SEAN KINGSTON PUBLISHING
We are attending the RAI's 'virtual' Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future conference this week (of 14 September), where we will be launching The Anthropology of Displaced Communities on Monday 14 Sep (16:00). The editor, Robert Layton, will introduce this celebration of the RAI's Urgent Anthropology Fellowship Fund, and the legacy of the fund's founder, George Appell. Do come and see us in the publishers' exhibit, where as usual we will be happy to offer a discount on our books.
We are attending the 'virtual' EASA conference, where we will be launching Anthropology Inside Out: Fieldworkers Taking Notes on Wednesday (13:15 - 13:45). This will be a first for us! Do come and see us in the publishers' exhibit, where as usual we will be happy to offer a discount on our books.
We are often asked about EBOOKS, especially in these times when physical access to libraries and bookshops may be difficult. Almost all of our books are available in this format. Either as a direct 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.
We are recently returned from the very successful IUAES 2019 conference in Poznan, Poland, the perfect place for our launch of Twilight Zone Anthropology: Voices from Poland, The RAI Country Series Vol. 2, which was edited by Michal Buchowski. Both the conference and the volume really do evidence the unique and strong anthropological tradition of Poland, which is currently experiencing a great resurgence. The IUAES conference was also the occasion to unveil African Americans & American Africans: Migration, History, Race and Identities by Dmitri M. Bondarenko, a serious and revealing study of key themes in 'black' identity in the United States. We're delighted to have both these books on our list.
We're excited to announce the publication of The Culture of Invention in the Americas: Anthropological Experiments with Roy Wagner, edited by Pedro Pitarch and José Antonio Kelly. No higher praise can we give it, than to say that it is a fitting continuation of Wagner's sparklingly inventive and insightful thought, and we are delighted that he was able to contribute to, and commentate upon, the book before his death.
Dunbar's Number, the apparent limit on the size of social groups and personal networks, has become one of the most exciting, controversial and potent theoretical developments of our time, with ramifications and developments spanning the human sciences. So we are especially pleased to publish the volume, Dunbar's Number, which is devoted to exploring this concept, and includes two new chapters by its originator, Robin Dunbar. Edited by David Shankland, and the latest result of our ongoing collaboration with the RAI, it is Occasional Paper No. 45 of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
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Open Access (link) - Sean Kingston Publishing is delighted to consider proposals for Open Access Publishing on a Gold Standard basis, under a Creative Commons Attribution v4.0 International License (CC BY), the most open license available, allowing readers to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to alter, transform, or build upon the material, including for commercial use, providing the original author is credited. In addition, such projects are published in print as a relatively low cost paperback. All projects vary, so please contact us (link) for a quotation.
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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.
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
Robert Layton is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of
Durham.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-22-5, £65.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
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 Sjřrslev, Senior Lecturer Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
Ebook, ISBN 978-1-907774-23-2, OPEN ACCESS (link)
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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: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), $85.00 (USD)
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
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), $75.00 (USD)
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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, Kisedję (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
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)
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: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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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
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-47-8, £60.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
A lost sketch book on a Portuguese castle rampart left Manuel Joăo 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 Joăo 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
Premium Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-19-5, £60.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
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
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-912385-01-0, £60.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
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
Premium Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-25-6, £65.00 (GBP), $100.00 (USD)
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
Published in association with the University of Bergen.
Ebook, ISBN 978-1-907774-50-8, OPEN ACCESS (link)
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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
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)
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
Geoffrey Gowlland is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-98-0, £50.00 (GBP), $75.00 (USD)
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
Paul Sillitoe FBA is Professor of Anthropology at Durham University
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-45-4, £100.00 (GBP), $150.00 (USD)
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
Paul Sillitoe FBA is Professor of Anthropology at Durham University
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-89-8, £120.00 (GBP), $180.00 (USD)
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)
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)
'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
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, £25.00 (GBP), $40.00 (USD)
Ebook, ISBN 978-1-907774-99-7, OPEN ACCESS (link)
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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
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)
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
Elizabeth Bonshek is Senior Curator for Pacific Cultures at Museum Victoria, Melbourne.
Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-39-3, £60.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
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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
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)
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
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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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
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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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
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) Paperback, ISBN 978-1-912385-04-1, £30.00 (GBP), $45.00 (USD)
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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
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, £47.50 (GBP), $80.00 (USD)
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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
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, £60.00 (GBP), $100.00 (USD)
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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
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, £60.00 (GBP), $100.00 (USD)
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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
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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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: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, £90.00 (GBP), $155.00 (USD)
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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: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, £55.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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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
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, £80.00 (GBP), $135.00 (USD)
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.
Heidi Armbruster is a social anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Southampton.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-29-4, £60.00 (GBP), $105.00 (USD)
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.
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, £65.00 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
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
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, £55.00 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
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, £125.00 (GBP), $215.00 (USD)
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
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, £65.00 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
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
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 Razăo 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, £59.00 (GBP), $105.00 (USD)
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
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, £75.00 (GBP), $130.00 (USD)
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
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, £55.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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.
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, £59.99 (GBP), $105.00 (USD)
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-907774-35-5, £25.00 (GBP), $42.50 (USD)
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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 Western 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.
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, £49.99 (GBP), $85.00 (USD)
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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, £65.00 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
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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: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, £55.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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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: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, £59.99 (GBP), $100.00 (USD)
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-907774-11-9, £24.99 (GBP), $42.50 (USD)
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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
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, £55.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-907774-28-7, £25.00 (GBP), $42.50 (USD)
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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:Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-02-7, 340 pp., 108 plates - £50.00 (GBP), $80.00 (USD)
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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:Hardback, ISBN 978-1-9077740-1-0, £55.00 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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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:Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-5-6, £49.99 (GBP), $85.00 (USD)
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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
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, £64.99 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
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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: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, £49.99 (GBP), $85.00 (USD)
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‘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: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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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).
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, £19.50 (GBP), $35.00 (USD)
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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.
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, £54.99 (GBP), $95.00 (USD)
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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.
Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-0-1, £49.99 (GBP), $85.00 (USD)
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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
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, £19.50 (GBP), $35.00 (USD)
Hardback, ISBN 0-9545572-9-8 (978-0-9545572-9-4), £49.50 (GBP), $85.00 (USD)
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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, £45.00 (GBP), $80.00 (USD)
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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, £19.50 (GBP), $35.00 (USD)
Hardback, ISBN 0-9545572-8-X, £45.00 (GBP), $80.00 (USD)
Please click here to order book.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, £12.99 (GBP), $22.00 (USD)
Please click here to order book.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, £50.00 (GBP), $85.00 (USD)
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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, £15.99 (GBP), $28.00 (USD)
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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.
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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)
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