I have a confession. I’m not a gamer. Or so I thought. I was having thisconversation with a good colleague of mine, sat outside the train stationin a surprisingly sunny Sheffield: “Really” he said, looking puzzled, “noteven something on your phone?”“oh well, now you come to mention it.....”.That was the point I realised that perhaps I was a gamer after all, justa particular sort. …
y first trip to Amsterdam was for a couple of days in the autumn of 2003. A second-year student at the University of Georgia, I was studying abroad at Oxford, just a few hours by air from Amsterdam. Years before, I had learned how to smoke marijuana and enjoy its effects, probably too much so.1 For stoners like my former self, visiting Amsterdam’s coffeeshops is a recreational pi…
Doing Feminist Urban Research introduces the reader to the newly emerging 21st-century global landscape of feminist urban research. It showcases decolonising practices, partnerships and teamwork, new standards such as EDI, geo-ethnographic methodologies, software-enhanced qualitative data analysis, and knowledge mobilisation. This book delves into both the institutional and lived realities of t…
How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. Drawing on ethnographic insights from diverse field sites around the world, this book offers a unique window onto the ways in which people grapple with fundamental questions about how to live and what it means to be human. Developing a distinctly anthropological approach concerned less with gauging h…
The tabloid newspaper Bild portrayed the rise of Bakery Jatta as a professional football player with almost fan-alike admiration. The word ‘fairy tale’ was widely used to describe the sport career of this young Gambian, who migrated to Europe in 2015 in the context of the ‘refugee crisis’ and rapidly made a name for himself in one of the world’s top football leagues. Within just…
Less than a year after the end of authoritarian rule in 1998, huge images of Jesus Christ and Christian scenes proliferated on walls and billboards around a provincial town in eastern Indonesia in a conflict pitting Muslims against Christians. A manifestation of the extreme perception that emerged amidst the uncertainty and challenge to seeing brought on by urban warfare, the street paintings e…
In this Very Short Introduction, Ali Rattansi provides a balanced assessment of what's true and what's false about multiculturalism. Rattansi provides a useful definition of the word "multiculturalism" and he looks at how the term is used--and misused--in political debate, public policy, and within the educational arena, presenting a balanced and comprehensive view of all the opinions surroundi…
Always contextualize. Always historicize. Always focus on the particular and the specific. These have become basic mantras in cultural anthropology, as well as the humanities in general. And with these mantras have come a deep suspi-cion of wide-ranging comparative studies, and in particular a deep suspicion of the general categories that undergird such comparative work. Terms like myt…
ocial and behavioral scientists have tended to focus on young people’suse of (both legal and illegal) psychoactive and addictive substances,largely ignoring their use of other kinds of chemicals. There are fourbroad trends in this body of research: one set of studies defines substanceuse as risky behavior, something that needs to be prevented by under-standing the determinants of use. These s…
Mr. Wang died of cancer at the Nanjing Municipal Hospital of Chinese Medicine during the wee hours of the morning on December 14, 2014. He was eighty-four years old and had been at the hospital for almost two weeks. Before coming to the hospital, he saw a series of doctors about pain in his legs and hips, but checked into the hospital when the pain increased. About five days before his death, a…
Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right and conside-red a core value in liberal democracies. However, it is also one of our time’s most contested issues, constantly claimed either to be too wide-ranging, allowing continuous repression of minority groups, or too limited – restricting dissent and democratic deli-beration. In this book we depart from conventional approaches to fr…
Sometimes animals surprise us by doing something that seems uncannily human-like.Marmosets (South American monkeys of the family Callitrichidae) are tiny, weighing only around 300–400g, and though they are primates they look entirely unlike humans, perhaps even a little more like squirrels. However, like humans they form pair bonds, and collaborate in childcare…
Entrance into the sacred heart of the Sancang forest requires a steep descent of 337 unevenly aligned, concrete steps. With every passing year, the tentacles of tree roots make further advances in their inevitable quest to reclaim the forest floor. Ka handap; ka luhur – the Sundanese (West Javan) terms for descending and ascending – I climb the steps several times a day following gibbons fr…
The implementation of these professional training courses assumed a far more engaging significance than what is commonly assumed by those who believe it their exclusive prerogative to interpret the transfer of the skills re-quired to carry out given activities. It also drew attention to the need to mod-ulate the interpretative key to the social role associated with the activities to be carried …
Sure, paleontologist and historians can make a virtue out of necessity (see, e.g.,Muir,1991; Zemon Davis,2010:5–6; Peltonen,2012; Bassi,2016), but the com-monsensical assumption is that immediate observation and interrogation of phenom-ena in their entirety are preferable—time travel would be more effective.1However,the recourse to traces is getting more frequent not only for studying the h…
Critical theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose—and, if at all possible, cure—the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Wa…
he most important subdivisions of the province were calledprefectures; directly subordinate to the provincial governmentthere might also be smaller units called independent departmentsor subprefectures. Prefectures in turn were subdivided into xian,"counties" (or, as some authors have it, "districts"); these werethe lowest units of formal territorial a…
