bearing witness is both politically complex and traumatic for the individual involved. Independent trials and commissions have become important mechanisms through which the truth of past violence is sought in democratising states, but to date there has been little close attention to the processes and complexity of the work of such institutions.
Fiona Ross's fascinating study of the process of bearing witness is the first book to examine the gendered dimensions of this topic from an anthropological and ethnographic viewpoint. Taking as a key example the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Ross explores women's relationships to testimony, particularly the extent to which women avoid talking about or are silent about certain forms of violence and suffering.
Offering a wealth of first hand examples, Ross approaches a more subtle understanding of the achievements and the limitations of testimony as a measure of suffering and recovery generally. Is it, she asks, the panacea it is usually seen as? Or do conventional discourses on human rights, suffering and reconciliation oversimplify an altogether more complex and problematic process?
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Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship
by Ladislav Holy
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
This authoritative introductory text takes into account the changes in the conceptualisation of kinship brought about by new reproductive technologies and the growing interest in culturally specific notions of personhood and gender.
Holy considers the extent to which Western assumptions have guided anthropological study of kinship in the past. In the process, he reveals a growing sensitivity on the part of anthropologists to individual ideas of personhood and gender, and encourages further critical reflection on cultural bias in approaches to the subject.
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In Foreign Fields
The Politics and Experiences of Transnational Sport Migration
by Thomas F. Carter
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
This book examines the lives, decisions and challenges faced by transnational sport migrants - those professionals working in the sports industry who cross borders as part of their professional lives.
Despite a great deal of romance surrounding international celebrity athletes, the vast majority of transnational sport migrants - players, journalists, coaches, administrators and medical personnel - toil far away from the limelight. Thomas F. Carter traces their lives, routes and experiences, documenting their travels and travails.
He argues that far from the ease of mobility that celebrity sports stars enjoy, the vast majority of transnational sports migrants make huge sacrifices and labour under political restrictions, often enforced by sport's governing bodies.
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The Anthropology of Security
Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-terrorism and Border Control
by Various Authors
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
In a post-Cold War world of political unease and economic crisis, processes of securitisation are transforming nation-states, their citizens and non-citizens in profound ways.
The book shows how contemporary Europe is now home to a vast security industry which uses biometric identification systems, CCTV and quasi-military techniques to police migrants and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. This is the first collection of anthropological studies of security with a particular but not exclusive emphasis on Europe.
The Anthropology of Security draws together studies on the lived experiences of security and policing from the perspective of those most affected in their everyday lives. The anthropological perspectives in this volume stretch from the frontlines of policing and counter-terrorism to border control.
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A World of Insecurity
Anthropological Perspectives on Human Security
by Various Authors
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Human security is a key element in the measure of well-being, and a hot topic in anthropology and development studies. A World of Insecurity outlines a new approach to the subject.
The contributors expose a contradiction at the heart of conventional accounts of what constitutes human security, namely that without taking non-material considerations such as religion, ethnicity and gender into account, discussions of human security, academically and in practical terms, are incomplete, inconclusive and deeply flawed. A variety of compelling case studies indicate that, in fact, material security alone cannot adequately explain or fully account for human activity in a range of different settings, and exposed to a variety of different threats.
This forceful book will expand and deepen the entire concept of human security, in the process endowing it with political relevance. It is an essential read for students of development studies and anthropology.
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Becoming Arab in London
Performativity and the Undoing of Identity
by Ramy M. K. Aly
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
This is the first ethnographic exploration of gender, race and class amongst British born or raised Arabs in London. It takes a critical look at the idea of 'Arab-ness' and the ways in which their ethnicities are created and expressed in the city.
Looking at everyday spaces, encounters and discourses, the book explores the lives of young people and the ways in which they achieve 'Arab-ness'. It uncovers stories of growing up in London, the social codes at Shisha cafes and the sexual politics and ethnic self-portraits which are present in British-Arab men and women.
Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Becoming Arab in London reveals the need to move away from the notion of identity and towards a performative reading of race, gender and class. What emerges is an innovative contribution to the study of diaspora and difference in contemporary Britain.
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Private Oceans
The Enclosure and Marketisation of the Seas
by Fiona McCormack
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
As the era of thriving, small-scale fishing communities continues to wane across waters that once teamed with (a way of) life, Fiona McCormack opens a window into contemporary fisheries quota systems, laying bare how neoliberalism has entangled itself in our approach to environmental management.
