338 books match the query 'Ethnology' and 25 start with c

cover of Caribbean Journeys: An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks

Caribbean Journeys

An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks

Karen Fog Olwig

Duke University Press, 2007

Caribbean Journeys is an ethnographic analysis of the cultural meaning of migration and home in three families of West Indian background that are now dispersed throughout the Caribbean, North America, and Great Britain. Moving migration studies beyond its current focus on sending and receiving societies, Karen Fog Olwig makes migratory family networks the locus of her analysis. For the people whose lives she traces, being “Caribbean” is not necessarily rooted in ongoing visits to their countries of origin, or in ethnic communities in the receiving countries, but rather in family narratives and the maintenance of family networks across vast geographical expanses.

The migratory journeys of the families in this study began more than sixty years ago, when individuals in the three families left home in a British colonial town in Jamaica, a French Creole rural community in Dominica, and an African-Caribbean village of small farmers on Nevis. Olwig follows the three family networks forward in time, interviewing family members living under highly varied social and economic circumstances in locations ranging from California to Barbados, Nova Scotia to Florida, and New Jersey to England. Through her conversations with several generations of these far-flung families, she gives insight into each family’s educational, occupational, and socioeconomic trajectories. Olwig contends that terms such as “Caribbean diaspora” wrongly assume a culturally homogeneous homeland. As she demonstrates in Caribbean Journeys, anthropologists who want a nuanced understanding of how migrants and their descendants perceive their origins and identities must focus on interpersonal relations and intimate spheres as well as on collectivities and public expressions of belonging.

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cover of Casing a Promised Land, Expanded Edition: The Autobiography of an Organizational Detective as Cultural Ethnographer

Casing a Promised Land, Expanded Edition

The Autobiography of an Organizational Detective as Cultural Ethnographer

H.L. Goodall, Jr.

Southern Illinois University Press, 1994

H. L. Goodall’s ground-breaking study of what people do with symbols and what symbols do to people explores the lives led by people in organizations. His narratives take on the form of six detective mysteries in which the narrator figures into the plot of the intrigue and then works out its essential patterns.

In the first mystery, "Notes on a Cultural Evolution: The Remaking of a Software Company," Goodall looks at the transition of a Huntsville regional office of a Boston-based computer software company where the lives and social dramas of the participants reflect the current state of high technology. The second essay and perhaps the most insightful, "The Way the World Ends: Inside Star Wars," penetrates the various defenses of the Star Wars command office in Huntsville to discover its secrets and surprises. Goodall shows how media, technology, fear of relationships, and symbolic images of the future unite into the day-to-day operations of people who believe they are responsible for the outer limits of our nation’s defense.

"Lost in Space: The Layers of Illusion Called Adult Space Camp" illustrates how a supposedly innocent theme park invites participation in rituals and ceremonies designed to influence a future generation of taxpayers. In "Articles of Faith," Goodall enters a super mall in Huntsville, noting how shopping centers provide consumers with far more than places to purchase goods and services. "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" finds Goodall back in an academic environment, at a conference of communication scholars, where he demonstrates the difficult task of translating cultural understandings from one context to another. "The Consultant as Organizational Detective" offers the sobering message that real-life mysteries may surprise even the most accomplished sleuth. A concluding chapter, "Notes on Method," and a new autobiographical afterword round out Goodall’s penetrating look at our symbol-making culture.

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cover of Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque: A Collaborative Ethnography of War and Peace

Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque

A Collaborative Ethnography of War and Peace

Jonathan Spencer, Jonathan Goodhand, Shahul Hasbullah, Bart Klem, Benedikt Korf, and Kalinga Tudor Silva

Pluto Press, 2014

Is religion best seen as only a cause of war, or is it a source of comfort for those caught up in conflict?

Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque is based on fieldwork in Sri Lanka’s most religiously diverse and politically troubled region in the closing years of the civil war. It provides a series of new and provocative arguments about the promise of a religiously based civil society, and the strengths and weaknesses of religious organisations and religious leaders in conflict mediation. It argues that for people trapped in long and violent conflicts, religion plays a contradictory role, often acting as a comforting and stabilising force but also, in certain situations, acting as a source of new conflict. Additionally, war itself can lead to profound changes in religious institutions: Catholic priests engage with Buddhist monks and new Muslim leaders, while Hindu temples and Pentecostal churches offer the promise of healing.

This book will provoke new debate about the role of religious organisations and leaders in situations of extreme conflict and will be of great interest to students of anthropology, development studies, religious studies and peace/conflict studies.

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cover of Chicano Studies: The Genesis of a Discipline

Chicano Studies

The Genesis of a Discipline

Michael Soldatenko

University of Arizona Press, 2009

Chicano Studies is a comparatively new academic discipline. Unlike well-established fields of study that long ago codified their canons and curricula, the departments of Chicano Studies that exist today on U.S. college and university campuses are less than four decades old. In this edifying and frequently eye-opening book, a career member of the discipline examines its foundations and early years. Based on an extraordinary range of sources and cognizant of infighting and the importance of personalities, Chicano Studies is the first history of the discipline.

What are the assumptions, models, theories, and practices of the academic discipline now known as Chicano Studies? Like most scholars working in the field, Michael Soldatenko didn't know the answers to these questions even though he had been teaching for many years. Intensely curious, he set out to find the answers, and this book is the result of his labors. Here readers will discover how the discipline came into existence in the late 1960s and how it matured during the next fifteen years-from an often confrontational protest of dissatisfied Chicana/o college students into a univocal scholarly voice (or so it appears to outsiders).

Part intellectual history, part social criticism, and part personal meditation, Chicano Studies attempts to make sense of the collision (and occasional wreckage) of politics, culture, scholarship, ideology, and philosophy that created a new academic discipline. Along the way, it identifies a remarkable cast of scholars and administrators who added considerable zest to the drama.


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cover of Chiefs, Scribes, and Ethnographers: Kuna Culture from Inside and Out

Chiefs, Scribes, and Ethnographers

Kuna Culture from Inside and Out

By James Howe

University of Texas Press, 2009

The Kuna of Panama, today one of the best known indigenous peoples of Latin America, moved over the course of the twentieth century from orality and isolation towards literacy and an active engagement with the nation and the world. Recognizing the fascination their culture has held for many outsiders, Kuna intellectuals and villagers have collaborated actively with foreign anthropologists to counter anti-Indian prejudice with positive accounts of their people, thus becoming the agents as well as subjects of ethnography. One team of chiefs and secretaries, in particular, independently produced a series of historical and cultural texts, later published in Sweden, that today still constitute the foundation of Kuna ethnography. As a study of the political uses of literacy, of western representation and indigenous counter-representation, and of the ambivalent inter-cultural dialogue at the heart of ethnography, Chiefs, Scribes, and Ethnographers addresses key issues in contemporary anthropology. It is the story of an extended ethnographic encounter, one involving hundreds of active participants on both sides and continuing today.
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cover of Children In The Field

