A sure sign of the successful exposition of a field of research, is the list of desired further reading that accumulates as one progresses through the text. By that measure, and many others, Speculative Anthropology: A Literary History of Contamination by Oscar Hemer is a rip-roaring triumph. From Levi-Strauss, Leiris and Glissant to Borges, Saer and Ghosh, not to mention Coetzee and Wicomb, the ideas and prose connecting anthropology and literature are explored and mapped by our savvy and perceptive guide. This compelling reading is Out Now!
It's always a pleasure to bring important work to Open Access. So I'm very happy to announce that The Yalaku: History and Warfare in the Middle Sepik, an amazing indigenous history that contains the most complete account of traditional warfare in the Sepik is now available as OPEN ACCESS and PAPERBACK. Out Now!
We're delighted to publish Creativity in a Time of Covid-19, an engaging and colourful gathering of reflections on the new forms of creativity provoked by the apparently existential crisis that was Covid-19. The result of collaboration between the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Folklore Society, I can highly recommend this volume. Out Now!
Almost all of our books are available as ebooks, either as a free download from our expanding Open Access list, or for purchase by academic libraries from ProQuest Ebook Central. Just ask your librarian to order these through LibCentral or OASIS.
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BOOKS
In a field of multinational corporations, Sean Kingston Publishing is a family business, a small press specializing in high-quality academic texts within the social sciences, particularly anthropology. We published our first books in 2004, volumes by Marilyn Strathern, James Leach and Lawrence Kalinoe, and Alan Rumsey and James Weiner. Since that time, we have grown organically, establishing many long-lasting relationships with our partners (e.g. the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Centro Incontri Umani) and authors, and publishing more books each year on our own behalf, as well as assisting other organizations with their publications (e.g. The British Museum).
Dr Sean Kingston is a published and prize-winning anthropologist, and is personally involved in all books accepted for publication. He assesses every title himself, and each book is also submitted to peer review by experts on the topic. You will find him and our books at many anthropology conferences in Europe, and sometimes further afield. We have business relationships with some of the largest book distributors, and through them access the latest print-on-demand (POD) technology to print and market from the UK, the US and Australia.
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Crises no Tempo
Horizontes Etnográficos na Amazônia e na Melanésia
Editado por Tony Crook e Marilyn Strathern
Este livro considera algumas das maneiras pelas quais o tempo aparece - e aparentemente funciona - através de momentos de crise. O que diferentes conceitos de tempo e modelos temporais podem nos dizer sobre como as crises são configuradas e apreendidas?
A pesquisa em primeira mão é central para a construção da etnografia através do trabalho de campo, mas sempre traz consigo um horizonte temporal específico. Reconhecer que o presente do etnógrafo nem sempre é o melhor ponto de vista para entender as questões contemporâneas possibilita uma nova via para os debates atuais sobre como o passado e o futuro estimulam a ação social, revelando assim suas multiplicidades temporais. Os capítulos do livro voltam-se para a Amazônia e Melanésia contemporâneas a fim de examinar em detalhes a produção e reprodução de crises específicas e os horizontes temporais que elas mobilizam.
Os temas etnográficos explorados incluem a transformação de crises profetizadas no passado e suas implicações para o futuro; o que significa explorar percepções de crise a partir das consequências de conflitos armados recentes; a natureza multifacetada dos horizontes futuros precipitados por mudanças nas políticas econômicas, quando estas têm impacto tanto corporal como social; e a melhoria de crises governamentais através de iniciativas que dependem de compreensões temporais específicas sobre mudanças eficazes. Tais trajetórias são definidas de várias maneiras em contextos de colonialismo contínuo, calamidades ambientais, hostilidade manifesta, o estado ausente ou excessivamente presente, e percepções de degradação moral.
Reflexões analíticas adicionais examinam as maneiras pelas quais a crise ocupa a imaginação ao subsistir no tempo; configuram marcos temporais internacionais através de representações da crise climática como a 'tragédia do horizonte'; e oferecem uma perspectiva para comparar os diferentes modelos temporais abordados nos capítulos anteriores.
Tony Crook dirige o Centro de Estudos do Pacífico na Universidade de
St Andrews.
Marilyn Strathern é Professora Emérita de Antropologia Social em
Cambridge e Membro Vitalício do Girton College.
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-912385-69-0, £25.00 (GBP), $35.00 (USD) Please click here to order.
Also available in OPEN ACCESS (link)
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Speculative Anthropology
A Literary History of Contamination
By Oscar Hemer
Anthropology's keen interest in fiction can be traced to the discipline's so-called 'literary turn' in the 1980s and 90s, instigated by James Clifford and George Marcus's groundbreaking anthology Writing Culture (1986). But the close connection between anthropology and literature goes back to pioneer anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who were also prominent writers. The discussion continues, and 'literary anthropology' is now a well-established sub-field that addresses literary studies as well as creative writing. Yet, anthropology's courting of literature has largely remained unanswered. Some famous authors have a background in anthropology, such as Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin and Amitav Ghosh, but few - one of the exceptions being Ghosh - have reflected on the relationship between the two practices, let alone consciously attempted to fuse them.
Speculative Anthropology: A Literary History of Contamination explores the 'intersection' between anthropology and literature from the literary side, with the perspective of the writer, rather than the critic. The title is inspired by Argentinian author Juan José Saer's tentative definition of 'fiction' as 'speculative anthropology' and Ghanaian British philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's similarly tentative proposal for a literary tradition of 'contamination', going back to Roman playwright Terence's fusion of comedy and tragedy. In this pioneer monograph, Oscar Hemer reinterprets Appiah's 'contamination' as genre crossing and mixing, not between different literary genres but between fiction and discursive forms of writing - anthropological as well as philosophical and historical. His tentative 'canon of contamination' explored in this volume includes, among others, Montesquieu's Persian Letters, the 'self-ethnographies' of Michel Leiris and Édouard Glissant, Jorge Luis Borges's 'fictional essays', César Aira's 'freaked-out ethnography', Chris Kraus's 'theoretical fiction', Zoë Wicomb's spectral South African history - and the exemplary philosophy-by-fiction of J.M. Coetzee.
What is knowledge? It's somewhere in that mystery of Otherness that contaminates its seekers, Hemer argues. Prowling for weakness on the imaginary fence line between anthropology and literature, Speculative Anthropology sniffs out the haunted ruins of colonial obsessions, scents that still entice and ensnare, even as we disavow them.
Anna Tsing, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa CruzThe purpose, the author says, is not to look back to his European base, but to permit connections in the global South to challenge disciplinary categories of thought and imagination. A unique study, Hemer s Speculative Anthropology stages contamination as transgressive and progressive modernity.
Michael Chapman, Emeritus Professor of English, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban
Oscar Hemer is Professor Emeritus of Journalistic and Literary Creation at Malmö University, Sweden. His diverse body of work includes novels, translations, academic essays and experimental literary anthropology.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-62-1, £70.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD) Please click here to order.
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Creativity in a Time of Covid-19
Edited by Patricia Lysaght, James H. Grayson and David Shankland
Occasional Paper No. 47 of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Published in association with the Folklore Society
Creative responses to Covid 19 - no longer consumed by notions of divine retribution as in past plagues - constituted a broad cultural flowering, often within the digital world. This volume combines anthropology's understanding of ritual and society with folklore's appreciation of the marginal to explore the role of artistic practice in this period.
The chapters consider many different examples of artistic resourcefulness in this time of adversity. Lockdown constraints provided opportunities to re-invent traditions, as in the alternative 'non-fiestas' of the Basque Country, in which women took up roles previously denied to them. On the pilgrim route of St James, decorating shrines allowed people a sense of normality and continuity at a time when churches had closed their doors. The shutting of venues led one group of Japanese classical musicians to new online ways of working, and a global following. Making a church tour in Buenos Aires virtual amplified an old legend that resonated with the media, highlighting the scandal of femicide during the pandemic.
For individuals, online crafting might lend apt metaphors of mending, stabilizing and repair to daily lives; but, in the case of collage, absurdity and disjunction could also express uncomfortable new meanings. Forums of positive haiku blossomed; but satirical responses in the reworking of traditional Greek proverbs on Twitter, allowed participants to signal their distrust of politicians through creative uses of language. Anti-Vaxx and QAnon narratives, when viewed as folklore rather than disinformation, foreground the fashioning of self and community within digital space. Children repurposed old games with 'Coronavirus tag', while locked-down artist-parents' creative engagement with the world beyond their front door led to a national campaign for the rights of children to play on the street.
Overall, there was a shift in artistic practice from inward activity to one undertaken in social solidarity. In many ways, this is the unifying theme of this startling period of recent history, as well as of this volume.
These varied, personal, and often moving accounts attest to the power and irrepressibility of the human imagination.
Dr Fiona Bowie, The Royal Anthropological Institute / University of OxfordThe essays brought together in this excellent volume reflect the long association between Folklore and Anthropology, and the range of subjects demonstrates varied responses to the cultural impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr Juliette Wood, The Folklore Society / Cardiff University
Patricia Lysaght is Professor Emerita of European Ethnology, University College Dublin
James H. Grayson is Emeritus Professor of Modern Korean Studies in the School of East Asian Studies at The University of Sheffield
David Shankland is Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
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Crises in Time
Ethnographic Horizons in Amazonia and Melanesia
Edited by Tony Crook and Marilyn Strathern
This book considers some of the ways in which time appears - and seemingly does it work - through moments of crisis. What can different concepts of time and diverse temporal frameworks tell us about how crises are configured and apprehended?
First-hand research is central to the fashioning of ethnography through fieldwork, yet always brings with it a specific time horizon. Recognizing that the ethnographer's present is not always the best vantage point from which to grasp contemporary issues offers a fresh entry into current debates on how both past and future stimulate social action, and thus reveal its temporal multiplicities. These essays turn to present-day Amazonia and Melanesia to examine in detail the production and reproduction of specific crises and the time horizons they mobilize.
The ethnographic themes explored include the transformation of crises prophesized in the past and their implications for the future; what it means to explore perceptions of crisis from the aftermath of recent armed conflict; the multifaceted nature of future horizons precipitated by changing economic policies, when these have bodily as well as social impact; and the amelioration of governmental crisis through initiatives that rely on specific temporal understandings of effective change. Such trajectories are set variously against backgrounds of continuing colonialism, environmental calamity, overt hostility, the absent or over-present state and perceptions of moral degradation.
Further analytic reflections examine the ways crisis holds the imagination through subsisting in time; configure international temporal frameworks through depictions of the climate crisis as the 'tragedy of the horizon'; and highlight a perspective from which to compare the diverse temporal frameworks presented in the preceding chapters.
Emerging from explicitly inter-generational discussions, leading scholars of Amazonia and Melanesia here address issues of perpetual interest. Methodological and textual insight emerges from in-depth examinations of temporalities in conjunction with the notion of 'crisis' . These analyses offer theoretically and philosophically astute thinking for anthropology on its own conceptual process and (future) analyses. They point the way to learning both from critical reflection on scholarly practice and from other times altogether.
James Leach, Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
Tony Crook directs the Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of St Andrews.
Marilyn Strathern is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge and Life Fellow of Girton College.
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-912385-59-1, £25.00 (GBP), $35.00 (USD) Please click here to order.
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Creation, Procreation and Isolation
An Anthropological Introduction to Genesis
By John Forrest
Genesis is unlike any other book in the Bible. Indeed, it is unlike any other book you are likely to come across. Most people will be aware of many of its stories, such as Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark or the Garden of Eden, even without ever having read the actual tales. Their images reside in the collective consciousness of generations, appearing in countless works of poetry, art, song, literature, advertising and film. From scholarly commentaries to internet videos, from sermons to simple story books, there is a superabundance of all kinds of exegeses for all tastes.
However, Genesis is also, arguably, the most contested battleground of the entire Bible. Whatever you say about Genesis, someone will disagree with you: especially if you put a cultural anthropologist and an evangelical Christian in the same room.
Undaunted, John Forrest argues that there is much to be gained from a reading of Genesis that combines the depth of biblical scholarship, motivated by faith, with anthropology's developed understanding of the cultural contexts of societies. Demonstrating this in his careful analyses, it turns out that the stories of Genesis are a great place to start when introducing students to anthropological themes as diverse as gender roles and sexuality; state powers and exile; the transition from foraging to herding and agriculture; kinship, marriage systems and incest laws; and religion in society. His approach bridges old disciplinary divides and reveals Genesis, and the life lessons it contains, as a cultural survival manual for an oppressed people in exile. Its fundamental strategy becomes clear: to grow strong and numerous in complete isolation from the taints and temptations of other cultures.
John Forrest's anthropological take on Genesis is revelatory. If you think you know what Genesis is about, read this book for eye-opening surprises. If you are new to Genesis, Forrest will open pathways of understanding that will ensure a memorable experience. At last a sociocultural anthropologist has paid in-depth attention to Biblical material. Read this unforgettable book.
Barbara D. Miller, Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, George Washington University
John Forrest holds degrees in theology as well as advanced degrees in folklore and
anthropology (including archaeology). He was professor of anthropology at the
College at Purchase, SUNY, and is also an ordained Presbyterian minister.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-54-6, £65.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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Spectral Borders
History, Neighbourliness and Discord on the Polish-Belarusian Frontier
By Aimée Joyce
Based on ethnographic research conducted in a town on the Polish-Belarussian border, this book examines borders and the lingering echoes of conflict. Using hauntology as a guiding framework to understand how people live amidst the histories and reverberations of conflicts, the author investigates the role that landscape, with its material presences and absences, plays in evoking and maintaining the border. The ethnography probes themes of ethnicity, religious practice, memory and space, investigating the border as a dynamic social process.
By immersing herself in the everyday lives of the borderland, Joyce unravels how traces - lingering imprints of the past - shape local relationships in the present, influencing shared understandings of history and the future. Introducing the concept of the spectral border as a lens to shed light on the ambiguous presence of afterlives and memories tied to a historical boundary, the book unveils its present-day ghostly forms in local ideas and practices of neighbourliness and the borderland identity. Spectral Borders interrogates the use and limitations of these practices by exploring points of tension, where the meanings and uses of 'being a neighbour' and 'being from the borderland' are tested and challenged. In doing so, the book raises questions about how conviviality is created and managed in a place with a long and unresolved history marked by ethnic and religious violence, war, and civil unrest.
This monograph is a fascinating read, offering a fresh and original perspective on the complex cultural landscape of the Polish-Belarusian borderland. The concept of spectral borders, which refers to the various ambivalences and silences resulting from the uncomfortable history of a multi-ethnic community trying to maintain good neighbourly relations, is presented with particular ethnographic sensitivity and offers an engaging and elegant literary narrative.`
Justyna Straczuk, Associate Professor, Polish Academy of SciencesJoyce has written a layered and nuanced ethnography of a formerly little-known Polish borderland. While tragic events have recently brought the region to world attention, she shows that the Polish-Belarus border has long been politicized, as it has shifted between different nations, and has been both porous and militarized. The book focuses on the hauntings that underlie much of the social, religious and cultural life of the region: the spectres of religious conflicts played out in contested spaces by Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox institutions and actors, and of a large Jewish community now all but disappeared. Joyce explores the complex relations local people have with the forest, a place full of hidden and secret histories as well as a plethora of environmental initiatives, tourist trails, local foragers and more clandestine economic practices. The border follows the River Bug, also a site where traces of past presences and conflicts lurk below the surface, easily evoked by present occurrences. This is a lovely book, moving easily between anthropology and history, in a dialogue between vivid ethnography and sophisticated theory. Beautifully written in accessible prose, and illustrated with delightful, whimsical drawings, it deserves to be read by anyone interested in the region, or in memory, place and landscape, and the complex social worlds that encompass and make them.
Frances Pine, Emerita Reader in Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London
Aimée Joyce is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews. She works in Poland and Ireland on borders, heritage, and the afterlives of conflict.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-52-2, £65.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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The Yalaku
History and Warfare in the Middle Sepik
By Ross Bowden
This ground-breaking and beautifully illustrated ethnography of the Kaunga-speaking Yalaku provides the first detailed history of any of the 200 language groups in the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea. The story of this society, recorded by Ross Bowden at their request, is told by the people themselves, and contains by far the most complete account of traditional warfare in this region.
The history begins around 1800, the limit of Yalaku cultural memory. It describes the flashpoints that ignited tribal fighting (from the theft of a hunting dog to accusations of sorcery), the strategic thinking of warriors, the use of alliances, the building of structural defences, and even the actual blows of notable battles. It includes songs recounting the reversals of fortunes a warrior can experience and the laments of women over their loved ones, relaying the perspectives of both war-parties and attacked communities. This gripping narrative, performed in a men's house with both men and women present, is both a feat of memory and a communal endeavour.
Bowden's deft ethnographic analyses of the social structure and myths of the Yalaku provide the essential context to understand this society once locked into warfare with their neighbours, adversaries who knew each other's names, spoke each other's languages, intermarried, and during peacetime took part together in rituals at which their shared history was sung.
Bowden's historical reconstruction of the history of Yalaku warfare from about 1800 to the ethnographic present of the 1970s is truly breathtaking for anyone who has tried to collect a sensible set of stories in a Papua New Guinea village. He connects the past to the present of his fieldwork in a novel and dynamic way. This is essential reading for anyone interested in New Guinea ethnography.
Robert L. Welsch, PhD, formerly of Dartmouth College and Franklin Pierce UniversityThe Yalaku describes a New Guinea group that is among the least known to anthropology even though it lies in the midst of some of the best known. Bowden's meticulous talent as an ethnographer ensures that its ethnographic value will last long after the importance of others has faded.
Paul Roscoe, Emeritus Professor, University of Maine
Ross Bowden is an Australian cultural anthropologist and the author of four books on the Kwoma.
Premium Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-51-5, £140.00 (GBP), $180.00 (USD)
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A Touch of Genius
The Life, Work and Influence of Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard
Edited by André Singer
Vol. 4 of the RAI Series.
Evans-Pritchard was perhaps the most influential anthropological scholar of the twentieth century. His extraordinary work in Africa has formed a central foundation to anthropological thought since the 1930s, with generations of anthropologists having read and appreciated his ethnographies of the Azande, Nuer and Sanusi, and his analyses of social structures, belief systems and history. And yet, though so much has been written about his work, a rounded understanding of the person has proved elusive.
This volume covers Evans-Pritchard as a promising student, a young graduate in search of career opportunities, an adventurous cultural explorer, a determined officer in the Second World War, and an ambitious department-building professor with a global reputation. Against a glittering array of contexts and characters - from Malinowski to Marett to the Maharaj of Kutch; from Oxford poets and pubs to Catholic conversion in war-torn Libya - there emerges a fascinating study of a figure who was much more than an innovative anthropologist.
A portrait of the man and his time is composed from personal correspondence, archives and familial recollections, contributions from surviving friends and students, and accounts by those, including contemporary African scholars, who continue to debate and re-evaluate his work in all its complexity. This book is a fitting monument to Evans-Pritchard's legacy and a landmark in anthropological historiography.
No other anthropologist has had Evans-Pritchard's unique combination of theoretical sophistication and ethnographic skill in a number of very different contexts, and personal charisma. This volume will be an essential reference for anyone seeking to understand the mercurial man behind the classic monographs.
David N. Gellner, Professor of Social Anthropology and Fellow of All Souls, University of OxfordWhat emerges in this remarkable volume is a complex character whose attributes cannot be easily and holistically represented, but he vividly comes through in biographical accounts, interpersonal correspondence, recollections of family members, friends, students and colleagues, and, of course, his own scholarship.
Ambassador Francis Deng, United Nations Special Representative on Human Rights, and Special Representative for the Prevention of Genocide until 2012A valuable contribution to the discipline's history through his time; both locally in Oxford, and globally.
Hilary Callan, Director Emerita, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
André Singer is is Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California and Professorial Research Associate at London School of Oriental and African Studies.
Published in association with the Royal Anthropological Institute
Ebook, ISBN 978-1-912385-50-8, OPEN ACCESS (link)
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-48-5, £130.00 (GBP), $175.00 (USD)
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Sharing the Camera
A Guide to Collaborative Ethnographic Filmmaking
By Martin Gruber
Participatory video and collaborative filmmaking have become powerful assets in a broad range of contexts and academic disciplines. In Sharing the Camera, Martin Gruber shows how 'Collaborative Ethnographic Filmmaking' enables the participants and conveners of workshops to produce highly cinematic films together. This approach facilitates collaboration in all aspects of filmmaking, from conception and direction, to shooting, editing and distribution.
While drawing inspiration from seminal examples in the history of ethnographic filmmaking, Gruber searches for a more mutual form of collaboration than is usual in the field. Borrowing insights from Indigenous media, and the role of film in struggles for self-determination, he explores the cultural dynamics that may occur when introducing film into small-scale social arenas. He considers what can be gained from participatory video (PV), an applied visual anthropology approach, and its goal of social change. Admirably unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries but ever mindful of potential pitfalls, this guidebook finds a way through critical objections to informed practical implementation.
Gruber's methodological toolkit, based on his experiences in Angola, Botswana and Namibia, provides honest and practical advice on topics such as pre-production legal work, navigating local power structures, conflicts around decision-making, and fostering inclusion of the wider community. The wealth of knowledge presented makes Sharing the Camera a vital resource for planning collaborative media projects in any context.
Laying clear groundwork that shows a decolonial path through important fields, Gruber provides an insightful framework for the practice of ethnographic filmmaking at its most collaborative and creative, using his own thoughtful media projects made with his research partners & His clear writing, sophisticated command of several fields, and generous approach to filmmaking make Gruber's book a welcome addition for a wide range of readers across the fields of anthropology, documentary studies, and filmmaking.
Faye Ginsburg, Kriser Professor of Anthropology and Director, Graduate Program in Culture & Media, New York UniversitySharing the Camera is an impressive and valuable addition to written studies of collaboration in ethnographic filmmaking & The book is judicious in tone and is written in clear, undogmatic language, free of academic jargon. It is both practical and intellectually nuanced, addressing questions of production and reception as well as those of authorship, authority, ethical practice and interpersonal relationships in the field. It will be essential reading for anyone contemplating the use of video cameras in future research projects.
David MacDougall, Honorary Professor, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University
Martin Gruber is a researcher, lecturer and filmmaker in the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research of the University of Bremen.
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What People Do With Images
Aesthetics, Politics and the Production of Iranian Visual Culture in Transnational Circuits
By Mazyar Lotfalian
Rejecting broad-brush definitions of post-revolutionary art, What People Do With Images provides a nuanced account of artistic practice in Iran and its diaspora during the first part of the twenty-first century. Careful attention is paid to the effects of shifts in internal Iranian politics; the influence of US elections, travel bans and sanctions; and global media sensationalism and Islamophobia. Drawing widely on critical theory from both cultural studies and anthropology, Mazyar Lotfalian details an ecosystem for artistic production, covering a range of media, from performance to installations and video art to films.
Museum curators, it is suggested, have mistakenly struggled to fit these works into their traditional-modern-contemporary schema, and political commentators have mistakenly struggled to position them as resistance, opposition or counterculture to Islam or the Islamic Republic. Instead, the author argues that creative artworks neutralize such dichotomies, working around them, and playing a sophisticated game of testing and slowly shifting the boundaries of what is acceptable. They do so in part by neutralizing the boundaries of what is inside and outside the nation-state, travelling across the transnational circuits in which the domestic and diasporic arenas reshape each other. While this book offers the valuable opportunity to gain an understanding of the Iranian art scene, it also has a wider significance in asking more generally how identity politics is mediated by creative acts and images within transnational socio-political spheres.
What People Do With Images is an exciting contribution to the growing anthropological engagement with contemporary art, especially work concerned with transformations in the circulation of culture. Drawing on Rancière and Mitchell, Lotfalian articulates an original framework for engaging his detailed discussion of the changing world(s) of Iranian art and visual culture, their mediation with (and of) the affairs of the world, arguing for art as 'a meta-political space' of 'dissensus'. His approach to 'the work of art' - in the case of a rapidly growing and changing Iranian visual culture, reframed by digital media is all the more significant and moving given his insights as an anthropologist/participant. Lotfalian brings profound knowledge and sympathy to his engaging account of what contemporary Iranian artists 'do with images', revealing their implication in the national and transnational worlds in which they circulate.
Professor Fred R. Myers, New York University
Mazyar Lotfalian is an anthropologist who has taught at several different universities, including Yale, Pittsburgh and Emerson College. He has also worked as Assistant Director of Persian Studies at the University of California, Irvine and held an inaugural post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for Religion and Media, New York University.
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The Last White Canoe of the Lau of Malaita, Solomon Islands
By Pierre Maranda, James Tuita Dede and Ben Burt
Building a beautiful ornamented 'white canoe' was a way for the Lau people of Malaita in Solomon Islands to honour the ghosts of their ancestors in the days before they became Christians. This book tells the story of the last of these canoes, built in 1968 by one of the few clans still following their traditional religion, as witnessed by the late anthropologist Pierre Maranda.
Maranda observed how the great artistic projects of Malaita were once supported by elaborate ritual procedures and celebrated with community festivals, all richly illustrated here by his photographs. James Tuita was among the Lau boys who played with Maranda's son and, years later, he visited Quebec to help Maranda with his research. Besides writing the Lau text for this book, he contributes his own acutely felt insights into the radical changes in Lau society during his lifetime and the importance of maintaining its cultural traditions. Ben Burt, a curator at the British Museum, knew Maranda through his own anthropological research in Malaita and worked with James Tuita to ensure that Maranda's plans for his ethnographic research were realized after his death. It is published, as Maranda intended, in Lau and English languages, to return some of their cultural heritage to the people of Lau, Malaita and Solomon Islands.