Grounded in fieldwork in New Zealand, Iceland, Ireland and Hawaii, McCormack offers up a comparative analysis of the mechanisms driving the transformations unleashed by a new era of ocean grabbing. Exploring the processes of privatisation in ecosystem services, Private Oceans traces how value has been repositioned in the market, away from productive activities. The result? The demise of the small-scale sector, the collapse of fishing communities, cultural loss, and the emergence of a newly propertied class of producers - the armchair fisherman.
Ultimately, Private Oceans demonstrates that the deviations from the capitalist norm explored in this book offer grounds for the reimagining of both fisheries economies and broader environmental systems.
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State Formation
by Various Authors
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
What is the 'state' and how can we best study it? This book investigates new ways of analysing the state.
The contributors argue that the state is not a fixed and definite object. Our perceptions of it are constantly changing, and differ from person to person. What is your idea of the state if you are a refugee? Or if you are living in post-aparteid South Africa? Our perceptions are formed and sustained by evolving discourses and techniques -- these come from institutions such as government, but are also made by communities and individuals.
The contributors examine how state structures are viewed from the inside, by official state bodies, composed of bureaucrats and politicians; and how these state manifestations are supported, reproduced or transformed at a local level. An outline of theoretical approaches is followed by nine case studies ranging from South Africa to Peru to Norway.
With a good range of contributors including Cris Shore, Clifton Crais, Ana Alonso and Bruce Kapferer, this is a comprehensive critical analysis of anthropological approaches to the study of state formation.
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The Gloss of Harmony
The Politics of Policy-Making in Multilateral Organisations
by Various Authors
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
The Gloss of Harmony focuses on agencies of the United Nations, examining the paradox of entrusting relatively powerless and underfunded organisations with the responsibility of tackling some of the essential problems of our time. The book shows how international organisations shape the world in often unexpected and unpredictable ways.
The authors of this collection look not only at the official objectives and unintended consequences of international governance but also at how international organisations involve collective and individual actors in policy making, absorb critique, attempt to neutralise political conflict and create new political fields with local actors and national governments.
The Gloss of Harmony identifies the micro-social processes and complexities within multilateral organisations which have, up to now, been largely invisible. This book will have wide appeal not only to students and academics in anthropology, business studies and sociology but also to all practitioners concerned with international governance.
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The Paradox of Svalbard
Climate Change and Globalisation in the Arctic
by Zdenka Sokolíčková
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
'Engaging, rich and nuanced, this book exposes the deep dilemmas facing this Arctic archipelago. A must for anyone with an interest in the challenges of a melting world. Ethnography at its best' Marianne E. Lien, Professor, University of Oslo
'Rich and deeply textured ... Zdenka Sokolíčková demonstrates how the logic of extraction intersects awkwardly with community, environment, geopolitics and sustainability' Klaus Dodds, Professor, Royal Holloway University of London
'Lucidly captures the dilemmas of maintaining community in the world's northernmost settlement, where climate change is particularly evident. Highly recommended!' Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard, Professor, University of Bergen
Longyearbyen in the Arctic is the world's northernmost settlement. Here, climate change is happening fast. It is clearly sensed by the locals; with higher temperatures, more rain and permafrost thaw. At the same time, the town is shifting from state-controlled coal production to tourism, research and development. It is rapidly globalising, with numerous languages spoken, and with cruise ships sounding their horns in the harbour while planes land and take off.
A small town of 2,400 inhabitants on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, Longyearbyen provides a unique view into the unmistakable relationship between global capitalism and climate change. The Paradox of Svalbard looks at local and global trends to access a deep understanding of the effects of tourism, immigration and labour on the trajectory of the climate crisis, and what can be done to reverse it.
Zdenka Sokolíčková is a researcher at the University of Hradec Králové, Czechia, and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her research in Longyearbyen was hosted by the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway.
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Audit Culture
How Indicators and Rankings are Reshaping the World
by Cris Shore
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
'A new and compelling argument for why so many institutions continue to be spellbound by rankings and metrics – despite the cultural carnage they cause. How can we halt this "death by audit"? The authors develop a radical agenda that will strike fear into number-loving technocrats around the world' Peter Fleming, author of Dark Academia: How Universities Die
'A powerful and definitive critical diagnosis of the effects of audit culture on individuals, organisations and society. Essential reading' Michael Power, Professor, LSE
'A visionary book' Marilyn Strathern, Emeritus Professor, University of Cambridge
All aspects of our work and private lives are increasingly measured and managed. But how has this 'audit culture' arisen and what kind of a world is it producing? Cris Shore and Susan Wright provide a timely account of the rise of the new industries of accounting, enumeration and ranking from an anthropological perspective. Audit Culture is the first book to systematically document and analyse these phenomena and their implications for democracy.