Children In The Field

edited by Joan Cassell

Temple University Press, 1994

"The wisdom of taking children on this journey into the abyss of otherness is debatable. That's the point: the unsettled (and unsettling) quality of this book is what makes it worth reading and pondering." --The Women's Review of Books The conditions under which knowledge is acquired help shape that knowledge. Yet, until quite recently, the conditions under which anthropologists observe and interact with members of other cultures were considered the stuff of memoirs, not science. Although many families have accompanied anthropologists to the field, few researchers have discussed this aspect of scientific life. This collection of narratives by anthropologists who brought children with them into the field combines personal drama, practical information, and advice with an examination of the way in which the presence of children can alter the relationship between those who study and those who are studied. The stories are funny, sad, horrifying, fascinating. Each essay presents different field conditions, locations, family constellations, experiences, and reactions. Photographs of the anthropologists and their children enhance the engaging and illuminating accounts. This book, the first study of its kind, will be essential reading for anyone involved in field research. "A superb collection of papers documenting the value, trauma, joy, and frustration of taking children along on a field work adventure. This book covers, among other topics: burying a child in the field, bearing a child in the field, analysis of the hardships children face in a difficult field experience, and children serving as role models in language learning and the establishment of rapport with community members. This should be required reading for anyone anticipating a field work experience." --Sue-Ellen Jacobs, University of Washington "[These] stories...present the missing factor in anthropological research, which is after all supposed to be producing the most human of disciplines, involved with the intercultural world of woman alive and man alive; at last in this book we have children alive. The volume covers difficulties both of family and field situation and truthfully faces the differences in cultures.... The vignettes of children's lives are unforgettable." --Edith L.B. Turner, University of Virginia
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cover of Cine-Ethnography

Cine-Ethnography

Jean Rouch

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

One of the most influential figures in documentary and ethnographic filmmaking, Jean Rouch has made more than one hundred films in West Africa and France. In such acclaimed works as Jaguar, The Lion Hunters, and Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet, Rouch has explored racism, colonialism, African modernity, religious ritual, and music. He pioneered numerous film techniques and technologies, and in the process inspired generations of filmmakers, from New Wave directors, who emulated his cinema verité style, to today’s documentarians.Ciné-Ethnography is a long-overdue English-language resource that collects Rouch's key writings, interviews, and other materials that distill his thinking on filmmaking, ethnography, and his own career. Editor Steven Feld opens with a concise overview of Rouch’s career, highlighting the themes found throughout his work. In the four essays that follow, Rouch discusses the ethnographic film as a genre, the history of African cinema, his experiences of filmmaking among the Songhay, and the intertwined histories of French colonialism, anthropology, and cinema. And in four interviews, Rouch thoughtfully reflects on each of his films, as well as his artistic, intellectual, and political concerns. Ciné-Ethnography also contains an annotated transcript of Chronicle of a Summer—one of Rouch's most important works—along with commentary by the filmmakers, and concludes with a complete, annotated filmography and a bibliography. The most thorough resource on Rouch available in any language, Ciné-Ethnography makes clear this remarkable and still vital filmmaker's major role in the history of documentary cinema. Jean Rouch was born in Paris in 1917. He studied civil engineering before turning to film and anthropology in response to his experiences in West Africa during World War II. Rouch is the recipient of numerous awards, including the International Critics Award at Cannes for the film Chronicle of a Summer in 1961. Steven Feld is professor of music and anthropology at Columbia University.
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cover of Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government

Collecting, Ordering, Governing

Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government

Tony Bennett, Fiona Cameron, Nelia Dias, Ben Dibley, Harrison Rodney, Ira Jacknis, and Conal McCarthy

Duke University Press, 2017

The coauthors of this theoretically innovative work explore the relationships among anthropological fieldwork, museum collecting and display, and social governance in the early twentieth century in Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, and the United States. With case studies ranging from the Musée de l'Homme's 1930s fieldwork missions in French Indo-China to the influence of Franz Boas's culture concept on the development of American museums, the authors illuminate recent debates about postwar forms of multicultural governance, cultural conceptions of difference, and postcolonial policy and practice in museums. Collecting, Ordering, Governing is essential reading for scholars and students of anthropology, museum studies, cultural studies, and indigenous studies as well as museum and heritage professionals.
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cover of Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge

Colonial Situations

Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge

Edited by George W. Stocking, Jr.

University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

As European colonies in Asia and Africa became independent nations, as the United States engaged in war in Southeast Asia and in covert operations in South America, anthropologists questioned their interactions with their subjects and worried about the political consequences of government-supported research.  By 1970, some spoke of anthropology as “the child of Western imperialism” and as “scientific colonialism.”  Ironically, as the link between anthropology and colonialism became more widely accepted within the discipline, serious interest in examining the history of anthropology in colonial contexts diminished.


