Aging in today's world

Never before in human existence have the aged been so numerous — and for the most part — healthy. In this important new book, two professionals, an anthropologist and a physician, wrestle with the complex subject of aging. Is it inevitable? Is it a burden or gift? What is successful aging? Why ...

Human adaptation at grasshopper pueblo, arizona

A detailed study of the bone chemistry of individuals buried at the 14th century Grasshopper Pueblo site is presented in this volume. This is a data-rich study which provides much information for social and economic reconstructions of prehistoric Pueblo adaptation to their environment.

Aspirations of young adults in urban asia

Comparing first-person ethnographic accounts of young people living, working, and creating relationships in cities across Asia, this volume explores their contemporary lives, pressures, ideals, and aspirations.

Breast feeding and sexuality

Whereas in western countries breastfeeding is an uncontroversial, purely personal issue, in most parts of the world mother and baby form part of a network of interpersonal relations with its own rules and expectations. In this study, the author examines the cultural and social context of breast...

Dynamics of identification and conflict

Dealing with the dynamics of identification and conflict, this book uses theoretical orientations ranging from political ecology to rational choice theory, interpretive approaches, Marxism and multiscalar analysis. Case studies set in Africa, Europe and Central Asia are grouped in three section...

Children of palestine

Palestinian children and young people living both within and outside of refugee camps in the Middle East are the focus of this book. For more than half a century these children and their caregivers have lived a temporary existence in the dramatic and politically volatile landscape that is the M...

French women in politics: writing power

Although more women in France have entered political life than ever before, the fact remains that there are fewer women representatives in the French parliament than there were after the Second World War. In a new and original approach, the author presents an overview and analysis of the emergi...

Silence, screen, and spectacle

Takes on an innovative focus on “spectacular memory,” asking how spectacle functions in processes of memory, countermemory, and silencing. Breaks new ground in the discussion of absence, both in terms of the ‘absent,’ missing dialogues, texts, monuments and communities, as well as the “d...

Migration, development, and transnationalization

Unsafe motherhood

Follows the global policies that have been implemented in Sololá, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. Examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical pe...

Field manual for the archaeology of ritual, religion, and magic

By bringing together in one place specific objects, materials, and features indicating ritual, religious, or magical belief used by people around the world and through time, this tool will assist archaeologists in identifying evidence of belief-related behaviors and broadening their understandi...

Difficult folk?

Configuring contagion

Expanding our understanding of contagion further than typical notions of infection and pandemics, this book widens the field to include biosocial epidemics. The chapters propose varied and detailed answers to questions about the epidemic and contagious potential of specific infections and non-i...

Fire in the dark

Anthropologists who are employed to change the worlds they are researching find themselves in a potentially contradictory position. Combining the various roles and expectations involved in working with Gypsies and local government at the same time as conducting anthropological research, provide...

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.

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...

The manchester school

Pioneered by Max Gluckman to demonstrate the way in which social practice and structure together constitute and are themselves constituted by the situational flow of social life, the extended case method became diagnostic of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology. Anticipating practice th...

Existential anthropology

Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic methods, Jackson explores a variety of compelling topics, including 9/11, episodes from the war in Sierra Leone and its aftermath, the marginalization of indigenous Australians, the application of new technologies, mundane forms of rituali...

Food for health, food for wealth

Food and eating practices are central to current sociological and anthropological concerns about the body, health, consumption, and identity. This study explores the importance of these themes as they intersect with processes of globalization and cultural production within a specific group of c...

Crime and punishment in jewish law

The Bible presents only a small portion of the laws necessary for a state to function. Nevertheless, whole tractates of the Talmud discuss a wide variety of legal issues both civil and criminal. Although the jurisdiction of the beth din was limited in every land where Jews have lived, the schol...

Migration in the making of the gulf space

Combining visual and literary analyses and original ethnographic studies as part of a more general political reflection, Migration in the Making of Gulf Space examines the role of migrants and non-citizens in the processes of settling in the Arab States of the Gulf region.

