In Balinese Worlds, Fredrik Barth proposes a new model for anthropological analysis of complex civilizations that is based on a fresh, synthetic account of culture and society in North Bali and one that takes full notice of individual creativity in shaping the contours of this dynamic culture.

In this detailed ethnography of the Northern district of Buleleng, Barth rejects mainstream anthropological generalizations of Bali as a cultural system of carefully articulated parts. Instead—drawing on many sources, including the sociology of knowledge, interactional analysis, postmodern thought, and his own exceptionally varied field experience—Barth presents a new model that actually generates variation. Barth's innovative analysis of Balinese life highlights both the constructive and the disorganizing effects of individual action, the constant flux of interpretation, and the powerful interaction of memory and social relationships, and knowledge as a cultural resource.

Balinese Worlds is a unique contribution not only to Balinese studies but also to the theory and methods of the anthropology of complex societies.

As the incidence of violent crime rises in the United States, so does the public demand for a solution. But what will work?
    Mark S. Fleisher has spent years among inmates in jails and prisons and on the streets with thieves, gang members, addicts, and life-long criminals in Seattle and other cities across the country. In Beggars and Thieves, he writes about how and why they become and remain offenders, and about the actual role of jails and prisons in efforts to deter crime and rehabilitate criminals. Fleisher shows, with wrenching firsthand accounts, that parents who are addicts, abusers, and criminals beget irreversibly damaged children who become addicts, abusers, and criminals. Further, Fleisher contends that many well-intentioned educational and vocational training programs are wasted because they are offered too late to help. And, he provides sobering evidence that many youthful and adult offenders find themselves better off in prison—with work to do, medical care, a clean place to sleep, regular meals, and stable social ties—than they are in America’s cities.
    Fleisher calls for anti-crime policies that are bold, practical, and absolutely imperative. He prescribes life terms for violent offenders, but in prisons structured as work communities, where privileges are earned through work in expanded, productive industries that reduce the financial burden of incarceration on the public. But most important, he argues that the only way to prevent street crime, cut prison growth, and reduce the waste of money and human lives is to permanently remove brutalized children from criminal, addicted, and violent parents.

How do deaf people in different societies perceive and conceive the world around them?  Drawing on three years of anthropological fieldwork in Nepali deaf communities, Being and Hearing shows how questions of cultural difference are profoundly shaped by local habits of perception. Beginning with the premise that philosophy and cultural intuition are separated only by genre and pedigree, Peter Graif argues that Nepali deaf communities—in their social sensibilities, political projects, and aesthetics of expression—present innovative answers to the very old question of what it means to be different.
 
From pranks and protests, to diverse acts of love and resistance, to renewed distinctions between material and immaterial, deaf communities in Nepal have crafted ways to foreground the habits of perception that shape both their own experiences and how they are experienced by the hearing people around them. By exploring these often overlooked strategies, Being and Hearing makes a unique contribution to ethnography and comparative philosophy.

The Kashmir conflict, the ongoing border dispute between India and Pakistan, has sparked four wars and cost thousands of lives. In this innovative ethnography, Ravina Aggarwal moves beyond conventional understandings of the conflict—which tend to emphasize geopolitical security concerns and religious essentialisms—to consider how it is experienced by those living in the border zones along the Line of Control, the 435-mile boundary separating India from Pakistan. She focuses on Ladakh, the largest region in northern India’s State of Jammu and Kashmir. Located high in the Himalayan and Korakoram ranges, Ladakh borders Pakistan to the west and Tibet to the east. Revealing how the shadow of war affects the lives of Buddhist and Muslim communities in Ladakh, Beyond Lines of Control is an impassioned call for the inclusion of the region’s cultural history and politics in discussions about the status of Kashmir.

Aggarwal brings the insights of performance studies and the growing field of the anthropology of international borders to bear on her extensive fieldwork in Ladakh. She examines how social and religious boundaries are created on the Ladakhi frontier, how they are influenced by directives of the nation-state, and how they are shaped into political struggles for regional control that are legitimized through discourses of religious purity, patriotism, and development. She demonstrates in lively detail the ways that these struggles are enacted in particular cultural performances such as national holidays, festivals, rites of passage ceremonies, films, and archery games. By placing cultural performances and political movements in Ladakh center stage, Aggarwal rewrites the standard plot of nation and border along the Line of Control.