    This volume is an effort to initiate a critical historical consideration of the varying “colonial situations” in which (and out of which) ethnographic knowledge essential to anthropology has been produced.  The essays comment on ethnographic work from the middle of the nineteenth century to nearly the end of the twentieth, in regions from Oceania through southeast Asia, the Andaman Islands, and southern Africa to North and South America. 


    The “colonial situations” also cover a broad range, from first contact through the establishment of colonial power, from District Officer administrations through white settler regimes, from internal colonialism to international mandates, from early “pacification” to wars of colonial liberation, from the expropriation of land to the defense of ecology.  The motivations and responses of the anthropologists discussed are equally varied:  the romantic resistance of Maclay and the complicity of Kubary in early colonialism; Malinowski’s salesmanship of academic anthropology; Speck’s advocacy of Indian land rights; Schneider’s grappling with the ambiguities of rapport; and Turner’s facilitation of Kaiapo cinematic activism.



“Provides fresh insights for those who care about the history of science in general and that of anthropology in particular, and a valuable reference for professionals and graduate students.”—Choice



“Among the most distinguished publications in anthropology, as well as in the history of social sciences.”—George Marcus, Anthropologica

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cover of Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology

Colonial Subjects

Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology

Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2000

It is often forgotten that anthropology--the scientific study of cultural difference--arose from situations that required a practical management of cultural differences. Out of the practical contexts of colonial contact--administration, mission, nationalism, policing, settler cultivation, tourism, warfare--emerged methods, and images of otherness, that inform anthropological notions of cultural difference to this day.
The essays in this volume share the assumption that "ethnography," far from being the unique purview of anthropology, is a broader field of practice out of which and alongside which anthropology attempted to distinguish itself as a scientific discipline. They explore a variety of situations in colonial South and Southeast Asia and Africa and in the treatment of the indigenous inhabitants of North America and Australia to provide genealogies of present-day anthropological practices, tracing them back to the subjects of colonial ethnography.
This book introduces into the history of anthropology many of the insights developed in recent studies in history, cultural studies, and the anthropology of colonialism. It can serve as a course book in the history of anthropology and the anthropology of colonialism, while at the same time addressing a much larger audience of students of colonial history, of the history of science and modernity, and of globalization.
Peter Pels is Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. Oscar Salemink is Program Officer for Social Sciences and Humanities, The Ford Foundation-Vietnam.
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cover of Comprehending Drug Use: Ethnographic Research at the Social Margins

Comprehending Drug Use

Ethnographic Research at the Social Margins

Page, J. Bryan

Rutgers University Press, 2010

Comprehending Drug Use, the first full-length critical overview of the use of ethnographic methods in drug research, synthesizes more than one hundred years of study on the human encounter with psychotropic drugs. J. Bryan Page and Merrill Singer create a comprehensive examination of the whole field of drug ethnography-methodology that involves access to the hidden world of drug users, the social spaces they frequent, and the larger structural forces that help construct their worlds. They explore the important intersections of drug ethnography with globalization, criminalization, public health (including the HIV/AIDS epidemic, hepatitis, and other diseases), and gender, and also provide a practical guide of the methods and career paths of ethnographers.
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cover of Confronting Margaret Mead: Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific

