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Ethnographers Before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 1870-1922 (EASA Series #44)
by Frederico Delgado Rosa and Han F. VermeulenFocusing on some of the most important ethnographers in early anthropology, this volume explores twelve defining works in the foundational period from 1870 to 1922. It challenges the assumption that intensive fieldwork and monographs based on it emerged only in the twentieth century. What has been regarded as the age of armchair anthropologists was in reality an era of active ethnographic fieldworkers, including women practitioners and Indigenous experts. Their accounts have multiple layers of meaning, style, and content that deserve fresh reading. This reference work is a vital source for rewriting the history of anthropology.
Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space: Place-Making in the New Northern Ireland (Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement #8)
by Milena Komarova Maruška SvašekExploring the complex dynamics of twenty-first century spatial sociality, this volume provides a much-needed multi-dimensional perspective that undermines the dominant image of Northern Ireland as a conflict-ridden place. Despite touching on memories of “the Troubles” and continuing unionist-nationalist tensions, the volume refuses to consider people in the region as purely political beings, or to understand processes of placemaking solely through ethnic or national contestations and territoriality. Topics such as the significance of friendship, gender, and popular culture in spatial practices are considered, against the backdrop of the growing presence of migrants, refugees and diasporic groups.
Ethnography And The Corporate Encounter
by Melissa CefkinBusinesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The nature of such work, as described in this volume, raises crucial questions about potential implications to disciplines of critical inquiry such as anthropology. In addressing these issues, the contributors explore how researchers encounter and engage sites of organizational practice in such roles as suppliers of consumer-insight for product design or marketing, or as advisors on work design or business and organizational strategies. The volume contributes to the emerging canon of corporate ethnography, appealing to practitioners who wish to advance their understanding of the practice of corporate ethnography and providing rich material to those interested in new applications of ethnographic work and the ongoing rethinking of the nature of ethnographic praxis.
Ethnography in the Raw: Life in a Luzon Village
by Brian MoeranEthnography in the Raw describes the author’s encounters with the Philippine family into which he has married, his wife’s friends and acquaintances, and their lives in a remote rural village in the rice basin of Luzon, about 130 miles northeast of Manila. The book links detailed descriptions of his Philippine family with cultural practices such as circumcision, marriage and cockfights combined with theoretical musings on the concepts of sacrifice, social exchange, patron-client relations, food, and religious symbolism. It is both anthropological fieldwork ‘in the raw,’ and an incisive analysis of contemporary Philippine society and culture.
Ethnography in the Raw: Life in a Luzon Village
by Brian MoeranEthnography in the Raw describes the author’s encounters with the Philippine family into which he has married, his wife’s friends and acquaintances, and their lives in a remote rural village in the rice basin of Luzon, about 130 miles northeast of Manila. The book links detailed descriptions of his Philippine family with cultural practices such as circumcision, marriage and cockfights combined with theoretical musings on the concepts of sacrifice, social exchange, patron-client relations, food, and religious symbolism. It is both anthropological fieldwork ‘in the raw,’ and an incisive analysis of contemporary Philippine society and culture.
European Foundations Of The Welfare State
by Franz-Xaver KaufmannWhile social welfare programs, often inspired by international organizations, are spreading throughout the world, the more far-reaching notion of governmental responsibility for the basic well-being of all members of a political society is not, although it remains a feature of Europe and the former British Commonwealth. The welfare state in the European sense is not simply an administrative arrangement of various measures of social protection but a political project embedded in distinct cultural traditions. Offering the first accessible account in English of the historical development of the European idea of the welfare state, this book reviews the intellectual foundations which underpinned the road towards the European welfare state, formulates some basic concepts for its understanding, and highlights the differences in the underlying structural and philosophical conditions between continental Europe and the English-speaking world.