Sound matters

The sounds of music and the German language have played a significant role in the developing symbolism of the German nation. In light of the historical division of Germany into many disparate political entities and regional groups, German artists and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th cen...

Iconicity of the uto-aztecans

The attempt to study a snake simulacrum thus constitutes the basic objective of this volume. A long, all-embracing iconicity of snakes and related snake motifs are evident in different cultural expressions ranging from rock art templates to other cultural artifacts like basketry, pottery, templ...

How is a man supposed to be a man?

The global trend of declining fertility rates and an increasingly ageing population has serious implications for individuals and institutions alike. Childless men are mostly excluded from ageing, social science and reproduction scholarship and almost completely absent from most national statist...

Crypto crowds

Develops a new, innovative approach to cryptocurrency by exploring crowd and community dynamics of cryptocurrency advocates. Analyses how the increasing digitalization and datafication of life will increase the relevance of cryptocurrencies. Includes short essays by prominent anthrop...

Between marx and coca-cola

In the 1960s and 1970s, Western Europe's "Golden Age" (Eric Hobsbawm), a new youth consciousness emerged, which gave this period its distinctive character. Offering rich and new material, this volume moves beyond the easy conflation of youth culture and "Americanization" and instead sets out to...

Simulated dreams

At the core of the author's concern stands the question of cultural transmutation in an era riddled with media channels and all-embracing messages. Fragments of the Israeli experience are pieced together in this provocative essay to provide a socio-anthropological agenda for some of the issues ...

The psychosocial wellness of refugees

Beyond wild and tame

Pure food

Food purity and nutrition has inter-disciplinary roots in anthropological, ethnological, evolutionary, psychological and applied perspectives. Pure Food presents the theoretical and cross-cultural aspects of adopting food purity. It demonstrates variations and similarities in diverse cultural b...

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 ...

Multidimensional change in sudan (1989–2011)

Sheds light on the dynamics of change and the relationship between microscale and macroscale processes which took place in Sudan between the 1980s and the independence of South Sudan in 2011. Contributors’ approaches focus on the issue of “access to resources.” Analyses major transfo...

The world trade center and global crisis

Numerous humanly caused destructions of just the last hundred years dwarf the World Trade Center disaster, and the attention still addressed to it may over the next few years appear disproportionate. But the significance of events is always determined by the social, political, and cultural forc...

Post-war women's writing in german

Women in the Federal Republic, the former GDR, Switzerland and Austria have initiated a remarkable literary movement, especially after 1968, which is also attracting growing attention elsewhere. Informed by critical feminist and literary theory, this broad-ranging collection, the first of its k...

Identity politics and the new genetics

Racial and ethnic categories have appeared in recent scientific work in novel ways and in relation to a variety of disciplines: medicine, forensics, population genetics and also developments in popular genealogy. Once again, biology is foregrounded in the discussion of human identity. Of partic...

The environment in jewish law

Environmental concerns are at the top of the agenda around the world. Judaism, like the other world religions, only rarely raised issues concerning the environment in the past. This means that modern Judaism, the halakhic tradition no less than others, must build on a slim foundation in its eff...

Remaking the human

The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions – is now a part of our lives. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive, and provides ethnographic insights into people’s motives and aspiration...

Rights in exile

Of the estimated 12 million refugees in the world, more than 7 million have been confined to camps, effectively "warehoused," in some cases, for 10 years or more. Holding refugees in camps was anathema to the founders of the refugee protection regime. Today, with most refugees encamped in the l...

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...

Girlhood and the politics of place

Offers a comprehensive reading on how girlhood scholars construct and deploy research frameworks that directly engage girls in the research process. Investigates how girlhood is positioned in relation to interdisciplinary and transnational research methodologies, media environments, geog...

Making things happen

Making Things Happen is about the sociocultural side of post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction, drawing on one project, the Pakistan Earthquake Reconstruction and Recovery Project (PERRP). As disasters are increasing in number and intensity so too will be the need for reconstruction, for w...