Confronting Margaret Mead

Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific

edited by Lenora Foerstel and Angela Gilliam

Temple University Press, 1994

"...valuable information, ideas, and contrasts." --Choice The legendary Margaret Mead changed Americans' views of themselves by relating information collected from remote peoples to our society--a society that she did not consider necessarily to be the pinnacle of human development. However, Mead and her followers have been criticized for promulgating sensationalized and inaccurate images of Melanesian societies, including savagery, cannibalism, and wanton sexuality. This book deals with the consequences of such Western condescension. Destined to be highly controversial, this book for the first time brings a multicultural outlook to bear on Margaret Mead, scrutinizing her role and impact on Western anthropology, colonialism, and strategic and business interests in the South Pacific. The contributors, most of them avowedly activist supporters of the concept of a nuclear-free and independent Pacific, include Warilea Iamo, Papua New Guinea's first anthropologist; John D. Waiko, Director of the New Guinea Institute of Applied Social and Economic Research; Nahau Rooney, the daughter of one of Mead's informants, and; Susanna Ounei, a leader of a New Caledonian independence front. "This book is a remarkable portrait of a scholar and a field, both fierce and fair. The conjecture of perspectives--ethnography and empire, personal history and public practice, voices from the Pacific as well as the United States--makes a document important for assessing anthropology, both past and future." --Dell Hymes, University of Virginia, and editor of Reinventing Anthropology "Mead's attitude toward and activities in relation to her country's foreign and military policies are under scrutiny here, and so is her relationship with the subjects of her research. Such critical assessment of leading scholars is crucial to improvement of academic research and scholastic work and building trust, confidence, and good relations among poe0ples of the world." --Amelia Rokotuivuna, Young Women's Christian Association, Fiji, and former Chair of the Nuclear-Free Pacific Conference
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cover of Conjuring Science: Scientific Symbols and Cultural Meanings in American Life

Conjuring Science

Scientific Symbols and Cultural Meanings in American Life

Toumey, Christopher P.

Rutgers University Press, 1996

What are the implications for Americans when actors who play doctors on television endorse medical products, or when an entire town in the Midwest prepares for an earthquake based on the specious advice of a zoologist? These are just two of the many questions Christopher Toumey asks in his investigation of the role of science in American culture. Toumey focuses on the ways in which the symbols of science are employed to signify scientific authority in a variety of cases, from the selling of medical products to the making of public policy about AIDS/HIV––a practice he calls "conjuring" science. It is this "conjuring" of the images and symbols of scientific authority that troubles Toumey and leads him to reflect on the history of public understanding and perceptions of science in the United States. He argues that while most Americans invest a great deal of authority in science, there is a vacuum of understanding about scientific knowledge. This gap between belief and understanding greatly influences public policy decisions and democratic processes.           

Toumey argues that instead of comprehending scientific knowledge, methods, or standards, most Americans know science only in terms of symbols that stand for science and that stand between people and scientific understanding. He breaks this paradox down into three questions. First, what are the historical conditions that have caused the culture of science to be so estranged from other parts of American culture? Second, how does science fit into American democratic culture today? And third, if the symbols of science are being used to endorse or legitimize certain values and meanings, but not the values and meanings of science, then to what do they refer?            

In witty, readable prose, Toumey investigates these questions by presenting five episodes of science in American life: the fluoridation controversies; the 1986 California referendum on AIDS/HIV policy; the cold fusion controversy; the anti-evolution of creationism; and the mad- scientist stories of fiction and film.     

 

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cover of Conserving Culture: A NEW DISCOURSE ON HERITAGE

Conserving Culture

A NEW DISCOURSE ON HERITAGE

Edited by Mary Hufford

University of Illinois Press, 1994

Conserving Culture examines
  heritage protection in the United States and how it has been implemented in
  specific cases. Contributors challenge the division of heritage into nature,
  the built environment, and culture. They describe cultural conservation as an
  integrated process for resource planning and recommend supplanting the current
  prescriptive approach with one that is more responsive to grass-roots cultural
  concerns. 
 
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cover of Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss

Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon

University of Chicago Press, 1991

At the age of eighty, one of the most influential yet reclusive intellectuals of the twentieth century consented to his first interviews in nearly thirty years. Hailed by Le Figaro as "an event," the resulting conversations between Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon (a correspondent for Le Nouvel Observateur) reveal the great anthropologist speaking of his life and work with ease and humor.

