Culture wars

The relationship between anthropologists’ ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpr...

Transforming study abroad

An accessible introduction of current theoretical debates on common study abroad concepts (“culture,” “global citizen,” “immersion,” “host family,” etc.) for study abroad practitioners. A myth-buster of common study abroad discourses. Concrete suggestions for how to incorporate theoretic...

The global age-friendly community movement

This book provides an introduction to the global phenomenon of the age-friendly community movement, through an extensive collection of international case studies by researchers and practitioners. It explores current tensions in the movement and offers a wide-ranging set of recommendations for a...

Fortune and the cursed

Innovation-making is a classic theme in anthropology that reveals how people fine-tune their ontologies, live in the world and conceive of it as they do. This ethnographic study is an entrance into the world of Buryat Mongol divination, where a group of cursed shamans undertake the ‘race agains...

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...

Culture, rhetoric and the vicissitudes of life

Inspired by the Rhetoric Culture Project, this volume focuses on the use of imagery, narrative, and cultural schemes to deal with predicaments that arise during the course of life. The contributors explore how people muster their resources to understand and deal with emergencies such as illness...

The state and the grassroots

First study of immigrant organizations conducted in the U.S. and Europe. First comparative study of immigrant organizations conducted with the same research methodology. First study to focus explicitly on the relation between immigrant organizations and development in sending c...

Mortuary dialogues

Presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity and its transformations. Describes the different genres of talk and e...

Animism beyond the soul

The contributors to this volume offer compelling case studies that demonstrate how indigenous animistic practices, concepts, traditions, and ontologies are co-authored in highly reflexive ways by anthropologists and their interlocutors.

The power of law in a transnational world

How is law mobilized and who has the power and authority to construct its meaning? This important volume examines this question as well as how law is constituted and reconfigured through social processes that frame both its continuity and transformation over time. The volume highlights how powe...

After the cult

Offers comparison of indigenous and anthropological perceptions of other and self Examines mutual influencing between indigenous and Western perceptions as well as the relation between anthropological “predecessors” and “successors” Investigates cultural perceptions of other and self...

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...

The living ancestors

Original work both in terms of author’s chosen theoretical framework (phenomenology-holography) and the empirical richness of ethnographic detail through which the former is executed. Captivating and original ethnographic content and its articulation through conceptual and interpretive i...

Virtualism, governance and practice

Explores the relationship between conservation design and conservation execution Analyzes environmentalist visions and organizational policies and programs Justifies critics' concerns regarding organizations' impositions in different parts of the world Disproves critics by showca...

Tourism, magic and modernity

A comprehensive ethnographic study of tourism and tourism development An innovative re-reading of different uses of concepts of magic in the contemporary world An approach of tourism to study the ideological underpinnings of modernity A uniquely accessible writing style based on ...

Urban residence

Riobamba and Cuenca, two intermediate cities in Ecuador, have become part of global networks through transnational migration, incoming remittances, tourism, and global economic connections. Their landscape is changing in several significant ways, a reflection of the social and urban transformat...

Household archaeology on the northwest coast

Since the late 1970s, household archaeology has become a key theoretical and methodological framework for research on the development of permanent social inequality and complexity, as well as for understanding the social, political and economic organization of chiefdoms and states. This volume ...

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.

Experimental collaborations

Grounded in a series of diverse ethnographic projects in Africa, America and Europe, Experimental Collaborations attempts to expand our ethnographic repertoire of fieldwork devices. The titular concept signals a descriptive account of certain forms of ethnographic engagement, and a research and...

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.

All or none

All or None is a social history and anthropological study of the world’s oldest voluntary collective farms in Ravenna, Italy, addressing the question of the viability of cooperative enterprise as a potential solution for displaced workers, and as a more humane alternative to capitalist agribusi...

Gendering modern german history

Writing on the history of German women has - like women's history elsewhere - undergone remarkable expansion and change since it began in the late 1960s. Today Women's history still continues to flourish alongside gender history but the focus of research has increasingly shifted from women to g...

Youth gangs and street children

Presents an original and powerful ethnographic examination of children’s childhood with a focus on the child’s active participation in and acquisition of, cultural practices Describes how the phenomenon that at times children themselves end up parenting their parents, generates contradi...

