Iron in the soul

In his vivid, lively account of how Greek Cypriot villagers coped with a thirty-year displacement, Peter Loïzos follows a group of people whom he encountered as prosperous farmers in 1968, yet found as disoriented refugees when revisiting in 1975. By providing a forty year in-depth perspective ...

An american icon in puerto rico

Since her creation in 1959, Barbie has become an icon of femininity to girls all over the world. In this monograph, author Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez explores the ways through which women and girls in Puerto Rico construct their own identities in relation to femininity, body image, race, and nationa...

Louis dumont and hierarchical opposition

The work of Louis Dumont, who died in 1998, on India and modern individualism represented certain theoretical advances on the earlier structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. One such advance is Dumont's idea of hierarchical opposition, which he proposed as a truer representation of indigenous ide...

Gender in georgia

Gender in Georgia is the first edited volume that brings together an international group of feminist scholars to explore the political, economic, social and cultural conditions that have shaped gender dynamics in Georgia from the late 19th century to the present. The majority of contribu...

The subject of sovereignty

Exploring the themes of nature, race, and the divine, this book identifies the more realistic alternative in the “relational subject”: a subject that is inseparable from the global field of relations through which it emerges and yet distinct from that field because it lives a life that no one e...

Tarzan was an eco-tourist

Tourism and informal encounters in cuba

Explores touristic encounters and relationships from the perspectives both of locals and of tourists. Examines and compares a range of relationships, from tourism harassment to market exchange, hospitality, friendship, festive and sexual relationships. Reopens, in a new light, the ke...

Negotiating risk

Drawing on fieldwork with British Pakistani clients of a UK genetics service, this book explores the personal and social implications of a ‘genetic diagnosis’. Through case material and comparative discussion, the book identifies practical ethical dilemmas raised by new genetic knowledge and sh...

Moving places

Explores spatial implications of movement that generate relative locations. Examines not only movement but also questions how movement and mobility perforce and relate to place and locationand how the latter are produced, defined and experienced through a complex set of relations and sep...

Travelling towards home

This collection brings ethnographic insight into the ever more topical question of homemaking, exploring a diverse range of socio-political contexts worldwide (from Jewish returnees from Israel to Ukraine to young gay South Asians in London) and provoking new understandings of the material and ...

Understanding conflicts about wildlife

Conflicts about wildlife are usually portrayed as resulting from the negative impacts of wildlife on human livelihoods or property. However, deeper analysis reveals that these conflicts are often better understood as people-people conflicts. Understanding Conflicts About Wildlife unites academi...

Histories of a radical book

This collected volume explores the complex impact of E.P. Thompson’s monumental book, The Making of the English Working Class, both as an intellectual project and material object, relating it to the social and cultural history of the book form itself—an enduring artifact of English history.

Methodologies of mobility

Research into mobility is an exciting challenge for the social sciences that raises novel socio-cultural, ethical, and methodological questions. Speaking beyond disciplinary boundaries to the challenges of engaging with a world on the move, Methodologies of Mobility traces innovative strategies...

Russian culture

This volume brings together two classic works on the culture of the Russian people which have been long out of print. Gorer's Great Russian Culture and Mead's Soviet Attitudes towards Authority: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Problems of Soviet Character were among the first attempts by anthr...

Wolf conflicts

To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive analysis of conflicts over large carnivores that see these controversies primarily as social conflicts embedded in deeper tensions in contemporary societies, and not so much as conflicts between animals and people. The book points out that wo...

Mirrors of passing

Mirrors of Passing explores the relationship between death, materiality, and temporality, drawing from the fields of archaeology, cultural anthropology, political science, and media studies to explore fundamental questions about the relationship between death and our perception of time.

Challenging modernity

When Dada burst onto the European stage in 1916, it shocked and scandalized the public of its day with art forms, ideas, and attitudes which were so revolutionary that it is only in recent decades that they have begun to find recognition within the broad cultural movement known as postmodernism...

Vision and change in institutional entrepreneurship

Sheltered for a long time within the public sector environment with high job security and professional research autonomy, defense R&D organizations faced unprecedented challenges when government support was being withdrawn and closure threatening. They needed to be led by a suitable vision ...

Heirs of the bamboo

Heirs of the Bamboo is about the Macanese who left Macao and now live in Portugal and looks at their interactions with their counterparts in Macao and elsewhere in the diaspora, using the Internet.