This invaluable bilingual ethnographic account records with care and respect the social and religious life of a Pacific Islands community. The Last White-Canoe describes a people struggling against the challenges of colonial and Christian modernity through the revitalization of the craftsmanship and sacred knowledge of canoe-making during the transition from traditional religion to Christianity. With their experience of working with local experts and appreciation of indigenous historical and cultural knowledge, the authors confidently take the reader into the sacred world of this Lau community and the cultural heritage of Malaita and Solomon Islands. It is a task well done.
Revd Dr Ben Wate, Solomon Islands National UniversityThis bilingual, international collaboration in scholarship offers rich insights into the complexities of making a major cultural object in Solomon Islands in the mid-twentieth century. This is not just a matter of the technical and practical manufacture, but of the day by day sourcing of resources, provisioning of food and shelter for the makers, the negotiations among men and with other beings, the ritual procedures and offerings, the eating and the talking and the celebrating. Vividly detailed, and illustrated with photographs taken throughout the process, the book makes a way of living and thinking alive to the reader.
Dr Lissant Bolton, Keeper of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, British Museum
Pierre Maranda of Laval University, Quebec, was an anthropologist who researched with the Lau of Malaita from the 1960s onwards.
James Tuita Dede is an elder of the Rere clan of Lau who assisted Pierre Maranda with his research.
Ben Burt is a curator in the Oceanic section of the British Museum and an anthropologist who has researched with the Kwara'ae of Malaita.
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Anthropology in Norway
Directions, Locations, Relations
Edited by Synnøve K.N. Bendixsen and Edvard Hviding
This book traces the history, growth and wide-ranging public engagements of social anthropology in Norway. An outcome of the Norwegian Anthropology Day at the Royal Anthropological Institute, the book explores diverse developments of theory and fieldwork near and far, and provides an overview of the institutional beginnings of social anthropology in Norway. A special section includes lively debates between Norwegian and British colleagues.
This is a striking book and a wonderful read. The contributors are so direct, honest and penetrating in their understanding of Norwegian Anthropology's historical development, which was very rapid indeed, compared to other countries. The breadth of this particular anthropology, from the classical actor-oriented ethnography made famous by Frederik Barth, to the study of development, local community studies in Norway, to its scientific engagement in issues of immigration, multiculturalism, structures of power, not least between the sexes, are all remarkable achievements. It is also abundantly clear, that the anthropological public sphere has been exceptional in its openness to different interpretations of reality and the willingness to enter into debate. We should all be thankful for the Norwegian presence in Anthropology.
Jonathan Friedman, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, University of California San Diego and Directeur D'études, École des Hautes Études en Sciences SocialesA recurrent theme of this fascinating collection of essays, debate and commentary is the attention given to centre/periphery relations. Norwegian anthropology is characterised by the editors as a 'betwixt and between' position, neither at the centre nor at the periphery. The contributors draw attention to a sense of ambiguous global positioning and an intellectual commitment both to collaborative, international scholarship and to engagement in national public debate. In the process they produce an important reflection on the elasticity of 'national' framings, and the shifting configurations of centres and peripheries as they emerge and transform over time.
Penny Harvey, Professor of Anthropology, University of Manchester
Synnøve K.N. Bendixsen is Associate professor of social anthropology, University of Bergen.
Edvard Hviding is Professor of social anthropology, University of Bergen
Contributors: Synnøve K.N. Bendixsen, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Signe Howell, Edvard Hviding, Olaf H. Smedal, Gunnar M. Sørbø, Marilyn Strathern and Halvard Vike.
Chapter 1: Portrait of a young discipline? - Synnøve K.N. Bendixsen and Edvard Hviding; Chapter 2: Social anthropology in Norway: A historical sketch; Chapter 3: The fieldwork tradition - Signe Howell; Chapter 4: No direction home?: Anthropology in and of Norway - Halvard Vike; Chapter 5: Norwegian anthropology and development: New roles for a troubled future? - Gunnar M. Sørbø; Chapter 6: The unbearable lightness of being ... a public anthropologist in Norway - Thomas Hylland Eriksen; Chapter 7: Disagreement, illumination and mystery: Towards an ethnography of anthropology in Norway; Chapter 8: Norwegian Anthropology Day: Panel discussion; Chapter 9: Norwegian anthropology: Towards the identification of an object - Marilyn Strathern; Contributors; Index.
Published in association with the Royal Anthropological Institute
Ebook, ISBN 978-1-912385-38-6, OPEN ACCESS (link)
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-912385-30-0, £25.00 (GBP), $35.00 (USD)
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Anthropology in Motion
Encounters with Current Trajectories of Scholarship from Austria
Edited by Andre Gingrich
Anthropology in Austria has come a long way, in terms of achieving diversity, growth and international visibility, since first emerging in Vienna, the capital of the former Habsburg Empire, and now of one of its main successor countries. This volume combines elements of critical self-reflection about that academic past with confidence in the intellectual currents presently in motion across the discipline.
As with the country's contributions to world literature and music, the trrajectory of social-cultural anthropology may be seen as a good example of the global relevance of research in Austria within the humanities and social sciences. This 'anthropology in motion' situates itself at the intersections between contemporary and historical research, but also often between the natural and the social sciences. It shows a commitment to conceptual and theoretical pluralism, but, equally importantly, a dedication to the maintenance and improvement of standards of methodological quality. Whether empirical research is focused on studies at home or abroad, the blending of renewed forms of ethnographic fieldwork with solid comparative analyses and archival research characterizes many of these ongoing advances.
Both the liveliness and substance of contemporary anthropology in Austria emerge from a collection that also makes an unusually frank and critical appraisal of the discipline's trajectory there.
Prof. Dame Marilyn Strathern, FBA, Girton College, University of CambridgeIt is hard to imagine a better introduction to social anthropology in Austria - both to the history of what it has been (at the heart of a multicultural and multilingual empire) and to the contemporary richness of its interests. Austria's globally networked anthropologists of today, as this collection amply demonstrates, occupy a privileged position at the heart of Europe that enables them, with unrivalled sensitivity, to mobilize the tools of ethnography and anthropology to tackle key questions of history, culture, and radical change.
Prof. David N. Gellner,, University of Oxford
Andre Gingrich is is a Founding Member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and a member of the Royal Swedish and the Austrian Academies of Sciences, where (until 2019) he served as Founding Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA).
Contributors: Ayse Çaglar, Thomas Fillitz, Andre Gingrich, Chris Hann, Stephan Kloos, Eva-Maria Knoll, João de Pina-Cabral, Peter Schweitzer, Maria Six-Hohenbalken.
Chapter 1: Advances, transitions and other forms of motion: Introducing the trajectories of anthropology in Austria - Andre Gingrich; Chapter 2: Revaluation processes: Urban restructuring, war and dispossessed histories in a border city - Ayse Çaglar; Chapter 3: Remote connections: Human entanglements with built and natural environments in the Arctic and elsewhere - Peter Schweitzer; Chapter 4: In motion: Genes, identities and mediated lives in dispersed small-scale contexts - Eva-Maria Knoll; Chapter 5: Persistent universals in biennial research: A perspective from the Biennale de Dakar - Thomas Fillitz; Chapter 6: From Buddhist deities to the spirit of capitalism: Tibetan medicine and the remaking of Inner Asia - Stephan Kloos; Chapter 7: Mnemotopes and memoryscapes in a transnation: The commemorations of extreme violent experiences in Kurdish and Yezidi society - Maria Six-Hohenbalken; Chapter 8: Riddles of the past: Historical anthropology and the history of anthropology - Andre Gingrich; Chapter 9: The heirs of ethnologia: The missing homeland and three imperial suburbs; Chapter 10: Comment: An anthropology of the land - João de Pina-Cabral; Contributors; Index.
Published in association with the Royal Anthropological Institute
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-32-4, £60.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
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Social Anthropologies of the Welsh
Past and Present
Edited by W. John Morgan and Fiona Bowie
Asking the perennial question, 'Who are the Welsh?', this collection illustrates the history of anthropology in Wales and its distinctive contributions to this debate. Its essays range from the ethnographic insights of Gerald of Wales in the twelfth century, to analyses of the multicultural Wales of today. Contributors discuss the legacy of Iorwerth Peate, co-founder of the Welsh Folk Museum of St Fagans (now the National Museum of History), and the schools of research pioneering community studies of Welsh rural life in the second half of the twentieth century. Writings on the changing nature of family relations in de-industrialized settings such as the 1950s 'new' town of Cwmbrân and a contemporary Welsh public-housing estate provide new insights, while research on shifting patterns of religious adherence re-examine what has often been seen as a defining characteristic of Welsh society. Case studies on the challenges faced by European immigrants in Wales post Brexit and the Welsh diaspora in Patagonia add a global dimension.
The interdisciplinary nature of anthropology as practised in Wales brings both a richness and openness born of collaboration. Revealing both the startling variety and continuity of Welsh life and identity, certain themes consistently emerge: connections with place and the natural world as a way of being Welsh, the complex meanings of language in identity formation and the role of kinship in giving a sense of belonging to the Welsh nation.
Since the pioneering social studies of the likes of Alwyn Rees and Ronald Frankenberg, Isabel Emmett and Joseph Loudon, Wales has inspired significant anthropological contributions. This volume is no less pioneering in its interdisciplinary focus on 'the Welsh'. With Great Britain's unity once more being called into question, and relations to Europe and the wider world open to debate, this is a necessary volume.
Prof. Nigel Rapport, University of St Andrews
W. John Morgan is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Education, University of Nottingham; Honorary Professor, School of Social Sciences, and Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow, the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, and Data, Cardiff University.
Fiona Bowie is Research Affiliate, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Oxford University, and a member of Wolfson College, Oxford.
Contributors: Helen Blakely, David Dallimore, Howard Davis, Marta Eischsteller, Elaine Forde, Taulant Guma, Chris Hann, Rhys Dafydd Jones, Robin Mann, John O Connell, Elen Phillips, Huw Pryce, Gareth Rees, Iwan Wyn Rees, Marilyn Strathern.
Introduction - W. John Morgan and Fiona Bowie; Chapter 1: Horizons of comparison - Marilyn Strathern; Chapter 2: Gerald of Wales: Medieval ethnographer of the Welsh - Huw Pryce; Chapter 3: Sir William Jones: Welsh Orientalist and comparative musicologist - John O'Connell; Chapter 4: Wales in miniature: Iorwerth C. Peate and the Welsh Folk Museum - Elen Phillips; Chapter 5: Anthropological perspectives on religion in Wales - Fiona Bowie; Chapter 6: The Welsh in diaspora: Patagonia - Iwan Wyn Rees; Chapter 7: Community studies and twentieth-century social change: Perspectives on Welsh society - Gareth Rees; Chapter 8: Exploring civil society through the lens of place: Illustrations from a post-industrial Welsh village -Robin Mann, David Dallimore, Howard Davis and Marta Eichsteller; Chapter 9: Making sense of welfare reform: History, community and kinship in the South Wales valleys - Helen Blakely; Chapter 10: One Wales, one model?: Complicating ways of knowing Wales - Elaine Forde; Chapter 11 'I didn't even know that Wales existed': European Union migrants' participation and belonging in Wales - Taulant Guma and Rhys Dafydd Jones; Chapter 12: Voyages around fathers: Class, community, and mobility in industrial South Wales - Chris Hann; Contributors; Index
Published in association with the Royal Anthropological Institute
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-33-1, £60.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
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Music, Dance, Anthropology
Edited by Stephen Cottrell
This volume celebrates the significant resurgence of interest in the anthropology of music and dance in recent decades. Traversing a range of fascinating topics, from the reassessment of historical figures such as Katherine Dunham and John Blacking, to the contemporary salience of sonic conflict between Islamic Uyghur and the Han Chinese, the essays within Music, Dance, Anthropology make a strong argument for the continued importance of the work of ethnomusicologists and ethnochoreologists, and of their ongoing recourse to anthropological theories and practices. Case studies are offered from areas as diverse as Central Africa, Ireland, Greece, Uganda and Central Asia, and illuminate core anthropological concepts such as the nature of embodied knowledge, the role of citizenship, ritual practices, and the construction of individual and group identities via a range of ethnographic methodologies. These include the consideration of soundscapes, the use of ethnographic filmmaking, and a reflection on the importance of close cultural engagement over many years.
Taken together these contributions show the study of music and dance practices to be essential to any rounded study of social activity, in whatever context it is found. For as this volume consistently demonstrates, the performance of music and dance is always about more than just the performance of music and dance.
Stephen Cottrell is Professor of Music at City, University of London.
Contributors: John Baily; Peter Cooke; Ann R. David; Catherine E. Foley; Andree Grau; Rachel Harris; Maria Koutsouba; Jerome Lewis; Barley Norton; Carole Pegg; Martin Stokes.
Introduction; Part I - Histories, Theories, Concepts: Chapter 1 - The Royal Anthropological Institute and the development of ethnomusicology in the UK; Chapter 2 - 'The legs that put a kick into anthropology': forerunners of the anthropology of dance; Chapter 3 - How musical is the citizen?; Chapter 4 - Why music matters: social aesthetics and cultural transmission; Chapter 5 - The 'voice of the body': revisiting the concept of embodied ethnography in the anthropology of dance; Chapter 6 - Ethnomusicology and filmmaking; Part II - Regional Insights: Chapter 7 - The soundscapes turn in ethnomusicology: sonic territoriality and the Islamic revival across Chinese-Central Asian borders; Chapter 8 - Performative bodies: overtoning self and personhood among nomadic musicians and shamans of the Altai-Sayan Mountains of southern Siberia; Chapter 9 - 'To win or lose a place in the sun': sounding movements, changing contexts and the sean nós dancer; Chapter 10 - Local dance traditions and glocalized crisis: a landscape of traditional dance in Greece under austerity; Chapter 11 - Music, power and patronage: the case of the king's musicians of Buganda; Contributors; Index.
Published in association with the Royal Anthropological Institute
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-31-7, £60.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
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The Nuaulu World of Plants
Ethnobotanical cognition, knowledge and practice among a people of Seram, eastern Indonesia
Roy Ellen
Vol. 3 of the RAI Series.
Roy Ellen's The Nuaulu World of Plants is the culmination of anthropological fieldwork on the eastern Indonesian island of Seram, and of comparative enquiries into the bases of human classificatory activity through the study of ethnobiological knowledge over a fifty year period.
This rich account of the ways plants feature in the worldview and lifeways of the Nuaulu, recognizes that plant knowledge is embedded in plural local and historical contexts: in swiddens, garden crops, managed fallow, village spaces and pathways; in the trees, and the ecological, conceptual and experiential relationships to forest; in plants' roles as healing agents, raw materials, fuels and in ritual; and in historical flux, with the introduction of exotic plants and the impact of colonial and post-colonial ways of seeing the plant world. Ellen's contemporary examination of Nuaulu classificatory practices, in the light of comparable observations made by the seventeenth-century Dutch naturalist Rumphius, gains us a better understanding of how scientific taxonomy emerges from folk knowledge.
The comprehensive study of local plant classification based on robust datasets and long-term fieldwork presented here is a rare achievement, and comprises an outstanding resource for regional ethnology. But this book offers a further dimension, evaluating the theoretical consensus on the relationship between so-called 'natural' classifications and utilitarian schemes, and thereby highlights, and addresses, some of the problems of Berlin and Atran's highly influential framework for studying folk knowledge systems. It emphasizes the difficulties of simple claims for universality versus relativity, cultural models versus individual contextual schemata, and of two-dimensional taxonomies. Ellen persuasively argues that classification is a dynamic and living process of cultural cognition that links knowledge to practice, and is not easily reducible to graphical representations or abstract generalizations. Moreover, he draws attention to recent radical approaches to ontology and epistemology, specifically those focusing upon 'convergence metaphysics', arguing these present new challenges for the field.
This book will undoubtedly become a landmark study in the field of ethnobotany. It represents anthropology at its best ... Roy Ellen has an outstanding reputation and is recognised globally as a leading ethnoscientist, and this rich volume further confirms his status.
Paul Sillitoe FBA, Professor of Anthropology at Durham UniversityThis will be a must read for students interested in conducting ethnobiological fieldwork and, more broadly, comparative analysis of cognition... Nuggets of gold come in every chapter.
Thomas Thorton, Associate Professor & Senior Associate Research Fellow, University of Oxford
Roy Ellen FBA is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Human Ecology at the University of Kent.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-25-6, £100.00 (GBP), $150.00 (USD)
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Powerful Things
The History and Theory of Sacred Objects
Karl-Heinz Kohl
We both give meanings to, and derive our own meanings from, the multitude of objects we live amongst. Trivial things remind us of past loves; old things embody an idealized past; on other things we believe our fate depends. In this book, Karl-Heinz Kohl describes relationships to sacred objects from the viewpoint of anthropology and the history of religion, showing how people of all cultures ascribe quite immeasurable value to things and make their own destiny dependent on these objects.
During their voyages of discovery, Portuguese seafarers came across Africans who attributed mysterious powers to objects that became known as 'fetishes', and the concept of 'fetishism' soon cast a spell over European thinkers. The Church condemned it as the work of the devil, while for the philosophers of the Enlightenment it proved that no religion was rational at heart. But the fascination remained - Hegel, Comte, Marx and Freud - each of them tried to solve the riddle of fetishism in their own way. And it is fetishism that is the starting point for this book, which offers nothing less than a comprehensive theory of the sacred object, from the stone cult of ancient Israel and the Bible's prohibition on images, to the medieval cult of reliquaries, Native American sacred bundles, magical figures of the BaKongo, and the idols of the Ancient Greeks. Tracing the fate of ancient cult images since their rediscovery in the Renaissance, Kohl comes to a striking conclusion: in the secularized societies of the Global North, it is the museum cult that is the bastion of contemporary fetishism.
CONTENTS:Karl-Heinz Kohl is undisputedly one of the best-known German anthropologists and one of the most sought-after interlocutors for all those who still think ethnology is a voice worth listening to.
Peter Probst (Tufts University), Zeitschrift für EthnologieKarl-Heinz Kohl's work shows very clearly that it is very revealing not to always focus primarily on the actors in a culture, but rather to focus on things as actors: the thing 'sacred or banal' is obviously more alive than we think.
Dorothee Kimmich (Karl-Eberhard University), Frankfurter Rundschau
Foreword; Chapter 1: The fetishes of the West African coast; Chapter 2: The prohibition of images and the Christian cult of relics; Chapter 3: The invention of fetishism: Travelogues and early critiques of religion; Chapter 4: Object genres; Chapter 5: The genesis of sacred objects; Chapter 6: Museum: Temple of the muses; Index.
Karl-Heinz Kohl is Professor Emeritus of Ethnology at Frankfurt Goethe University and former Director of the Frobenius institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-24-9, £60.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
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The Anthropology of Displaced Communities
Edited by Robert Layton
This collection highlights the work of the Royal Anthropological Institute's Urgent Anthropology Fellowships fund, which supports research into communities whose culture and social life are under immediate threat. Created by George Appell in response to the distress he experienced working with a traumatized community of swidden cultivators in Borneo, who were struggling to survive after relocation in what Appell describes as a 'cultural concentration camp', the fund was established to identify ways of supporting and strengthening such communities through ethnographic work.
Since 1995, Urgent Anthropology Fellows have worked with many displaced communities, whether found in refugee camps, resettled in kindred communities across national borders or in environments hostile to their traditional way of life; or whether suffering from the aftermath of civil war or the intrusion of foreigners in search of minerals. Despite the diversity of circumstances in these case studies, this book shows some of the common strategies that emerge in helping displaced communities regain some control over their own destinies. These include membership of social networks, access to natural resources, land ownership and self sufficiency, autonomy in local judicial procedures and economic activities as well as the celebration of traditional rituals, all of which lessen the potential powerlessness of displaced communities.
Any anthropologist or NGO worker, and indeed anyone who works with, or cares about, vulnerable communities and the rights of indigenous peoples, will gain much from the accumulation of experience and insights offered herein.
CONTENTS:This book is a testimony to George Appell's vision, generosity and legacy. A forceful representative of a tradition that cherishes ethnographic description as a potent stimulus for the appreciation of diversity and the best corrective to biased speculation. The Urgent Anthropology Fellowship Programme has created a wealth of work that illuminates the contemporary contexts of indigenous struggles worldwide, while encouraging the mutuality of thinking, a most precious gift..
Laura Rival, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of OxfordThis rich collection explores what happens when people from small-scale societies are displaced from their home communities and asks how, and under what conditions, they can create or recreate their lives. Going well beyond 'survival anthropology', the authors reveal the complexities of such situations and their effects on the well-being (or otherwise) of those obliged to uproot themselves and move elsewhere.
Pat Caplan, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London
Tribute: A tribute to my father - Laura P. Appell-Warren; Introduction: The anthropology of displaced communities - Robert Layton; Chapter 1: The RAI's Urgent Anthropology Fellowships and the Anthropologists' Fund for Urgent Anthropological Research - George N. Appell; Chapter 2: Reckoning urgency: Making do in a Sudanese war-displaced community - Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf; Chapter 3: Case studies in asocial reproduction: Displacement, leadership and conflict resolution among refugees in the Horn of Africa and the Sudan - Kwesi Sansculotte-Greenidge and Laura Barber; Chapter 4: Changing patterns of religion and ritual in a Vasava Bhil community impacted by involuntary resettlement - Roxanne Hakim; Chapter 5: The impact of attempted resettlement on the Konda Reddis, South India - Thanuja Mummidi; Chapter 6: Displacement, language loss and identity in two villages in eastern Nicaragua - Mark Jamieson; Chapter 7: Displacing culture: Intervention and social change in Papua New Guinea s extractive industries - Emma Gilberthorpe; Chapter 8: Memory and historical narratives among Orthodox Christians in Syria at the start of the twenty-first century - Noriko Sato; Chapter 9: Nations with/out borders: Neoliberalism and the problem of belonging in Africa, and beyond - Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff; Chapter 10: Cultural concentration camps: Resettlement in Borneo, and other insults to the social order of indigenous peoples - George N. Appell; Contributors; Index.
Robert Layton is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Durham.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-22-5, £65.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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Anthropology Inside Out
Fieldworkers Taking Notes
Edited by Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen, Anne Line Dalsgård, Mette Lind Kusk, Maria Nielsen, Cecilie Rubow and Mikkel Rytter
Fieldworkers' notebooks are full of sensations and observations in which the subjectivity of the ethnographer seeps through. Not really science. Much closer to life. Yet in classical anthropology they are invisible to the reader. In this book the focus is reversed, turning Anthropology Inside Out as it explores the vibrant backstage life of field notes. What happens when we put them centre stage?
Aimed at both curious novice and experienced practitioner, the chapters read as a catalogue of experimental practices teetering on the edge of the tradition: intuitively observational drawings; notes pervaded with paranoia; collective note-taking; crisis-ridden personal confessions; layers of notes in photographs and archives; old flip-flops that trigger memories in mind and body.
This exploration of what field notes are, can do and could be, concludes with a constellation of shimmering notes on notes from Michael Taussig, a meta-commentary on anthropologists' fetishistic relationship with the most personal of professional tools.
CONTENTS:Translation, in all its forms, is one of the most difficult and important things that anthropologists do. Perhaps the pivotal instant of translation takes place when the frozen moments trapped in ethnographic field notes are thawed and mobilized as intermediaries between lived life and polished text. This extremely timely and original book starts a long overdue discussion within anthropology on these matters. The authors are to be commended for filling a gap in the methodology literature, which was so glaring until now as to be invisible to most of us.
Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Department of Social Anthropology, University of OsloThe book is steeped in love for the materiality of the process of learning about life - inner life as well as the life out there. The chapters open up for reflections on the artistic and scientific aspects of the anthropological endeavour and become experimental in their expansion of the genre of anthropological work and thinking.
Inger Sjørslev, Senior Lecturer Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
Acknowledgements; Chapter 1: Introductory notes - Anne Line Dalsgård, Cecilie Rubow and Mikkel Rytter; Chapter 2: An ecology of notes in a utopian fieldwork - Ester Fritsch, Marianne Hedegaard and Cecilie Rubow; Chapter 3: Field notes from a field of notes: A nthropology and the afterlife of notes in archives - Marianne Holm Pedersen and Lars Christian Kofoed Rømer; Chapter 4: The 'proto-language' of anthropological practice: An exhibition of original field notes - Sofie Isager Ahl; Chapter 5: The wind in the mirror: Some notes on the unnoteworthy - Martin Demant Frederiksen; Chapter 6: The world in a grain of dust: The si gnificance of the apparently insignificant - Maria Nielsen; Chapter 7: Life notes: When fields refuse to stay in place - Morten Schütt; Chapter 8: Risky notes: Reading tense situations in Cairo 2015 - Mille Kjærgaard Thorsen; Chapter 9: ethnoGRAPHIC field notes: On drawn notes and their potentials - Mette Lind Kusk; Chapter 10: Visual note-making: Photo-elicitation and photographic re-interpretations as collaborative anthropological techniques - Christian Vium; Chapter 11: Stimulating presence: On the materiality of field notes and a few Brazilian flip-flops - Anne Line Dalsgård; Chapter 12: Fourteen endnotes - Michael Taussig; Contributors; Index.
Ebook, ISBN 978-1-907774-23-2, OPEN ACCESS (link)
Colour paperback, ISBN 978-1-912385-21-8, £25.00 (GBP), $40.00 (USD)
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Twilight Zone Anthropology
Voices from Poland
Edited by Michal Buchowski
Vol. 2 of the RAI Country Series.