Empire and after

The growing debate over British national identity, and the place of "Englishness" within it, raises crucial questions about multiculturalism, postimperial culture and identity, and the past and future histories of globalization. However, discussions of Englishness have too often been limited by...

Messy europe

Interdisciplinary Different disciplines actually integrated nicely Grounded in fieldwork in specific countries Focus on local- and state- and pan-state levels Offers critical look at “crisis” talk Links together crisis that are often treated separate Offers unique un...

Floating economies

In the Himalayas of the Indian part of Kashmir three communities depend on the ecology of the Dal lake: market gardeners, houseboat owners and fishers.  Floating Economies describes for the first time the complex intermeshing economy, social structure and ecology of the area against the backgro...

A policy travelogue

It is the first full-length ethnographic study of policy movement that combines both horizontal (across states) and vertical (within states) movement. It complements the focus on key players (e.g., the United States) by focusing on players not considered central (e.g., Aotearoa/New Zeala...

An enchantment of digital archaeology

The use of computation in archaeology is a kind of magic, a way of heightening the archaeological imagination. Agent-based modelling allows archaeologists to test the ‘just-so’ stories they tell about the past. These models are one end of a spectrum that ends with video games. This volume explo...

World heritage craze in china

There is a World Heritage Craze in China. China claims to have the longest continuous civilization in the world and is seeking the recognition from UNESCO. With a sociological lens, this book offers comprehensive insights into World Heritage, as well as China’s deep social, cultural, and politi...

Gardening the world

Offers multi-group comparative ethnography within river catchment area. Provides new theoretical insights into why societies use resources unsustainably. Eludicates complex social and cultural dynamics of water use and management. Considers what water means to different groups of...

The cracked art world

This book presents a nuanced view of Northern Ireland, a place at once deeply mired in its past and seeking to forge a new future for itself as a ‘post-post-conflict’ place within the context of a changing United Kingdom, a disintegrating Europe, and a globalized world.

Indigenous medicine among the bedouin in the middle east

First native anthropologist to discover tribal secrets of traditional medicine. Unique data on medicine among pastoral-nomadic, semi-nomadic, and settled tribes. Healers and clients tell their stories. Synthesis between traditional and bio-medicine to/for their reciprocal enrichm...

Food health

Provides in-depth analysis and comprehensive review of methods necessary to design, plan, implement and analyze public health programming using anthropological best practices. Each chapter elaborates a case study from the author's own work, showing why particular methods were adopted in ...

Identity matters

In response to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and war in Afghanistan, the Fulbright New Century Scholars program brought together social scientists from around the world to study sectarian, ethnic, and cultural conflict within and across national borders. As one result of their year of inten...

Beyond writing culture

The only serious and sustained analysis of the intersections between epistemology and representational practice Represents the collection of a number of recent arguments regarding the future of ethnography Offers transdisciplinary perspectives as well as a clear critique

Years of conflict

Recent years have witnessed a significant growth of interest in the consequences of political violence and displacement for the young. However, when speaking of “children” commentators have often taken the situation of those in early and middle childhood as representative of all young people un...

The death of the big men and the rise of the big shots

An important insight into the radical cultural changes following on from demographic change, land-conflicts and economic scarcity An analysis of how people re-make sociality in an era of post-colonial neo-liberalism Contributes to the understanding of the problems of post-disaster r...

The peirce seminar papers

Since the modern founding of the theory of signs by the American philosopher-scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), the field of semiotics has become increasingly prominent as a method of interdisciplinary research and study, bridging the humanities, the fine arts, and the natural and so...

Landscape, process and power

In recent years, the field of study variously called local, indigenous or traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) has experienced a crisis brought about by the questioning of some of its basic assumptions. This has included reassessing notions that scientific methods can accurately elicit and...

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

Culture change and ex-change

Biography&Relationship: I was born in PNG in 1972, lived there until I was 5 and thus have a very personal relationship to people and place. It is my home. Although not old-childhood friends of mine, Bena people adopted me more than 23 years ago into their community. The long-term relati...

Anthropology and mass communication

Anthropological interest in mass communication and media has exploded in the last two decades, engaging and challenging the work on the media in mass communications, cultural studies, sociology and other disciplines. This is the first book to offer a systematic overview of the themes, topics an...