Care across distance

Geographic scope: While the majority of other works focus on one or two regions of the world (e.g., India; Peru and Italy; Australia), this volume is uniquely ambitious in its vast geographical reach, since it includes in-depth, ethnographically collected data from five different (sub-)conti...

An invitation to anthropology

Synthesizing British, French and American traditions, this stimulating and accessible text presents a comprehensive and fascinating introduction to social and cultural anthropology. It offers an original approach through integrating knowledge produced from a variety of perspectives, placing cul...

Where there is no midwife

In the Sitapurdistrict of Uttar Pradesh, an agricultural region with high rates of infant mortality, maternal health services are poor while family planning efforts are intensive. By following the daily lives of women in this setting, the author considers the women’s own experiences of birth an...

Things of the house

Focusing on the life stories of a group of European and Catholic Brahmin Goan families of the colonial elite who left Mozambique after their independence in 1975, the book shows how material culture interferes with structuring dimensions of migratory experiences, in the management of family tie...

Advocacy and archaeology

Inspired by the idea of revolution and excitement about the ways archaeology is being used in social justice arenas, this volume seeks to visualize archaeology as part of a movement by redefining what archaeology is and does for the greater good.

Ethnographies of deservingness

Claims around 'who deserves what and why' moralise inequality in the current global context of unprecedented wealth and its ever more selective distribution. Ethnographies of Deservingness explores this seeming paradox and the role of moralized assessments of distribution by reconnecting dispar...

The franco-mauritian elite

Focuses on the power of white elites still lingering on in postcolonial realities. Addresses anew how an elite group aims to prolong its position over time.

Cultural resource management

Stressing the interdisciplinary, public-policy oriented character of Cultural Resource Management (CRM), which is not merely “applied archaeology,” this short, relatively uncomplicated introduction is aimed at emerging archaeologists.

Struggles for home

Based on anthropological studies across the globe, this book explores the social practice of home-making amongst people whose lives are characterized by movement and violence. Social scientific and policy understandings of home and migration tend to focus on territory, culture and nation, often...

Sexual self-fashioning

Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, this book provides an ethnographic account of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. It argues that by embracing, rejecting, and questioning modernity in stories about sexuality, the Iranian Dutch actively engage in proce...

Theorizing relations in indigenous south america

Whether invented, discovered, implicit, or directly addressed, relations remain the main focus of most anthropological inquiries. These relations, once conceptualized in ethnographic fieldwork as self-evident connections between discrete social units, have been increasingly explored through loc...

Vital diplomacy

Focusing on the major ceremonial cycle of the Enawene-nawe people, Vital Diplomacy sheds new light on classic Amazonian themes such as manioc cultivation and cuisine, predatory relations with non-humans, and the interplay of myth and practice, and to consider dynamics of kin, clan, and gender r...

Zora neale hurston

Uniquely Positioned & Freshly Celebrated: Standing out as the only short biography dedicated to Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological contributions, this accessible volume brings renewed visibility to a vital yet long overlooked figure in the social sciences. Courageous Trailbla...

Peripheral vision

An in-depth ethnography of Portugal from 2005-2010 examining ‘modernization through technology’ Uses surveillance studies to explain the current fragilities of Portugal’s young democratic system Broadens the usual technocentric perspective of surveillance studies through political an...

Fragile futures

Caring for small children and the family in Burkina Faso is hard work. Although the health infrastructure in Burkina Faso is weak and many citizens feel neglected by the state, Fragile Futures shows that the state continues to play an important role in people’s engagements and hopes for a bette...

Cultural topographies of the new berlin

Offers an interdisciplinary investigation of the New Berlin Provides culturally-focused considerations of the New Berlin in a globalizing Europe and as a pillar of the European Union. Highlights the tensions between Berlin’s Creative City identification and its urban challenges.

Being a sperm donor

First book length ethnography on (Danish) sperm donors Bringing medical anthropology/sociology in dialogue with queer-feminist analyses of gender and sexuality In depth insights into the interplay between male identity and (reproductive) biomedicine

Themes in french culture

Margaret Mead collaborated with her long-time colleague Rhoda Métraux in this unique study of French culture. The Hoover Institute at Stanford University originally published this volume, which grew out of the Columbia University project on Research of Contemporary Cultures in 1954. It is one o...

Moral anthropology

It is a critical view of a new methodological and epistemological fashion in anthropology It is a collection of authors with different ethnographic expertise and well-developed theoretical positions It is a provocation to open up a debate that is important for anthropology but to the...