The book explores how audit culture operates across a wide range of fields, including health, higher education, NGOs, finance, the automobile industry and the military. The authors build a powerful critique of contemporary public sector management in an age of neoliberal market-making, privatisation and outsourcing. They conclude by offering ideas about how to reverse its damaging effects on communities, and restore the democratic accountability that audit culture is systematically undermining.
Cris Shore is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University. One of his recent publications is The Shapeshifting Crown. Susan Wright is Professor of Educational Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. One of her recent books is Enacting the University. Together they are co-editors of the Stanford Anthropology of Policy book series.
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As if Already Free
Anthropology and Activism After David Graeber
by Various Authors
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
"Contains precious insights into what made David Graeber the most innovative social thinker of our time, and why the legacy of his ideas will inspire projects of emancipation for generations" – David Wengrow, Professor, University College London, co-author with David Graeber of The Dawn of Everything
"A must-read for anyone who believes in the power of academia as activism" – Sophie Chao, University of Sydney
David Graeber (1961–2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist, who left us with new ways to understand humankind. This collection of new writing brings together his insights into one book, showing how deeply his work continues to influence us today.
Graeber's writing resonates with scholars and activists looking to shake things up. The impact of his work is broad in scope, from birth to banking, and he picks open social hierarchy and political power to expose what really makes human society tick.
In today's neoliberal world, we can turn to his legacy to provide a way for us to understand what went wrong, and how to fix it. This collection of writings is both an introduction to his life and works, a guide to his key ideas, and an inspiring example of how people are continuing to use his work today.
Holly High is an Associate Professor at Deakin University, Australia. She has written two books, Fields of Desire and Projectland. Joshua O. Reno is a Professor at Binghamton University, US. A socio-cultural anthropologist, he is the author of Waste Away, Military Waste and co-author of Imagining the Heartland.
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At the Heart of the State
The Moral World Of Institutions
by Didier Fassin
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
An edited collection that explores all aspects of the state and its institutions.
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Rubbish Belongs to the Poor
Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons
by Patrick O'Hare
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Rubbish. Waste. Trash. Whatever term you choose to describe the things we throw away, the connotations are the same; of something dirty, useless and incontrovertibly 'bad'. But does such a dismissive rendering mask a more nuanced reality?
In Rubbish Belongs to the Poor, Patrick O'Hare journeys to the heart of Uruguay's waste disposal system in order to reconceptualize rubbish as a 21st century commons, at risk of enclosure. On a giant landfill site outside the capital Montevideo we meet the book's central protagonists, the 'classifiers': waste-pickers who recover and recycle materials in and around its fenced but porous perimeter. Here the struggle of classifiers against the enclosure of the landfill, justified on the grounds of hygiene, is brought into dialogue with other historical and contemporary enclosures - from urban privatizations to rural evictions - to shed light on the nature of contemporary forms of capitalist dispossession.
Supplementing this rich ethnography with the author's own insights from dumpster diving in the UK, the book analyses capitalism's relations with its material surpluses and what these tell us about its expansionary logics, limits and liminal spaces. Rubbish Belongs to the Poor ultimately proposes a fundamental rethinking of the links between waste, capitalism and dignified work.
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Base Encounters
The US Armed Forces in South Korea
by Elisabeth Schober
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
Base Encounters explores the social friction that US bases have caused in South Korea, where the entertainment districts next to American military installations have come under much scrutiny.
The Korean peninsula is one of the most heavily militarised regions in the world and the conflict between the North and South is continually exacerbated by the presence of nearly 30,000 US soldiers in the area. Crimes committed in GI entertainment areas have been amplified by an outraged public as both a symbol for, and a symptom of, the uneven relationship between the United States and the small East Asian nation.
Elisabeth Schober's ethnographic history scrutinises these controversial zones in and near Seoul. Sharing the lives of soldiers, female entertainers and anti-base activists, she gives a comprehensive introduction to the social, economic and political factors that have contributed to the tensions over US bases in South Korea.
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Home Spaces, Street Styles
Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City
by Leslie J. Bank
Part of the Anthropology, Culture and Society series
This book revisits the classic anthropology study - the Xhosa in Town series - based on research in the South African city of East London conducted during the 1950s.
The original studies revealed that there were two opposed responses to urbanisation in East London's African locations, one embracing Westernisation, European values and Christianity and another opposed to it. Leslie Bank returned to the areas of East London studied in the 1950s to assess how social and political changes have transformed these areas, in particular the apartheid reconstruction of the 1960s and 1970s and the struggle for liberation followed by the post-Apartheid period in the 1980s and 1990s.
Bank has added important theoretical insights to this rich ethnography, and forged strong links with issues that transcend the particularities of his urban study.