Heritage, gentrification and resistance in the neoliberal city

What happens when versions of the past become silenced, suppressed or privileged due to urban restructuring? In this volume, the authors explore a variety of attempts to interrupt and interrogate urban restructuring, and to imagine alternative forms of urban organization, produced by diverse co...

Creativity in transition

Describes how in an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity, the dynamics of cultural production and the very notion of creativity is in transition. Highlights the spread of modernist discourses of creativity. The contributions are based on a long term collab...

Indigeneity on the move

“Indigeneity” has become a prominent yet contested concept in national and international politics, as well as within the social sciences. This edited volume draws from authors representing different disciplines and perspectives, aiming to convey a theoretical and empirical overview of indigenei...

Inward looking

Inward Looking seeks to understand the relationship between Romani identity, performance and migration. Particularly, it studies the idea of ‘Romanipe’ under the prism of the personal accounts of Romani migrants. The findings are based on qualitative data gathered from Romani migrants from thre...

The devil is disorder

On the geopragmatics of anthropological identification

An audacious critique of the issues that have plagued culturalization in anthropological thought and writing. Allen Chun argues that disciplinary knowledge has always been embedded in changing contexts of sociopolitical practice and that neglect of its underlying politics gives different meanin...

Cosmic coherence

Humans are unique in their ability to create systematic accounts of the world – theories based on guiding cosmological principles. This book is about the role of cognition in creating cosmologies, and explores this through the ethnography and history of Yijing divination in China.

Managing ambiguity

First ethnographic study of favors in a former Yugoslav country; First ethnographic study of a welfare system in a former Yugoslav country; It explores how the same people pursue favors across several fields (social protection, healthcare, humanitarianism), rather than just to focus ...

Collective terms

Provides an alternate view of the fractious French suburbs Suggests new ways for thinking about difference in everyday life One of the only English-language studies of the history of the French suburbs and the French New Towns Draws on the view from France to provide an alternate...

Peaceful selves

With its focus on personhood and self-making, it investigates gaps in understanding left behind by dominant frameworks for analyzing life in post-conflict societies, such as reconciliation, justice, and commemoration politics The argument is built around fundamental tensions in Rwandan c...

Consuming the inedible

Everyday, millions of people eat earth, clay, nasal mucus, and similar substances. Yet food practices like these are strikingly understudied in a sustained, interdisciplinary manner. This book aims to correct this neglect. Contributors, utilizing anthropological, nutritional, biochemical, psych...

Money at the margins

Technology for the Poor / in the developing world Social studies of monetary behavior Human Design centered with a focus on context Rethinking technological development / financial inclusion solutions

Reclaiming the forest

Describes the reindeer herders of Aoluguya, China, a group of former hunters who today see themselves as “keepers of reindeer” as they engage in ethnic tourism and exchange experiences with their Evenki neighbors in Russian Siberia. Focuses on the efforts of the Ewenki to reclaim their f...

Tracing slavery

Looking at the ways in which the memory of slavery affects present-day relations in Amsterdam, this ethnographic account reveals a paradox: while there is growing official attention to the country’s slavery past (monuments, festivals, ritual occasions), many interlocutors showed little interest...

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.

The practice of war

The fact is that war comes in many guises and its effects continue to be felt long after peace is proclaimed. This challenges the anthropologists who write of war as participant observers. Participant observation inevitably deals with the here and now, with the highly specific. It is only over ...

The anthropology of corporate social responsibility

The first and only edited volume on the anthropology of corporate social responsibility. Offers a critical, comprehensive overview charting the anthropological contribution to the analysis of corporate social responsibility. Draws together work of key thinkers/anthropologists work...

Of life and health

An anthropological study of the health system of the Dagara people of northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso, Of Life and Health develops a cultural and epistemological lexicon of Dagara life by examining its religious, ritual, and artistic expressions, and gives a holistic account of the Dag...

Culture, catastrophe, and rhetoric

It develops the concept of political culture through case studies of communicative action. It introduces the concept of the texture of political action, which refers to how social context operates on the surface of an event to shape political experience. It focuses on thecatastrophic...