Hunters, gatherers, and practitioners of powerlessness

A dramatic account of the socio-economic transformations of the 1990s in Poland. Tracks the experiences of unemployed miners, scrap collectors, and poverty-stricken village residents. Traces the ways in which people actively reconfigure their lives.

Girls take action

An illuminating examination of activism networks run for, by, and with girls and young women globally, Girls Take Action highlights the myriad ways girls and young women are exercising their agency in the face of injustice, considering especially the role collaboration plays in creating a more ...

Who are 'we'?

Critically interrogates the powerful yet under-studied relationship between collective anthropological identities and affiliations (who ‘we’ think ‘we’ are) and anthropological methods, concepts and theories, both past and present. Attempts to decolonize and reimagine the Anglo-American ...

Pacing mobilities

Turning the attention to the temporal as well as the more familiar spatial dimensions of mobility, this volume looks at the means of mobility in twenty-first century movement. Through a focus on pacing and pace, this volume looks at how people are moving rather than the more usual focus in mobi...

Social dna

Social DNA presents a new synthesis of ideas on human social origins based upon the evolution of behavioral plasticity and the process of multilevel selection. What set our ancestors off on a separate evolutionary trajectory – what made them human – was the ability to flex their reproductive an...

Unruly hills

The questions that inspired this study are central to contemporary research within environmental anthropology, political ecology, and environmental history: How does the introduction of a modern, capitalist, resource regime affect the livelihood of indigenous peoples? Can sustainable resource m...

'brothers' or others?

Muslim Arab Sudanese in Cairo have played a fundamental role in Egyptian history and society during many centuries of close relations between Egypt and Sudan. Although the government and official press describes them as "brothers" in a united Nile Valley, recent political developments in Egypt ...

After society

In the early 1980s, when the contributors to this volume completed their graduate training at Oxford, the conditions of practice in anthropology were undergoing profound change. Here self-ethnography is used to portray the contributors’ anthropological trajectories, showing how analytical and a...

Textures of belonging

The longstanding European conception that Roma and non-Roma are separated by unambiguous socio-cultural distinctions has led to the construction of Roma as "non-belonging others." Challenging this conception, Textures of Belonging explores how Roma negotiate and feel belonging on the everyday l...

The global idea of ‘the commons’

During the last three decades, corporations allied with scientists and universities, national and regional governments, and international financial institutions have, through a variety of mechanisms associated with neo-liberal globalization, acted to dispossess large proportions of the world’s ...

Ambiguous pleasures

The book makes a strong contribution to the scholarship of African sexualities and gender The volume reveals new insights into the methodology and theory of the study of sexuality within the social sciences It moves beyond an investigation of a health or development perspective of se...

Homo itinerans

This book builds on more than two decades of ethnographic itinerancy in some twenty countries, bringing the readers from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran to Europe, North America and Australia. It describes the everyday life and transnational circulations of Afghan refugees and expatriates.

Pepsi and the pill

With the reintroduction of many important debates surrounding reproductive rights, migration and nationalism, Pepsi and the Pill brings to the fore examples and critical historical and media analysis of British and French films in the popular culture and political discourses of 1960s Western Eu...

Living on thin ice

Longitudinal study conducted over 15 years. Interdisciplinary in both methodologies and content. Primary qualitative and quantittative data used has never been published before.

Images from paradise

the recent transformation of the ideology of European federalism into a political soteriology the palingenetic myth that drives supranational institutions’ federalist agenda the visualization of the EU’s promise of a new era the use of old and new symbols and rituals aimed at rei...

Rebirth of a culture

After 1945, Jewish writing in German was almost unimaginable—and then only in reference to the Shoah. Only in the 1980s, after a period of mourning, silence, and processing of the trauma, did a new Jewish literature evolve in Germany and Austria. This volume focuses on the re-emergence of a liv...

Civilizations beyond earth

Presents empirical and theoretical research on the societal dimensions of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Interdisciplinary effort encompassing fields such as archaeology, sociology, mathematics and religious studies Academically rigorous yet accessible collection...

Evidence, ethos and experiment

Medical research has been central to biomedicine in Africa for over a century, and Africa, along with other tropical areas, has been crucial to the development of medical science. At present, study populations in Africa participate in an increasing number of medical research projects and clinic...

Ӧmie sex affiliation

The practice of affiliating the female child with the mother and the male child with the father was considered a rare and inexplicable practice in Papua New Guinean ethnography at the time the original data was collected some forty years ago. Marta Rohatynskyj undertakes a shift in her analytic...

