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...

Pursuits of Happiness

Crisis of the State

Women, Power, and the Academy

Many nations affirm the principle of gender equality. As women continue to advance in most walks of life, the impression that equality has been reached and that gender issues no longer pose real problems has naturally gained ground. Yet, many cultural, economic, and social barriers remain. Alth...

Public Engagement and Education

Public Engagement and Education shares effective approaches for engaging and educating learners of all ages about archaeology and how one can encourage them to become stewards of the past. Offered are applied examples that are not bound to specific geographies or cultures, but rather, are appro...

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...

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...

Cinemas of Boyhood

Drawing from political sociology, pop psychology, and film studies, Cinemas of Boyhood features an eclectic range of films from British and Indian cinemas to silent Hollywood and the new Hollywood of the 1980s, culminating in a comprehensive overview of the diverse concerns surrounding represen...

Foucault's Orient

Method: The book uses archival research supplemented by interviews Novelty of topic: Foucault’s view of the non-Western cultures has not been studied before. Range: The book covers three different countries. There were studies of Foucault’s view of Iran, but no book covers Iran, ...

Bulldozer Capitalism

Set in the resource frontier of northeastern Turkey, Bulldozer Capitalism studies the rise and decline of an anti-dam/anti-displacement campaign and the political responses to other extractive projects that it helped to shape in its aftermath.

Theoretical Scholarship and Applied Practice

Investigates the ways in which theoretical research has been incorporated into recent applied practices across the social sciences and humanities. Advances our understanding of the ethics, values, opportunities and challenges that emerge in the making of engaged and interdisciplinary sch...

Kinship and Beyond

The genealogical model has a long-standing history in Western thought. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which assumptions about the genealogical model—in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission—structure other modes of practice and knowledge-making i...

Gender Politics in the Expanding European Union

In May 2004, after bringing their legislation into accordance with EU regulations, ten more countries joined the European Union. The contributors to this volume assess the impact of this historical development on gender relations in the new and old EU member states. Instead of focusing on eithe...

Honour and Violence

Examines the central position of karo kari in the social, political and juridical structures in Upper Sindh, Pakistan. An exploration of how the state justice system and informal mediations inform each other in state responses to karo kari. An explanation of how modern law is implica...

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...

Polarized Pasts

When questions of belonging enter the forefront of political debates, so too does heritage. From different ends at the political spectrum, people invoke the past to validate their stance on immigration, equality and security. Together, the texts pave the way for a better understanding of the ro...

A Walk to the River in Amazonia

Our lives are mostly composed of ordinary reality — the flow of moment-to-moment existence — and yet it has been largely overlooked as a subject in itself for anthropological study. In this work, the author achieves an understanding of this part of reality for the Mehinaku Indians, an Amazonian...

Against Better Judgment

Anthropologists have long explained social behaviour as if people always do what they think is best. But what if most of these explanations only work because they are premised upon ignoring what philosophers call 'akrasia' – that is, the possibility that people might act against their better ju...

The Future of Indigenous Museums

Indigenous museums and cultural centres have sprung up across the developing world, and particularly in the Southwest Pacific. They derive from a number of motives, ranging from the commercial to the cultural political (and many combine both). A close study of this phenomenon is not only valuab...

Critique of Identity Thinking

Michael Jackson’s response to our beleaguered age is to ask what forms of speech and action are called for in ‘dark times’. He argues that experiences that fall outside the concepts and categories we habitually deploy in rendering life manageable and intelligible have both critical and redempti...

Sexual Politics and the European Union

Just as feminist scholars began to develop an analysis of "the state" and women in Europe gained access to its political, legal and bureaucratic arenas, increased attention and reliance on European institutions have begun to take precedence over the more parochial concerns of the nation state. ...

Indeterminacy

What happens to people, places, and things that do not fit the progressive, ordering narratives of capitalism and modernity? This volume explores the indeterminacy left behind by conventional understandings of progress and shows how totalizing forward movement may be resisted by fragments, open...

