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…