Twilight Zone Anthropology provides an engaging and multifaceted picture of anthropology in Poland, Bronislaw Malinowski's motherland, with a comprehensive introduction describing the discipline's history thus far, and thematic contributions detailing diverse and innovative contemporary practices that foreshadow rich possibilities for its future. It makes the compelling argument that Polish anthropology should be seen to have developed within a twilight zone of contact between 'imperial' discourses of a French-Anglo-US disciplinary hegemony and an Eastern European intellectual and political heritage.
Initially deriving from a conference hosted by the Royal Anthropological Institute, Twilight Zone Anthropology provides a palpably vibrant sampling of a 'cosmopolitan Polish national anthropology', with discussions of a wide-range of disciplinary issues, such as gender, memory, engagement, activism, health and politics. Offering many insights as to how anthropology may be practised so as to evolve original conceptions and contributions to world anthropologies from a decentred context, in response to global trends, this work represents a significant step forward in the ongoing redefinition of global hierarchies of knowledge and the creation of a pluriversal anthropology.
CONTENTS:Introduction: Twilight zone anthropology - Michal Buchowski; Chapter 1: Polish anthropology yesterday and today: An impossible overview - Michal Buchowski; Chapter 2: Subversive brilliance: Józef Obrebski's theory of ethnic diversity and the hierarchizations of knowledge in Polish academia - Marcin Lubas; Chapter 3: Sex, gender and Polish socio-cultural anthropology: A historical and auto-ethnographic account - Grazyna Kubica; Chapter 4: Memory and the past as subjects of study in Polish anthropology - Katarzyna Kaniowska; Chapter 5: Public, engaged and activist: The dead-ends of contemporary anthropology - Marcin Brocki; Chapter 6: Engagements and disengagements in contemporary Polish anthropology - Hana Cervinková; Chapter 7: Experimental anthropology?: Action-research in urban activism - Kacper Poblocki; Chapter 8: Anthropology and gender/queer studies in contemporary Poland: A personally situated view - Monika Baer; Chapter 9: Feminist anthropologists meet the ideology of gender - Agnieszka Koscianska and Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz; Chapter 10: Democracy and the highlanders: On the diversity of meanings - Anna Malewska-Szalygin; Chapter 11: Christians in the biomedical embrace: The refusal of blood transfusions among Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany - Malgorzata Rajtar; Contributors; Index.
Michal Buchowski is professor of sociocultural anthropology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, and at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. He is a President of the Polish Ethnological Society, and past President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, as well as a past Chair of the World Council of Anthropological Association.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-06-5, £60.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
African Americans & American Africans
Migration, history,race and identities
Dmitri M. Bondarenko
In America today, two communities with sub-Saharan African genetic origins exist side by side, though they have differing histories and positions within society. This book explores the relationship between African Americans, descendants of those Africans brought to America as slaves, and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, who have come to the United States of America voluntarily, mainly since the 1990s. Members of these groups have both a great deal in common and much that separates them, largely hidden in their assumptions about, and attitudes towards, each other.
In a work grounded in extensive fieldwork Bondarenko and his research team interviewed African Americans, and migrants from twenty-three African States and five Caribbean nations, as well as non-black Americans involved with African Americans and African migrants. Seeking a wide range of perspectives, from different ages, classes and levels of education, they explored the historically rooted mutual images of African Americans and contemporary African migrants, so as to understand how these images influence the relationship between them. In particular, they examined conceptions of 'black history' as a common history of all people and nations with roots in Africa.
What emerges is a complex picture. While collective historical memory of oppression forges solidarity, lack of knowledge of each other's history can create distance between communities. African migrants tend to define their identities not by race, but on the basis of multiple layers of national, ethnic, religious and linguistic affinities (of which African Americans are often unaware). For African Americans, however, although national and regional identities are important, it is above all race that is the defining factor. While drawing on wider themes from anthropology and African studies, this in-depth study on a little-researched subject allows valuable new understandings of contemporary American society..
CONTENTS:"This work, which is filled with observational precision and anthropological insight, will spark much debate about the complex nature of contemporary social relations in the United States. In these troubled times, African Americans & American Africans is a most welcome addition to the anthropological record."
Paul Stoller, Professor of Anthropology, West Chester Universitye
Chapter 1: African Americans and African migrants: Mutual attraction and repulsion; Chapter 2: Historical memory as a factor in interactions between African Americans and sub-Saharan African migrants; Chapter 3: Images of cultures, and interactions between African Americans and sub-Saharan African migrants; Conclusion; Photographic Essay; References ; Index.
Dmitri M. Bondarenko is Vice-Director of Research of the Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences; Director of the International Centre of Anthropology, National Research University Higher School of Economics; and Professor, Centre of Social Anthropology, Russian State University for the Humanities.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-00-3, £55.00 (GBP), $80.00 (USD)
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The Culture of Invention in the Americas
Anthropological Experiments with Roy Wagner
Edited by Pedro Pitarch and José Antonio Kelly
The Culture of Invention in the Americas takes the theoretical contribution of one of anthropology's most radical thinkers, Roy Wagner, as a basis for conceptual improvisation. It uses Wagner's most synthetic and complex insights - developed in Melanesia and captured in the title of his most famous book, The Invention of Culture - as a springboard for an exploration of other anthropological and societal imaginaries. What do the inherent reflexivity, recursiveness and limits of all and any peoples' anthropologies render for us to write and think about, and live within? Who is doing anthropology about whom? Which are the best ways to convey our partial grasp of these conundrums: theory, poetry, jokes? No claim is made to resolve what should not be seen as a problem. Instead, inspired by Roy Wagner's study and use of metaphor, this book explores analogical variations of these riddles.
The chapters bring together ethnographic regions rarely investigated together: indigenous peoples of Mexico and Lowland South America; and Afro-American peoples of Brazil and Cuba. The 'partial connections' highlighted by the authors' analytic conjunctions - Ifá divination practices and Yanomami shamanism, Kisedjê (Amazonia) and Huichol (Mexico) anthropology of Whites, and Meso-American and Afro-American practices of sacrifice - show the inspirational potential of such rapprochements.
As the first book to acknowledge the full range of Wagner's anthropological contributions, and an initial joint exploration of Native American and Afro-American ethnographies, this experimental work honours Wagner's vision of a multiplicity of peoples' anthropologies through and of each other. It concludes with a remarkable dialogue created by Roy Wagner's responses to each author's work.
CONTENTS:We don't have to imagine what Wagner might have made of this inspired collection: his concluding commentary on each of these extraordinary chapters is in effect a collection in itself. The sparks they together ignite make this an editorial and publishing triumph.
Marilyn Strathern, University of CambridgeIf Roy Wagner famously 'invented' culture, the contributors to this volume 'counter-invent' Wagner, at once engaging comprehensively and didactically with his thought, and exteriorizing it onto novel conceptual and geographical territories. A book from 'tomorrow's yesterday' (Wagner), The Culture of Invention in the Americas anticipates for us the anthropology to come - playful, experimental, and deeply ethnographic.
Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Spanish National Research Council
Introduction - José Antonio Kelly and Pedro Pitarch; Chapter 1: Blood, initiation, and participation: what is given and what is made in Afro-Brazilian religions - Marcio Goldman; Chapter 2: How myths make men in Afro-Cuban divination - Martin Holbraad; Chapter 3: The domestication of the abstract soul - Pedro Pitarch; Chapter 4: Invented gifts, given exchange: the recursive anthropology of Huichol modernity - Johannes Neurath; Chapter 5: Child-snatchers and head-choppers: a highland Meso-American reverse anthropology - Roger Magazine; Chapter 6: Invention, convention and clowning: symbolic obviation and dialectical mediation in the Yaqui Easter ritual - Marianna Keisalo; Chapter 7: Visible dancers and invisible hunters: divination and masking among Masewal people in the northern highlands of Puebla, Mexico - Alessandro Questa; Chapter 8: The crossroads of time - Lydia Rodríguez and Sergio López; Chapter 9: Cross-twins and outcestous marriages: how kinship (under)determines humanity for the Kisedje of central Brazil - Marcela Coelho de Souza; Chapter 10: The curse of Souw among the Amazonian Enawenê-nawê - Chloe Nahum-Claudel; Chapter 11 : Figure-ground dialectics in Yanomami, Yekuana and Piaroa myth and shamanism - José Antonio Kelly; Chapter 12: Commentary - Roy Wagner; Index.
Pedro Pitarch is Professor of Anthropology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
José Antonio Kelly is Assistant Professor at the Univeridade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-02-7, £60.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
Dunbar's Number
Edited by David Shankland
Occasional Paper No. 45 of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Dunbar's Number, as the limit on the size of both social groups and personal social networks, has achieved something close to iconic status and is one of the most influential concepts to have emerged out of anthropology in the last quarter century. It is widely cited throughout the social sciences, archaeology, psychology and network science, and its reverberations have been felt as far afield as the worlds of business organization and social-networking sites, whose design it has come to underpin. Named after its originator, Robin Dunbar, whose career has spanned biological anthropology, zoology and evolutionary psychology, it stands testament to the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to human behaviour. In this collection Dunbar joins authors from a wide range of disciplines to explore Dunbar's Number's conceptual origins, as well as the evidence supporting it, and to reflect on its wider implications in archaeology, social anthropology and medicine.
CONTENTS:Chapter 1: Dunbar's time and human evolution - Clive Gamble; Chapter 2: From there to now, and the origins of some ideas - Robin Dunbar; Chapter 3: From 150 to 3 Dunbar's numbers - Russell A. Hill; Chapter 4: Inclusive hierarchies and the rank-size rule - Matt Grove; Chapter 5: Monogamy and infanticide in complex societies - Christopher Opie; Chapter 6: Untangling causality: multiple levels of explanation for human cognitive Evolution - Robert A. Foley; Chapter 7: Lifting the gloomy curtain of time past: tracing the identity of the first cognitively modern hominin in deep history - S.J. Underdown and S.J. Smith; Chapter 8: Ego-centred networks, community size and cohesion: Dunbar's Number and a Mandara Mountains conundrum - James H. Wade; Chapter 9: About the curious power of dialogue - Esther Goody; Chapter 10: Schizophrenia, evolution and self-transcendence - Simon Dein; Chapter 11: Dunbar's Number(s): constraints on the social world - Robin Dunbar; Contributors; Index.
David Shankland is Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Reader in Anthropology at the University of Bristol. Amongst his specialist areas of study are the history of anthropology, particularly disciplinary diversity and the emergence of Social Anthropology in the twentieth century.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-03-4, £50.00 (GBP), $75.00 (USD)
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Pre-textual Ethnographies
Challenging the phenomenological level of anthropological knowledge-making
Edited by Tomasz Rakowski & Helena Patzer
Anthropologists often have fieldwork experiences that are not explicitly analysed in their writings, though they nevertheless contribute to and shape their ethnographic understandings, and can resonate throughout their work for many years. The task of this volume is precisely to uncover these layers of anthropological knowledge-making.
Contributors take on the challenge of reconstructing the ways in which they originally entered the worlds of research subjects - their anthropological Others - by focusing on pre-textual and deeply phenomenological processes of perceiving, noting, listening and sensing. Drawing on a wide range of research experiences - with the Dogon in Mali, immigrant football players in Spain, the Inuit of the Far North, Filipino transnational families, miners in Poland and students in Scotland - this book goes beyond an exploration of the development of increased ethnographic sensitivity towards words or actions. It also commences the foundational project of developing a new language for building anthropological works, one stemming from recurring acts of participation, and rooted primarily in the pre-textual worlds of the tacit, often non-visible, and intense experiences that exceed the limitations of conventional textual accounts.
CONTENTS:These edifying essays lay the groundwork for an anthropology that not only overcomes old antinomies of body-mind, text-context, representation-reality, but encourages us to see how participatory method, social attentiveness, and new forms of ethnographic writing can enhance our understanding of the affective, intersubjective, and conceptual complexities of life as lived.
Michael Jackson, Distinguished Professor of World Religions, Harvard University
Introduction: Pre-textual ethnography and the challenge of phenomenological knowledge-making - Tomasz Rakowski and Helena Patzer; PART I - Setting the perspective; Chapter 1: Feet on the ground: The role of the body in pre-textual ethnography - Anne Line Dalsgard; Chapter 2 - The phenomenological programme and anthropological research: A mutual mirroring - Gheorghita Geana; Chapter 3: Beyond the textual bias, towards pre-textual experience: Therapeutic guidelines - Grzegorz Godlewski; PART II - Revealing field-knowledge; Chapter 4: A pre-textual path: Revealing the field in a closed-down mining centre in south-west Poland - Tomasz Rakowski; Chapter 5: A praxeology and phenomenology of Dogon landscape: Fieldwork practice, kinesthetic experience and embodied knowledge and embodied knowledge - Laurence Douny; Chapter 6: Muscular consciousness Knowledge-making in an Arctic environment - Kirsten Hastrup; Chapter 7: Sport as common ground in fieldwork: On apprenticeship, habitus and habituation - Juliane Muller; Chapter 8: Meeting the pre-textual: Intersubjective knowledge of long-distance carein the Philippines - Helena Patzer; Chapter 9: The epoché, mindfulness and the body: Dynamics of a phenomenological experiencein the field - Sonja Lenk; Chapter 10: To journey near and far: The dis-illusion of perception, knowledge and the body - Andrew Irving; Epilogue: The organ of human perception and a supra-cultural knowledge of human being - Nigel Rapport.
Tomasz Rakowski is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw.
Helena Patzer is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, in Prague.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-47-8, £60.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
Of Hairy Kings and Saintly Slaves
An Ethiopian Travelogue
Manuel Joao Ramos
Translated by Christopher Tribe
A lost sketch book on a Portuguese castle rampart left Manuel João Ramos bereft, and the impulse to draw deserted him - but his first trip to Ethiopia reawakened this pleasure, so long denied. Drawing obsessively and free from care, his rapidly caught impressions convey the rough edges of the intensely lived experiences that are fundamental to the desire to travel. For the travel sketch is more than a record or register of attendance ('been there, seen that'): it holds invisibly within itself the remnant of a look, the hint of a memory and a trace of an osmosis of feelings between the sketcher and the person or objects sketched. Less intrusive than using a camera, Ramos argues drawing comprises a less imperialist, more benign way of researching: his sketchbook becomes a means of communication between himself and the world in which he travels, rendering him more human to those around him.
As he journeys through the Ethiopian Central Highlands, collecting historical legends of the power struggles surrounding the arrival of the first Europeans in the mid-sixteenth century, he is drawn to the Portuguese legacy of castles, palaces and churches, near ruins now, though echoes of their lost splendour are retained in oral accounts. Excerpts from his diary, as well as journalistic pieces, share the conviviality of his encounters with the priests, elders and historians who act as custodians of the Amhara oral tradition. Their tales are interwoven with improvised, yet assured, drawings, and this informality of structure successfully retains the immediacy and pleasure of his discovery of Ethiopia. It also suggests the potential for drawing to play a more active part in anthropological production, as a means of creating new narratives and expositional forms in ethnography, bringing it closer to travel writing or the graphic novel.
CONTENTS:What do anthropologists do? They sketch! This, at least, is what Manuel João Ramos does in this captivating collection of traveller s tales and indigenous legends, drawn from his excursions in Ethiopia. Sketchbook in hand, he draws as much as writes, not representing the people and the things he meets, but bringing them irresistibly to life. They explode like crackers from the pages of this book, erupting in a shower of evanescent memories. Why, Ramos asks us, has an anthropology obsessed with visual images forgotten how to draw? And how can drawing and writing be brought together again?
Tim Ingold, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen
Introduction; An Ethiopian travelogue; Ethiopian stories; Biographical note.
Manuel João Ramos is a professor of anthropology at ISCTE University Institute of Lisbon, and an active illustrator and essayist.
Premium Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-19-5, £65.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
Indigeneous Modernities in South America
Edited by Ernst Halbmayer
Indigenous peoples have been cast as representing modernity' s fading premodern Other. This volume starts from the opposite assumption, namely that contemporary indigenous peoples are specifically modern societies, profoundly shaped by their specific ways of dealing with, making use of and transforming the contexts imposed by nation-states, colonial systems and globalization. They do that from a position alternative to that of the modern West. The book aims to understand these processes and the resulting forms of indigenous modernities in Lowland South America through ethnographic case studies. It argues that there is more about indigenous modernities than the simple assertion that indigenous peoples are now modern too.
Indigenous groups are modern in multiple, complex and alternative ways. As the contributions show this holds true for current forms of shamanism and indigenous Christian churches, new meanings of traditional clothing, as well as indigenous cosmologies that confront western concepts, technology and welfare programmes.
The notion of indigenous modernities refers to a space beyond old modernist dichotomies. The paradox, like the disturbing Otherness it brings to our attention, is the result of a relation in which assumptions we take ontologically for granted are confronted by other realities. Looking at the creative ways indigenous peoples' practices subvert such assumptions may result in substantial irritation and is a starting point for a renewed reflection on classical assumptions about modernities and indigenous ways of both being modern and exceeding modernity in the face of long-standing power inequalities and the imposition of logics of Western ontology.
CONTENTS:Indigeneous Modernities in South America makes a major contribution to South American studies and is a 'must read' for every ethnographer, historian, ethnohistorian, and analyst of South American peoples. It challenges the very basis of so-called 'modernization theory' and opens new doors to the understanding of indigenous agency and indigenous powers.
Norman E. Whitten, Jr, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignReading this book is one step (and an important one, might it even be a giant leap?) to decolonizing the mind, as the reader is confronted with an intermingling multitude of perspectives, values, worldviews and futures. This book is especially valuable for senior scholars and students alike, for anybody seriously concerned with social processes of marginalization, resistance, adaptation, appropriation and the creative and constructive shaping of social realities.
Bernd Brabec de Mori, University of Music and Performing Arts Graz
Acknowledgements; Chapter 1: Indigenous peoples and the transformations of modernity: Introductory thoughts on contemporary indigeneities - Ernst Halbmayer; Chapter 2:Shamanic modernities and ritual dynamics among the Shuar - Elke Mader; Chapter 3: Yukpa modernity as joint becoming: Ontology, creolization and the affirmation of difference - Ernst Halbmayer; Chapter 4: The fashion of politics and the politics of fashion: On indigenous modernities and Matsigenka struggles - Dan Rosengren; Chapter 5: Christian indigenous identities and alter-native modernities in the upper Amazon - Anna Meiser; Chapter 6: 'We bought a television set from Lídia': Social programmes and indigenous agency among the Sateré-Mawé of the Brazilian lower Amazon - Wolfgang Kapfhammer and Luiza Garnelo; Chapter 7: Ribeirinho hunting techno-animism: On the inexact lines of Amazonian modernity - Aníbal G. Arregui; Chapter 8: The modernity of indigenous movements: Multiple voices between pragmatism, pressure and agency - Katinka Weber; Chapter 9: 'More than modern' indigenous modernities: Tautology, paradox, excess - Ernst Halbmayer; Contributors; Index.
Ernst Halbmayer is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Institute for Comparative Cultural Research, University of Marburg, Germany.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-01-0, £60.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
Rematerializing Colour
From Concept to Substance
Edited by Diana Young
Colour is largely assumed to be already in the world, a natural universal that everyone, everywhere understands. Yet cognitive scientists routinely tell us that colour is an illusion, and a private one for each of us; neither social nor material, it is held to be a product of individual brains and eyes rather than an aspect of things.
This collection seeks to challenge these assumptions and examine their far-reaching consequences, arguing that colour is about practical involvement in the world, not a finalized set of theories, and getting to know colour is relative to the situation one is in - both ecologically and environmentally. Specialists from the fields of anthropology, psychology, cinematography, art history and linguistics explore the depths of colour in relation to light and movement, memory and landscape, language and narrative, in case studies with an emphasis on Australian First Peoples, but ranging as far afield as Russia and First Nations in British Columbia. What becomes apparent, is not only the complex but important role of colours in socializing the world; but also that the concept of colour only exists in some times and cultures. It should not be forgotten that the Munsell Chart, with its construction of colours as mathematical coordinates of hues, value and chroma, is not an abstraction of universals, as often claimed, but is itself a cultural artefact.
CONTENTS:This is a very beautiful book, replete with the insightful essays that the topic demands. It will change the way you think about colour. In a brilliant paradox, it challenges the very existence of colours only to bring colour back into the centre of human lives. This volume weaves an argument that cuts across history, art and time.
Howard Morphy, Distinguished Professor, Australian National University College of Arts and Social SciencesRematerializing Colour leaves any understanding of colour as an add-on or surface phenomenon behind. Embracing colours as dynamic, transformative materialities inherent to a multitude of experiences, environments and things, and to the formation of subjectivities and collective identities, contributors' essays are centred upon colours' mutable, palpable, excessive and affectively charged capacities and effects.
Patricia Spyer, Professor of Anthropology & Sociology, The Graduate Institute, Geneva
Introduction - Diana Young; Chapter 1: Does colour matter? An affordance perspective - Alan Costall; Chapter 2: Pink cake, red eyes, coloured photos: Desire, loss and Aboriginal aesthetics in northern Australia - Jennifer Deger; Chapter 3: How much longer can the Berlin and Kay paradigm dominate visual semantics? English, Russian and Warlpiri seen from the native's point of view - Anna Wierzbicka; Chapter 4: Cinematographic encounters with natural-light colour - Cathy Greenhalgh; Chapter 5: Iridescence - Peter Sutton and Michael Snow; Chapter 6: Colour as the edge of the body: Colours as space-time in the east of the Western Desert - Diana Young; Chapter 7: The role of colour in a period when cultures crossed: Paintings from Central Australia from the 1930s to 1980 - Mary Eagle; Chapter 8: Notes on the hapticity of colour - Jennifer L. Biddle; Chapter 9: Paint as power among Kuninjku artists - Luke Taylor; Chapter 10: Problems translating colour terms - Barbara Saunders; Contributors; Index.
Diana Young is Director of the Masters in Museum Studies Programme at the University of Queensland. She was Director of the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum for eight years.
Premium Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-25-6, £65.00 (GBP), $105.00 (USD)
State, Resistance, Transformation
Anthropological Perspectives on the Dynamics of Power in Contemporary Global Realities
Edited by Bruce Kapferer
The territorially sovereign nation-state - the globally dominant political formation of Western modernity - is in crisis. Though it is a highly heterogeneous assemblage, moulded by different histories involving myriad socio-cultural processes, its territorial integrity and sovereignty are always contingent and related to the distribution and organization of authority and power, and the state's position within encompassing global dynamics.
This volume attends to these contingencies as they are refracted by the communities and populations that are variously incorporated (in conformity or resistance) within their ordering processes. With ethnographically grounded analyses and thick description of locales as various as Russia, Lebanon and Indonesia, a vital conversation emerges about forms of state control under challenge or in transition.
It is clear that the politico-social configurations of the state are still taking new directions, such as extremist populism and a general dissatisfaction with the corporatism of digital and technological revolutions. These are symptoms of the dilemmas at the peripheries of capital growth coming home to roost at their centres. Such transformations demand the new forms of conceptualization that the anthropological approaches of the essays in this volume present.
CONTENTS:A fascinating and timely collection that dwells on the unsettled nature of contemporary relationships between 'state' and 'society'. Drawing on case studies from beyond the heartland of political theory, contributors refuse to treat global phenomena as generic and focus instead on the specific social relations that constitute the varied possibilities and limits of contemporary state power.
Penny Harvey, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of ManchesterThis is political anthropology on a truly large canvas. The standing question about how 'state' and 'society' relate, and whether the distinction between them makes sense in the first place, is tackled deftly through the lenses of varying conceptions and practices of power and resistance.
Martin Holbraad, Professor of Social Anthropology, University College London
Introduction: Crises of power and the state in global realities - Bruce Kapferer; Chapter 1: Challenges to the European state: The deep play of finance, demos and ethnos in the new old Europe - Don Kalb; Chapter 2: State formation, territorialization and the challenge of movement - Hege Toje; Chapter 3: The state? What state? State, confessionalism and civil society in Lebanon - Anh Nga Longva; Chapter 4: 'Yogya Inc.': Transformed kingship in decentralizing Indonesia - Eldar Bråten; Chapter 5: Resistance as a problem: An ethnic minority and the state in twenty-first century Indonesia - Olaf H. Smedal; Chapter 6: Sovereignties in the making: Reflections on state and society in the Sudan - Leif Manger; Chapter 7: Pastoralists at war with the state: Historical armed violence in the shadow state of north-eastern Uganda - Eria Olowo Onyango; Chapter 8: Buddhist cosmological forms and the situation of total terror in Sri Lanka's ethnic civil war - Bruce Kapferer and Roshan de Silva-Wijeyeratne; Chapter 9: Inside and outside the state in Italy and Botswana: Historical and comparative reflections on state apparatuses of capture and rhizomic forces - Ørnulf Gulbrandsen; Chapter 10: Arts for the people: Public support and private patronage - Judith Kapferer; Chapter 11: Repressive ententes, organized crime and the corporate state - Donald M. Nonini; Afterword Notes on crisis and transformation of political orders in the global arena - Jonathan Friedman; Contributors.
Bruce Kapferer is Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Published in association with the University of Bergen.