Medicine between science and religion

Offers a sustained exploration of ‘religion’, ‘science’ and ‘medicine’ in Western and Tibetan medical contexts. Discusses the situated confluence and/or friction of medicine between religious and scientific world views in various contexts of healing . Offers original ethnographic ex...

Elusive promises

Focuses on the idea of the promise as a way to understand planning through time. Ethnographic accounts from highly-regarded anthropologists on planning. Comparative study of planning.

The virago story

The Virago Story provides a comprehensive history of classic feminist publisher Virago, along with an up-to-date analysis of the four waves of feminism, new strands of feminist analysis and praxis, and publishing trends.

Politics of scale

The volume develops research in Critical Heritage Studies by: Providing a multi/interdisciplinary point of view to politics of scale and heritage-scale relationship. Contributors to the volume have their disciplinary background in: geography, cultural studies, art history, museum studies, ...

Resistance in an amazonian community

Like many other indigenous groups, the Huaorani of eastern Ecuador are facing many challenges as they attempt to confront the globalization of capitalism in the 21st century. In 1991, they formed a political organization as a direct response to the growing threat to Huaorani territory posed by ...

Gentrifications

Using a thorough analysis of the diversity of the forms, places and actors of gentrification in an attempt to isolate the ‘DNA’ of gentrification, the book addresses the place of social groups in cities, their competition over the appropriation of space, the infrastructure unequally offered to ...

Taking sides

Concerns with research ethics have intensified over recent years, in large part as a symptom of "audit cultures" (M. Strathern) but also as a serious matter of engagement with the ethical complexities in contemporary research fields. This volume, written by a new generation of scholars engaged ...

Leaving footprints in the taiga

Examines the strategies that Orochen reindeer herders of southeastern Siberia have developed to navigate recent environmental and social changes in post-Soviet Siberia. Describes strategies that play a central role in Orochen cosmology.

Multicultural dialogue

As cross-cultural migration increases democratic states face a particular challenge: how to grant equal rights and dignity to individuals while recognizing cultural distinctiveness. In response to the greater number of ethnic and religious minority groups, state policies seem to focus on managi...

Making scenes

In this unique volume examining the nature of scenes in rock art, researchers examine what defines a scene, what are the necessary elements of a scene, and what can the evolutionary history tell us about storytelling, sequential memory and cognitive evolution among ancient and living cultures?

Dreams made small

Dreams Made Small offers an in-depth, ethnographic look at journeys of education among young Papuans under Indonesian rule, ultimately revealing how dreams of transformation, equality, and belonging are shaped and reshaped in the face of multiple constraints.

Migration without borders

International migration is high on the public and political agenda of many countries, as the movement of people raises concerns while often eluding states’ attempts at regulation. In this context, the ‘Migration Without Borders’ scenario challenges conventional views on the need to control and ...

The ethics of knowledge creation

This volume focuses on how knowledge is relationally created, how local knowledge can be transmuted into ‘universal knowledge’, and how transactions and consumption of knowledge monitors knowledge. The Ethics of Knowledge Creation examines how these transactions are then situated according to b...

Caring for the 'holy land'

In Israel, as in numerous countries of the global North, Filipina women have been recruited in large numbers for domestic work, typically as live-in caregivers for the elderly. The case of Israel is unique in that the country has a special significance as the ‘Holy Land’ for the predominantly d...

Kinship in europe

Since the publication of Philippe Ariès’s book, Centuries of Childhood, in the early 1960s, there has been great interest among historians in the history of the family and the household. A central aspect of the debate relates the story of the family to implicit notions of modernization, with th...

Non-humans in amerindian south america

It focuses only on South America. It embraces both its Highlands and Lowlands. All their chapters are fieldwork-based. It critically addresses currently debated issues linked to Anthropology, Anthropocene, Climate Change, Ontologies and Non-Humans.

Nazi labour camps in paris

First account on the three Paris labor camps that were lost from collective memory and nearly forgotten by historians An important chapter of the Holocaust in France Offers an authoritative account of a much neglected subject

Girl making

Through the innovative methodology of asking them to record their experiences on videotape, this book offers an evocative and fascinating cross-cultural exploration into the everyday lives of a number of teenage girls from their own broad social, cultural and ethnic perspectives. The use of the...