Fertility, conjuncture, difference

In the last forty years anthropologists have made major contributions to understanding the heterogeneity of reproductive trends and processes underlying them. Fertility transition, rather than the story of the triumphant spread of Western birth control rationality, family forms, and modern tech...

Inhabiting silence

This volume is the result of observant participation in which the ethnographer is a protagonist social actor in two French monasteries of Discalced Carmelite nuns. The author experiences and narrates details of their everyday life that usually remain unseen but contribute to shaping community-b...

Urban biopolitics

Urban biopolitics is a relatively new field of research that builds around a variety of what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben would have called “forms of life” in the city. The idea of urban biopolitics is heavily affected by neoliberal and post-political policies targeting ...

Anthropology and consultancy

More and more, anthropologists are recruited as consultants by government departments, companies or as observers of development processes in their field areas generally. Although these roles can be very gratifying, they can create ambiguous situations for the anthropologists who find that new p...

Travel and representation

Exploring and re-examining the various convergences between literature, art, photography, television, cinema and travel, this collection offers a careful appreciation of the entanglement of travel and its representations, emphasizing a reconsideration of the intersections between travelers, fie...

War on the homefront

About half of the women in the United States and Canada have been physically or sexually assaulted after the age of 16. The figures in other countries are similar. Written by an outsider (an anthropologist) and an insider (a spousal abuse survivor), this book offers a humanistic, rather than st...

Remaking home

Rather than emphasising boundaries and territories by examining the ‘integration’ and ‘acculturation’ of the immigrant or the refugee, this book offers insights into the ideas and practices of individuals settling into new societies and cultures. It analyses their ideas of connecting and belong...

Enacted relations

Enacted Relations explores the Yolngu relational ontology and epistemology in the context of everyday practices, ritual ceremonies, bicultural education, vernacular Christianity and the production of popular music.

Returning life

The book centers on vernacular concepts and claims to investigate how ‘life’ is an effect of transfers and transformations of ‘life force’ that occur through parts of persons, houses, livestock, and crops in the activity of ‘dwelling’ and that afford and constitute the existence of beings of...

Trust us

Scandinavia. Populism. Nationalism. Identity.

Transactions and creations

In the early 21st century, intellectual and cultural resources emerge on all sides as candidates for ownership claims. Members of an anthropological research team investigating emergent conomic relations in a part of the world renowned for its innovative approach to resources and transactions, ...

Identities and place

With a focus on historic sites, this volume explores the recent history of non- heteronormative Americans from the early twentieth century onward and the places associated with these communities. Authors explore how queer identities are connected with specific places: places where people gather...

Education, aspiration and social mobility

Informed by over two decades of anthropological research in Chhattisgarh, this book examines how the marginalized Adivasi (tribal) youth in rural India navigate the contradictory ways in which education represents both a strategy for social mobility and a very tangible risk.

The forest people without a forest

Examines how the Baka, who live in Eastern Cameroon, assert forms of belonging in order to participate in development interventions. Investigates how community life is shaped and reshaped through these interventions.

Ecological migrants

The first ethnography in English devoted solely to China’s only reindeer herders. Offers a typical case in China that combines the macro policy and the local practice of the ecological migration project. Reflects the mainstream discourse of modernization of China through the marginal...

Tourism imaginaries

First in-depth anthropological study of tourism imaginaries. Collection of the most innovative thinkers in the anthropology of tourism at the moment. Agenda-setting volume for future research in tourism studies. World-wide geographical coverage, especially ethnic/minority tourism...

Documenting transnational migration

Most studies on transnational migration either stress assimilation, circulatory migration, or the negative impact of migration. This remarkable study, which covers migrants from one Jordanian village to 17 different countries in Europe, Asia, and North America, emphasizes the resiliency of tran...

Engaging with strangers

An ethnographical analysis of "stranger sociality" - how the Solomon Islanders have embraced and incorporated outsiders over the course of 200 years. Describes engagements with strangers across many realms of life—pre-colonial warfare, Christian conversion, logging and conservation, post...

Anthropology now and next

The work provides an enormously valuable perspective on some key ideas from the career of Ulf Hannerz The collection offers essays about current and future anthropological practice The volume addresses the theoretical, epistemological, ethical and methodological challenges facing ant...

Sustainability and communities of place

The concept of sustainability holds that the social, economic, and environmental factors within human communities must be viewed interactively and systematically. Sustainable development cannot be understood apart from a community, its ethos, and ways of life. Although broadly conceived, the pu...