Sartre, self-formation and masculinities

Published on the occasion of Sartre's Centenary, this book helps to understand the man behind the work, offering a psycho-social analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre with an emphasis on his masculinity. It sets out to contextualize Sartre in terms of his psycho-sexual formation and processes of self-co...

Industrial labor on the margins of capitalism

The focus on regular versus precarious labour. Case studies from outside the familiar Euro-American core. Ethnographic methods, linking factory work to households and communities. Focus on multiple dimensions of social inequality in diverse industrial settings and on how they int...

Exceptional experiences

Looking at encounters that can puncture or jolt us, this volume uses art as a lens through which to register and understand exceptional experiences. The volume also includes the fieldworker’s experience of unexpected events that can lead to key understandings, as well as revelatory moments that...

The categorical impulse

Classification, as an object of recent anthropological scrutiny came to prominence during the 1960s, exemplified in the British (constructionist) tradition by the writings of Mary Douglas, and in the American ethno-semantics (cognitive) tradition by the likes of Harold Conklin and Brent Berlin....

Of jaguars and butterflies

Jointly authored by an anthropologist and a philosopher, this book investigates some of the most puzzling ideas and practices reported in modern ethnography and ancient philosophy concerning topics such as humans, animals, persons, spirits, agency, selfhood, consciousness, nature, life, death, ...

Secret spaces, forbidden places

In this highly original approach to the study of the construction of culture, this collection of previously unpublished essays explore the topography of the secret and the forbidden, focusing on specific moments in recent cultural and political history. By bringing together writers from differe...

In the mind's eye

This volume brings together the disciplines of palaeontology, psychology, anatomy, and primatology. Together, they address a number of issues, including the evolution of sex differences in spatial cognition, the role of archaeology in the cognitive sciences, the relationships between brain size...

The origins of complex societies in late prehistoric iberia

A series of papers by a wide range of authors from different countries and backgrounds focuses firmly on the question of the origin and development of social complexity, from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age, in Iberia writ large. A wide range of specific topics is covered with this specifi...

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...

Chinese medicine in east africa

Based on fieldwork conducted between 2001-2008 in urban East Africa, this book explores who the patients, practitioners and paraprofessionals doing Chinese medicine were in this early period of renewed China-Africa relations.

Beyond the lens of conservation

Truly dual-sited study giving equal weight to a society in the global North and the global South. Comparison of perceptions of non-experts both in the North and the South (as opposed to Northern experts vis-à-vis non-experts in the South as is usually the case). Focus on imaginations...

Liquid bread

brings cross-disciplinary perspectives on beer and brewing together brings cross-cultural ethnographies, archaeology, etc. to those who pick up the book because of their interest in beer and brewing introduces modern brewing technology and marketing techniques to those interested in ...

Defiance and compliance

The gap between rich and poor is widening in most countries, putting more pressure on women in particular who often find themselves with the ultimate responsibility to provide for their families, especially their children, in the face of economic and political discrimination. Based on participa...

The pursuit of pleasurable work

Against the backdrop of an alienating, technologizing and ever-accelerating world of material production, this book tells an intimate story: one about a community of woodworkers training at an historic institution in London’s East End during the present ‘renaissance of craftsmanship’.

The last shaman

The Arakmbut are an indigenous people who live in the Madre de Dios region of the southeastern Peruvian rain forest. Since their first encounters with missionaries in the 1950s,they have shown resilience and a determination to affirm their identity in the face of many difficulties. During the l...

The nomads of mykonos

When things become property

Interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam. Describes how property reforms are no longer miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.

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...

Deadly contradictions

A compelling account of the American empire. An explanation of how contemporary forms of violence exercised by American elites in the colonies, client state, and regions of interest have deferred imperial problems, but not without raising their own set of deadly contradictions. Can b...

Paradoxes of civil society

"Civil Society" has been experiencing a global renaissance among social movements and political thinkers during the last two decades. This collection of original papers by junior and senior scholars offers an important comparative-historical dimension to the debate by examining the historical r...