Now available in English, the conversations are rich in Lévi-Strauss's candid appraisals of some of the best-known figures of the Parisian intelligentsia: surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst, with whom Lévi-Strauss shared a bohemian life in 1940s Manhattan; de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus, the stars of existentialism; Leiris, Foucault, Dumézil, Jacob, Lacan, and others. His long friendships with Jakobson and Merleau-Ponty are recalled, as well as his encounters with prominent figures in American anthropology: Lowie, Boas (who suddenly died in his chair beside Lévi-Strauss at a banquet at Columbia University), Benedict, Linton, Mead, and Kroeber.

Lévi-Strauss speaks frankly about how circumstances and his own inclinations, after his early fieldwork in Brazil, led him to embrace theoretical work. His straightforward answers to Eribon's penetrating questions—What is a myth? What is structuralism? Are you a philosopher?—clarify his intellectual motives and the development of his research; his influential role as an administrator, including the founding of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology and of the journal L'Homme; the course of his writings, from Elementary Structures of Kinship to The Jealous Potter; and his thoughts on the conduct of anthropology today. 

Never before has Lévi-Strauss spoken so freely on so many aspects of his life: his initial failure to be elected to the Collège de France; his reaction to the events of May 1968; his regrets at not being a great investigative reporter or playwright; his deep identification with Wagner, Proust, and Rousseau. This is a rare opportunity to become acquainted with a great thinker in all his dimensions.
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cover of Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity

Coral Empire

Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity

Ann Elias

Duke University Press, 2019

From vividly colored underwater photographs of Australia's Great Barrier Reef to life-size dioramas re-creating coral reefs and the bounty of life they sustained, the work of early twentieth-century explorers and photographers fed the public's fascination with reefs. In the 1920s John Ernest Williamson in the Bahamas and Frank Hurley in Australia produced mass-circulated and often highly staged photographs and films that cast corals as industrious, colonizing creatures, and the undersea as a virgin, unexplored, and fantastical territory. In Coral Empire Ann Elias traces the visual and social history of Williamson and Hurley and how their modern media spectacles yoked the tropics and coral reefs to colonialism, racism, and the human domination of nature. Using the labor and knowledge of indigenous peoples while exoticizing and racializing them as inferior Others, Williamson and Hurley sustained colonial fantasies about people of color and the environment as endless resources to be plundered. As Elias demonstrates, their reckless treatment of the sea prefigured attitudes that caused the environmental crises that the oceans and reefs now face.
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cover of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader

Critical Ethnic Studies

A Reader

Critical Ethnic Studies Editorial Collective

Duke University Press, 2016

Building on the intellectual and political momentum that established the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, this Reader inaugurates a radical response to the appropriations of liberal multiculturalism while building on the possibilities enlivened by the historical work of Ethnic Studies. It does not attempt to circumscribe the boundaries of Critical Ethnic Studies; rather, it offers a space to promote open dialogue, discussion, and debate regarding the field's expansive, politically complex, and intellectually rich concerns. Covering a wide range of topics, from multiculturalism, the neoliberal university, and the exploitation of bodies to empire, the militarized security state, and decolonialism, these twenty-five essays call attention to the urgency of articulating a Critical Ethnic Studies for the twenty-first century. 
 
 
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cover of Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations

Critical Indigenous Studies

Engagements in First World Locations

Edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson

University of Arizona Press, 2016

With increasing speed, the emerging discipline of critical Indigenous studies is expanding and demarcating its territory from Indigenous studies through the work of a new generation of Indigenous scholars. Critical Indigenous Studies makes an important contribution to this expansion, disrupting the certainty of disciplinary knowledge produced in the twentieth century, when studying Indigenous peoples was primarily the domain of non-Indigenous scholars.
 
Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s introductory essay provides a context for the emerging discipline. The volume is organized into three sections: the first includes essays that interrogate the embedded nature of Indigenous studies within academic institutions; the second explores the epistemology of the discipline; and the third section is devoted to understanding the locales of critical inquiry and practice.
 