Food and the Status Quest

The use of food to negotiate status is found in all human societies. Here, for the first time, a single book brings together contributions from different disciplines to investigate, from ethological and anthropological perspectives, behavior that appears to have biological roots such as the ten...

Waterworlds

The book sees the making and unmaking of people’s lives through the shared lens of water, yielding great comparative potential across different regions and approaches. Through the notion of waterworlds, the book addresses human and non-human actors as mutually constitutive. The book ...

The Good Holiday

Explores tourists as (nongovernmental) governors (to the best of my knowledge, this is the first book that interprets and analyses tourists as a sort of participants in [nongovernmental] governance). Heterogeneous perspective (it engages ethnographically on both destination people and to...

Autonomy

The question of individuality in non-European, and especially South Asian societies is a controversial one. Studies in anthropology and psychology undertaken in recent years on concepts of person and self approach the problem by concentrating on ideologies; the question of practice remains larg...

Theorising Media and Conflict

Theorising Media and Conflict brings together anthropologists as well as media and communication scholars to collectively address the elusive and complex relationship between media and conflict. Practitioners, policymakers, students and scholars who wish to understand the lived realities and dy...

The Scope of Anthropology

The volume brings together world-class scholars Sophisticated discussions of Maurice Godelier’s work and approach The text contains theoretical propositions applicable in a wide scope of social sciences

Parallel Lives Revisited

The study has a long-term perspective, whereas most research on integration looks at a moment in time It does not focus on one ‘ethnic group’ but looks at a cross-section of migrants from different countries, thus combating the ‘ethnic groupism’ that characterizes a lot of the research ...

Street Vending in the Neoliberal City

Analyzes street vending from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. Illustrates how street vending is conducted both in the global north and global south and shows how informal economies are inherent to neoliberal societies. Analyzes vendors’ positionalities and daily p...

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...

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...

Postsocialism

In many parts of post-socialist Europe the tumultuous political and economic developments have generated strong emotions, ranging from hope and euphoria to disappointment, envy, disillusionment, sorrow, loneliness, and hatred. Yet these aspects have been largely neglected in analyses of the pro...

At Home in a Nursing Home

Focusing on contemporary ideas about how aged care is provided, this book poses the question: How can people who are aged and frail live out the final phase of their lives with dignity? In seeking answers, the author examines what it means to be ‘at home’ in residential care in a novel and comp...

Melanesian Odysseys

The Imbalance of Power

Demonstrates ethnographically that the Carib speaking indigenous societies of the Guiana region of Amazonia do not fit conventional characterizations of ‘simple’ political units with ‘egalitarian’ political ideologies and ‘harmonious’ relationships with nature. The author builds a persua...

Transitions and Transformations

illustrates how population ageing has become embedded within individual, social and cultural life courses introduces a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to studying life course transitions in conjunction with broader sociocultural transformations explores the overl...

Conjuring Hope

Notions of magic and healing have been changing over past years and are now understood as reflecting local ideas of power and agency, as well as structures of self, subjectivity and affect. This study focuses on contemporary urban Russia and, through exploring social conditions, conveys the exp...

Vehicles

A collection of ethnographic essays on the metaphoric significance of vehicles in different cultures Examines key issues in the study of objects, material culture and techniques Provides a new perspective on how vehicles are understood in relation to the dynamics of culture, politics...

Morality, Crisis and Capitalism

With the growing numbers of displaced populations and the rise in the politics of fear and hate, we are facing challenges to our very ‘species-being’. Papers in the volume include ethnographic studies on the ‘refugee crisis’, the ‘financial crisis’ and the ‘rule of law’ crisis in the Mediterran...

Embracing Landscape

Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, this book focuses on concepts such as domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. By looking into hunting rituals and herding techniques, the ethnography questions the dy...