Ebook, ISBN 978-1-907774-50-8, OPEN ACCESS (link)
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Lusophone Hip-hop
'Who we are' and 'Where we are': Identity, urban culture and belonging
Edited by Rosana Martins and Massimo Canevacci
This book brings multiple sites of lusophony together, and illuminates how mobile configurations of people, technologies and hip-hop creativities are best understood as compositions of ubiquitous identities, dispersed communities and syncretic networks. Significantly, the chapters highlight identity narratives that clash with the city, yet which play an important part in its reconstruction and resignification. Occupying public space, creative expressions of young people provide critiques of the social order, mainstream media and criminalization of fringe neighbourhoods. In this way, hip-hop has become a political instrument of an 'I' that is excluded and marginalized. Its growth has led to a global movement incorporating local forms such as traditional musical arrangements and native languages. Its messages educate youths about citizenship, addressing their reality of racial discrimination and oppression. At the same time, hip-hop continues to innovate at the street level, constantly rejecting and challenging a consumer culture that seeks to co-opt it.
The pillars of hip-hop - rapping, DJing, break-dancing, graffiti, and now political organization - are considered across three continents, in a collection that seeks to provide more nuanced characterizations of contemporary relationships between lusophone countries allowing dialogue about inter/intra, colonial/racial contradictions and their impact on power structures. Lusophone Hip-hop offers fascinatingly diverse perspectives on rich source material little-known to readers more familiar with hip-hop in African American contexts.
CONTENTS:Lusophone Hip-Hop is one of the most exciting books linking contemporary culture to human rights. This work shows how hip-hop in the 'peripheries' of lusophone countries is emerging as an art form in its own right, and, in doing so, is providing hope, meaning and purpose to the young creative artists. Working through non-commercial and commercial networks, this street culture speaks for generations of the dispossessed.
Prof. Colin Samson, University of EssexAn original and innovative approach to new urban cultures, connecting shared experiences which are impregnated with stories of lusophonies.
Prof. Francisco Rui CádimaCádima, New University of Lisbon (NOVA - FCSH-UNL)I consider this book essential to the vigour of the Fifth Element of Hip-Hop.
Evandro Vieira Ouriques, Director of the Fifth Element of Zulu Nation Portugal
Preface - Isabel Ferin Cunha; Acknowledgemenents; Livre no mundo/Free in the world - Sharylaine; Contributors; Introduction: Fragmented connectivity in lusophone diasporic spaces - Rosana Martins and Massimo Canevacci; PORTUGAL: Chapter 1: Representation and the sense of belonging in São Paulo and Lisbon - Rosana Martins; Chapter 2: Graffiti, visual culture and ethnicity: The black neighbourhood of Kova da Moura - Ricardo Campos; Chapter 3: Spaces of representation: Identity, otherness and transformation in Portuguese hip-hop - Teresa Fradique; Chapter 4: The sampling of Lisbon: Hip-hop and the lusophone imagination - Jorge de La Barre; BRAZIL: Chapter 5: B-boys (Rio de Janeiro) and rappers (Lisbon) in search of recognition: A brief comparison - Otávio Raposo; Chapter 6: PiXação: In praise of the strength and 'useless' beauties of Brazilian youth - Gustavo Coelho; Chapter 7: 'Manos e Minas': The TV show - Claudia Garrocini; Chapter 8: Urban quilombo: Maranhão's hip-hop, periphery and Africaness - Ana Stela Cunha and Rosenverck Estrela Santos; Chapter 9: 'Os anos de chumbo': Grupo Tupinãodá and the possibilities of street art for resistance - Holly Eva Ryan; AFRICA: Chapter 10: Chronotope identification in Kriolu rap - Derek Pardue; Chapter 11: Rap and the representation of public space in Praia City - Redy Wilson Lima; Chapter 12: Who has the word? MC Azagaia's intervention into past and politics in Mozambique - Anna Pöysä and Janne Rantala; Chapter 13: Hip-hop in Angola: Social intervention rap - Gilson Lázaro and Osvaldo Silva; Chapter 14: From the radios to the stage: Juvenile political participation and dissent through rap - Miguel de Barros; Conclusion: Performative metropolis: Self-representation, expanded codex, digital culture, trans-urban subject - Massimo Canevacci; Index
Rosana Martins is a Research Associate at the Research Centre for Media and Journalism at the New University of Lisbon (NOVA), and at the Research Centre for Educational Cybernetics and Digital Language Laboratory, at the University of São Paulo.
Massimo Canevacci is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Rome 'La Sapienza' and Visiting Professor with the Edward Said Chair (UNIFESP) at the University of São Paulo.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-12-6, £65.00 (GBP), $100.00 (USD)
Reinventing Craft in China
The Contemporary Politics of Yixing Zisha Ceramics
Geoffrey Gowlland
How does a craft reinvent itself as 'traditional' following cultural, social and political upheaval? In the township of Dingshu, Jiangsu province of China, artisans produce zisha or Yixing teapots that have been highly valued for centuries. Yet in twentieth-century socialist imagination, handicrafts were an anomaly in a modern society. The Maoist government had clear ambitions to transform the country by industrialization, replacing craft with mechanized methods of production. Four decades later, some of the same artisans identified as 'backward' handicraft producers in the 1950s and made to join workers' cooperatives, were now encouraged to set up private workshops, teach their children and become entrepreneurs. By the 2000s ceramic production in Dingshu is booming and artisans are buying their first cars, often luxury brands. However, many involvements of the Chinese state are apparent, from the control of raw materials, to the inscription of the craft on China's national list of intangible cultural heritage. In this perceptive study, Gowlland argues that this re-evaluation of heritage is no less inherently political than the collectivism of the communist regime. Reflecting that the craft objects, although produced in very different contexts, have remained virtually the same over time and that it is the artisans' subjectivities that have been transformed, he explores the construction of mastery and its relationship to tradition and authenticity, bringing to the fore the social dimension of mastery that goes beyond the skill of simply making things, to changing the way these things are perceived, made and talked about by others.
CONTENTS:Gowlland takes his reader on a captivating journey into a world of craftwork that has undergone seismic change since the era of Chairman Mao. A combination of rich ethnography, refined analysis and the author's hands-on understanding of the potter's materials and techniques convincingly demonstrates that craft knowledge and aesthetic appreciation are deeply embedded in the political. This is a highly significant book for all scholars of craft and material culture.
Trevor Marchand, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies
Acknowledgements; Notes on transliteration and names; Chapter 1 - Introduction; Chapter 2 - Craft and industry in Dingshu; Chapter 3 - Creating value in the zisha 'art world'; Chapter 4 - Learning in the factory and in the household; Chapter 5 - Engaging with the craft; Chapter 6 - Style, names and authenticity; Chapter 7 - Mastery and singularization; Chapter 8 - Conclusion; Glossary; References; Index
Geoffrey Gowlland is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-98-0, £55.00 (GBP), $75.00 (USD)
Built in Niugini
Constructions in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea
Paul Sillitoe
Vol. 1 of the RAI Series.
The sequel to the acclaimed Made in Niugini, which explored in unparalleled depth the material world of the Wola comprising moveable artefacts, Built in Niugini continues Paul Sillitoe's project in exemplary fashion, documenting the built environment, architecture and construction techniques in a tour de force of ethnography. But this is more than a book about building houses. Sillitoe also shows how material constructions can serve to further our understandings of intellectual constructions. Allowing his ethnography to take the lead, and paying close attention to the role of tacit understandings and know-how in both skilled work and everyday dwelling, his close experiential analyses inform a phenomenologically inflected discussion of profound philosophical questions - such as what can we know of being-in-the-world - from startlingly different cultural directions.
The book also forms part of a long-term project to understand a radically different 'economy', which is set in an acephalous order that extends individual freedom and equality in a manner difficult to imagine from the perspective of a nation-state - an intriguing way of being-in-the-world that is entwined with tacit aspects of knowing via personal and emotional experience. This brings us back to the explanatory power of a focus on technology, which Sillitoe argues for in the context of 'materiality' approaches that feature prominently in current debates about the sociology of knowledge. Archaeology has long been to the fore in considering technology and buildings, along with vernacular architecture, and Sillitoe contributes to a much needed dialogue between anthropology and these disciplines, assessing the potential and obstacles for a fruitful rapprochement.
CONTENTS:Built in Niugini represents the culmination of Sillitoe's luminous scholarship as an anthropologist who dialogues fluidly with the literature and ideas of numerous disciplines. The arguments throughout engage with key concepts and theories from anthropology, archaeology, architecture, material culture studies, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy. The result is a significant work that contributes to not only our regional knowledge of the New Guinea Highlands but also to studies of tacit knowledge and the anthropology of architecture and building practices.
Trevor Marchand, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies
List of figures; List of maps; List of plates; List of tables; Foreword; Preface; Chapter 1 - Whys and wherefores of construction; Chapter 2 - A dwelling perspective; Chapter 3 - Locating the house, locating the social; Chapter 4 - A seminar: what can archaeology and anthropology do together?; Chapter 5 - Seminar postscript: accessing minds, past and present; Chapter 6 - Building materials and materiality; Chapter 7 - House construction: a how-to-do-it account and critique; Chapter 8 - Some other structures: tradition and change; Chapter 9 - Snakes and bridges: social constructivism?; Chapter 10 - Gender structures and divisions; Chapter 11 - Passing on knowing: hands-on participation; Chapter 12 - Knowing the tacit; Chapter 13 - Doing it to know it; Appendix - Glossary of Wola construction terms; References; Index
Paul Sillitoe FBA is Professor of Anthropology at Durham University
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-45-4, £100.00 (GBP), $150.00 (USD)
Made in Niugini
Technology in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea
Paul Sillitoe
Vol. 2 of the RAI Series.
This impressive and inspiring volume has as its modest origins the documentation of a contemporary collecting project for the British Museum. Informed by curators' critiques of uneven collections accompanied by highly variable information, Sillitoe set out with the ambition of recording the totality of the material culture of the Wola of the southern highlands of Papua New Guinea, at a time when the study of artefacts was neglected in university anthropology departments. His achievements, presented in this second edition of Made in Nuigini with a new contextualizing preface and foreword, brought a new standard of ethnography to the incipient revival of material culture studies, and opened up the importance of close attention to technology and material assemblages for anthropology. The 'economy' fundamentally concerns the material aspects of life, and as Sillitoe makes clear, Wola attitudes and behaviour in this regard are radically different to those of the West, with emphasis on 'maker users' and egalitarian access to resources going hand in hand with their stateless and libertarian principles.
CONTENTS:What a stunning and rewarding book! Te Rangi Hiroa, C.S. Ford, Darryl Forde, Clark Wissler and Edward Gifford - to mention a few of my earlier friends and teachers - would all have enjoyed this work immensely.
Harold C. ConklinNot many anthropologists could have brought to fruition a work like this. Its singleness of purpose offers what amounts to a unique perspective on Papua New Guinea Highland life& It will be a work of reference for Melanesianists. But social anthropologists in general should take note. The relentlessness of Sillitoe's investigation has its own effect. It throws up quite unexpected detail: the chert knappers' care that people will not cut their feet on fragments, the different times it takes men to tease their hair into wigs, why barbed arrows are feared ... the number of skirts a woman needs to feel adequately attired ... [A] magnificent epic to human endeavour. Regardless of whether they hold collections from Melanesia, this should be in the library of every ethnographic museum: and regardless of whether they think they are interested in material culture, this should be available to every anthropology department.
Marilyn Strathern, ManMade in Niugini is an extraordinarily ambitious and finely executed account, encyclopaedic in scope and design, and expertly illustrated.
Thomas G. Harding, American Anthropologist
Foreword; Preface to the second edition; List of maps; List of figures; List of tables; List of plates; Preface; Chapter 1 - Artifacts and people; Chapter 2 - Environment and resources; Chapter 3 - Tools; Chapter 4 - Weapons; Chapter 5 - Consumption utensils; Chapter 6 - Apparel; Chapter 7 - Finery and self-destruction; Chapter 8 - Musical instruments; Chapter 9 - Art and facts pertaining to Wola artifacts; Appendix I - Technical glossary; Appendix II - Property survey questionnaire; References; Index
Paul Sillitoe FBA is Professor of Anthropology at Durham University
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-89-8, £120.00 (GBP), $180.00 (USD)
Patterns Through Time
An Ethnographer's Quest and Journey
Norman E. Whitten, Jr
For well over a half century, Norman Whitten has spent a third of his professional life undertaking ethnography with Afro-Latin American and Indigenous peoples living in tropical forest-riverine environments of northern South America. He has spent the other two thirds engaged with theory construction in anthropology in institutional settings. In this memoir, he tells of his contributions to ethnography as a theory-constructive endeavor, and depicts an academic and practical environment in which strong support exists, but where obstacles and strong resistance must also be navigated.
Ethnographers construct theory within and sometimes against disciplinary frameworks, working back and forth between explication and explanation to make contributions to diverse and sometimes divergent literatures. This book traces Whitten's career from graduate student through a long and productive career as an anthropologist and ethnographer. Along the way, the reader gains valuable and sometimes surprising perspectives on American anthropology from 1950s to the present day, and insights into the different roles of the professional anthropologist. Whitten poignantly describes and analyzes the wrenching experience of moving from immersion in an Amazonian shamanic universe to administrative duties in a dysfunctional academic setting. As a mentor, author and editor of prominent books and journals, he highlights the importance of connecting a local study with the wider world. As a museum curator, he argues that it is above all a deep connection with living people that gives resonance to objects on display and agency to those studied. Throughout, Whitten makes a resounding case for serious, longitudinal ethnography as the foundation of anthropological theory, past, present and future.
CONTENTS:Patterns Through Time offers a moral and intellectual compass for all those who are embarking, traveling, looking back upon, or otherwise navigating the journey from casual observer of human life worlds to engaged ethnographer and accomplished professional anthropologist. This thoughtfully crafted, imaginative, and powerfully written memoir by a respected elder with more than five decades of experience as an ethnographer, author, editor, and beloved mentor should be required reading for all anthropologists and anyone who cares about the future of the discipline's unique blending of scientific rigor and humanistic values.
Jonathan D. Hill, Professor of Anthropology, SIUC and President, Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (2014-17)
Preface; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1 - The novitiate years, 1959-70; Chapter 2 - Milestones and misunderstandings in longitudinal ethnographic research; Chapter 3 - Shamanic purviews; Chapter 4 - A detour into strangeness and dysfunctionality; Chapter 5 - Patterns through time; References
Norman E. Whitten Jr is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Latin American Studies and Curator of the Spurlock Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-88-1, £45.00 (GBP), $65.00 (USD)
Pilgrimage and Ambiguity
Sharing the Sacred
Edited by Angela Hobart and Thierry Zarcone
'Ambiguous sanctuaries' are places in which the sacred is shared. These exist in almost all religions: tombs of saints, mausoleums, monasteries and shrines, a revered mountain peak, a majestic tree, a cave or special boulders in the river. This book examines this phenomenon in diverse parts of the world: in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Brazil. What these ritual spaces share is the capacity to unsettle and challenge people's experiences and understandings of reality, as well as to provoke the imagination, allowing universes of meanings to be interlinked.
The spaces discussed reveal the many different ways the sacred can be shared. Different groups may once have visited sites that are nowadays linked to only one religion. The legacy of earlier religious movements is subtly echoed in the devotional forms, rituals, symbols or narratives (hagiographies) of the present, and the architectural settings in which they take place. In some pilgrimage sites, peoples of different faiths visit and take part in devotional acts and rituals - such as processing, offering candles, incenses and flowers - that are shared. The saints to whom a shrine is dedicated can also have a double identity. Such ambiguity has often been viewed through the lens of religious purity, and the exclusivity of orthodoxy, as confusion, showing a lack of coherence and authenticity. But the openness to interpretation of sacred spaces in this collection suggests a more positive analysis: that it may be through ambiguity transcending narrow confines that pilgrims experience the sanctity and power they seek.
CONTENTS:In the engaging and accessible essays that comprise Pilgrimage and Ambiguity the contributors consider the ambiguous forces that cohere in sacred spaces - forces that move us into the inspirational depths of human spirituality. In so doing, the essays bring us closer to a deeper appreciation of how ambigui ty helps to define the human condition. This collection is one that will be read and debated for many years to come.
Paul Stoller, West Chester University, Pennsylvania, 2013 Anders Retzius Gold Medal Laureate in Anthropology'In a time of religious polarization, this fine collection of essays recalls that ambiguity, ambivalence and shared experience characterize the sacred as it is encountered in pilgrimages. Readers will travel through the Mediterranean, India, Pakistan and China, but also Western Europe and Amazonia, to discover saintly landscapes full of multiple meanings.'
Alexandre Papas, Senior Research Fellow, National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris
Introduction: Why do pilgrims share a sanctuary? Some hypotheses - Angela Hobart and Thierry Zarcone; PART I - AMBIGUOUS SACRED PLACES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN: Chapter 1: Towards a reappraisal of ambiguity: In the footsteps of Frederick W. Hasluck - Dionigi Albera; Chapter 2: From the god Amon to Sufi mawlids - Pierre-Jean Luizard; Chapter 3: 'Ambiguity in context' according to Islamic thought: Bridging theory and actuality relating to saints in Islam - Yasushi Tonaga; PART II - PILGRIMAGES AND SACRED PLACES IN THE INDO-PERSIAN WORLD AND CHINA: Chapter 4: Chinese, Tibetan and Mongol Buddhists on Wutaishan (China) from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century - Isabelle Charleux; Chapter 5: Betwixt and Between Figures of ambiguity in the Sufi cult of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar (Pakistan) - Jürgen Wasim Frembgen; Chapter 6: Syncretism and the superimposition of Islam on Buddhism in the Pamir: Mountain cults and saint veneration - Thierry Zarcone; PART III - AMBIGUOUS SITES CROSS-CULTURALLY: Chapter 7: Monte Verita, the 'Mountain of Truth' in Ascona: A pilgrimage site of paradoxes and contradiction - Angela Hobart; Chapter 8: The Seven Sleepers pilgrimage in Brittany: The ambiguity of a Christian-Muslim 'heterotopia' - Manoël Pénicaud; Chapter 9: Multi-centric mythscapes: Sanctuaries and pilgrimages in north-west Amazonian Arawakan religious traditions - Robin M. Wright, Omar González Nanez and Carlos César Xavier Leal; List of contributors; Index
Angela Hobart is the Director of the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, Honorary Reader at Goldsmiths College and Honorary Professor of Medical Anthropology at University College London.
Thierry Zarcone is a Senior Research Fellow (Directeur de recherches) at CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), Paris.
Published in association with the Centro Incontri Umani.
Colour Paperback, ISBN 978-1-907774-77-5, £30.00 (GBP), $40.00 (USD)
Ebook, ISBN 978-1-907774-99-7, OPEN ACCESS (link)
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Greek Island Life
Fieldwork on Anafi
Margaret E. Kenna
Sixteen months on a small Greek island? Not the holiday of a lifetime, but the start of anthropologist Margaret E. Kenna's involvement with the residents of Anafi and its migrant community in Athens. Greek Island Life gives a vivid and engaging account of research on Anafi in the 1960s, and is based on letters, progress reports, field-notes and diary entries made at the time. Since then the author has returned to the island many times and her later impressions and knowledge are integrated into the earlier texts. The islanders, who once regarded themselves to be so remote as to be 'far from God', are now making a living from tourism, marketing their island as an unspoilt idyll. Anyone interested in Greece and travel will find this book illuminating and captivating, as will students and teachers of anthropology, sociology, modern history, travel writing and Modern Greek studies.
CONTENTS:'In the whole of the Cycladic and Sporadic groups there exists no island so remote in its solitude as Anafi' wrote the traveller Theodore Bent in the early 1880s: 'it is a mere speck in the waves in the direction of Rhodes and Crete, where no one ever goes, and the 1000 inhabitants of the one village are as isolated as if they dwelt on an archipelago in the Pacific.'
So Anafi remained until the mid 1960s when Margaret E. Kenna stepped ashore to begin a memorable stay, and a lifetime's connection, described in this lovely book. Full of wonderful observation, scrupulously honest, it would be compelling simply as a travel book, but it is much more: it is a landmark study of the Greek island world on the eve of the huge changes that would transform Greece by mass tourism from the early 1970s, and it is all the more poignant now given the crises currently engulfing the country.
All lovers of Greece will relish and admire this book for its insight, its realism and its humanity: a portrait of a world which is almost gone, but as Margaret Kenna shows in her updates, not quite yet.
Michael Wood, Professor of Public History, Manchester University, and broadcaster'This wonderful book counters the common accusation that anthropologists do such interesting things and then write boring books about them. This is a unique document, a narrative of fieldwork, written not retrospectively but in the actual ethnographic present, in lucid and lyrical prose worthy of Jane Austen. We the readers are invited to participate in the unfolding of events from Kenna? s arrival to her departure, sharing in the first puzzles and initial descriptions of strangers who, by the end, become familiar figures and friends.'
Judith Okely, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Hull University
Preface to the second edition of Greek Island Life; Introduction; Chapter 1 - 'A fieldworker with no field': Sikinos and Anafi, May 1966; Chapter 2 - 'Olive trees looking like brides': Summer and autumn 1966; Chapter 3 - 'God has rained gold': Winter, spring and summer 1967; Chapter 4 - 'Because of the name': Kinship, dowry and inheritance; Chapter 5 - 'In a bubble car to see another Anafiot': Athens, Santorini, Mani; Chapter 6 - 'Crossing myself from right to left': Religion and ritual; Chapter 7 - 'An island-centred view of Greek history': From Argonauts to exiles; Chapter 8 - 'Letters might be censored': The Colonels' coup and Easter 1967; Chapter 9 - 'My last letter from Anafi': And what happened later; Chapter 10 - 'An honorary citizen of the island': Research in the twenty-first century; Bibliography; Index
Margaret E. Kenna is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at Swansea University.
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-907774-86-7, £25.00 (GBP), $40.00 (USD)
Tikopia Collected
Raymond Firth and the Creation of Solomon Islands Cultural Heritage
Elizabeth Bonshek
During 1928-9 the renowned anthropologist Raymond Firth visited Tikopia, a small island in the east of Solomon Islands, for the first time. This book takes the collection he made as its subject, and explores how through its acquisition, Firth ceased to be a stranger and became a respected figure incorporated into Tikopia society.
The objects were originally viewed by Firth as data in a scientific record of a culture, and evidence challenging the belief that complex economic transactions could only take place in a recognizable market economy. Elizabeth Bonshek, however, revisits the collection's documentation and the ethnography of Tikopia with a different intent in mind: to highlight the social relations the collecting process illuminates and to acknowledge Tikopia voices, past and present. She argues that Firth downplayed the impact of contact with outsiders - whalers, traders and missionaries calling for the abandonment of the Work of the Gods - yet this context is vital for understanding why local people actively contributed to his collecting and research. She follows the life of the collection after leaving the island in institutions that attributed different meanings to its significance, in a failed repatriation request and in a new role in the transmission of 'cultural heritage' along with Firth's writings. She concludes that Firth's exchanges of objects with other high-ranking men were culturally appropriate to the social values dominant in that time and place. Indeed, she suggests that while Firth was acquiring Tikopia artefacts, the Tikopia were perhaps acquiring him.
CONTENTS:'On what ethical and economic terms does an anthropologist acquire other people's things? Collecting Tikopia deftly applies the insights of contemporary material culture studies to a historically important case. Bonshek coaxes ethnographic documents and museum artefacts to reveal how objects both materialize cultural identities over time and mediate social relations across worlds of difference.' - Professor Robert Foster, University of Rochester, President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology
'Richly supported by documentation this skilful and insightful analysis reveals the complexity of cross-cultural interactions and highlights important concerns for the interpretation and management of cultural heritage in museum 'treasure places' worldwide.' - Dr Robin Torrence, Senior Principal Research Scientist, Anthropology Research, Australian Museum
Introduction; Chapter 1 - Collecting Tikopia; Chapter 2 - Firth's scientific anthropology; Chapter 3 - Interaction between Tikopia and Europeans, 1606 to 1928; Chapter 4 - Objects as sacred: Mediating the spirits in Tikopia; Chapter 5 Koroa (valued property): Objects binding people; Chapter 6 - Tikopia collected: The social life of a museum collection; Chapter 7 - The idea of a 'treasure place'; Conclusion - Creating cultural heritage; Appendix 1 - Firth's 'Specimen List'; Appendix 2 - The Firth Collection at the Australian Museum; Appendix 3 - Names of individuals who gave objects to Firth; Appendix 4 - Tikopia objects held in public collections collected prior to 1928; References; Index
Elizabeth Bonshek is Senior Curator for Pacific Cultures at Museum Victoria, Melbourne.
Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-39-3, £60.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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Kitawa
The Thinking Hand and the Making Mind
Giancarlo Scoditti
Sketching and carving both visualize and memorize a given image, but within Nowau culture the manner in which this is achieved in a canoe prowboard is entirely different than in a conventional drawing. When studying the impressive ceremonial canoes of Kitawa, in the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea, G.M.G. Scoditti became struck by the absolute predominance of the artist's mind in the process of creating images: all its stages, its uncertainties and experimentation, must unfold within its silent, rarefied space. Only once fully formed can the image be revealed to the village in material form.
Reflecting on the absence of orthographic writing within Nowau culture, and finding parallels with poetic and musical composition, Scoditti gained further insight into the Nowau processes of creation through the critiques the Kitawan carvers made of his own fieldwork sketchbooks. Spurred on by their curiosity, the anthropologist handed over his art materials to the master carvers to make their own drawings on paper or cardboard. Traditional pigments used on the polychrome canoe prowboards were added to the unfamiliar media of watercolour, acrylic, coloured pencils and ballpoint pen. Three-dimensional ornamentation became two-dimensional as images of self-decoration and huts were added to those of prowboards. This exercise was all the more fascinating given the prohibition of drawing on the surface of the wood before carving. On return to Italy, further graphic dialogues unfolded when an architect and an artist from the tradition of Italian Abstraction responded with their own intriguingly different interpretations of the canoe prowboard and its relationship to the Nautilus shell. All these drawings are brought together in this book, along with Scoditti's own sketches from fieldwork and ethnographic collections in Newcastle upon Tyne and Rome.