Each essay places and contemplates critical Indigenous studies within the context of First World nations, which continue to occupy Indigenous lands in the twenty-first century. The contributors include Aboriginal, Metis, Maori, Kanaka Maoli, Filipino-Pohnpeian, and Native American scholars working and writing through a shared legacy born of British and later U.S. imperialism. In these countries, critical Indigenous studies is flourishing and transitioning into a discipline, a knowledge/power domain where distinct work is produced, taught, researched, and disseminated by Indigenous scholars.

View the Table of Contents
here.

Contributors:

Hokulani K. Aikau
Chris Andersen
Larissa Behrendt
Vicente M. Diaz
Noelani Goodyear Kaopua
Daniel Heath Justice
Brendan Hokowhitu
Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Jean M. O'Brien
Noenoe Silva
Kim Tallbear
Robert Warrior       
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cover of Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing

Crumpled Paper Boat

Experiments in Ethnographic Writing

Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean, editors

Duke University Press, 2017

Crumpled Paper Boat is a book of experimental ventures in ethnographic writing, an exploration of the possibilities of a literary anthropology. These original essays from notable writers in the field blur the boundaries between ethnography and genres such as poetry, fiction, memoir, and cinema. They address topics as diverse as ritual expression in Cuba and madness in a Moroccan city, the HIV epidemic in South Africa and roadkill in suburban America. Essays alternate with methodological reflections on fundamental problems of writerly heritage, craft, and responsibility in anthropology. Crumpled Paper Boat engages writing as a creative process of encounter, a way of making and unmaking worlds, and a material practice no less participatory and dynamic than fieldwork itself. These talented writers show how inventive, appealing, and intellectually adventurous prose can allow us to enter more profoundly into the lives and worlds of others, breaking with conventional notions of representation and subjectivity. They argue that such experimentation is essential to anthropology’s role in the contemporary world, and one of our most powerful means of engaging it.
 
Contributors. Daniella Gandolfo, Angela Garcia, Tobias Hecht, Michael Jackson, Adrie Kusserow, Stuart McLean, Todd Ramón Ochoa, Anand Pandian, Stefania Pandolfo, Lisa Stevenson, Kathleen Stewart

A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar
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cover of Cultural Compass

Cultural Compass

Martin Manalansan

Temple University Press, 2000

Cultural Compass re-writes the space of Asian Americans. Through innovative studies of community politics, gender, family and sexual relations, cultural events, and other sites central to the formation of ethnic and citizen identity, contributors reconfigure ethnography according to Asian American experiences in the United States. In these eleven essays, scholars in anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, and Asian American studies reconsider traditional models for ethnographic research.

Drawing upon recent theoretical discussions and methodological innovations, the contributors explore the construction and displacement of self, community, and  home integral to Asian American cultural journeys in the late twentieth century. Some discuss the  unique situation of doing ethnographic work "at home" -- that is researching one's own ethnic group or another group with Asian America. Others draw on rich and diverse field experiences. Whether they are doing homework or fieldwork, contributors reflect on the ways that particular matters of identity -- gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, age -- play out between researchers and informants. Individual essays and the book as a whole challenge the notion of a monolithic, spatially bounded Asian American community, pointing the way to multiple sites of political struggle, cultural critique, and social change.
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cover of Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis

Cultural Struggles

Performance, Ethnography, Praxis

Dwight Conquergood

University of Michigan Press, 2013

The late Dwight Conquergood’s research has inspired an entire generation of scholars invested in performance as a meaningful paradigm to understand human interaction, especially between structures of power and the disenfranchised. Conquergood’s research laid the groundwork for others to engage issues of ethics in ethnographic research, performance as a meaningful paradigm for ethnography, and case studies that demonstrated the dissolution of theory/practice binaries.Cultural Struggles is the first gathering of Conquergood’s work in a single volume, tracing the evolution of one scholar’s thinking across a career of scholarship, teaching, and activism, and also the first collection of its kind to bring together theory, method, and complete case studies.