Spaces of Solidarity

Exploring notions of activism and space as narrated by Karen displaced persons and refugees in the Thai-Burma borderlands, this book looks beyond refugees as passive victims or a ‘humanitarian case’. Instead, the book examines the active engagement the Karen have with their persecution and disp...

Vertiginous Life

Through individual stories from crisis Greece, this book explores the everyday effects of vertigo: nausea, dizziness, breathlessness, the sense of falling, and unknowingness of Self. Being lost in time, caught in the spin-cycle of crisis, people reflect on belonging to modern Europe, neoliberal...

Spanish Comics

Spanish Comics offers an overview on contemporary scholarship on Spanish comics, focusing on a wide range of comics dating from early comics history in 1875-1939; the Francoist dictatorship, 1939-1975; the Political Transition, 1970-1985; and Democratic Spain from the early 1980s, and themes of...

When Women Held the Dragon's Tongue

Challenges the dominant culturalist approach associated with Clifford Geertz and Marshall Sahlins Bridges the current gap between approaches to studies of peasant society and popular culture Presents a critical rethinking of the philosophical anthropologies found in specific historie...

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...

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...

The Patient Multiple

Investigates the complex web of healing practices engaged by people in Bhutan as they seek cures for their ailments. Examines all options in the context of patients’ daily lives and decision-making processes. Describes how these unique mountain cultures are finding new paths to good ...

Growing Up in Central Australia

First ethnographic volume on the subject of Young Aboriginal Australians Today Regional ethnography with contributions from diverse disciplines Integration of scholarly and self-reflective accounts

Communities of Complicity

A description of everyday life in contemporary rural China based on 18 months of observation, surveys, and interviews Illustrates how people construct their own senses of their lives and futures through their work, celebrating marriages and funerals , and building their houses Descri...

Exchange and Markets in Early Economic Development

The idea of an informal economy emerged from, and is a critique of, the ideology of ‘economic development’. It originated from Keith Hart’s recognition of informal economic activity in 1960s Ghana. In the context of four colonialisms – German, British, Australian and Dutch – this book recounts ...

Raccomandazione

It looks at Italian clientelism in a holistic cultural contest, not just within limited sectors of the society (which is the tendency of political science and sociological approaches). It approaches Italian clientelism from a deeply emic perspective, that is, from the point of view of...

The Hadrami Diaspora

In-depth assessment of Hadrami identity, social order and religious change Provides detailed analysis of Hadrami communities both within and outside Yemen Highlights the complexity of the diasporic process Describes links betwen Hadrami migrants from Yemen and from the Indian Oce...

Matsutake Worlds

Matsutake Worlds explores matsutake mushrooms through the lens of multispecies encounters, to explore the mushroom’s success on the world stage. This success cannot be accounted for by any one cultural or economic process—rather, the matsutake has flourished due to many different processes, cul...

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...

Lewis Henry Morgan's Comparisons

Georg Pfeffer re-examines the work of Lewis Henry Morgan on relationship terminologies, societal forms, and ideas of property and the relationship between these three domains. He concludes that reciprocal affinal relations determine most ‘classificatory’ terminologies and regulate many non-stat...

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.

Two Sides of One River

compares topographic and ethnographic descriptions of Galicia and Portugal during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrates how the integration in different states and the existence of a specific nationalist discourse marked differences in the ways that two bordering regions ha...

From Storeroom to Stage

It is an ample study of the ‘folk’ idiom which has not been researched in Romania in this way It draws some comparison between Romanian and British museological practices It follows a class of objects through different spheres of cultural production, some of which have been unexplore...

Global Fluids

Embedded in feminist communication, sociological, and anthropological scholarship, Global Fluids examines the ways in which women’s body products (such as urine, eggs, and placentas) become valuable ingredients in the fertility and cosmetics industries, and develops cultural politics of reusabi...