CONTENTS:'The fieldworker's or museum ethnographer's sketches are never going to be quite the same. Through the double filter of Kitawan philosophy and Scoditti's ruminations, the apparently simple triad of sketch - drawing - carving opens out into a discourse on the creative mind. The Kitawan creator - here primarily the male carver - does not have to demonstrate how he creates, and what springs from these pages have a fascination of their own. Several distinctive hands, Kitawan and Italian, reflect from different interpretive and professional vantage points on the very process of drawing through doing exactly that, drawing. The result is images that delight and challenge, sensitively assembled, beautifully reproduced. An extraordinary record of creativity, and a rare corpus of visual memorials'
Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge
THE CARNET OF A MELANESIAN CULTURE; THE DRAWINGS: The drawings made by Kitawans: Canoes and their ornaments; Self-decoration; Huts; Nowau classification of colours: Giancarlo M.G. Scoditti's 'graphic memories': The George Brown Collection, Newcastle upon Tyne; The Lamberto Loria Collection, 'Museo preistorico ed etnografico L. Pigorini', Rome; Field research on Kiriwina and Kitawa Islands; Graphic interpretations of ceremonial-canoe prowboards by Alveraldo A.G. Scoditti and Giulia Napoleone: The graphic interpretation of the cognitive schema of the prowboards by Alveraldo A.G. Scoditti; The graphic interpretation of the prowboards' figures by Giulia Napoleone; List of figures; Artists.
G.M.G. Scoditti is Emeritus Professor of Ethnology at the Department of Classical Archaeology and History of Ancient Art, University of Urbino in Italy.
Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-43-0, £90.00 (GBP), $135.00 (USD)
Mikidadi
Individual Biography and National History in Tanzania
Pat Caplan
This is the extraordinary story of Mikidadi, an ordinary Tanzanian from a remote coastal island, who became a Koran-school teacher, charity leader, environmental activist and guardian of an extended family. But this biography is not only about Mikidadi's life and legacy, but also his times. He lived through transitions from colonialism to independence, socialism to neoliberalism, a single- to a multi-party state, and a local Swahili Islam to a more globalized and politicized form. He also experienced the growth of corruption, and the increasing role of Western NGOs and Islamic charities. In considering how wider historical processes impacted on Mikidadi, as life got progressively harder for his family, this book seeks to counter some of the recent rewriting of Tanzania's post-colonial history.
Skilfully moving through the decades, between events at national, regional and individual levels, between three generations, and even adding a further layer of her own life as an anthropologist, Caplan succeeds in writing an engaging, accessible account that will appeal to both academics and students. For at the centre of this book is an unlikely friendship that began in 1966 between a 12-year-old boy and a 23-year-old woman, and lasted nearly four decades, to be cut short by Mikidadi's untimely death in 2002. Recollections of meetings, and extracts from fieldwork notes and correspondence, bring a lively immediacy to this exchange, in which profound cultural differences between researcher and researched are transcended in interconnected lives.
CONTENTS:'An unprecedented ethnographic analysis of contemporary Tanzanian history exploring how individuals, families and communities over time perceive, act, negotiate and strive to adjust in the shade of shifting political, economic and ideological conditions' - Kjersti Larsen, Professor, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo
'Clear, engaging, and insightful, this accessible biography provides a rich entry point into African history and anthropology through an intimate account of life in a coastal East African village.' - Christine J. Walley, Professor of Anthropology, Director of Graduate Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
'A model of participatory and ethical research, Mikidadi is an invaluable resource for scholars, students, development practitioners, and environment activists' - Marjorie Mbilinyi, Professor, University of Dar es Salaam (1968-2003); Principal Policy Analyst, Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (2004-14)
'This clear and well-written book celebrates a life and its place in history. It is an exemplar of public anthropology' - David Zeitlyn, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford
Introduction: Mikidadi, the anthropologist and this book; Chapter 1: The search for education: The 1960s; Chapter 2: Education continued, forestry training and first job: The 1970s; Chapter 3: Getting married and starting a family: The 1980s; Chapter 4: Pursuing a livelihood and becoming an activist:The 1990s; Chapter 5: Seeking pathways to Mafia's development: The new millennium; Chapter 6: Mikidadi's death and its aftermath: 2003-10; Conclusion: Changes since 1965 and Mikidadi's legacy; Afterword: A personal note; References; List of places and people; Glossary of Swahili terms; Index.
Pat Caplan is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-48-5, £50.00 (GBP), $75.00 (USD)
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The Politics of Distinction
African Elites from Colonialism to Liberation in a Namibian Frontier Town
Mattia Fumanti
Scholarly definitions of elites as those who wield political power and control distribution of resources in their locales consistently leave out their capacity to shape morality, civic ethics and the legitimacy of power relations beyond material domination. In this insightful ethnography of Rundu, a frontier town in Namibia, Mattia Fumanti highlights the fundamental contribution elites make to the public space through their much-praised concept of civility and their promotion of nationbuilding at the local level. In centring his argument on the moral agency of elites over three generations and their attempts to achieve distinction in public life, this book counters an often found and over-generalized view of postcolonial African states as weak, ruling through authoritarian, greedy and corrupt practices.
By looking at the intricate ways in which the biographies of a middle-range town and its inhabitants are interwoven, this study draws very different conclusions from the grand narratives of pathologies, chaos and crisis that characterize much of the accepted discourse of African urbanization derived from the study of large cities. Focusing on how generational relations between elites have both shaped, and are shaped by, the transitions from apartheid and civil war to independence and postindependence, the book illuminates public debates on the power of education, the aspirations of youth, the role of the state and citizen, delivery of good governance and the place of ethnic and settler minorities in post-apartheid southern Africa.
CONTENTS:'This book is a vibrant antidote to Afro-pessimism and views that emphasize the spectacle of disaster, kleptomania and corruption of the weak state. By examining the rhetoric of public morality Fumanti challenges this but is, nevertheless, also critical of the ruling elite. This is a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of how small-town elites emerge and how they see the world, a group of people who are potentially vital players in the evolving shape of African cultures and moralities, who have not received the scholarly attention they deserve.'
Robert Gordon, University of Vermont and University of the Free State
'The Politics of Distinction tackles a perennial anthropological subject with immense brio. Using the most contemporary of social theories and ethnographic methods, Mattia Fumanti addresses the enduring but elusive nexus of inter-generational consciousness and of the ambivalences between generations. That the two generations in this Namibian border town see themselves as the architects and inheritors of liberation imbues their provincial relations with echoes of grand history. Anyone interested in African elite formation, post-colonial governance, and the dividends and distinctions of education, or simply looking for a finely crafted contemporary ethnography, will find Fumanti's a compelling narrative.'
Richard Fardon, Professor of West African Anthropology at SOAS
Acknowledgements; Introduction; PART I - FROM COLONIALISM TO LIBERATION: Chapter 1: Rundu: A frontier town; Chapter 2: The politics of distinction: Leadership, passion and morality; Chapter 3: The liberation elite: Building public life in post-apartheid Rundu; Chapter 4: Sacralizing education: Rituals of distinction in post-apartheid Namibia; PART II - AFTER LIBERATION: THE YOUTH ELITE: Chapter 5: Inheriting an establishment: The youth elite and intergenerational dialectics; Chapter 6: The Shinyewile Club: Networks, social capital and the pursuit of distinction; Chapter 7: Youthful palindromes; Chapter 8: Straddling the rural-urban divide: Exchange and civility; Epilogue: Back to the future: Old and new elites twenty years after independence; References; Index.
Mattia Fumanti is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. He has conducted anthropological research in Namibia, Ghana and the UK.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-46-1, £65.00 (GBP), $115.00 (USD)
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Copyright Africa
How Intellectual Property, Media and Markets Transform Immaterial Cultural Goods
Edited by Ute Röschenthaler and Mamadou Diawara
Africa is known for its multi-faceted immaterial culture, manifested in its highly original music, oral texts, artistic performances and sporting events. These cultural expressions have become increasingly regulated by intellectual property (IP) rights, as orally transmitted stories are written down, traditional songs broadcast and ownership claimed, and sporting activities once part of village life become national media events. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary team of legal experts, anthropologists and literary scholars to explore, from a local African point of view, what happens to intangible cultural goods when they are confronted with large-scale commodification and distribution through media technologies, and defined by globalized and divergent judicial systems, institutions and cultural norms.
These transformations are observed in diverse cultural products from Senegalese wrestling contests to beauty pageants in Mali, from Kenyan hip-hop to the Nigerian novel, from the vuvuzela to Cameroonian masks. Contributors address the role of the state and the colonial legacy of the European origination of IP laws, as well as the forms of ownership, technologies of mediation and degrees of commercialization that existed pre-colonially in different African societies, recognizing that performances in most societies have always been embedded in economic activities and exchange networks. Resisting a single narrative of the imposition of a Western, external legal regime displacing older African modes, these local studies open up a more complex picture of the intricate interconnections among pirates, artists, communities, governments and international organizations. They argue that it is only when local actors embrace technologies and regulations in a specific historical situation that these become influential forces for change. The question raised is not whether international IP norms conform to African practices, nor whether media impose a Western style, but rather what local actors do with these regulations and how both local and Western practices and technologies impact on each other and co-exist.
CONTENTS:'Intellectual property (IP) has become central to global governance but we have little idea of how this international legislation plays out on the ground. Drawing on case studies from South Africa, Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria, Mali and Senegal, this pioneering book shows how local actors use IP rather than the other way around. A must-read for anyone interested in intellectual property.'
Isabel Hofmeyr, Visiting Global Distinguished Professor, New York University and Professor of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand
'A deeply engaging and evidence-rich analysis of the worlds into which intellectual property law, specifically copyright law, has entered in Africa and its effect on these worlds. This collection illustrates the best of what edited volumes can do: create a diverse, informed, and compelling conversation about a specific yet complex topic.'
Dr. Hauke Dorsch, AMA African Music Archives, Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz
Preface and acknowledgements; List of contributors; Introduction: African intellectual worlds in the making - Ute Röschenthaler and Mamadou Diawara; PART I - PROTECTING IMMATERIAL CULTURAL GOODS: AUTHORS, ARTISTS AND THE LAW: Chapter 1: The colonial legacy of the international copyright system - Alexander Peukert; Chapter 2: Whose text is it? Writing the oral - Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi; Chapter 3: Lion's share: Intellectual property rights and the South African music industry - Veit Erlmann; PART II - CREATING NORMS AND GENRES: MODELLING, QUOTING AND MIXING: Chapter 4: Authorship, copyright and quotation in oral and print spheres in early colonial Yorubaland - Karin Barber; Chapter 5: In whose image or likeness?: Publishing and the literary order in early post-colonial Nigeria - Patrick Oloko; Chapter 6: Covers, remixes and mash-ups: Locating African hip-hop in intellectual property rights discourse - Caroline Mose; PART III - TRANSFORMATIONS OF CULTURAL GOODS: IMITATION, APPROPRIATION AND PIRACY: Chapter 7: 'Be faster than the pirates': Copyright and the revival of 'traditional dances' in south-west Cameroon - Ute Röschenthaler; Chapter 8: From communal practice to intellectual property: The Ngqoko Cultural Group, political claim-making and the judicialization of performance in South Africa - Neo Musangi; Chapter 9: Breaking the contract?: Handling intangible cultural goods among different generations in Mali - Mamadou Diawara; Chapter 10: Music for everyone: The dynamics of piracy in Cameroon - Alexie Tcheuyap; Chapter 11: Regulating mobility, reshaping accessibility: Nollywood and the piracy scapegoat - Alessandro Jedlowski; PART IV - MARKETING CULTURE AND THE BODY: PERFORMANCE, COMPETITION AND IDENTITY PRACTICES; Chapter 12: Between transnational and local aesthetic standards: Beauty pageants in Mali - Dorothea E. Schulz; Chapter 13: Wrestling, the media and marketing: When folklore meets show business - Ibrahima Wane; Chapter 14: Who owns the vuvuzela?: Local interests, intellectual property and the football World Cup in South Africa - Matthias Gruber; Index.
Ute Röschenthaler is Professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz; Scientific Collaborator in the Cluster of Excellence 'The Formation of Normative Orders' and the project 'Africa's Asian Options' (AFRASO) at Goethe University, Frankfurt.
Mamadou Diawara is Professor of Anthropology at the Goethe University Frankfurt; Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence, Deputy Director of the Frobenius Institut; Founding Director of Point Sud, The Center for Research on Local Knowledge, Bamako, Mali.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-42-3, £75.00 (GBP), $130.00 (USD)
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Anthropology at the Crossroads
The View from France
Edited by Sophie Chevalier
Vol. 1 of the RAI Country Series.
The influence of French intellectual thought on anthropology worldwide has been immense. This set of outstanding essays examines the influence of Lévi-Strauss, internal debates concerning anthropology's place within French culture, the way that anthropologists in France approach the dilemmas of practising in a globalized world, and the shifting relationship between anthropology and museums. They also contain a highly stimulating discussion of how anthropology 'at home' has a particular trajectory in France. Together, they allow us to appreciate better why France has been such a stimulating laboratory for anthropological thought and why it is likely to remain so in the future. Indeed, leading figures have emerged there not only because of the brilliance of French academic culture, but also because of a specific readiness to combine an interest in public life and philosophy with anthropology.
CONTENTS:'A splendid volume: extremely informative and very clearly written. The editor and the authors are to be congratulated on the way they have worked up the material into a coherent account of the contemporary French anthropological scene. It provides a model for subsequent works in the series, and a model too in general for how to make a collection of essays into a good book.'
Tim Jenkins, Reader in Anthropology and Religion, University of Cambridge
'This compelling book provides rich insight into the traditions and institutions of French anthropology, and a unique perspective on the new theoretical approaches that are shaping the discipline's renewal after Lévi-Strauss.'
Marc Abélès, Director of Research, CNRS Director of Studies, EHESS
Contributors; Introduction: Accommodating globalization - Sophie Chevalier; Chapter 1: Anthropology in France today: A view from within - Sophie Chevalier and Emmanuelle Lallement; Chapter 2: Lévi-Strauss and his heirs - Emmanuel Désveaux; Chapter 3: The contemporary turn of anthropology: (Still) endeavouring to understand the world around us - Michel Agier; Chapter 4: The rise and fall of French 'anthropology at home': (With some reference to Britain) - Sophie Chevalier; Chapter 5: Can French anthropology outlive its museums?: Notes on a changing landscape - Benoît de L'Estoile; Chapter 6: Ethnologists and the city: A history of an object and of disciplines - Emmanuelle Lallement; Chapter 7: Métissage and kinship: Two key concepts in the study of diaspora - Anne-Christine Trémon; Index.
Sophie Chevalier, the editor of these essays, has long played a leading part in organizing and publishing French anthropology, as president of one of its professional associations, an instigator of the first unified national association for anthropology and founding editor of the multimedia online journal, ethnographiques.org. Here she has brought together prominent French anthropologists and some younger scholars to show that anthropology there is responding creatively to domestic institutional pressures as well as to the challenges of globalization.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-40-9, £50.00 (GBP), $80.00 (USD)
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Beyond Tradition, Beyond Invention
Cosmic Technologies and Creativity in Contemporary Afro-Cuban Religions
Edited by Diana Espírito Santo and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos
Afro-Cuban religiosity is likely to bring to mind beliefs and practices with a visibly 'African' flavour - music, dance, spirit possession, sacrifices and ritual language that have undergone a transformation, on Cuban soil, under a strong Spanish and Catholic influence. Much anthropological work has analysed Afro-Cuban religion's 'syncretic' character in the light of these European influences, taking as a given that each tradition is relatively independent, and focusing on well-documented origins in specific socio-historical environments. In this context, understandings of religious innovation based on charismatic leaders have resulted in a top down approach.
However, this volume argues that there are alternatives to cult-centred accounts, by looking at the relationships between Afro-Cuban traditions, and indeed going beyond 'traditions' to place the focus on creativity as an embedded logic in everyday religious practice. From this forward-looking perspective, ritual engagement is no longer a means of recreating pre-existing universes but rather of generating, as well as participating in, an ever-emerging cosmos. Traditions are not perceived as given doctrines or mental constructs but as perceptual habits and potencies beyond questions of spirit or matter, mind or body. Offering a fresh, improvisatory ethnographic vision, this book recasts the Afro-Cuban religious complex in the terms of the experts and adepts who creatively sustain it and responds to the significant fact, often overlooked or ignored, that many Cubans engage with more than one tradition without any sense of conflict.
CONTENTS:'Beyond Tradition, Beyond Invention shows how far scholarship has transcended the verificationist searches for origins, reification of traditions as bounded entities, and sterile quests for typological coherence that, for too long, dominated the anthropology of Afro-Caribbean ritual praxis. The contributions not only vividly exemplify how mechanistic conceptions of tradition and cultural change, or pseudo-problems such as syncretism, can be overcome by ethnographic means. They also point towards novel theories of the ever emergent, hence thoroughly historical, nature of worlds shared by humans, deities, and spirits. This book ought to inspire all anthropologists working on complex and 'inventive' ritual traditions.'
Stephan Palmié, Professor of Anthropology, The University of Chicago
'Amidst the cacophony of calls to 'creativity' and 'innovation' as cultural commodities, here's a remarkable collection about the power of creation as a condition of human existence, rather than just its outcome. If you want to see what the world might be like without the very distinction between creator and creation - or, for that matter, between human beings and the worlds they inhabit - then look at Afro-Cuban religious traditions, the editors tell us. The sheer vivacity of the material is astounding, and suggests altogether new ways to think about not just the classic concerns of Caribbean anthropology with syncretism and cultural borrowings, but also basic categories of anthropological thinking such as ritual, technology, myth and cosmology.'
Martin Holbraad, Professor of Social Anthropology, University College London
Introduction: Inventive traditions: A short introduction to Afro-Cuban religiosity - Diana Espírito Santo and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos; Chapter 1: Ikú lobi ocha: The dead give birth to the deities - Anastasios Panagiotopoulos; Chapter 2: ¿Pa' que tu me llamas, si no me conoces?: Spiritist performative technologies in the creation of cosmology - Diana Espírito Santo; Chapter 3: Language, creativity and identity in conversations with the dead - Ana Stela de Almeida Cunha; Chapter 4: Valuing the community: Non-initiatory versions of 'Afro-Cuban' religions - Alessandra Basso Ortiz; Chapter 5: The city overtaken by santeros: A post-nineties ritualized urban image - Dayron Carrillo Morell; Chapter 6: The evil eye and the state - Kenneth Routon; Chapter 7: Embodying the sacred in Abakuá performance: Places of power and gender construction - Geraldine Morel; Chapter 8: A throne for Changó: On the display of Afro-Cuban religions on the island of Tenerife - Grecy Pérez Amores; Chapter 9: Lumbamba, 'Lord of Justice': Mounting a prenda for Lucero in the Pacific Northwest - Claire Garoutte and Anneke Wambaugh; Glossary; Index.
Diana Espírito Santo is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology, Programa de Antropología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago de Chile.
Anastasios Panagiotopoulos is Post-doctoral researcher at Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA) / FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-37-9, £65.00 (GBP), $100.00 (USD)
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Pacific Alternatives
Cultural Politics in Contemporary Oceania
Edited by Edvard Hviding and Geoffrey White
At the centre of this collection are the actors and processes referred to by the distinguished Oceania thinker and visionary Epeli Hau'ofa as 'ordinary people ... who, because of the poor flows of benefits from the top, scepticism about stated policies and the like, tend to plan and make decisions about their lives independently, sometimes with surprising and dramatic results that go unnoticed or ignored at the top'. The contributors explore innovative social, cultural and political responses to global processes as they influence and unfold in a range of Pacific locations - with a major focus on Island Melanesia and a further range of contributions on Palau, Pohnpei, Rotuma and Australia. A multidisciplinary group, including a number of Pacific Islanders, the authors present contemporary connections between expanding perceptions of cultural heritage and the emergence of new political forms, in the context of challenges posed by the global political economy. At issue in the volume are viable local Pacific alternatives to the institutions and practices commonly advocated in development discourse, but difficult to implement in Pacific settings.
CONTENTS:'Pacific Alternatives provides fresh perspectives on the ways that cultural heritage serves as a unique source of engaging the modern state and global non-state actors. The volume showcases two of the strongest features of contemporary Pacific Studies scholarship: the ability to find new insights in experience-near analyses of Islander life that have world-enlarging potentials, and the foregrounding of Indigenous voices in the evolving dialogue around land, politics, culture, tradition, custom, and identity.'
Ty Kawika Tengan, Professor of Anthropology & Chair of the Dept. of Ethnic Studies, University of Hawai'i
Foreword - Terence Wesley-Smith; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Pacific alternatives in a global context - Geoffrey White and Edvard Hviding; PART I - STATES AND CULTURAL PLACES: Chapter 1: State effects and festival performances: Indigenous Australian participation in the Festival of Pacific Arts - Rosita Henry; Chapter 2: Space Wars: Nan Madol as cultural and political property - David Hanlon; Chapter 3: Feasts, festivals and phantoms: The predicament of cultural policy in a Solomon Islands society - Geoffrey White; PART II: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF LAND AND SEA: Chapter 4: Absentee landowners, gifted lands and 'economies of affection' - Vilsoni Hereniko; Chapter 5: The Western Solomons and the sea: Maritime cultural heritage in sociality, province and state - Edvard Hviding; Chapter 6: Women and customary land tenure in Vanuatu: Changing understandings - Lissant Bolton; PART III: HERITAGE AS POLITICAL DISCOURSE: Chapter 7: Port Vila mi lavem yu: Visualizing the urban experience in Vanuatu - Haidy Geismar; Chapter 8: Culture, politics and tourism on Tanna - Lamont Lindstrom; Chapter 9: Coming together: Kastom, religiosity and scale-making in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea - Graeme Were; Chapter 10: Gauging perceptions of heritage in Palau - Stephen Wickler; Chapter 11: Re-presenting Melanesia: Ignoble savages and Melanesian alter-natives - Tarcisius Kabutaulaka; Epilogue Imagining the state as a vehicle for cultural survival in Oceania - Ralph Regenvanu; Index.
Edvard Hviding is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. His research in Solomon Islands includes interests in environmental knowledge, social movements, maritime practice and regional systems past and present.
Geoffrey White is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. His research in Solomon Islands includes interests in Christianity, cultural policy and memory of the Second World War.
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-907774-87-4, £25.00 (GBP), $40.00 (USD)
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-38-6, £65.00 (GBP), $100.00 (USD)
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The Ways of the World
European Representations of Other Cultures: From Homer to Sade
Peter Mason
Before the emergence of anthropology around the middle of the nineteenth century, there was no ethnography as such. But the discipline owes its formation to certain strands that go back into the remoter past of the ancient world, as far back as Homeric epic, and range over such themes as the Greek views of non-Greeks and indeed of the boundaries of what it is to be human.
These classical structural polarities have provided an enduring interpretative framework for configuring the 'other' in very different societies and places. Reaching across a remarkable time span, Mason's approach does not attempt a unified narrative, but uses case studies from the ancient world, the early modern era and the Enlightenment, many of them related to the difficulties of comprehending the cultures of the New World, to pinpoint startling continuities and changes. In this way, Mason reveals 'embedded ethnographies' in the works of a diverse set of writers, from giants of their age such as Sextus Empiricus, Columbus, Montaigne, the Marquis de Sade and Goethe, to little-known authors of the sixteenth century such as Jan Huygen van Linschoten (tales of sex and drugs in Goa) and Adriaen Coenen (encountering Eskimos in The Hague). Drawing his conclusions from a wealth of sources, the author deftly moves from travellers' accounts, encyclopaedias, cosmographies and natural history compilations, to literary works of fiction, translating them from seven languages. Many are presented here to English readers for the first time. Whether non- European peoples are demonized or idealized, the author asks, can any trace of a native voice still be found in these European texts?
CONTENTS:'An outstanding work by a scholar with an eye for extraordinary case studies and unexpected cultural connections, which contribute to opening up new paths of research and reinvigorate the field.'
Francisco Bethencourt Charles Boxer Professor of History, King's College London
'The Ways of the World is an elegant, lucid, exemplary piece of intellectual history by an author who is as much at home in philosophy and literary criticism as he is in anthropology and history.'
Peter Burke Emeritus Professor of Cultural History, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge
Preface; Introduction: Questions of method; PART I - GREEK POLARITIES: Chapter 1: The tobacco that Pliny smoked; Chapter 2 Para-ethnography, scepticism and relativism: Outlines of Pyrrhonism; PART II - SIXTEENTH-CENTURY SINGULARITIES: Chapter 3: Hermeneutics of the other: Montaigne and Columbus; Chapter 4 'Were a man of iron or steel...': Sex and drugs in sixteenth-century Goa; Chapter 5: These are people who eat raw fish; PART III - THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS DISCONTENTS: Chapter 6: Theatres of cruelty; Chapter 7 Dress, nudity and body painting at the ends of the world; Conclusion: Distancing, displacement, disguise; Index.