Fracturing resemblances

Western societies draw crucially on concepts of the 'individual' in constructing their images of the ethnic group and nation and define these in terms of difference. This study explores the implications of these constructs for Western understanding of social order and ethnic conflicts. Comparin...

Archaeologies of rules and regulation

How can we study the impact of rules on the lives of past people using archaeological evidence? To answer this question, Archaeologies of Rules and Regulation presents case studies drawn from across Europe and the United States, exploring the use of archaeological evidence in understanding the ...

Birds of passage

Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Malta, this book traces the complex interactions between hunters, birds and the landscapes they inhabit, as well as the dynamics and politics of bird conservation. Birds of Passage looks at the practice and meaning of hunting in a specific context, ...

Turkish culture in german society

For many decades Germany has had a sizeable Turkish minority that lives in an uneasy co-existence with the Germans around them and as such has attracted considerable interest abroadwhere it tends to be seen as a measure of German tolerance. However, little is known about theactual situation of ...

Strangers either way

Croatia gained the world's attention during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In this context its image has been overshadowed by visions of ethnic conflict and cleansing, war crimes, virulent nationalism, and occasionally even emergent regionalism. Instead of the norm, this book of...

Aging and the digital life course

In recent years there have been many books about aging populations. This book is unique in that it not only focuses on the role and design of technologies for older people around the world but it aims to situate this within local context. It is comprised of a carefully balanced mix...

Mobile farmers

The helmand baluch

The late Ghulam Rahman Amiri accompanied a joint Aghan-US archaeological mission to the Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan in the 1970s and published the ethnography in Farsi in Kabul in 1987. This volume, the first English translation, describes the cultural, political, and economic system...

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 ...

Security and development

Since 9/11 ideas of security have focused in part on the development of ungovernable spaces. Important debates are now being had over the nature, impacts, and outcomes of the numerous policy statements made by northern governments, NGOs, and international institutions that view the merging of s...

Living on a time bomb

Providing a holistic understanding of extensive oil extraction in rural Mexico, this book focuses on a campesino community, where oil extraction is deeply inscribed into the daily lives of the community members. The book shows how oil shapes the space where it is extracted in every aspect and p...

A taste for oppression

Very few up-to-date qualitative studies are available on locked societies (such as north Korea or Belarus), thus this book fills an important gap in our understanding of existing authoritarian regimes. An inside look at daily lives of people in a country that is often referred to as “the...

Ritual

Designed for both academic and lay audiences, this book identifies the characteristics of ritual and, via multiple examples, details how ritual works on the human body and brain to produce its often profound effects. These include enhancing courage, effecting healing, and generating group cohes...

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 ...

Ethnography in the raw

Ethnography in the Raw describes the author’s encounters with a Philippine family into which he has married, his wife’s friends and acquaintances, and their lives in a remote rural village in the rice basin of Luzon, about 130 miles north east of Manila. It is both anthropological fieldwork ‘in...

The anthropologist as writer

Accessibly written so as to attract students, scholars and generalists. Explores new ways of writing anthropology. Takes different anthropological genres seriously. Provides both theories and techniques for writing anthropology.  

Fishers and scientists in modern turkey

Through the ethnography and history of fish production, seafood consumption, state modernizing policies and marine science, this book analyzes the role of local knowledge in the management of marine resources on the Eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey. Fishing, science and other ways of knowing a...

The anthem companion to gabriel tarde

‘The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde’ offers the best contemporary work on Gabriel Tarde, written by the best scholars currently working in this field. Original, authoritative and wide-ranging, the critical assessments of this volume will make it ideal for Tarde students and scholars alike. ‘A...

Teaching palestine on an israeli university campus

The word “occupation” is not heard in classrooms on the Hebrew University campus, at the heart of Palestinian East Jerusalem. The “war outside” is not spoken of. Israeli and Palestinian students unsettle this denial for the first time in a practice-led course on human rights in the reality around...