Migration by boat

The only edited volume to date to focus specifically on forced sea migrations and their memorializations. Covers a wide international (geographic) berth in terms of case studies, and therefore has international appeal. An excellent example of engaged social sciences regarding current...

America observed

Essays offering a critique on the absence of fieldwork done on the United States by anthropologists from abroad. Explores its likely reasons while also illustrating the advantages of studying fieldwork-based anthropological projects conducted by colleagues from outside the U.S. Suita...

An introduction to two theories of social anthropology

Louis Dumont, who died in 1998, was one of the most important figures in post-war French anthropology. He is well-known for his early work on India, which culminated in Homo Hierarchicus (1966; in English 1972, 1980), an anthropological account of the caste system. He later extended this work i...

A sealed and secret kinship

Adoption has long been a controversial subject in the United States as well as in other western countries, but never more so than in the past three decades. Why that is and how public attention affects the decisions made by those who arrange, legalize, and experience adoptive kinship constitute...

The early morning phonecall

Offers valuable insights into remittance dynamics in conflict-affected settings, a rarely studied area A perspective on everyday life in the Somali regions and the diaspora Features a transnational view encompassing three contrasting locations A multi-method, interdisciplinary ap...

When god comes to town

Shows how urbanization influences the religiosity of everyday life in modern urban centres Explores how urbanization poses problems for traditional religions that are all rooted in rural, small-scale societies Questions appeal of these old religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, or...

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...

Categories in context

Despite the wealth of empirical research into the interrelationships of gender and labor available, little is known about the forms of classification and categorization shaping these social phenomena. Categories in Context enriches our understanding of how cognitive categories such as status, l...

Landscapes beyond land

Goes beyond the theoretical dichotomy of structure and experience Focuses on routes, aesthetics and narratives Wide regional spread of ethnography Links British and French traditions of landscape study

Deleuzian intersections

Science and technology studies, cultural anthropology and cultural studies deal with the complex relations between material, symbolic, technical and political practices. In a Deleuzian approach these relations are seen as produced in heterogeneous assemblages, moving across distinctions such as...

Deconstructing dolls

Deconstructing Dolls explores the role of dolls in girlhood and young womanhood, seeking to understand the historical and contemporary significance of dolls particularly as they relate social meanings in the lives of girls.

Debating authenticity

All contributions are based on field research in Europe, Africa, Arabic Peninsula, Latin America, North America Authenticity is debated in various subfields, in particular: visual arts, popular culture, material culture, music, tourism, religion, colonial history. Scholars with affil...

Nameless relations

Based on the author's fieldwork at assisted conception clinics in England in the mid-1990s, this is the first ethnographic study of the new procreative practices of anonymous ova and embryo donation. Giving voice to both groups of women participating in the demanding donation experience – the d...

The mirage of china

Today’s world is one marked by the signs of digital capitalism and global capitalist expansion, and China is increasingly being integrated into this global system of production and consumption. As a result, China’s immediate material impact is now felt almost everywhere in the world; however, t...

Living like a girl

Working with diagrams

Arising from the need to go beyond the semiotic, cognitive, epistemic and symbolic reading of diagrams, this book looks at what diagrams are capable of in scholarly work. Rather than attempting to define what diagrams are, and what their dietic capacity might be, contributions to this volume dr...

If everyone returned, the island would sink

Focusing on the small island of Paama, Vanuatu, and the capital, Port Vila, this book presents a rare and recent study of the ongoing significance of urbanization and internal migration in the Global South.

Blood and fire

A collection of highly original pieces that make an important contribution to the anthropology of labor Evaluates the prevalence of insecure and informal labor in the twenty-first century Compares the interrelation between class, spatiality, violence and history Utilises key case...

Intimate mobilities

This book explores how various types of migration that are often seen as distinct phenomena – such as marriage migration, romance tourism and sex work migration – are in fact variations of cross-border mobilities that evolve around experiences and constructions of “intimacy”, and are facilitate...

A twisted style

In "western" cultures, some people have chosen a dreadlock hairstyle, despite many in mainstream society looking at it in a negative light. Based on interviews and close observations in social media, the book offers insights into the culture(s) surrounding dreadlocks and ultimately interprets t...