Europeanization in Sweden: Opportunities and Challenges for Civil Society Organizations (Studies on Civil Society #10)
by Anna Meeuwisse Roberto ScaramuzzinoNotwithstanding its many successes since 1945, the project of European integration currently faces major difficulties, from financial crises and mass immigration to the impending departure of the UK from the European Union. At the same time, these challenges have spurred civil society organizations within and across Europe, revealing a shared public sphere in which citizens can mobilize around refugee rights, opposition to austerity policies, and other issues. Europeanization in Sweden assembles new empirical research on how these processes have played out in one of the continent’s wealthiest nations, providing insights into whether, and how, the “Swedish model” can guide European integration.
Evil Spirits and Rocket Debris: In Search of Lost Souls in Siberia
by Ludek BrozThe Altai Republic in southern Siberia is renowned for excavations of frozen mummies from high-altitude burial sites. Less well-known is the fact that it hosts fallout zones for the second stages of rockets launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome. Local inhabitants blame ‘evil spirits’ released by archaeological work and toxic fuel from rocket debris for their misfortunes. This book explores the divergent fates of such claims when confronted with state-fostered ‘rationalisms’ of science and governance.
Explorations in Economic Anthropology: Key Issues and Critical Reflections
by Kirsten W. Endres Deema KaneffAt a time of rising global economic precarity and social inequality, the field of economic anthropology offers solutions through the study of local and contextualized economic practices. This book is made up of an exciting collection of succinct essays authored by leading scholars primarily from the field of economic anthropology, but also featuring contributions from sociology and history. The chapters engage with debates at the cutting edge of research on the topics of Eurasia, the anthropology of postsocialism and the embeddedness of economic practices.
Fairies, Ghosts, and Santa Claus: Tinted Glasses, Fetishes, and the Politics of Seeing
by Neriko Musha DoerrInvestigating the politics of seeing and its effects, this book draws on Slavoj Žižek’s notion of fetish and Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious to offer newer concepts: “tinted glasses”, through which we see the world; “unit-thinking”, which renders the world as consisting of discrete units; and “coherants”, which help fragmented experiences cohere into something intelligible. Examining experiences at a Japanese heritage language school, a study-abroad trip to Sierra Leone, as well as in college classrooms, this book reveals the workings of unit-thinking and fetishism in diverse contexts and explores possibilities for social change.
Faithfully Urban: Pious Muslims in a German City
by Petra KuppingerIn the southern German city of Stuttgart lives a pious Muslim population that has merged with the local population to create a meaningful shared existence. In this ethnographic account, the author introduces and examines the lives of ordinary residents, neighborhoods, and mosque communities to analyze moments and spaces where Muslims and non-Muslims engage with each other and accommodate their respective needs. These accounts show that even in the face of resentment and discrimination, this pious population has indeed become an integral part of the urban community.
The Familial Occult: Explorations at the Margins of Critical Autoethnography (EASA Series #47)
by Alexandra CoţofanăThe Familial Occult addresses the presence of occult experiences in some scholars' families and how that has affected their epistemological and ontological worlds, as well as their identities as scholars. Those with backgrounds in the familial occult often experience a series of conflicting relationships and different ways of interacting with binaries such as the subjective and objective, a powerful conceptual couple still governing academic thinking. While much has been written on encountering the occult in fieldwork or becoming an apprentice in an occult practice, little yet has been published in the academic literature about growing up with the occult.
The Feeling of the Fall: An Ethnographic Writing Experiment between the Belize Barrier Reef and the Edges of Toronto, Ontario (New Directions in Anthropology #46)
by Ines TacconeAs an inquiry into engagements with forces of loss and threat, this work explores experimental ways to write about climate crisis in anthropology. From Belize to Ontario and back, this ambitious piece of ethnographic writing set during a time “beyond ruin” in a fictional, ecotourist community in the year 2040. Here, loss is taken up through an inventive form of ethnographic storytelling that brings together people, animals, landscapes, and the weather in a world beyond the climate crisis right now where new entanglements with things which have fallen to ruin emerge in imagined milieus in which loss and life converge.
Fire on the Island: Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu (ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology #13)
by Tom BratrudIn 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision’. However, it ended dramatically when two men believed to be sorcerers and responsible for much of the society’s problems were hung by persons fearing for the island’s future security. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on Ahamb between 2010 and 2017, this book investigates how upheavals like the Ahamb revival can emerge to address and sometimes resolve social problems, but also carry risks of exacerbating the same problems they arise to address.