Discourse on applied sociology: volume 1

This engaging and wide-ranging two-volume study urges a balance between theoretical and practical sociology.

Outlaw heroes in myth and history

This book provides an overview and analysis of the global tradition of the outlaw hero. The mythology and history of the outlaw hero is traced from the Roman Empire to the present, showing how both real and mythic figures have influenced social, political, economic and cultural outcomes in many t...

The anthem companion to alexis de tocqueville

‘The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville’ contains original interpretations of Tocqueville’s major writings on democracy and revolution as well as his lesser- known writings on colonies, prisons and minorities. Each chapter compares Tocqueville’s ideas on a given subject with those of other...

Transnational return and social change

Return has long been considered the end of a migration cycle. Today, returnees’ continued transnational ties, practices and resources have become increasingly visible. ‘Transnational Return and Social Change’ pays tribute to the meso-level impacts that follow the practices and resources migrant r...

Self-presentation and representative politics

The book presents six articles written at intervals of about a decade between 1960 and 2020, all of which relate to the problem of representative politics. The articles are contextualised historically to document a developing presentation of self on the part of the author while also raising quest...

The liquidation of exile

A theoretical overview and six case studies showing that the exile of intellectuals is a difficult, dependent, and fluid condition, whose achievements are dearly bought and whose endings rarely fulfill the missions informing their beginnings.

Covid-19 and the challenges of trauma and transformations

Covid-19 has created trauma, death and destruction as well as challenged us for transformation of our existing society, economy and polity. The book deals with it.

Decolonial mourning and the caring commons

This book engages with decolonial mourning by bearing witness to the political grief work of contemporary struggles against migration-coloniality necropolitics in Europe, the United States and Latin America.

Mexico-us, serbia-eu border lives and works

Mexico–US, Serbia–EU Border Lives and Works is an interdisciplinary, accessible study of Mexico–US and Serbia-EU border practices and policies. Our interdisciplinary, collaborative team of scholars, artists, and migration practitioners tackle crucial questions about how these borders impact peopl...

Doing gender in heavy metal

This book offers a sociological study of gender regarding women in the heavy metal subculture. Relying on interviews with fans, women have made progress in the metal world, although gendered conditions also continue to exist. Heavy metal feminism is a process in becoming, but not yet an accomplis...

The anthem companion to david ricardo

This edited volume provides a comprehensive survey of the life and work of David Ricardo (1772–1823), a major contributor to the British classical school of political economy.

Fashion as cultural translation

The book deals with fashion as a form of visual culture embodied through signs. It reproduces itself with a pattern based on the semiotic network of places, social practices and forms of imagery.

Bauman, elias and latour on modernity and its alternatives

‘Bauman, Elias and Latour on Modernity and Its Alternatives’ summarizes and compares the sociological works of three contemporary authors insofar as they deal with the themes of modernity and its alternatives. These alternatives are either deemed to be possible or actually experienced, whether hi...

Toward a politics of the (im)possible

This book presents a philosophical discussion on the issues of the body and knowledge from a feminist perspective.

The anthem companion to karl mannheim

“The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim” is an international collection of original articles on the classical sociologist Karl Mannheim and documents the current revitalization of the reception of this social thinker. Using “learning from Mannheim” as its motif, the chapters in this volume favor f...

The plight of potential

Drawing on an international body of case studies from leading millennial networks, "The Plight of Potential" shows how millennials can live deeper and more enriching lives by reflecting on the self, placing value on solitude and resisting the feeling that they must constantly connect and share.

The anthem companion to david riesman

The purpose of this book is to revisit the legacy of David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd, the biggest selling sociology book to date, and a highly influential public intellectual during the second half of the twentieth century.

The anthem companion to ferdinand tönnies

This book is a collection of ten articles covering various aspects of the thought of Ferdinand Tönnies. Leading authorities on Tönnies have written these articles in a way that will appeal to both the general reader and the sociological specialist.