Fifty years after her first fieldwork with Ju/'hoan San hunter-gatherers, anthropologist Megan Biesele has written this exceptional memoir based on personal journals she wrote at the time. The treasure trove of vivid learning experiences and nightly ponderings she found has led to a memoir of rare value to anthropology students and academics as well as to general readers. Her experiences focus …
With this book, we aim to demonstrate how civil society organizations navigate the dynamic and complicated terrain of expanding opportuni-ties for market- and government-oriented forms of engagement as well as the “shrinking” spaces for advocacy and contentious civic mobilization (Carothers & Brechenmacher, 2014). The chapters gathered here theo-retically interrogate, and p…
Creating Future People offers readers a fast-paced primer on how advances in genetics will enable parents to influence the traits of their children, including their children’s intelligence, moral capacities, physical appearance, and immune system. It explains the science of gene editing and embryo selection and motivates the moral questions it raises by thinking about the strategic aspects of…
Algeria’s high petroleum revenues1 in the 2000s prompted massive food imports in a highly EU-dependent socioeconomic and political setting. The rapid changes in food consumption patterns that occurred in Algeria during this prosperous period partially involved greater sugar and fat intake to the detriment of vegetable proteins (Chikhi and Padella, 2014). They also reflect the polit…
The French incorporated Vietnam into the larger Southeast Asian colony of French Indochina, along with Cambodia and Laos. Cities flourished in the new colony and people of very different backgrounds jostled each other in the streets every day. Everyone in this colonial world—whether Vietnamese, French, Chinese, Indian, Cambodian, Hmong, Malay, Cham, or a mix of ethnici…
Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural presents a summa of current and classic theorizing on religion and the supernatural in relationship to the land and develops this theorizing further by confronting it with a rich set of folkloristic and historical data. Focusing on the themes of “time and memory,” “repeating patterns,” “identity formation,” “morality,” “labor,” “pl…
The book examines the power of young people’s social relationships in schools to transform, or more often, to continue, differences that pervade societies: mind-body-emotional diff erences or Special Educational Needs and Disability, gender, poverty, race/ethnicity, sexuality and their intersections. The book details extensive qualitative research with young people, foregrounding their accoun…
Comparing the Worth of the While in Fiji and Finland presents comparative case studies of clock time from Fiji and Finland in order to ask what other values is time capable of expressing besides monetary worth – what “else” can time be besides money? Time is a highly particular vehicle for different considerations of what is good or important, but it is also one which is deployed at diffe…
Teaching Myself to See deals with Tito’s struggles to participate in a world full of visual details. As a person with autism, Tito is visually selective, processing the myriad of details seeping in through the eye rather than the whole. Tracing Tito’s experiences to learn to see in his own, “hyper-visual” way, through art, through magazines, through everyday life, Teaching Myself to See…
he CUIDAR project began as a response to a timely call by the European Commission’s Secure Societies theme within its Horizon 2020 programme for culturally sensitive disaster management plans. So we argued that children and young people should be considered as a cultural group whose perspectives and insights were overlooked in the adultist cultural worlds of emergency planning and disaster ri…
There is also certainly a very specific market, of those who are addressed in the marketing of sensory education tools, with a rather limited inclusivity entailed in many of the workshops, books and programs I found, whether through targeted groups or representation in advertisement. As I delve into throughout the book, sensory education is often seen as an antidote to dig-ital maximalism, wh…
Eating, after all, is not strictly a human activity. Eating beside Ourselvesasks what can be learned by recognizing that what makes food food, in both substance and significance, concerns its relation to a myriad of eaters—not only human eaters but others besides. In turning organic substances into food, acts of eating create webs of relations, interconnected food chains organized by relative…
thing of a challenge to the elite and orthodox literary culture ofIndia's classical language, Sanskrit. Only the so-called heterodoxreligious groups, the Buddhists and Jains, accepted and encouragedwriting in a vernacular language. Both Buddhists and Jains used earlyvernaculars, called Middle Indie, for religious texts and secular com-positions. …
Configuring an answer starts from the analysis of a few syntheses, representative of the western worldview and genuine cognitive metaphors for the periods in which they were produced. I will trace the paradigms for studying the topic of salt across several stages of human development in order to identify the themes of salt taken into consideration and how they are inter…
The salt monopoly in premodern China is a near-perfect vehiclefor understanding the Chinese political economy generally. Themonopoly possessed the same type of organization, personnel, methods,and character as any other Chinese bureaucracy of the time, the onlydifference was one of function: it was charged with monitoringproduction, supervisin…
Can friendship as a political practice offer enough traction to imagine a borderless world? The startling contemporary rise in aggressive ethno-nationalism and end-times ecological crises have the same root: an inability to be together with humans as much as the natural world. Matt Hern and Am Johal suggest that porous renditions of being-together animated by friendship can spark a repoliticiza…