Peter Mason is an independent scholar based in Rome. He has written widely on European representations of the New World, combining insights from cultural history, art history and anthropology with in situ research in Latin America.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-36-2, £55.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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Repositioning Pacific Arts
Artists, Objects, Histories
Edited by Anne E. Allen
with Deborah B. Waite
In investigating both customary and modern Pacific art, these collected essays present a wide-ranging view across time and space, taking the reader from antiquities to contemporary art and travelling across the region from Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, New Zealand to Samoa. Studies of artefacts and traditions, such as self-portraiture, wood carvings, shields, tapa, dance and masks, use a variety of approaches, some deriving from museum studies while others are based on field investigation. Together they reveal the oppositional tensions between tradition and innovation, and the inspiration this provides for contemporary artistic practice, either through conscious implementation or through rejection of past definitions. Engagement with these cultural performances and objects provide new possibilities for the creation of current identities.
The drafting of antiquities legislation, the tortuous journeys objects have taken to find a place in galleries, the use of exhibitions in cultural exchange, framed by the architecture of museums, as well as the role of film and photography in appropriating Pacific art culture for emerging nationalisms, all of these are considered here to enhance our understanding of indigenous art's place in the world today. These historical perspectives provide the framework in which to explore contemporary acquisition and outreach work with Pacific communities that seeks to reconnect people with objects taken away from the places and intentions of their makers. Questions of how identity is maintained and expressed through art are considered for both individuals and groups. What role does the transformations of objects play in this process? What impacts have been made by colonialism, modernism and the great migrations of people between Pacific countries, and from rural to urban environments? Ultimately, how is 'Pacific Islander' defined and by whom?
In Repositioning Pacific Arts, artists, curators and academics, including Maori and other Islanders, bring fresh approaches to Oceanic Art History and raise questions of relevance not only to scholars of indigenous art in the region but also in other parts of world.
CONTENTS:Introduction - Anne E. Allen; Keynote: Recycling tradition in the arts of Polynesia - Adrienne L. Kaeppler; PART I - ARTEFACTS AND TRADITIONS: Chapter 1: Maori self-portraiture - Ngarino Ellis (Ngapuhi, Ngati Porou); Chapter 2: Consequences of conversion: The transformation of Samoan siapo in the nineteenth century - Hilary L. Scothorn; Chapter 3: Mythical woodcarvers of the Kamoro and Asmat - Pauline van der Zee; Chapter 4: Must a shield look like a shield? - Deborah B. Waite; Chapter 5: Art traditions of New Ireland: An overview - Michael Gunn; Chapter 6: Prehistoric canoe-shaped bone containers of the Massim region of Papua New Guinea - Harry Beran with John Tomowau; PART II - COLLECTIONS AND COLLECTING: Chapter 7: New Zealand's first antiquities legislation: The Maori Antiquities Act 1901 and a proposal for a national Maori museum - Moira White: Chapter 8: The exceptional voyage of a Biwat painting from Kinakatem to Paris - Christian Coiffier; Chapter 9: Bridging the gap: Connecting the Maori collection at the British Museum to New Zealand - Jill Hasell; Chapter 10: Reconsidering the past: Charles Pearcy Mountford in America, 1945-6 - Susan Kennedy Zeller; Chapter 11: Constructing identity: Collecting Oceanic art/artefacts in New Zealand - Rose Evans; Chapter 12: The house and the housed: The architecture of museums - Mike Austin; PART III - THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC: Chapter 13: Against the grain: Counter-images of urban Pacific identity - Caroline Vercoe; Chapter 14: Soilen Besena women artists: Keeping the culture in Oz - Jacquelyn A. Lewis-Harris; Chapter 15: Aesthetic encounters between white tribes of the Tasman Sea: Aspects of Australian-New Zealand art exchange 1973-99 - Pamela Zeplin; Chapter 16: O le tai faga'e: Reality and change in contemporary Samoan art - Saumaeafe Vanya Taule'alo; Contributors.
Anne E. Allen is Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University, Southeast. Her research considers the spatial dynamics of Samoan vernacular architecture. She is currently the editor of Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Art Association.
Deborah B. Waite is Professor of Pacific Art History in the Department of Art and Art History, University of Hawai i. Her research speciality involves art from the Solomon Islands.
Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-23-2, £95.00 (GBP), $155.00 (USD)
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Westermarck
Edited by David Shankland
Occasional Paper No. 44 of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Published in association with the Anglo-Finnish Society.
Westermarck was a remarkable man, but one who has received little credit for the significant part he played in the creation of modern anthropology. He spanned two worlds: the comparative anthropological endeavours of the nineteenth century, and the establishment of social anthropology at the LSE, in which he played a major role. One of Malinowski's principal teachers, he was himself an outstanding fieldworker. His work on Morocco has, even today, hardly been surpassed. Yet, his theories on the nature of human marriage and the origins of the incest taboo place him firmly in the earlier, generalist camp, and the controversies to which they have given rise have hardly settled down to this day. In this volume, Westermarck's place in anthropology is discussed, along with detailed descriptions of his very active academic life in Finland and in Britain, whilst other chapters consider his equally pioneering writings in morals and ethics. Westermarck's own writings are featured by way of illustration of his ideas, including his LSE inaugural lecture, his Huxley lecture, and a hitherto unpublished paper on ritual and survivals. This volume shows, indeed, that Westermarck is a 'missing link' in today's history of anthropology, and our understanding of that history will be profoundly changed by a better appreciation of his role within it.
CONTENTS:Foreword - Pekka Huhtaniemi, Finnish Ambassador in London; Acknowledgements; Key dates in Westermarck's public life; Introduction: Westermarck: A missing link - David Shankland; PART I - ON WESTERMARCK: Chapter 1: Westermarck, anthropology and the Royal Anthropological Institute - David Shankland; Chapter 2: Edward Westermarck at the Academy of Åbo, 1918-32 - Olli Lagerspetz and Kirsti Suolinna; Chapter 3: Edward Westermarck as a Finnish patriot abroad - Pekka Rantanen; Chapter 4: Carl Starcke and Wilhelm Bolin on Edward Westermarck's dissertation, The History of Human Marriage: The question of plagiarism - Juhani Ihanus; Securing language in a multilingual world; Chapter 5: Westermarck and the Westermarck Hypothesis - Arthur P. Wolf; Chapter 6: Westermarck might have been both right and wrong: A comment on Arthur P. Wolf's chapter - Jan Antfolk; Chapter 7: Looking backwards and forwards - Timothy Stroup: Chapter 8: Westermarck's theory of morality in his and our time: A perspective from the LSE anthropology department - Maurice Bloch; Chapter 9: The relativity of Westermarck's moral relativism -Camilla Kronqvist; PART II - BY WESTERMARCK: Chapter 10: Implications of the theory of selection (1889, edited and translated by Jan Antfolk); Chapter 11: Sociology as a university study (Inaugural lecture as Martin White Professor in Sociology, 1908); Chapter 12: Survival in ritual (Delivered to the International Congress of Ethnological and Anthropological Sciences, 1934); Chapter 13: Methods in social anthropology (Huxley Memorial Lecture, 1936); Index.
David Shankland is Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Reader in Anthropology at the University of Bristol. Amongst his specialist areas of study are the history of anthropology, particularly disciplinary diversity and the emergence of Social Anthropology in the twentieth century.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-31-7, £60.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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The Things We Value
Culture and History in Solomon Islands
Edited by Ben Burt and Lissant Bolton
The Things We Value takes as its subject the creativity and cultural heritage of Solomon Islands, focusing on the kinds of objects produced and valued by local communities across this diverse country in the south-west Pacific. Combining historical and interpretive analyses with personal memories and extensive illustrations, the contributors examine such distinctive forms as red feather-money, shell valuables, body ornaments, war canoes, ancestral stones and wood carvings. Their essays discuss the materials, designs, manufacture, properties and meanings of artefacts from across the country. Solomon Islanders value these things variously as currency, heirlooms and commodities, for their beauty, power and sanctity, and as bearers of the historical identities and relationships which sustain them in a rapidly changing world. The volume brings together indigenous experts and leading international scholars as authors of the most geographically comprehensive anthology of Solomon Islands ethnography yet published. It engages with historical and contemporary issues from a range of perspectives, anthropological and archaeological, communal and personal, and makes a major new contribution to Pacific Islands studies.
CONTENTS:'Since Malinowski, anthropologists have known that valued objects of various kinds are of vital significance in Melanesian societies. Ranging over exchange-valuables, customary 'money', woven and carved objects to contemporary art, this book draws together cases past and present from across the Solomon Islands in a sophisticated and illuminating way.'
Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge
Introduction: Solomon Islands artefact traditions and their historical transformations - Ben Burt and Lissant Bolton; Chapter 1: Santa Cruz feather-money: Its demise and revival - Salome Samou; Chapter 2: Kesa and other shell valuables from Choiseul - Rhys Richards; Chapter 3: Shell valuables and history in the western Solomon Islands - Peter J. Sheppard; Chapter 4: Traditional money and artefacts in Malaita - Michael Kwa'ioloa; Chapter 5: Bata The adaptable shell-money of Langalanga, Malaita - Pei-yi Guo; Chapter 6: Clan valuables of Guadalcanal - Jackson Gege; Chapter 7: Collecting Makira Kakamora stones, shrine stones and the grounds for things in Arosi - Michael Scott; Chapter 8: Some family treasures of Santa Isabel - Evelyn Tetehu; Chapter 9: Regenerating local arts at the Kwaio Cultural Centre - David Akin; Chapter 10 : Western Solomons war canoes, past and present - Edvard Hviding; Chapter 11: Woriwori objects for Sale: Contemporary trade in wood carvings from Aorigi - Sandra Revolon; Chapter 12: Solomon Islands contempory arts: The Rennell-Bellona contribution - Jari Kupiainen; References.
Ben Burt is a Curator of Oceania at the British Museum.
Lissant Bolton is Keeper of the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum.
Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-21-8, £90.00 (GBP), $135.00 (USD)
Keeping the Faith
Syriac Christian Diasporas
Heidi Armbruster
Indigenous Christian communities in Turkey and the Middle East have declined dramatically in recent years, with large numbers emigrating in the face of violence, war and conflict. Keeping the Faith explores the impact of historical persecution and massmigration on the Suryoye, Syriac Orthodox Christians, from Turkey. Victims of genocide in 1915-16, subjugated by state nationalism in the Turkish Republic, part of the Turkish exodus of guest workers to Europe post 1960 and hemmed in by the Turkish-Kurdish conflict in the last decades of the twentieth century, they dispersed globally from eastern Anatolia. Only a few now remain in Turkey.
This book argues that these experiences migrated with those who re-settled abroad and became incorporated into their life story. Heidi Armbruster's ethnographic fieldwork both in rural villages and a monastery in their Anatolian homeland, and with migrants and their families in Berlin and Vienna, allows her to investigate a number of contexts in which Syriac Christians create identities for themselves, contested through the potent symbolic resources of the Aramaic language, Christian religion, and Assyrian and Aramean ethnicity.
Suryoye personal relationships to a collective history are not accessed through historians' accounts or institutional narratives, but through the intimate social worlds the author sensitively observes, in which experience and memories are formed, and in which individuals articulate their stake in a larger and more collective story. This discourse centres on 'community endangerment' and lies at the heart of negotiations of identity, family and group membership that are key to the spatial and historical processes of migration and diaspora. This account delineates with wonderful clarity how 'keeping the faith', has both imperilled and formed the foundations of continuity and community, for this fascinating group.
CONTENTS:
List of figures and maps; Acknowledgements; INTRODUCTION: Chapter 1 - Keeping the faith: An introduction; Chapter 2 - Trajectories of invisibility: The Suryoyo community in Turkey; PART I - BONDS OF HISTORY, LANGUAGE AND FAITH: Chapter 3 - The grief of history and the ethics of sacrifice; Chapter 4 - Securing language in a multilingual world; Chapter 5 - Scripts of belief; PART II - EMIGRATIONS AND NEW DEPARTURES: Chapter 6 - The routes to Europe; Chapter 7 - Assyrians and Aramaeans: Becoming a nation; PART III - BONDS OF FAMILY: Chapter 8 - Change and generation in Berlin; Chapter 9 - Establishing family in Vienna: Linked biographies; Chapter 10 - Belonging in time; Epilogue; Glossary; Notes; References; Index.
Heidi Armbruster is a social anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Southampton.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-29-4, £65.00 (GBP), $105.00 (USD)
The Line of Dust
Bororo Culture between Tradition, Mutation and Self-representation
Massimo Canevacci
In this volume Massimo Canevacci draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out together with Bororo of the Mato Grosso (Brazil), in particular Kleber Meritororeu, to examine the tensions, conflicts and exchanges between transformation and tradition. The practical as well as political keyword in his approach is self-representation. From this follows the incorporation of Bororo subjectivities into the text, and the focus on the emotional, philosophical and sacred aspects of their famous funeral ritual, in which their status as both performers and the interpreters is emphasized by their use of the digital camera.
The book takes its name from the line of dust laid down by a mestre dos cantos (master of chants), José Carlos Kuguri, between the anthropologist and himself: both a representation of an immaterial boundary, and a syncretic challenge to understand the transfiguration from a dead individual corpse to a living ancestral skull, an arara. Canevacci's answer is an assemblage of different narratives, in which an 'astonished' methodology of sensorial concepts, emotional photos and innovative logics traverses the entire Bororo funeral. He finds there is no dualism to life and death for the Bororo, but rather a porous, continuous transit and mixing of body and corpse, of humans and animals, of plants and deities; and that their sacred cosmology is time and again created and recreated via their wailing songs and circular dances, skin scarifications and bone painting. Their rituals are no mere repetition of tradition. They are also an attempt to respond to the changes inside and outside their aldeia (village), and to reenact their shifting cultures, subjectivities and identities.
CONTENTS:
Preface; Introduction; Chapter 1 - Dialogics; Chapter 2 - Transitions; Chapter 3 - Bororo funeral; Chapter 4 - Bororo myth; Chapter 5 - Sacred fetishisms - syncretic relativisms - mixing dusts; Afterword; Bibliography; Glossary; Index.
Massimo Canevacci is Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Digital Arts and Culture at the University of Rome La Sapienza and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study of the University São Paulo (IEA-USP). In 1995 he received The National Order of the Cruzeiro do Sul (Southern Cross) from the President of the Federal Republic of Brazil for his research.
Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-26-3, £70.00 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
Hearing and the Hospital
Sound, Listening, Knowledge and Experience
Tom Rice
An original ethnography of sound and listening in one of our major institutions, Hearing and the Hospital reveals the hospital to be a space in which several modes of listening are simultaneously in play and in which different layers of auditory knowledge and experience coexist. Engaging with Sound Studies, the Anthropology of the Senses, Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies in this volume, Tom Rice shows how sound and listening produce, articulate and mediate social relations inside the hospital, how listening acquires direction and focus within that environment, and how certain sounds become endowed with particular meanings and associations. He also exposes many of the sensory minutiae that both underpin and undermine the production of medical knowledge and skill. Hearing and the Hospital creates an acoustic interrogation of hospital life, and in doing so questions accepted ideas about the sense of hearing itself.
'There's a great deal to admire in Tom Rice's ethnography of the aural politics of the hospital. First because it represents a unique conjunction of the ethnography of sound and senses with medical anthropology and social studies of science. Next because it patiently details how sound as a way of knowing so deeply informs social practices of medical listening. And finally because it is so successful in revealing both how hospitals and bodies pulse as acoustic spaces, and how patients and doctors professionalize, personalize, and participate as situated listeners.'
Steven Feld, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music, University of New Mexico
CONTENTS:
Introduction; Chapter 1 - Soundselves: Sound, Surveillance and Selfhood on Hospital Wards; Chapter 2 - Broadcasting the Body: The Private Made Public in Hospital Soundscapes; Chapter 3 - Acoustemology of the Body: A Brief History of Diagnostic Listening; Chapter 4 - 'The Hallmark of a doctort': The Stethoscope and the Making of Medical Identity; Chapter 5 - Learning to Listen: Auscultation and the Transmission of Auditory Knowledge; Chapter 6 - 'Beautiful Murmurs': Stethoscopic Listening and Acoustic Objectification; Chapter 7 - Auto-auscultation: Listening to the Self; Chapter 8 - Deathoscope: Auscultation, Echocardiography and the 'Death of the Stethoscope'; Conclusion; Appendix - The Doctor; References; Index.
Tom Rice is is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Exeter, and specializes in auditory culture. As well as writing and teaching on sound he has produced audio pieces including the BBC Radio 4 feature The Art of Water Music.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-24-9, £60.00 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
The Anthropology of Persianate Societies Vol. 2
Les Lions en Pierre Sculptée chez les Bakhtiari
Description et significations de sculptures zoomorphes dans une société tribale du sud-ouest de l'Iran
Pedram Khosronejad
This impressive work of scholarship brings together anthropology, religion, popular culture, and history in its focus on Bakhtiari lion tombstones that have remained largely unknown and hence little studied. Although lions have long figured in Iranian history, art and myth as symbols of rulership, power, religious leadership or as steadfast guardians, art historians have tended to concentrate their attentions on court traditions and the role of lions in popular culture, especially in religion, has remained little considered until this book.
Funerary stone lions are to be found throughout western Iran, but are concentrated in the summer and winter pasture areas of the Bakhtiari, today's provinces of Chahar Mahal and Bakhtiari, west of Isfahan, and Khuzistan.
This highly illustrated colour volume draws on meticulous fieldwork and includes over three hundred photographs, drawings, charts and maps. The recording of this rare sculptural heritage, dating from the 16th century to the early 20th century, has become ever more pressing as some tombstones have been taken from their original settings and re-erected in parks, others damaged by the elements and some recently broken up to be used in road repairs.
'Pedram Khosronejad's Les Lions en Pierre Sculptée chez les Bakhtiari is to be greatly welcomed... [It is ]based on extensive fieldwork and represents something of a rescue project....This volume, however, goes further in raising three inter-related issues: why have these important artifacts been neglected even by specialists; how do they relate to a richer understanding of Iranian art and culture; and how does vernacular art relate to the accepted traditions of Iranian art?.... This volume will prove to be important in bringing the lion tombstones to a larger public attention.'
G. R. Garthwaite, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor in Asian Studies,Emeritus & Professor of History, Emeritus
Pedram Khosronejad is a Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews.
Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-22-5, £130.00 (GBP), $215.00 (USD)
The Making of Asmat Art
Indigenous Art in a World Perspective
Nick Stanley
Why has Asmat art, from a remote and small south-coast West Papuan society, had such a significant and prolonged impact on the world stage? This book explores the way major collections were made and examines the motivations of the collectors, their relationships with those from whom they purchased and the circumstances of the exchange. It also considers the involvement of artists and film-makers, anthropologists, representatives of the civil authorities and missionaries. Asmat artists have maintained their unique appeal through constant stylistic innovation and by engagement with new publics, both locally and internationally, as exemplified by the recent displays of women's weaving alongside the men's carved wooden shields, drums and figures. Despite accelerating social changes, Asmat art continues to thrive as a compelling and transformative Melanesian presence in the global art world.
'Awe-inspiring works of Asmat art loom large in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and in dozens of other great museums around the world. Nick Stanley's engagingly written study provides the best history to date of the making of Asmat art traditions and of their avid acquisition by successive European and north American collectors. Most importantly, the book foregrounds the creativity and imagination of Asmat artists themselves. This is a book that will be welcomed by everyone interested in the arts of the Pacific.'
Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge
CONTENTS:
List of illustrations; Preliminary notes; Prologue; Introduction - Absent presences; Chapter 1 - The historical appearance of Asmat; Chapter 2 - Asmat engagement with the Dutch colonial world, 1949-62; Chapter 3 - Museum scholars and collectors; Chapter 4 - Anthropological missionaries and the Indonesian state; Chapter 5 - Making carving work: Development programs in the 1970s; Chapter 6 - The Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress: The revitalization of tradition; Chapter 7 - Consolidating new art forms; Chapter 8 - Visual adventures; Conclusion - Dazzling the anthropologists; References; Index.
Nick Stanley is an Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, The British Museum and Emeritus Professor and former Director of Research, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham City University.
Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-20-1, £70.00 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
How Democracy Works
An Ethnographic Theory Of Politics
Marcio Goldman
In this book, Marcio Goldman provides an interpretation of a 'big' theme - the functioning of a modern political system - based on the ethnographic analysis of a 'small' one - the political involvement of a group of African-Brazilian people living in the town of Ilheus in the north-east of Brazil, and belonging to Afro-Brazilian religions, black movement factions, families and neighbourhoods. By giving a description 'from the native's point of view' he leads us to a truly anthropological perception of modern democracies, showing how we need to take seriously the actions and the reflections of those generally viewed as passive, manipulated, ignorant and not really interested in the political game. Only this can lead us to an 'ethnographic theory of politics'.
'A ground-breaking work of real importance - not only to the anthropology of politics, but to the continuing development of theory and epistemology in anthropology and the social sciences at large.'
'Goldman has masterfully analysed the terrain of politics in this town, illuminating not only its local specifics.... but what he calls the 'constitutive ambiguities' of democracy in Brazil - and indeed of democracy as a whole. In the process he robustly challenges various accepted wisdoms about poor people's political choices, gives new life to classic anthropological ideas like 'segmentation', and strips away the veil that, for many of us, obscures 'how democracy works'. He achieves this ambitious task with consummate skill, combining fine-grained detail with bold theoretical insight.'
Deborah James, London School of Economics
'If the intellectual contemplation of collectively instituted irrationality is what got anthropology going in the first place, then it must, at some point, address such entities as politicians, and why people vote for them. Read this book and learn.'
Peter Gow, University of St Andrews
CONTENTS:
Acknowledgements; Prologue - The drums of the dead and the drums of the living; Introduction - The anthropology of politics and an ethnographic theory of democracy; Chapter 1 - 2002: Memorial of Black Culture of Ilhéus; Chapter 2 - 1996: Research; Chapter 3 - 1992: Afro-Cultural Centre; Chapter 4 - 2000: Elections; Chapter 5 - 1998-9: Carnival; Chapter 6 - 2004: Candidacy; Glossary; Notes; Bibliography;Index.
Marcio Goldman s Associate Professor in the Postgraduate Programme of Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (National Museum, Brazil), and a researcher for the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and for the Estado do Rio Foundation for the Support of Research (FAPERJ). He is the author of Razão e Diferença: Afetividade, Racionalidade e Relativismo no Pensamento de Lévy-Bruhl (1994); Alguma Antropologia (1999). Como Funciona a Democracia: Uma Teoria Etnográfica da Política was originally published in Brazil in 2006 to great acclaim. In this translation, this groundbreaking book is brought to the English speaking world for the first time.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-15-7, £65.00 (GBP), $105.00 (USD)
We Don't Do Dots
Aboriginal Art and Culture in Wilcannia, New South Wales
Lorraine Gibson
What does it mean when whites say that certain Australian Aboriginal people have 'no culture' but accept that they have art? Why are notions and images of Aboriginal art and culture still dominated by those from the centre and north of the Australian continent, even though most Aborigines reside in the south-east? This book explores these questions, why they matter, and to whom they matter.
It draws on extensive fieldwork with Barkindji Aboriginal people in the small country town of Wilcannia, New South Wales. The richly textured ethnographic analysis examines how notions of Aboriginal art and Aboriginal culture are wielded as weapons of power in everyday racism in Australia. In so doing, it demonstrates how Aboriginal people deploy ideas of art, artists and culture to assert individual and group identity, and to subvert dominant culture ideas and ideals which operate as tools of oppression, distancing and harm.
'At the heart of Gibson's fascinating study is a conundrum: Wilcannia Aboriginal art is flourishing although Aboriginal culture is said to be nonexistent. She has produced an engaging and challenging account of social life as well as a serious analysis of deeply fraught relationships among the townspeople. The numerous photographs and paintings make this a rich and exciting publication.'
Gillian Cowlishaw, The University of Sydney
CONTENTS:
About this book; Acknowledgements; Illustrations; Introduction - Just any day in Wilcannia; Chapter 1 - Plenty of Aborigines, but no culture; Chapter 2 - Art and culture: The two main things, right? Chapter 3 - Badger Bates: Granny Moysey's baby; Chapter 4 - Stakeholders and their dispositions: Creating and selling 'art' and 'artists'; Chapter 5 - Art as an agent of social relations; Chapter 6 Big Murray Butcher - 'We still doin' it'; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.
Lorraine Gibson's research has explored contemporary Aboriginal identity and the way it is expressed, understood and valued by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Appointed to a Research Fellowship at the Australian Museum, Sydney in 2006, she went on to curate the exhibition 'Life on the Darling' at the museum in 2008/9, bringing the art of the Barkindji before a national and international audience. Recipient of the prestigious Vice Chancellor's Innovation Research Fellowship at the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion (CRSI), Macquarie University, from 2008-10, the author is currently working with Aboriginal women and children in Alice Springs' Town Camps who are affected by alcohol and volatile substance misuse.
Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-09-6, £80.00 (GBP), $130.00 (USD)
Iranian Sacred Defence Cinema
Religion, Martyrdom and National Identity
Edited by Pedram Khosronejad
While the cinema of post-revolutionary Iran is internationally acknowledged, the world outside Iran has been ignorant of the Iranian war films that are the subject of this pioneering book. Over 200 Iranian feature films concentrating primarily on fighting and military operations have appeared since the 1980s and the beginning of the war between Iran and Iraq. This book presents a detailed exploration of the 'Sacred Defence cinema' established by Seyed Morteza Avini, a cinema that directly connects this war to the faith and religious belief of volunteer guardians of the revolution. These films remain the primary vehicles of the Islamic state in Iran for the preservation and memorization of the theme of martyrdom. As the distinguished film scholar, Hamid Dabashi writes in his Foreword to the book: 'If national cinemas are predicated on national traumas, in the volume that Pedram Khosronejad has put together we are at the heart of Iranian cinema.'