Humour, Comedy and Laughter

An examination of the cognitive, social, and moral aspects of humour and its potential to bring about a sense of amity and mutual understanding, even among different and possibly hostile people. Describes how the positive aspects of humour far outweigh the danger of deepening divisions a...

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...

The State and the Social

Analyses the transformation of modern Botswana from the perspective of precolonial and colonial genealogies as well as the rise of structures of domination propelled by changing global forces An ethnographic and anthropological study of the unique formation of postcolonial Botswana T...

News as Culture

Explains the social relevance of news by discussing the relation between media related practices and dynamic cultural repertoires Moves beyond the dichotomy of reader and write in news relations to show how social interactions across these categories interactively create news texts and s...

Redescribing Relations

A tribute to Marilyn Strathern, among the most creative and celebrated contemporary anthropologists. Brings some of Strathern’s most committed and renowned readers into conversations in her honour. Deepens the understanding of Strathern’s work, and offers models of how to extend her ...

I Dreamed the Animals

This is Kaniuekutat's book. In it, he tells the story of his life and that of Innu culture in the northern parts of Labrador. The pages of this book are filled with the voice of Kaniuekutat giving his account of an Innu hunter's life and the problems and distress that have been caused by sedent...

Modern Crises and Traditional Strategies

The 1990s have seen a growing interest in the role of local ecological knowledge in the context of sustainable development, and particularly in providing a set of responses to which populations may resort in times of political, economic and environmental instability. The period 1996-2003 in isl...

The Sound of Silence

Combining Sámi perspectives and other Indigenous archaeologies Offers new perspectives for understanding the role of material culture in transformation of indigenous cultures in colonial contact Emphasizes local and indigenous histories and interpretations over Eurocentric ones

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...

Suffering and Evil

Until recently the subject of suffering and evil was neglected in the sociological world and was almost absent in Durkheimian studies as well. This book aims to fill the gap, with particular reference to the Durkheimian tradition, by exploring the different meanings that the concepts of evil an...

Abortion in Asia

Presents abortion case studies from Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and India Illustrates the conditions and hard choices faced by women and the circumstances surrounding unplanned pregnancies Explores the connections among poverty, violence, barriers to ac...

Abortion in Post-revolutionary Tunisia

Life as a Hunt

Addresses the global conundrum of how to promote ‘sustainable conservation and biological diversity, especially under ‘weak governments. Portrays three generations of rural cultivators as they narrate their livelihoods’ struggles. Explains how they cope with changing bureaucratic re...

Post-cosmopolitan Cities

Examining the way people imagine and interact in their cities, this book explores the post-cosmopolitan city. The contributors consider the effects of migration, national, and religious revivals (with their new aesthetic sensibilities), the dispositions of marginalized economic actors, and glob...

Deterritorialized Youth

Compares and contrasts humanitarian assistance among Sahrawi youth with self-sufficiency of Afghan refugee youth in Iran Offers methodological approach and rich qualitative data Examines refugee communities closely linked with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and other...

Living Under Austerity

Since its sovereign debt crisis in 2009, Greece has been living under austerity. This volume explores the effects of austerity policies on politics, health care, education, media, and other areas, and examines the crisis as the context for changing attitudes in Greek society regarding immigrati...

Media Practices and Changing African Socialities

Deriving from innovative new work by six researchers, this book questions what the new media's role is in contemporary Africa. The focus is on media-related practices, which require engagement with different perspectives and concerns while situating these in a wider analytical context.

How Kinship Systems Change

Using some of his landmark publications on kinship, along with a new introduction, chapter and conclusion, Robert Parkin discusses here the changes in kinship terminologies and marriage practices, as well as the dialectics between them.

Walls, Borders, Boundaries

Written by previously published scholars with expert knowledge in the fields of German studies, history and cultural geography Demonstrates the historical, cultural and political implications of walls and boundaries Explores walls not just as physical divisions, but as social, cultur...

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...