The problems of bioethics are embedded in people's lives and social worlds. They are shaped by individual biographies and relationships, by the ethos and institutions of health care, by economic and political pressures, by media depictions, and by the assumptions, beliefs, and values that permeate cultures and times. Yet these forces are largely ignored by a professional bioethics that concentrates on the theoretical justification of decisions.

The original essays in this volume use qualitative research methods to expose the multiple contexts within which the problems of bioethics arise, are defined and debated, and ultimately resolved. In a provocative concluding essay, one contributor asks his fellow ethnographers to reflect on the ethical problems of ethnography.

History of Anthropology is a series of annual volumes, inaugurated in 1983, each broadly unified around a theme of major importance to both the history and the present practice of anthropological inquiry. Bones, Bodies, Behavior, the fifth in the series, treats a number of issues relating to the history of biological or physical anthropology: the application of the "race" idea to humankind, the comparison of animals minds to those of humans, the evolution of humans from primate forms, and the relation of science to racial ideology. Following an introductory overview of biological anthropology in Western tradition, the seven essays focus on a series of particular historical episodes from 1830 to 1980: the emergence of the race idea in restoration France, the comparative psychological thought of the American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan, the archeological background of the forgery of the remains "discovered" at Piltdown in 1912, their impact on paleoanthropology in the interwar period, the background and development of physical anthropology in Nazi Germany, and the attempts of Franx Boas and others to organize a consensus against racialism among British and American scientists in the late 1930s. The volume concludes with a provocative essay on physical anthropology and primate studies in the United States in the years since such a consensus was established by the UNESCO "Statements on Race" of 1950 and 1951. Bringing together the contributions of a physical anthropologist (Frank Spencer), a historical sociologist (Michael Hammond), and a number of historians of science (Elazar Barkan, Claude Blanckaert, Donna Haraway, Robert Proctor, and Marc Swetlitz), this volume will appeal to a wide range of students, scholars, and general readers interested in the place of biological assumptions in the modern anthropological tradition, in the biological bases of human behavior, in racial ideologies, and in the development of the modern human sciences.

Sitting next to the Great Barrier Reef, steeped in coal and gas, the industrial boomtown of Gladstone, Australia embodies many of the contradictions of the “overheated” world: prosperous yet polluted, growing and developing, yet always on the precipice of crisis.
            Capturing Gladstone at the peak of its accelerated growth in 2013–14, Thomas Hylland Eriksen dissects here the boomtown phenomenon in all its profound ambivalence. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book examines local identity, family life, infrastructure, and local services and explores the tensions and resentments surrounding migrant workers.
            Writ large in Boomtown are the clashes of scale at the heart of the town’s contradictions, where the logic of big industry and the state compete with those of the individual and the local community and ecology, crystallizing the current crisis of political legitimacy that is unfurling all over the world.
 

In a compelling mix of literary narrative and ethnography, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb and writer Philip Graham continue the long journey of cultural engagement with the Beng people of Côte d’Ivoire that they first recounted in their award-winning memoir Parallel Worlds. Their commitment over the span of several decades has lent them a rare insight. Braiding their own stories with those of the villagers of Asagbé and Kosangbé, Gottlieb and Graham take turns recounting a host of unexpected dramas with these West African villages, prompting serious questions about the fraught nature of cultural contact.

 

Through events such as a religious leader’s declaration that the authors’ six-year-old son, Nathaniel, is the reincarnation of a revered ancestor, or Graham’s late father being accepted into the Beng afterlife, or the increasing, sometimes dangerous madness of a villager, the authors are forced to reconcile their anthropological and literary gaze with the deepest parts of their personal lives. Along with these intimate dramas, they follow the Beng from times of peace through the times of tragedy that led to Côte d’Ivoire’s recent civil conflicts. From these and many other interweaving narratives—and with the combined strengths of an anthropologist and a literary writer—Braided Worlds examines the impact of postcolonialism, race, and global inequity at the same time that it chronicles a living, breathing village community where two very different worlds meet.