Fixing Motorcycles in Post-Repair Societies: Technology, Aesthetics and Gender (Politics of Repair #3)
by Gabriel JderuMost social science studies on automobility have focused on the production, usage, identity construction and aesthetic improvements of personal means of transportation. What happens if we shift the focus to the labour, knowledge and social relations that go into the unavoidable moments of maintenance and repair? Taking motorcycling in Romania as an ethnographic entry point, this book documents how bikers handle the inevitable moments of malfunction and breakdown. Using both mobile and sedentary research methods, the book describes the joys and troubles experienced by amateur mechanics, professional mechanics and untechnical men and women when fixing bikes.
Flexible Firm: The Design of Culture at Bang & Olufsen
by Jakob Krause-JensenBang & Olufsen, the famous Danish producer of high-end home electronics, is well known as an early exponent of value-based management: the idea that there should be consistency in what the organisation does, a certain continuity between what the company develops and sells, and the beliefs and practices of the employees. This study investigates how company values are communicated and the collective identity is articulated through the use of such concepts as 'culture', 'fundamental values', and 'corporate religion', as well as how employees negotiate these ideas in their daily working lives. As this book reveals, the identification of values, meant to create cohesion and solidarity among employees, came to symbolise and engender a split between the staff and the other parts of the company. By examining the rise and fall of the value-based management approach, this volume offers the indispensible insight of anthropological enquiry to expose how social realities challenge conventional management strategies and therefore must be considered in the development of new management techniques.
Football Nation: The Playing Fields of German Culture, History, and Society (Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association #25)
by Alan McDougall Rebeccah Dawson, Bastian Heinsohn, Oliver KnabeOver the past century, the impact of football on Germany has been manifold, influencing the arts, political debates, and even contributing to the construction of cultural memories and national narratives. Football Nation analyses the game’s fluid role in shaping and reflecting German society, and spans its focus on modern German history, from the Wilhelmine era to the early 21st century. Expounding on topics of gender, class, fandom, spectatorship, antisemitism, nationalism, and internationalism, a diverse group of interdisciplinary scholars offer a novel approach to understanding the many influences of football throughout its extensive history which until recently has only been available to a German-speaking readership.
Foucault's Orient: The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan
by Marnia LazregFoucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the "Orient" constitute the "limit" of Western rationality. Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars in Tunisia, Japan and France, this book examines the philosophical sources, evolution as well as contradictions of Foucault's experience with non-Western cultures. Beyond tracing Foucault's journey into the world of otherness, the book reveals the personal, political as well as methodological effects of a radical conception of cultural difference that extolled the local over the cosmopolitan.
The France of the Little-Middles: A Suburban Housing Development in Greater Paris (Anthropology of Europe #1)
by Marie Cartier Isabelle Coutant Olivier Masclet Yasmine SiblotThe Poplars housing development in suburban Paris is home to what one resident called the “Little-Middles” – a social group on the tenuous border between the working- and middle- classes. In the 1960s The Poplars was a site of upward social mobility, which fostered an egalitarian sense of community among residents. This feeling of collective flourishing was challenged when some residents moved away, selling their homes to a new generation of upwardly mobile neighbors from predominantly immigrant backgrounds. This volume explores the strained reception of these migrants, arguing that this is less a product of racism and xenophobia than of anxiety about social class and the loss of a sense of community that reigned before.