The eight-year Iran-Iraq war near the end of the 20th century renewed the horrors of the First World War near the start of the century - causing millions of casualties and untold devastation on both sides. It also resulted in a vigorous and dynamic cinematic output in Iran, producing some of the most ardent Islamist political movies, Shii-inflected spiritual films, and original theorization of what constitutes an ' Islamic cinema' . Khosronejad has managed to amass an astute and fascinating anthology - the first in English - that brings together an international roster of scholars to deal with the complexities and varieties of war fiction films, documentaries, television series and auteur directors.
Prof. Hamid Naficy, Northwestern University
CONTENTS:
Dedication; Foreword - Hamid Dabashi; Acknowledgements; Poetry; Transliteration; Contributors; Introduction: The Iran-Iraq War and the creation of Sacred Defence cinema - Pedram Khosronejad; Chapter 1: Iranian Sacred Defence cinema and the ambivalent consequences of globalization: A study of the films of Ebrahim Hatamikia - Shahab Esfandyari; Chapter 2: Language and war symbols in the films of Ebrahim Hatamikia - Michaël Abecassis; Chapter 3: Iranian war cinema: The art of remembering pain - Sholeh Shahrokhi; Chapter 4: Images of women in Iranian war cinema: The difficulties in the representation of women in Iranian war films - Pershang Sadegh-Vaziri; Chapter 5: The aesthetics, techniques and technology of combat in Iranian narrative war films: A historical perspective - Reza Poudeh and Bahman Zonoozi; Chapter 6: How can faith be filmed on the battlefront and experienced by TV spectators? - Agnès Devictor; Chapter 7: Iranian war films: Entertainment and propaganda - Mohammad R. Ghanoonparvar; Morteza Avini filmography; War documentary filmography; War fiction filmography; Index
Pedram Khosronejad is a Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and the editor of several publications: The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shi'ism (2011) and Unburied Memories: The Politics of Bodies, and the Material Culture of Sacred Defense Martyrs in Iran (2011).
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-17-1, £60.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
Contesting the State
The Dynamics of Resistance and Control
Edited by Angela Hobart and Bruce Kapferer
The state is frequently conceived as a universal, although one apparently extraordinarily difficult to define. It often appears in academic discourse and, especially, in the popular imagination as an abstraction, usually nebulous, grasped as pervasive - a spectre to be feared. In this book, distinguished scholars from around the world take issue with this purported universality, exploring alternative imaginings of the state, of power and of global processes at the margins
Taking an anthropological perspective based in diverse ethnographic contexts marginal to Europe and North America, if not beyond their controlling influence in globalizing realities, this volume reveals different complexes of power, as well as processes that are external to power and often against it (contra Foucault, and as Pierre Clastres has famously argued).
The authors stress not only the different structures of institutional power, but also the persistence or transmutation of local kinds of power and their relevant cosmologies into contemporary globalized settings. They find innovative kinds of modernity, reconfigurations that have effects that cannot be reduced to over-generalized and often intensely Eurocentric concepts of power and the kinds of subjectivities realized by them. In this, the volume opens up the diversity of experiences of the state and offers new directions for its study.
CONTENTS:
Acknowledgements; Contributors; Introduction: Forces in the production of the state - Bruce Kapferer and Christopher C. Taylor; Chapter 1: The phenomenology of a stateless society: Non-dualism, identity and hierarchical anarchy among the Nuer - T.M.S. Evens; Chapter 2: Society against the tyrant: Power, violence and the poetics of an Amazonian egalitarianism - Joanna Overing; Chapter 3: Tribalism and power in Iraq: Saddam Hussein' s 'house' - Hosham Dawod; Chapter 4: An altered state?: Continuity, change and cosmology in Rwandan notions of the state - Christopher C. Taylor; Chapter 5: Post-war realities in Sri Lanka: From the crime of war to the crime of peace in Sri Lanka? - Bruce Kapferer and Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne; Chapter 6: The Hindu epics, theatre and the Indonesian state: Violence and cosmic regeneration - a Balinese perspective - Angela Hobart; Chapter 7: The death of divine kingship in Nepal: Nepal's move from autocratic monarchy to fragile republican state - Bal Gopal Shrestha; Chapter 8: Expectations of the state: An exile returns to his country - Laurie Kain Hart; Chapter 9: Diametric to concentric dualism: Cosmopolitan intellectuals and the re-configuration of the state - Jonathan Friedman; Index.
Angela Hobart is Director of the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, Switzerland, and a Research Fellow, Medical Anthropology Department, University College London, UK.
Bruce Kapferer is Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Bergen University, Norway, Adjunct Professor at James Cook University, Australia and Honorary Professor at University College London, UK.
Published in association with the Centro Incontri Umani.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-13-3, £65.00 (GBP), $105.00 (USD)
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-907774-35-5, £30.00 (GBP), $42.50 (USD)
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The Anthropology of Persianate Societies Vol. 1
Saints and their Pilgrims in Iran and Neighbouring Countries
Edited by Pedram Khosronejad
The importance and ramifications of saints, sainthood and pilgrimage in contemporary Iran and neighbouring countries are great, yet the academic conceptualizations of them and their entailments are sorely lacking. This book places the saints and their pilgrims in sharper focus, and offers important correctives to all-too-common
n misunderstandings, the foremost of which is the erroneous portrayal of Islam as primarily a body of legal doctrine and corresponding practice, and the associated principle that we can 'know' Islam if we 'know' Islamic law.
In an effort to challenge such a limited, and limiting, perspective, this volume suggests that both anthropology, insofar as it can focus on experience and practice, and history, insofar as it can encompass more than an institutional/political 'names and dates' discourse, can reveal something of the dynamism of the faith, as more than the sum of its laws. The approaches demonstrated in this book on Shiite Pilgrimage offer windows into the beliefs and lives of 'ordinary' people, past and present, and thereby bring forth agendas akin to those of 'subaltern studies'. Finally, the memorializing documented in these chapters provides evidence, past and present, of widespread desires for a more concrete, even immanent, relationship that is direct, unmediated and, at least partly, involves forms of intercession - even though such desires for immanence in the Islamic world have previously been considered as limited to devotees of the Sufi saints or the Shi'i Imams or their progeny.
CONTENTS:
Poetry; A note on transliteration; About the authors; About the project; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Anthropology, Islam and sainthood - Pedram Khosronejad; Chapter 1: The sanctity of Karbala in Shiite thought - Khalid Sindawi; Chapter 2: Pilgrimages to the Iraqi 'Atabat from Qajar era Iran - Tomoko Morikawa; Chapter 3: Listening, non-knowledge and the auditory body: Understanding Sufi zikr ritual and sama as sites of aesthetic experience - Seema Golestaneh; Chapter 4: Between history and memory: A case study of a martyr mausoleum in north of Iran - Morvarid Ayaz; Chapter 5: Innovation in the tradition of saint veneration in Turkey during the twentieth century: Venerating Nasreddin Hodja in Aksehir - Hakki Gurkas; Chapter 6: The revival of Shia rituals in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime: Permanence and evolution - Pierre-Jean Luizard; Index.
Pedram Khosronejad is a Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and the editor of several publications: The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shi'ism (2011) and Unburied Memories: The Politics of Bodies, and the Material Culture of Sacred Defense Martyrs in Iran (2011).
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-14-0, £55.00(GBP), $85.00 (USD)
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Notes on the Cognitive Texture of an Oral Mind
Kitawa, a Melanesian Culture
Giancarlo M. G. Scoditti, with a foreword by Pierre Maranda
This book marks the culmination of Giancarlo M.G. Scoditti's renowned series of publications on the cultural production of the northern Massim island of Kitawa, Papua New Guinea. It explores how the Nowau 'creators of images' conceive of the way their artistic compositions come about - sketching Kitawan cognitive philosophy and aesthetic practice. Describing how for them images grow like the loops of the Nautilus shell - one of nature's prominant demonstrations of the logarithmic spiral and the golden section - Scoditti's analysis of Kitawan cognitive and artistic principles resonates with Lévi-Strauss's work on myth and Kant's notion of the mental schema, and makes a ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of the 'oral mind'.
CONTENTS:
Foreword by Pierre Maranda; Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I: 1 - The thinkers and makers of oral aesthetics; 2 - The composer of visual texts; 3 - The interpreter of visual texts; Part II: 4 - The mental faculties and the definition of oral image; 5 - Image, graphic sign and figure; 6 - Forms of memorization and conservation; Part III: 7 - The oral mind; 8 - The thinking and making of oral images; 9 - Mind, reason, and the unwritten cognitive philosophy; 10 - The poetic formulas and the reason; 11 - Crowns and corollas as visual metaphors of the mental faculties; Conclusion; References; Index.
Giancarlo M. G. Scoditti is Professor of Ethnology at the Department of Classical Archaeology and History of Ancient Art, University of Urbino in Italy. Since 1973 he has carried out extensive field research on both Kitawa and Kiriwina Islands (Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea), focusing his attention on the verbal as well as non-verbal oral expressions of those cultures. He began by analysing the aesthetic and symbolic meaning of kula canoes' prowboards to their carvers. Then he worked on poetic formulas chanted on different occasions by inhabitants of Kitawa. Currently his researches concern the analysis of interpretations of the text of the myth of foundation narrated by the leaders of the four clans living on Kitawa and Kiriwina island.
Full Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-08-9, £70.00 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
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Anthropology Matters Vol. 6
The Shark Warrior of Alewai
A Phenomenology of Melanesian Identity
Deborah Van Heekeren
The first anthropological monograph published on the Vula'a people of south-eastern Papua New Guinea, The Shark Warrior of Alewai considers oral histories and Western historical documents that cover a period of more than 200 years in the light of an ethnography of contemporary Christianity.
Van Heekeren's phenomenology of Vula'a storytelling reveals how the life of one man, the Shark Warrior, comes to contain the identity of a people. Drawing on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, she goes on to establish the essential continuities that underpin the reproduction of Vula'a identity, and to demonstrate how these give a distinctive form to Vula'a responses to historical change. In an approach that brings together the fields of anthropology, history and philosophy, the book questions conventional anthropological categories of exchange, gender and kinship, as well as the problematic dichotomization of myth and history, to argue for an anthropology grounded in ontology.
CONTENTS:Preface and acknowledgements; Introduction; Chapter 1 - The people who fish; Chapter 2 - The life and death of Kila Wari; Chapter 3 - Of genealogy and place; Chapter 4 - The problem of history; Chapter 5 - The coming to be of Vula'a exchange; Chapter 6 - Of body, being and food; Chapter 7 - Singing for being; Chapter 8 - From myth as narrative to mythic being; Conclusion - Identity from end to end; Bibliography
Deborah Van Heekeren is a lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University Sydney. Her research interests include the cosmology, myth, history and Christianity of the Vula'a of Papua New Guinea.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-03-4, £60.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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Made in Oceania
Social movements, cultural heritage and the state in the Pacific
Edvard Hviding and Knut M. Rio
Throughout the Pacific, cultural heritage is both a powerful idiom in post-colonial state-making, and a potent mobilizing force in diverse grassroots social movements, many of which have been misunderstood as 'cargo-cults' or 'inventions of tradition' in anthropological analyses. This collection recognizes cultural heritage as a ground for creativity and experimentation with social forms, and pin-points both the conflicting values at play and their potentially subversive power. Describing key social processes in Hawaii, Tahiti, Pohnpei, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and Australia, it explores alternative ways of configuring authority and organizing the state, as well as highlighting the potential in local social movements to influence culture and politics at the national level.
Taking the pulse of important contemporary social movements in the region, this volume is key for understanding the development of the modern nation-state in the Pacific.
CONTENTS:Preface; Introduction: Pacific made: social movements between cultural heritage and the state - Knut M. Rio and Edvard Hviding; Chapter 1: Re-imagining the economy in Vanuatu: an interview with Ralph Regenvanu - Ralph Regenvanu and Haidy Geismar; Chapter 2: Re-placing the state in the Western Solomon Islands: the political rise of the Christian Fellowship Church - Edvard Hviding; Chapter 3: Voyaging, cultural heritage, and rites of passage: the Hawaiian transformation of Pacific and global space - Rolf Scott; Chapter 4: Nan Madol on Pohnpei: the future of its past - David Hanlon; Chapter 5: From kastam to kalsa? Leadership, cultural heritage and modernization in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea - Steffen Dalsgaard and Ton Otto; Chapter 6: The rise of the Pleiades: The quest for identity and the politics of tradition in French Polynesia - Guillaume Alévêque; Chapter 7: Dancing diplomacy: performance and the politics of protocol in Australia - Rosita Henry; Chapter 8: The Makiran underground army: kastom mysticism and ontology politics in south-east Solomon Islands - Michael W. Scott; Chapter 9: High chief, waetman and the codification of ritual objects in Vanuatu - Knut M. Rio; Chapter 10: Personhood, cargo, and Melanesian social unities - Lamont Lindstrom; Chapter 11: Solomon Islands cultural policy? a brief history of practice - Lawrence Foana'ota and Geoffrey White; Chapter 5512: Describing knowledge and practice in Vanuatu - Lissant Bolton; Chapter 13: Are the grassroots growing? Intangible cultural heritage lawmaking in Fiji and in Oceania -Guido Carlo Pigliasco.
Edvard Hviding is Professor and Head of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway, and Director of the Bergen Pacific Studies research group. He is an Adjunct Professor of anthropology at James Cook University, Australia and an Honorary Fellow of the Cairns Institute.
Knut M. Rio is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway, and is responsible for the ethnographic collections at the Bergen University Museum.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-06-5, £65.00 (GBP), $100.00 (USD)
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-907774-11-9, £30.00 (GBP), $45.00 (USD)
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The End of Anthropology?
Holger Jebens and Karl-Heinz Kohl
Decolonisation, modernisation, globalisation, the crisis of representation, and the 'cultural turn' in neighbouring disciplines have unsettled anthropology to such an extent that the field's foundations, the subjects of its study as well as its methods and concepts, appear to be eroded.
It is now time to take stock and either abandon anthropology as a fundamentally untenable or superfluous project, or to set it on more solid foundations. In this volume some of the world's leading anthropologists - including Vincent Crapanzano, Maurice Godelier, Ulf Hannerz, and Adam Kuper - do just that. Reflecting on how to meet the manifold institutional, theoretical, methodological, and epistemological challenges to the field, as well as on the continued, if not heightened, importance of anthropology in a world where diversity and cultural difference are becoming ever more important economically, politically, and legally, they set upon the task of reconstructing anthropology's foundations and firming up its stance vis-à-vis these challenges.
CONTENTS:With a backward glance at earlier predictions of the demise of anthropology, the essays present a confident account of the future of the discipline. Defining in clear terms what it is that anthropologists do, a well-chosen group of distinguished contributors confront the diversity and internal distinctions that characterize the field, weigh the seriousness of the trend toward interdisciplinary studies in the human sciences, and redefine the strengths of the anthropological mode of knowledge production.
Shirley Lindenbaum, Professor Emerita, City University of New York
Introduction - Karl-Heinz Kohl; 1: The crisis of anthropology - Holger Jebens; 2: The original sin of anthropology - Adam Kuper; 3: What ends with the end of anthropology? - Patricia Spyer; 4: The end of anthropology, again: on the future of an in/discipline - John Comaroff; 5: The end - the ends - of anthropology - Vincent Crapanzano; 6: Whatever happened to the spirit of adventure - Signe Howell; 7: Transitions: notes on sociocultural anthropology's present and its transnational potential - Andre Gingrich; 8: Diversity is our business - Ulf Hannerz; 9: In today's world, anthropology is more important than ever - Maurice Godelier; 10: The end - Mark Münzel; Contributors; Index
Holger Jebens is Senior Research Fellow at the Frobenius Institute and Managing Editor of Paideuma.
Karl-Heinz Kohl holds the chair of Cultural Anthropology at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main and is Director of the Frobenius Institute.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-05-8, £60.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-907774-28-7, £30.00 (GBP), $45.00 (USD)
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A Northern Chin Tradition
Architecture, History, Life, Death and Feasting in Sukte-Kamhau
S. Khup Chin Pau
In this volume we are provided with a unique insider's perspective on the rich culture of the northern Chin area of Burma/Myanmar by S. Khup Chin Pau, who, as grandson of Chief Hau Chin Khup, grew up amongst the feasts of merit and clan funerals of Kamhau chiefs at the height of their power and opulence. His account of the historical traditions of the area gains further depth and verisimilitude from exclusive access to rare documents and recordings of previous generations, including the personal notebooks of Pu Vung Za Kham, Secretary to Chief Pum Za Mang.
Beginning with the traditional architecture of the Kamhaus, Sukte and Siyins of the Northern Chin Hills, the book moves on to present the Sukte story in both poetry and song, and a local history of Sukte-Kamhau. The Sukte-Kamhau customs pertaining to the entirety of the life-cycle are described, including coming of age, courtship, marriage, the birth of a baby and the politically important communal feasts, funerals and memorials. A direct representation of peerless primary material, this highly illustrated work presents a wealth of data that will constitute a valuable resource for local people and scholars alike.
CONTENTS:Foreword; Acknowledgements; Chapter 1 - Architecture of the northern Chins; Architectural illustrations; Chapter 2 - The Sukte story; Memorials at khua mual village portals; Chapter 3 - Sukte and Kamhau; Four generations of Kamhau chiefs; Chapter 4 - Kamhau customs; Buuk and peeng; Chapter 5 - Communal feasts; Music and feasting; Chapter 6 - Feasts of merit; Trapping; Chapter 7 - Propitiation of spirits; Work and play; Chapter 8 - Death, funerals, memorials and crypts; Weaving and ceremonial blankets; Conclusion - Kamhau culture into the third millennium; Heirlooms and hair; Appendix I - Kamhau glossary; Teeklui pottery; Appendix II - Anthology of songs; Bamboo, cane, reed and wood; Appendix III - Kamhau customary law; Guns, powder-horns, swords and ceremonial shields; Appendix IV - English to Kamhau poetic diction (selection); Education and the church; Appendix V - Dictionary of Kamhau poetic diction (selection); The funeral of the last of the Kamhau chiefs; Appendix VI - Kamhau names and their meanings; Appendix VII - Panmun family network; Appendix VIII - Zubeel line-up for a four-day funeral; Appendix IX - Teizang meat distribution; Appendix X - Kamhau, Burmese and scientific botanical names; Selected references; About the author.
S. Khup Chin Pau served as a career officer in the Myanmar Army Corps of Engineers for 27 years, retiring as a major in 1989. He now lives in Singapore with his wife, Rita Man Lam Cing, who is the granddaughter of Chief Pum Za Mang.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-02-7, 340 pp., 108 plates - £50.00 (GBP), $80.00 (USD)
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Every Day's a Festival!
Diversity on Show
Edited by Susanne Küchler, László Kürti and Hisham Elkadi
Despite their ubiquity and cultural prominence, the academic study of arts festivals has long been neglected. The burgeoning festivals industry is, however, firmly embedded in both the arts funding and weekly calendar of European cities, and there is no doubt that festivals are fast becoming a defining feature of urban life in the twenty-first century. An assessment of their nature and impact is more pressing than ever before.
The contributors to this volume explore the modern urban festival and the difference it makes to the experience and management of diversity in the city. Their research reveals an unsettling coupling of the celebration of local diversity with institutional amnesia, in which the memory of a festival hardly ever outlasts its funding. This book documents a key phenomenon of our time, the supplanting of community-based remembering with the repetitive structures of events whose historic and interpretative depth is lost amid a spiraling velocity of 'festivalization'.
CONTENTS:Introduction; Section 1 - People and Traditions: Chapter 1: Festivals in India, diversity in celebrations: Gujarat and Bengal - Alaknanda Patel; Chapter 2: Every day is a festival: feasts and fantasies in Hungary - László Kürti; Chapter 3: Sibiu European Capital of Culture 2007: Saxonness as a Romanian cultural brand - Monica Stroe; Chapter 4: Sacred time after emigration: a study of the Holy Mother Festival in Zavoj - Mirjana Lozanovska; Section 2 - Place and Time: Chapter 5: Festivals as a tool to integrate cultural identities in the city of Belfast - Hisham Elkadi; Chapter 6: Mapping festivals in London - Susanne Küchler and Rossella Lo Conte; Chapter 7: Festivals and music: negotiating culture, identity and place - David Beynon; Section 3 - Art and Practices: Chapter 8: Art flow-art nexus: contemporary forms of autonomous emerging festivals - Ljiljana Simic; Chapter 9: Festivals and ethnic diversity in The Hague: a contemporary landscape - Manuela Hernández Sánchez.
Susanne Küchler is Professor of Anthropology at University College London, Department of Anthropology and one of the scientific leaders for the Sustainable Development in a Diverse World (SUSDIV) project funded by the Sixth Network of Excellence (NoE) Programme.
László Kürti teaches at the University of Miskolc, and the Karoli Gaspar University in Budapest, Hungary and has conducted fieldwork in North America, Romania and Hungary. From 2001 to 2006 he served as the Secretary of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Hisham Elkadi, also a scientific leader for the SUSDIV project funded by the Sixth Network of Excellence Programme, is Head of The School of Architecture and Building at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-9077740-1-0, £60.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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Anthropology Matters Vol. 5
Mutuality and Empathy
Self and Other in the Ethnographic Encounter
Edited by Anne Sigfrid Grønseth and Dona Lee Davis
Focusing on issues of empathy and mutuality, and self and other, as experienced in the everyday challenges of doing participant-observation fieldwork, this volume makes a significant contribution to rethinking the experiential and conceptual construction of the field. The contributors adopt a critical and self reflexive approach that goes beyond issues of voice and representation raised by early postmodern anthropology, to grapple with issues concerning the nature of knowledge transmission that lie at the very heart of the ethnographic effort. They explore how multiple modes of attending, awareness and sense making can shape the ethnographic process. Of note are those unanticipated, less palpable forms of communication that are peripheral to or transcend more formalized and structured research methods and agendas. Among these are empathy, intuition, somatic modes of attention and/or embodied knowledge and identification, as well as, shared sensory experiences and aesthetics. By the elaboration of such concepts the volume as a whole offers a substantial elaboration of a phenomenological approach.
CONTENTS:Foreword: The universality and the morality of fieldwork - Nigel Rapport; Introduction: Mutuality and empathy: self and other in the ethnographic encounter - Anne Sigfrid Grønseth; Chapter 1: Getting tamed to silent rules: experiencing 'the other' in Apiao, southern Chile - Giovanna Bacchiddu; Chapter 2: Cultural seascapes as embodied knowledge - Anita Maurstad; Chapter 3: Sharing dreams: involvement in the Other's cosmology - Guido Sprenger; Chapter 4: The status of 'non-existing' knowledge: how I came to share some aspects of Malay cosmology - Anne Kathrine Larsen; Chapter 5: Using storytelling to describe and analyze fieldwork experiences of knowledge generation - Theresa Dirndorfer Anderson; Chapter 6: Cultivating taste and class in the garden - Jane Nadel-Klein; Chapter 7: Us--Them, I--We and Me--You: navigating hyphens of identity and alterity among sets of identical twins - Dona Lee Davis and Dorothy I. Davis; Chapter 8: Sharing experiences with Tamil refugees in northern Norway: body and emotion as methodological tools - Anne Sigfrid Grønseth; Conclusion: Speaking-with and feeling-with: the phenomenology of knowing the other - Lisette Josephides; Index.
Dona Lee Davis has taught Anthropology at the University of South Dakota and the University of Tromsø. Her areas of research and publication include women's health, psychological and medical anthropology, human sexuality and North Atlantic fishing communities. She is currently working on a book about identical twins.
Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-5-6, £55.00 (GBP), $85.00 (USD)
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Anthropology Matters Vol. 4
Sin, Sex and Stigma
A Pacific Response to HIV and AIDS
Lawrence James Hammar
What happens to national HIV programmes when Science and Religion collide and when both ignore the setting of most infections: in or on the way to marriage?
HIV and AIDS are serious social and public-health problems in Papua New Guinea. After long delays, community-, business- and faith-based organizations have launched an impressive multi-sectoral response. But health-service systems are overwhelmed by the need for HIV antibody testing and counselling, and for treatment with antiretrovirals. Foreign notions of epidemiology, such as 'sex worker', 'risk group' and 'rural/urban', have gained traction despite massive empirical evidence as to their inapplicability. Each of these has fuelled, rather than confronted, the gendered contradictions of marriage and sexuality in Papua New Guinea. Quantitative approaches have fetishized numbers at the expense of enabling changes in social-structure.
Part One of Sin, Sex and Stigma draws upon ethnography, public discourse and archival data to critique public-health policy and epidemiological modelling. Christian-inflected sex-negativity and anti-condom rhetoric are shown to have stymied prevention initiatives. Part Two enlists experts in antiretroviral therapy, sex work activism and ethnography in dialogues focused on strengthening the national response to HIV and AIDS.
CONTENTS:A 'hot glow of anger' compelled Lawrence Hammar to write this fiery account of the many factors preventing successful HIV and AIDS interventions in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on his extensive research experience on sexuality and sex work, on cultural and Christian ideologies, and on outrageous stories of denial, abuse, and stigma, Hammar paints a rich and devastating portrait of the history of AIDS in PNG. Read it and weep. Lawrence Hammar is an inspiring reminder for AIDS scholars and activists everywhere of the differences committed social scientists can make to the way things are done.
Leslie Butt, Dept. of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria
A bold, accessible, and rousingly angry book. Hammar's examination of the problematic reliance on conventional epidemiological categories - such as high risk groups - is powerful, as is his analysis of the ways in which questionable HIV prevalence and behavioral data become privileged over thorough ethnographic research. Hammar's investigation of gendered violence, sexual networking, and the dissemination of condom misinformation is unflinching.