In the Meantime

The “meantime” represents the gap between what is past and the unknown future. When considered as waiting, the meantime is defined as a period of suspension to be endured. By contrast, the contributors of this volume understand it as a space of “the possible” where calculation coexists with unc...

Crafting 'The Indian'

In Europe, Indian hobbyism, or Indianism, has developed out of a strong fascination with Native American life in the 18th and 19th centuries. “Indian hobbyists” dress in homemade replicas of clothing, craft museum-quality replicas of artifacts, meet in fields dotted with tepees and reenact aspe...

Witches and Demons

The first published work on children accused of witchcraft in Europe. Based on ethnographic research. Comprehensive use of research data. The work uses research data. The chapters concern UK.

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...

Europe's New Racism

Europe has seen a tremendous rise in popularity of new rightist political parties in the last two decades or so, claiming cultural supremacy of the so-called native Europeans over foreign immigrants. In this volume, European scholars from Russian to Britain have come together to examine the med...

Durkheim in Dialogue

Collection of contemporary essays using Durkheimian theory; reclaims classical theory but applies it to current scholarly work. Bridges multiple areas of the world, multiple disciplines and sub-disciplines, united around a single theoretical approach. Both theoretical and ethnographi...

Fear in Bongoland

Spurred by wars and a drive to urbanize, Africans are crossing borders and overwhelming cities in unprecedented numbers. At the center of this development are young refugee men who migrate to urban areas. This volume, the first full-length study of urban refugees in hiding, tells the story of...

At Home in the Okavango

First anthropological study of the white citizens of the Okavango Delta, Botswana. Rare insights into the controversial practice of safari hunting, which has since been banned in Botswana. Contribution to theory surrounding autochthony/indigeneity.

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.

Militant Lactivism?

First in-depth academic study of attachment parenting and long-term breastfeeding in the UK or France A contribution to the nascent field of "Parenting Culture Studies" A theoretical focus on accountability and "identity-work", as part of a sociology of modernity A critique of co...

Momentous Mobilities

First in-depth (anthropological) discussion of various forms of contemporary mobilities. Coherent approach, with an introductory chapter and a conclusion. Agenda-setting volume for future research in mobility studies Experimental writing style, combining ethnography and memoir.

Cultural Diversity in Russian Cities

Case studies of qualitative ethnographic research on cultural practices and their spatial manifestations in several Russian cities (Moscow, St.Petersburg, Sochi, Novosibirsk) Issues of Racism and Homophobia in Russia Self-Representations of transnational labour migrants, sub-cultural...

Being-Here

The book is the first in-depth anthropological exploration of the existential quality of place in the context of displacement. It’s experience-near perspective on displacement by zooming in on the life stories and experiences of three individuals. It revalidates the role of place in ...

Affective States

The volume enhances the anthropological understanding of the various ways through which the state comes to be experienced as a visceral presence in social life.

Management and Morality

Drawing on extended ethnographic studies of management consultancies in the Oslo region of Norway, this book seeks to find a richer understanding of their role in contemporary work life and the attraction their practices exert on people. The author shows that management consultancy is an arena ...

Envisioning Eden

Based on more than two years of fieldwork in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Arusha, Tanzania offers an in-depth investigation of the local-to-global dynamics of contemporary tourism illustrates how tour guide narratives and practices are informed by widely circulating imaginaries of the p...

Rhetorical Minds

As a meditation on the nature of human thought and action, this book starts with the proposition that human thinking is inherently and irreducibly social, and that the long rhetorical tradition in the West has been a neglected source for thinking about cognition.

Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe

Since its first publication in 1989, this classic study has remained in demand. The third edition of Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe includes updated material with a new Preface, Epilogue, and map of the study area.

Invisible Founders

Literal and metaphorical excavations at Sweet Briar College reveal how African American labor enabled the transformation of Sweet Briar Plantation into a private women’s college in 1906. Despite being built and maintained by African American families, the college did not integrate its student b...