This book analyses the authoring of ethnographic films between 1895 and 2015. It is based on the general argument that the ethnographicness of a film should not be gauged according to whether it is about an exotic culture, but rather by the degree to which it conforms to the norms of ethnographic practice more generally. On these grounds, it considers films made in a broad range of styles, on a…
The 1st Edition of The Ethnographic Case, published in 2017, was an experiment in post-publication peer review, with the book published online and open to comments from readers. In this new 2nd edition, to be published later this year, the editors and authors have updated the text, both in response to these comments and taking into account changing contexts in the years since the book’s first…
Security is a defining characteristic of our age and the driving force behind the management of collective political, economic, and social life. Directed at safeguarding society against future peril, security is often thought of as the hard infrastructures and invisible technologies assumed to deliver it: walls, turnstiles, CCTV cameras, digital encryption, and the like. The contributors to Fut…
Why, every year, tens of thousands of people are willing to risk their lives in perilous voyages across Africa and the Mediterranean Sea? Why do they face such an ordeal to reach European countries where their long-term prospects are often dismal? The Big Gamble answers these questions through a multi-sited ethnography with refugees, their families back, smugglers and relatives in the diaspora.…
In recent decades, there has been a certain scepticism about earlier analyses of the indigenous religions of Fennoscandia that compared, for example, Sami and Scandinavian traditions and asked questions almost exclusively about origin. This is now changing and the leading researcher in the new endeavour of com-paring and relating Old Norse and Sami religious tradition…
The Pacific ‘grass skirt’ has provoked debates about the demeaning and sexualised depiction of Pacific bodies. While these stereotypical portrayals associated with ‘nakedness’ are challenged in this book, the complex uses and meanings of the garments themselves are examined, including their link to other body adornments and modifications. In nineteenth-century Fiji, beautiful fibre skir…
The "global" is permanently made and remade by how it is envisioned in political projects, in language, and in literature. Through a range of case studies, this book shows how practices of referring to the world actually constitute the global in its many facets. It aims to provide a sense in readers of how the global is not something »out there«, but that it is embedded in a wide range of the…
A World You Do Not Know explores the wilful ignorance demonstrated by North America’s settlers in establishing their societies on lands already occupied by indigenous nations. Using the Innu of Labrador-Quebec as one powerful contemporary example, Colin Samson shows how the processes of displacement and assimilation today resemble those of the 19th century as the state and corporations scramb…
A new theory of relational ethics that tackles contemporary issues. In How Is It Between Us?, Jarrett Zigon puts anthropology and phenomenological hermeneutics in conversation to develop a new theory of relational ethics. This relational ethics takes place in the between, the interaction not just between people, but all existents. Importantly, this theory is utilized as a framework for consider…
This volume examines Russia’s war on Ukraine. Scholars who have lived through the Russian invasion or who have conducted ethnographic research in the region for decades provide timely analysis of a war that will leave a lasting mark on the twenty-first century. Using the concept of dispossession, this volume showcases some of the novel ways violence operates in the Russian-Ukrainian war and t…
n an age where history is a global battleground and fake news proliferates, culture wars are being waged across India over its future – majoritarian or inclusive, neoliberal or socialist, religious or secular? Fake Gods and False History takes us to the BDD Chawls, a central Mumbai neighbourhood of tenement blocks (chawls) on the brink of a controversial redevelopment. Throughout the book, …
This book is about how water becomes people – or, put another way, how people and water flow together and shape each other. While the focus of the book is on the relationships held between water and people, it also has a broader message about human relationships with the environment generally – a message that illustrates not only that people are existentially entangled with the material wor…
This book makes a case for art as geography. In doing so, it situates itself at a certain juncture—the translation of geographical knowledge through art. This juncture is blurry, because in the making of art to trans-late knowledge, new knowledge is created. For this very reason, this book won’t perpetuate a false distinction between knowledge creation and kn…
Heritage comes in many shapes—in tangible forms such as sites, buildings, landscapes, or as intangibles, like memories, emotions, values and customs—as does the use of heritage, ranging from the purpose of building nations to marketing places. Heritage usually represents a phenomenon within a traditional historical discourse but have lately, more and more, come to take in peripheral appeara…
In 1939 Martinican writer Aimé Césaire first published his book length poem variously translated as Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Return to My Native Land, or Journal of a Homecom-ing, in which this epigraph appears. As the colonial powers were taking the world into an era of mass destruction, Césaire drew upon a Caribbean imaginary to counterpose to th…
This open access edited book brings together new research on the mechanisms by which maternal and reproductive health policies are formed and implemented in diverse locales around the world, from global policy spaces to sites of practice. The authors – both internationally respected anthropologists and new voices – demonstrate the value of ethnography and the utility of reproduction as a le…