Françoise Héritier (Anthropology's Ancestors #3)
by Gérald GaillardFollows the life of French anthropologist Françoise Héritier, who had a lasting impact on a generation of French anthropologists that continues to this day. A great intellectual figure, Françoise Héritier succeeded Claude Lévi-Strauss as the Chair of Anthropology at the Collège de France in 1982. She was an Africanist, author of magnificent works on the Samo population, the scientific progenitor of kinship studies, the creator of a theoretical base to feminist thought and an activist for many causes. “I read this intellectual biography of Françoise Héritier with great pleasure. Though highly regarded in France, she is not yet well known in English-language academic circles, but she certainly should be. This book will be a revelation to many anthropologists and feminist scholars.”—Adam Kuper, London School of Economics From the Forword by Michelle Perrot: I came to know her at the National Council for HIV, that she chaired from 1989 to 1994…. Her theoretical concerns were also crucial to the understanding of pandemics, but we did not then realise that HIV/AIDS was also a precursor and a warning of pandemics to come. She grasped the importance of conceptions of bodily ‘humours’—blood, semen, milk—that seemed to play a role in the horrific spread of an epidemic of which we knew nothing, except that it resulted in an appalling mortality rate, particularly among young men…. she was a remarkable chair, concerned to share her insights into the illness and to anchor—necessary—interventions within a framework that would be respectful of human rights.
Franz Baermann Steiner: A Stranger in the World (Methodology & History in Anthropology #42)
by Jeremy Adler Richard FardonFranz Baermann Steiner (1909-52) provided the vital link between the intellectual culture of central Europe and the Oxford Institute of Anthropology in its post-Second World War years. This book demonstrates his quiet influence within anthropology, which has extended from Mary Douglas to David Graeber, and how his remarkable poetry reflected profoundly on the slavery and murder of the Shoah, an event which he escaped from. Steiner’s concerns including inter-disciplinarity, genre, refugees and exile, colonialism and violence, and the sources of European anthropology speak to contemporary concerns more directly now than at any time since his early death.
From Village Commons to Public Goods: Graduated Provision in Urbanizing China (Dislocations #34)
by Anne-Christine TrémonIlluminating the complex processes of China’s uneven urbanization through the lens of the transition from village commons to public goods, this book is set in three urbanized villages in Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Xi’an, which have experienced similar demographic explosions and dramatic changes to their landscapes, the livelihoods of its inhabitants, and the power structures governing their residents. Graduated provision is the delivery of public goods informed by the teleological ideology of urbanization, and by neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics, and has been employed as an answer to the challenges of making public goods, such as welfare provisions, public parks, education, and senior care, equally accessible to all in recently urbanized communities.
Funerals In Africa
by Joel Noret Michael JindraAcross Africa, funerals and events remembering the dead have become larger and even more numerous over the years. Whereas in the West death is normally a private and family affair, in Africa funerals are often the central life cycle event, unparalleled in cost and importance, for which families harness vast amounts of resources to host lavish events for multitudes of people with ramifications well beyond the event. Though officials may try to regulate them, the popularity of these events often makes such efforts fruitless, and the elites themselves spend tremendously on funerals. This volume brings together scholars who have conducted research on funerary events across sub-Saharan Africa. The contributions offer an in-depth understanding of the broad changes and underlying causes in African societies over the years, such as changes in religious beliefs, social structure, urbanization, and technological changes and health.
Gentrifications: Views from Europe (Anthropology of Europe #7)
by Lydie Launay Marie Chabrol Anaïs Collet Matthieu GiroudOffering an original discussion of the gentrification phenomenon in Europe, this book provides new theoretical insights into classical works on the subject. Using a thorough analysis of the diversity of the forms, places and actors of gentrification in an attempt to isolate its ‘DNA’, the book addresses the place of social groups in cities, their competition over the appropriation of space, the infrastructure unequally offered to them by economic and political actors and the stakes of everyday social relationships.
The Gift of European Thought and the Cost of Living
by Vassos ArgyrouEuropean thought is often said to be a gift to the rest of the world, but what if there is no gift as such? What if there is only an economy where every giving is also a taking, and every taking is also a giving? This book extends the question of economies by making a case for an "economy of thought" and a "political economy." It argues that all thinking and doing presupposes taking, and therefore giving, as the price to pay for taking; or that there exists a "cost of living," which renders the idea of free thinking and living untenable. The argument is developed against the Enlightenment directive to think for oneself as the means of becoming autonomous and shows that this "light," given to the rest of the world as a gift, turns out to be nothing.