Cultivating arctic landscapes

In the last two decades, there has been an increased awareness of the traditions and issues that link aboriginal people across the circumpolar North. One of the key aspects of the lives of circumpolar peoples, be they in Scandinavia, Alaska, Russia, or Canada, is their relationship to the wild ...

Family upheaval

A focus on different generations within Pakistani migrant families A study of immigration, integration and securitization in Denmark The connections between integration policies and sorcery suspicions

Learning religion

As we enter the 21st century, it becomes increasingly difficult to envisage a world detached from religion or an anthropology blind to its study. Yet, how people become religious is still poorly studied. This volume gathers some of the most distinguished scholars in the field to offer a new per...

The 1926/27 soviet polar census expeditions

Utilizes primary sources from recently opened archives as well as interviews with descendents of the expeditions The first book-size effort to address the status of the Siberian indigenous people The culmination of eight years of work with primary record cards and sources

Facing discrimination

Through six micro-level studies from Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, Facing Discrimination offers insight into the dynamics of religious beliefs and bodily practices among those who are discriminated against. It examines how religion as a source of agency interacts with processes of margin...

In the event

Explains how to analyze generative moments through events that hold the key to understanding larger social situations. Based on ethnographic studies from around the world.

The discipline of leisure

The burgeoning social scientific study of tourism has emphasized the effects of the post-industrial economy on travel and place. However, this volume takes some of these issues into a different area of leisure: the spare-time carved out by people as part of their everyday lives - time that is m...

Capricious borders

Detailed ethnographic study of the anthropology of Thrace in the Northern Greek-Turkish border areas. An exposition of the conflicted subjectivities of the Turkish minorities of contemporary Greece Examines the mechnanisms in place, which on the one hand, legalise the status of the m...

Not born a refugee woman

Not Born a Refugee Woman is an in-depth inquiry into the identity construction of refugee women. It challenges and rethinks current identity concepts, policies, and practices in the context of a globalizing environment, and in the increasingly racialized post-September 11th context, from the pe...

Oligarchs and oligopolies

As corporate practices are becoming more fused with state processes, the state itself is increasingly taking on a corporate structure, as well as a more overt oligarchic character. Evidence of this can be seen in the growing domination of political organizations and institutions by close-knit s...

The benefit of the gift

Archaeological data from the Late Archaic (4000-2000 years ago) in the Western Great Lakes are analyzed to understand the production and movement of copper and lithic exchange materials. Also considered in this volume are access to and benefits from exchange networks, as well as social changes ...

The legacies of a hawaiian generation

A perspective on North American imperialism derived from three generations of Native Hawaiians who have been subject to imperial policies. The combination of anthropological fieldwork, archival resources, and “kitchen table” conversations gives the book a unique quality. Provides ins...

Ethnography and the corporate encounter

Businesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The nature of such work, as described in this volume, raises crucial questions about potential implications to disciplines of...

Anthropology and ethnography are not equivalent

Tim Ingold has raised many questions which are crucial for anthropology as a discipline, such as whether ethnography is central to the subject, and how imagination, reality and truth are joined in anthropological enterprises. His interventions have impacted anthropologists and scholars at large...

The power of death

Multidisciplinary: humanities + social sciences. Death is analysed as a cultural event. Includes creative responses to death as well as academic essays.

Culture, creation, and procreation

As reproduction is seen as central to kinship and the biological link as the primary bond between parents and their offspring, Western perceptions of kin relations are primarily determined by ideas about "consanguinity," "genealogical relations," and "genetic connections." Advocates of cultural...

Pastoralism in africa

Comprehensive account of anthropology and archaeology of African pastoralism in one volume Comprehensive account of long-term social-ecological and political processes in rural African societies Diversification and specialization as key-principles of economic adaptation to a diverse ...

Toward engaged anthropology

Describes how anthropologists may play a wider role in achieving social justice by applying anthropological theory and practice in programmes of action and activism Highlights the increasingly participatory role of anthropologists in communities or social groupings being studied

Trapped in the gap

A forensic analysis of the dilemmas of well intentioned white development workers in Australia. Explores what happens when well-meaning people, supported by the state, find themselves trapped by endless ambiguities and contradictions — a microcosm of the broader dilemmas of postcolonial ...

Social bodies

A proliferation of press headlines, social science texts and “ethical” concerns about the social implications of recent developments in human genetics and biomedicine have created a sense that, at least in European and American contexts, both the way we treat the human body and our attitudes to...

A history of oxford anthropology

Informative as well as entertaining, this volume offers many interesting facets of the first hundred years of anthropology at Oxford University.

Working with spirit