Holly Wardlow, University of Toronto
Foreword (Deborah Gewertz); Acknowledgments; Acronyms and Abbreviations Used; Part One: Sexual networking and sexually transmitted dis-ease in the Pacific; Chapter 1 - Introduction: HIV, human rights and the hot glow of anger; Chapter 2 - The women in traffic: Tu kina bus in town and country; Chapter 3 - HIV in history: Serosurveillance and other studies, 1987-2007; Chapter 4 - HIV in discourse: Problems and prospects of the national response, 1987-2007; Chapter 5 - Foreign objects and cognitive dissonance: The strange waters of anti-condom discourse; Part Two: What the experts (still) don't get; Chapter 6 - Courting disaster: HIV and AIDS, secrets and sexscapes in Indonesian Papua (with Sarah Hewat); Chapter 7 - 'What do they expect - angels with dirty faces?': Sexual identities and networking in Papua New Guinea (with Alison Murray); Chapter 8 - 'Trust me, I'm a doctor': Adverse events, side effects and other problems of HAART in PNG (with Mark Boyd); Chapter 9 - Epilogue: The sickness in society; Bibliography; Index
Lawrence Hammar conducted ethnographic fieldwork from 1990-2 on Daru island, capital of Papua New Guinea's Western Province, and worked alongside Papua New Guinean colleagues from 2003-6 during a nationwide study of HIV, AIDS, STDs, and sexual health and behaviour. His most recent project is 'Positive Research For Positive People: strengthening HIV social research capacity in Fiji', working in tandem with the Pacific Island AIDS Foundation and the Fijian Positive Network. He also teaches anthropology and sexuality courses throughout the state of Ohio.
Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-4-9, £70.00 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
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Villagers and the City
Melanesian Experiences of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
Edited by Michael Goddard
Since Papua New Guinea's Independence in the 1970s, Port Moresby has been transformed from a colonial administrative centre to a distinctively Melanesian city. However visitors often shun the capital, their perceptions coloured by unsympathetic media accounts of violent crime and unchecked corruption. Instead they seek the 'real' Papua New Guinea - traditionally oriented and reassuringly parochial - beyond its boundaries.
In this book, experts from the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology and human ecology seek to represent 'Mosbi' as Papua New Guineans experience it. They augment the urban focus of the book with knowledge of the rural societies from which the contemporary inhabitants come. Considering groups of migrants, long-term residents and the traditional landholders of the territory on which it has grown, the contributors offer intimately informed perspectives on the vibrant, dynamic, exciting, hybrid environment that is 'Mosbi'. They argue that it needs to be recognised as the real Papua New Guinea, and that its inhabitants need to be understood not as caricatures of unemployed criminals on the one hand and as corrupt elites on the other, but as modern Melanesians creatively adapting to the exigencies of urban living.
CONTENTS:Introduction: About Moresby - Michael Goddard; Chapter 1: Heat and History: Moresby and the Motu-Koita - Michael Goddard; Chapter 2: Cracks in the Road: Trying the Moral Limits of Capitalism in a Vula? a Village - Deborah Van Heekeren; Chapter 3: Adaptive Strategies of Huli Migrant Settlers - Masahiro Umezaki; Chapter 4: Urban Households, Means of Livelihood and Village Identity in Moresby - Keith Barber; Chapter 5: Making and Unmaking Marriage in Moresby - Michael Goddard; Chapter 6: Live Music and Living as a Musician in Moresby - Denis Crowdy; Bibliography.
Michael Goddard is a Research Associate at Macquarie University, Australia. He is the author of The Unseen City: Anthropological Perspectives on Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and Substantial Justice: An Anthropology of Village Courts in Papua New Guinea.
Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-6-3, £60.00 (GBP), $85.00 (USD)
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Other Voices, Other Eyes Vol. 1
Just Leave the Tree-Trunk Alone
A Magical-Realistic Journey Through the Land of the Bawòng in the Congo
Toon van Buren
‘Just leave the tree-trunk alone, the beetle is crawling out.’
In 1967, Toon van Buren went as a missionary-sponsored anthropologist to the Bawòng of the Congo, neighbours of the Lele made famous by Mary Douglas, initially to investigate her contentions about the ‘non-religious’ reasons for the missions’ success there. Like Douglas, he found his encounter there to be the most important of his life
Stalled by the prospect of presenting beliefs he could not believe to be true, van Buren’s outlook was changed by his own authentic 'Bawòng’ experience: a dream in which he was visited by the tribal chief and his wife.
Simultaneously attempting to do justice to both European and Bawòng points of view, and incorporating stories from over half the inhabitants of his host village, this is a magical-realistic travel story through the land of the Bawòng from a man experiencing overlapping beliefs.
CONTENTS:Part I: 1The assignment; Part II: 2 Jokomakári knew more about it; 3 Jokomakári’s wives; 4 Mpeemp, the Lord’s brother; 5 Departure from Paradise; Part III: 6 In Paradise after the fall; 7 Because of sin death came into the world; 8 How Kumantsempe knew it; 9 Imbwangkain went too far; 10 My father, are you there? Part IV: 11 Houtekiet; 12 The song of the tree-trunk; 13 The lie of a child from far away; 14 The last finger exercises; Part V:15 The case van Rompaay; 16 Epilogue; Appendix: Song of welcome for a Tribal Chief, the Guardian-of-the-village; Index of persons; Acknowledgement.
Toon van Buren studied philosophy and theology in Rome and Nijmegen, and was ordained a priest before leaving for mission work in the Congo (1966–8). On his return, he worked for the next 35 years as a (married) Roman Catholic pastor in psychiatric institutions, the last six years as a zen-meditation teacher. Currently, he meditates with zen adepts in a former monastery, ‘Gods Werkhof ’, in Werkhoven, the Netherlands.
Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-3-2, £34.99 (GBP), $60.00 (USD)
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Disasters, Relief and the Media
Jonathan Benthall
The mass media have immense power, in their reporting of disasters, both natural and man-made, to stir the consciences of prosperous Westerners as well as to manipulate the perception of poverty and deprivation for political ends. For the relief agencies, the media present both unparalleled opportunities to raise money and acute ethical dilemmas when fund-raising priorities, developmental strategies and educational values conflict.
In 1993, this was the first book-length study of the representation of disasters in the media and of the marketing methods used by major relief agencies. In the preface to this new paperback edition which reviews the major developments in aid and in the media since the early 1990s, Jonathan Benthall contests the view of some commentators that the emergence of new technologies – the Internet and the cellphone – has radically changed the balance of power between the aid system and afflicted populations. He develops his original theme to argue that a ‘stable system’ is in place, whereby representations of misery in the South are exported to the North as consumables which are continuously reciprocated by flows of humanitarian aid. When the allotted role of Third World victimhood is repudiated – for instance, by migrant workers – the North sets up stern political barriers.
CONTENTS:‘Essential reading for those involved in aid and development as well as for others interested in cultural studies’ (Oxfam Journal)
‘…a genuinely original work that creates a context for the nightly parade of keening refugees and pot-bellied infants through our living rooms.’ (Boyd Tonkin, New Statesman & Society).
Preface to the 2010 edition; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; The International Response to Disasters in the 1990s; Ambivalence within the Agencies; Parables of Disaster; The Cultural Style of NGOs; Images and Narratives of Disaster Relief; Conclusion: Disasters, Relief and the Media; Notes; Index.
Jonathan Benthall is co-author of The Charitable Crescent: Politics of Aid in the Muslim World, and was formerly Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Editor of Anthropology Today.
Paperback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-7-0, £25.00 (GBP), $35.00 (USD)
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Anthropology Matters Vol. 3
The Potters and Pottery of Miravet
Production, Marketing and Consumption of Pottery in Catalonia
Rob van Veggel
This rich account of potters in a southern Catalan village traces the history of pottery production and marketing and the responses of the potters to changing contexts of consumption. By juxtaposing the local, micro-history of a small group of producers (numbering no more than fifty people) with that of Spain’s changing economic and social climate, the author presents a local perspective of producers as affected by and acting upon global developments, ultimately localizing the European transition to one single integrated market economy.
Maintaining a dual focus on subject and object, and thereby combining social and material history, this book demonstrates how physical transformations in the pottery resulted from and affected its role in the social relations people formed as they produced, marketed and consumed it.
Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Potters and muleteers; Chapter 3 Potters and consumers during the period of the muleteers; Chapter 4 Selling to wholesalers and shop-owners; Chapter 5 New techniques, new products, new clients, new consumers; Chapter 6 Potters and their clients – wholesalers and shop-owners; Chapter 7 The exchanges at the workshops; Chapter 8 Potters and consumers in the early 1990s; Chapter 9 The central themes.
Rob van Veggel obtained his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and has since been applying his insights into material culture in product development research, marketing, brand strategy and governmental policies.
Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-2-5, £65.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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The Four Seasons of the U'wa
A Chibcha Ritual Ecology in the Columbian Andes
Ann Osborn
A beleaguered indigenous population came to the attention of the world in 1997 by threatening mass suicide in a last-ditch attempt to protect their ancestral lands (overlying possible oil deposits) from invasion by outsiders.
The U’wa (formerly known as the Tunebo) – a Chibchan-speaking group living on the eastern slopes of the Andes in NE Colombia – are documented in Ann Osborn’s pioneering study, here published in English for the first time. She introduces us to the U’wa on their own terms, enabling us to understand them from their own perspective, to place them squarely within the unique ecological setting that is a fundamental part of their being and to appreciate what might motivate them to contemplate such drastic action in the face of an external threat.
The life-sustaining annual round of ceremonies described here were undertaken not only for themselves but also on behalf of outsiders: ‘If we did not chant, the world would wear out … it would come down … we chant for the Whites as well, so that they can continue living in their world…’.
The contrast between this philosophy and that of our oil-hungry world provides timely cause for reflection.
Introduction by Stephen Hugh-Jones, emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
Section I Introduction to the physical and social setting: Chapter 1 Fieldwork; Chapter 2 The socio-geographical setting; Chapter 3 The geophysical setting, agriculture and residence; Chapter 4 U’wa territory and clans; Section II Introduction to the chanted myths: Chapter 5 Cosmology; Chapter 6 Mythology and chanting; Chapter 7 A description of the basic blowing ritual; Section III The chanted myths: seasonal performances: Introduction; Chapter 8 The wet season: flowering Chapter 9 The wet-to-dry season: harvest; Chapter 10 The dry season: seeds; Chapter 11 The dry-to-wet season: planting; Section IV Final considerations: Chapter 12 Conclusions.
Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-0-1, £60.00 (GBP), $85.00 (USD)
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Body Arts and Modernity
Edited by Elizabeth Ewart and Michael O'Hanlon
What happens to body arts when these aesthetic practices assume fresh significance in the context of modernity?
In many parts of the indigenous world, the realm of body arts has become an arena for innovation, debate, revival and repression under the conditions of modernity. Among some groups, formerly suppressed ‘traditions’ of body arts have recently been revived. Elsewhere, body arts have been the means for creating or renovating identities in response to a developing international tourist market and in the light of novel technologies of representation, such as photography and film.
The contributions to this volume draw together ideas emerging from the anthropology of the body, the western interest in body ornamentation of the ‘Other’, and the recent revival of specific body arts such as tattooing and piercing.
Drawing on ethnographic case studies from
Chapter 1: Body arts and modernity: an introduction, Michael O’Hanlon; Chapter 2: Ski masks, veils, nose-rings and feathers: identity on the frontlines of modernity, Beth A. Conklin; Chapter 3: Black paint, red paint and a wristwatch: the aesthetics of modernity among the Panará in Central Brazil, Elizabeth Ewart; Chapter 4: Clothing as acculturation in Peruvian Amazonia, Peter Gow; Chapter 5: Body art and modernity: south-east Nuba, James C. Faris; Chapter 6: From self-decoration to self-fashioning: Orientalism as backward progress among the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea, Bruce M. Knauft; Chapter 7: Lipsticked brides and powdered children: cosmetics and the allure of modernity in an eastern Indonesian village, Catherine Allerton; Chapter 8: Encounters on the surface of life: t-shirts and visual analogy in South Auckland, Chloe Colchester; Chapter 9: Decorated being in Huli: parleying with paint, Laurence R. Goldman; Chapter 10: ‘Island dress that belongs to us all’: mission dresses and the innovation of tradition in Vanuatu, Lissant Bolton.
Elizabeth Ewart is University Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford.
Michael O'Hanlon is Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University’s museum of anthropology and world archaeology.
Paperback, ISBN 978-1907774041, £25.00 (GBP), $35.00 (USD)
Hardback, ISBN 0-9545572-9-8 (978-0-9545572-9-4), £60.00 (GBP), $85.00 (USD)
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Anthropology Matters Vol. 1
Of Alien Kings and Perpetual Kin
Contradiction and Ambiguity in Ruwund (Lunda) Symbolic Thought
Manuela Palmeirim
Of Alien Kings and Perpetual Kin presents a detailed understanding and analysis of the ideology of kingship among the Aruwund (Lunda) of southern Democratic Republic of the Congo. In doing so the text is drawn into addressing a range of important regional themes: the debate on the concept of the 'culture hero' in central African traditions of state formation; the system of 'perpetual kinship'; issues of hierarchy; and the symbolic use of space in royal ritual. All these lead to an analysis that stresses the fluidity and ambiguity of symbolic thought. In this, this innovative work questions the heuristic and theoretical validity of the concept of 'opposition' as used in theoretical models applied to the study of symbolism in which terms are self-contained and mutually exclusive.
'a major ethnographic contribution ... Palmeirim is remarkably successful in her ambition to present the Ruwund epic as a story of exceptional complexity'
Johan Pottier (School of Oriental and African Studies), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14
CONTENTS
Prologue; Introduction; Chapter 1 - Negotiating the myth: the origin of kingship I; Chapter 2 - Rethinking culture heroes: the origin of kingship II; Chapter 3 - Metaphors of kinship: claiming perpetual ties among Ruwund aristocracy; Chapter 4 - Where distinctions remain unspoken: an essay on hierarchy; Chapter 5 - On courts, space and metaphors: the symbolic use of space; Epilogue - Of alien kings and angry chiefs; Appendix - The making of a king: a description of the royal installation ritual; Glossary; References.
Manuela Palmeirim is a Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Minho, Portugal.
Hardback, ISBN 0-9545572-7-1, £55.00 (GBP), $80.00 (USD)
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Anthropology Matters Vol. 2
Living with Things
Ridding, Accommodation, Dwelling
Nicky Gregson
Living with Things provides an account of consumption in terms of its centrality to our dwelling practices. Its focus is on the home, particularly on the movement of people and things within and through it in everyday habitation.
Here dwelling is seen as an activity, as doing things with and to the things to hand around us. Being ‘at home’ is achieved through living amongst things, as well as amongst people and other non-human presences, such as pets and gardens. Being at home is achieved through what we do with objects, the things that are acquired and stored, that linger around in our homes, sometimes for decades, and which we may eventually get rid of. These ordinary things make dwelling structures accommodating accommodations; they make them homes.
Based primarily on a former coal-mining village in North-east England, this book explores practices of inhabitation, from moving in or being modernised, to the daily accommodation of sleep and children. It provides a demonstration of what happens to consumption research when it ‘comes home’ and is positioned not in sites of exchange but within the home and in households.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 - From researching ridding to living with things; Chapter 2 - Moving in; Chapter 3 - Being modernised; Chapter 4 - Accommodating sleep; Chapter 5 - Collections, clothing and toys: the accommodations of everyday life; Chapter 6 - Accommodating appliances; Chapter 7 - Accommodating nature; Chapter 8 - Ridding, accommodation and dwelling; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.
Nicky Gregson is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield and the lead author of Servicing the Middle Classes; Second-hand Cultures.
Paperback, ISBN 978-1907774-07-2, £25.00 (GBP), $35.00 (USD)
Hardback, ISBN 0-9545572-8-X, £45.00 (GBP), $80.00 (USD)
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Medical Anthropology in Europe
Teaching and Doctoral Research
Elisabeth Hsu and Doreen Montag
Medical Anthropology is the fastest growing field in anthropology. Over the last three decades it has developed a strong academic and applied importance, both in North America and Europe. This has led to the establishment of a specific degree in medical anthropology at some universities, and to a specialization within general anthropological teaching or within the medical curriculum at others.
This publication provides a handbook to existing programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate level, with the aim of making this information available to a wide public. As a guide to medical anthropology programmes in Europe, it is primarily designed for students who are looking for suitable training, but it will also interest professionals who are looking for expertise in the field. It provides information on ongoing doctoral research all over Europe, and indicates new directions in medical anthropology. It is the first handbook of its kind.
CONTENTS
AUSTRIA - Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, University of Vienna; Ethnomedicine Unit, Institute for the History of Medicine, Centre for Public Health, Medical University of Vienna; CROATIA - Institute for Anthropological Research and Institute of Social Sciences ? Ivo Pilar? , Zagreb; DENMARK - Department of Anthropology and Ethnography, Institute of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, University of Aarhus; Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen; Institute of Public Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Southern Denmark; FINLAND - Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Helsinki; FRANCE - Department of Human Ecology and Anthropology, University of Aix-Marseilles; Doctoral Training in Social Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Research Programme, School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris; GERMANY - Institute for Ethnology/Social Anthropology, Free University Berlin; Department of Anthropology, South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg; GREAT BRITAIN - Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol; International Medical Anthropology Program, School of Social Sciences and Law, Brunel University; Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge; Department of Anthropology, University of Durham; Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh; London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM); Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford; School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London; Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex; Department of Anthropology, University College London (UCL); Behavioural and Social Sciences, Division of Medicine, University College London (UCL); HUNGARY - Department of Medical Anthropology, Institute of Behavioral Sciences, Semmelweis University, Budapest; ITALY - Department of Linguistic and Oriental Studies, University of Bologna; Department of Epistemology and Hermeneutics of Education, University of Milan; Department ? Man and Environment? , Anthropology Section, University of Perugia; Department of Anthropological, Archeological and Historical Sciences, University of Turin; NETHERLANDS - Medical Anthropology Unit, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam; NORWAY - Department of General Practice and Community Medicine, University of Oslo; POLAND - Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan; SPAIN - Department of Anthropology, Philosophy and Social Work, University Rovira i Virgili,Tarragona; SWEDEN - Department of Social Anthropology, Gothenburg University; Department of Social Anthropology, University of Stockholm; SWITZERLAND - Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basle; Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Berne; The Anthropology of Health, Institute of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Lausanne; Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Zurich.
Elisabeth Hsu is University Lecturer in Medical Anthropology, and Doreen Montag is completing a D.Phil. in Social Anthropology, both at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford.
Paperback, ISBN 0-9545572-5-5, £17.50 (GBP), $25.00 (USD)
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Mining and Indigenous Lifeworlds in Australia and Papua New Guinea
Edited by Alan Rumsey and James Weiner
This volume gives a vital and unique insight into the effects of mining and other forms of resource extraction upon the indigenous peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea. Based on extensive fieldwork with the people concerned, it offers a comparative focus on indigenous cosmologies and their articulation or disjunction with the forces of 'development'.
A central dimension of contrast is that Australia as a 'settled' continent has had wholesale dispossession of Aboriginal land, while in Papua New Guinea more than 95% of the land surface remains unalienated from customary ownership. Less obviously, there are also important similarities owing to:
- a shared form of land title (largely unheard of outside Australia and Papua New Guinea) in which the state retains ownership of underground resources;
- the manner in which Western law has been used in both countries to define and codify customary land tenure;
- an emphasis on the reproductive imagery of minerals, petroleum and extraction processes employed by Aborigines and Papua New Guineans;
- and some surprising parallels in the ways that social identities on either side of the Arafura Sea have traditionally been grounded in landscape.
These studies are essential reading for all scholars involved in assessing the effects of resource extraction in Third World and Fourth World settings. Their distinctive contribution lies in their penetrating study of the forms of indigenous socio-cultural response to multinational companies and Western forms of governance and law.
'The writing is new and interesting. The essays mark out new ideas in seemingly effortless abundance. . . In sum - buy it, read it, I think you'll agree that its one of the really interesting books of the year.'
Deborah Rose (Senior Fellow, Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, ANU)
CONTENTS
1 Introduction: Depositings, James F. Weiner; 2 The iron furnace of Birrinydji, Ian McIntosh; 3 The Mount Kare python: Huli myths and gendered fantasies of agency, Holly Wardlow; 4 Who and what is a landowner? Mythology and marking the ground in a Papua New Guinea mining project, Dan Jorgensen; 5 Continuity and identity: Mineral development, land tenure and 'ownership' among the northern Mountain Ok, Don Gardner; 6 Land, stories and resources: Some impacts of large-scale resource exploitation on Onabasulu lifeworlds, T.M. Ernst; 7 The politics of petroleum extraction and royalty distribution at Lake Kutubu, Bill F. Sagir; 8 The Old Airforce Road: Myth and mining in north-east Arnhem Land, Ian Keen; 9 Changing views of place and time along the Ok Tedi, Stuart Kirsch; 10 Poisoning the rainbow: Mining, pollution and indigenous cosmology in Far North Queensland, Veronica Strang; 11 Mining, land claims and the negotiation of indigenous interests: Research from the Queensland Gulf country and the Pilbara region of Western Australia, David Trigger and Michael Robinson; 12 Development, rationalisation, and sacred sites: Comparative perspectives on Papua New Guinea and Australia, Francesca Merlan; References; Index.
Alan Rumsey is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and James Weiner a Visiting Fellow in the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Project, both in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.
Hardback, ISBN 0-9545572-4-7, £60.00 (GBP), $85.00 (USD)
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Commons and Borderlands
Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability and the Flow of Knowledge
Marilyn Strathern
In Commons and Borderlands a leading social anthropologist examines early twenty-first-century interests in interdisciplinarity, with particular attention to the conjunction of science and society. Interdisciplinary practice has become well entrenched in any number of scientific disciplines, or disciplines from the humanities or from social science for that matter. This does not deter current rhetoric which sees new opportunities in new combinations of interests. One arresting strand is the promise that in a strong form - transdisciplinarity - 'society' might thereby be brought into 'science'. Marilyn Strathern’s questioning of these processes addresses the challenge that notions of ownership pose to the expected flow of knowledge. As is fitting for a consideration of the flow and transformational properties of knowledge, the contents of this collection are knowingly designated 'working papers', left as open, unfinished statements to highlight their future and the work they may still do. They are designed to inspire debate, and publication will coincide with a Cambridge seminar series on Social Property at which many of these challenges will be rehearsed and articulated.
CONTENTS
PREFACE; INTRODUCTION - In crisis mode : a comment on interculturality; CHAPTER ONE - Knowledge on its travels: Dispersal and divergence in the make-up of communities; CHAPTER TWO - Commons and borderland;.CHAPTER THREE - Who owns academic knowledge? CHAPTER FOUR - Accountabilty across disciplines.ENDNOTE Re-describing society.
Marilyn Strathern is William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
Paperback, ISBN 0-9545572-2-0, £20.00 (GBP), $28.00 (USD)
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Rationales of Ownership
Transactions and Claims to Ownership in Contemporary Papua New Guinea
Edited by Lawrence Kalinoe and James Leach
What constitutes a resource, and how do people make claims on them? In the context of a burgeoning discourse of property, these are vital questions. Rationales of Ownership offers conceptual clarification in the context of material, intellectual and cultural resources in Papua New Guinea. The volume is a result of a major research project headed by Marilyn Strathern and Eric Hirsch, and brings together contributions from social anthropology and law. The approaches demonstrated, and conclusions reached, build upon recent understandings developed within Melanesian anthropology, but have far wider significance. The first publication sold out in Papua New Guinea due to the relevance of its approach and contents to lawyers and policy makers in that country. It is here made available to a wider readership, particularly those teaching courses on resource development, cultural and intellectual property, contemporary Pacific societies, environmental degradation, and property itself.
'. . .a unique contribution to the discipline's voice in contemporary global debates. . .this volume represents the best of the comparative, ethnographic tradition providing critical insight into difference and similarity on issues that entangle us all in various degrees of responsibility and care. It will be read by anthropologists, policy makers and all academic and non-academic students of what has come to be seen as the test area of the survival of cultural difference.'
Marta Rohatynskyj (University of Guelph)
CONTENTS
Preface, James Leach; 1. Introduction: Rationales of Ownership, Marilyn Strathern; 2. Mining Boundaries and Local Land Narratives (tidibe) in the Udabe Valley, Central Province, Eric Hirsch; 3. Disputing Damage Versus Disputing Ownership in Suau, Melissa Demian; 4. Land, Trees and History: Disputes Involving Boundaries and Identities in the Context of Development, James Leach; 5. The Bases of Ownership Claims Over Natural Resources by Indigenous Peoples in Papua New Guinea, Lawrence Kalinoe; 6. Keeping the Network in View: Compensation Claims, Property and Social Relations in Melanesia, Stuart Kirsch; 7. Combining Rationales from Bolivip: The Person and Property Rights Legislation in Papua New Guinea, Tony Crook; 8. Global and Local Contexts, Marilyn Strathern.
Click here to sample prelims or endmatter, or to purchase chapters as pdfs.
Lawrence Kalinoe is Professor and Executive Dean in the School of Law, University of Papua New Guinea.
James Leach is Research Fellow, King's College and Associate Lecturer, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
Hardback, ISBN 0-9545572-0-4, £39.99 (GBP), $70.00 (USD)
Paperback, ISBN 0-9545572-1-2, £20.00 (GBP), $30.00 (USD)