The collection begins with an illuminating introduction by E. Patrick Johnson and ends with commentary by other scholars (Micaela di Leonardo, Judith Hamera, Shannon Jackson, D. Soyini Madison, Lisa Merrill, Della Pollock, and Joseph Roach), engaging aspects of Conquergood’s work and providing insight into how that work has withstood the test of time, as scholars still draw on his research to inform their current interests and methods.

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cover of Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century

Culture and Anomie

Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century

Christopher Herbert

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Few ideas are as important and pervasive in the discourse of the twentieth century as the idea of culture. Yet culture, Christopher Herbert contends, is an idea laden from its inception with ambiguity and contradiction. In Culture and Anomie, Christopher Herbert conducts an inquiry into the historical emergence of the modern idea of culture that is at the same time an extended critical analysis of the perplexities and suppressed associations underlying our own exploitation of this term.

Making wide reference to twentieth-century anthropologists from Malinowski and Benedict to Evans-Pritchard, Geertz, and Lévi-Strauss as well as to nineteenth-century social theorists like Tylor, Spencer, Mill, and Arnold, Herbert stresses the philosophically dubious, unstable character that has clung to the "culture" idea and embarrassed its exponents even as it was developing into a central principle of interpretation.

In a series of detailed studies ranging from political economy to missionary ethnography, Mayhew, and Trollope's fiction, Herbert then focuses on the intellectual and historical circumstances that gave to "culture" the appearance of a secure category of scientific analysis despite its apparent logical incoherence. What he describes is an intimate relationship between the idea of culture and its antithesis, the myth or fantasy of a state of boundless human desire—a conception that binds into a single tradition of thought such seemingly incompatible writers as John Wesley, who called this state original sin, and Durkheim, who gave it its technical name in sociology: anomie.

Methodologically provocative and rich in unorthodox conclusions, Culture and Anomie will be of interest not only to specialists in nineteenth-century literature and intellectual history, but also to readers across the wide range of fields in which the concept of culture plays a determining role.
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cover of Culture and Practical Reason

Culture and Practical Reason

Marshall Sahlins

University of Chicago Press, 1978

"The main thrust of this book is to deliver a major critique of materialist and rationalist explanations of social and cultural forms, but the in the process Sahlins has given us a much stronger statement of the centrality of symbols in human affairs than have many of our 'practicing' symbolic anthropologists. He demonstrates that symbols enter all phases of social life: those which we tend to regard as strictly pragmatic, or based on concerns with material need or advantage, as well as those which we tend to view as purely symbolic, such as ideology, ritual, myth, moral codes, and the like. . . ."—Robert McKinley, Reviews in Anthropology
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cover of Culture and the Question of Rights: Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia

Culture and the Question of Rights

Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia

Charles Zerner, ed.

Duke University Press, 2003

This collection of ethnographic and interpretive essays fundamentally alters the debate over indigenous land claims in Southeast Asia and beyond. Based on fieldwork conducted in Malaysia and Indonesia during the 1980s and 1990s, these studies explore new terrain at the intersection of environmental justice, nature conservation, cultural performance, and the politics of making and interpreting claims.
Calling for radical redefinitions of development and ownership and for new understandings of the translation of culture and rights in politically dangerous contexts—natural resource frontiers—this volume links social injustice and the degradation of Southeast Asian environments. Charles Zerner and his colleagues show how geographical areas once viewed as wild and undeveloped are actually cultural artifacts shaped by complex interactions with human societies. Drawing on richly varied sources of evidence and interpretation—from trance dances, court proceedings, tree planting patterns, marine and forest rituals, erotic poems, and codifications of customary law, Culture and the Question of Rights reveals the ironies, complexities, and histories of contemporary communities’ struggles to retain their gardens, forests, fishing territories, and graveyards. The contributors examine how these cultural activities work to both construct and to lay claim to nature. These essays open up new avenues for negotiating indigenous rights against a background of violence, proliferating markets, and global ideas of biodiversity and threatened habitat.

Contributors. Jane Atkinson, Don Brenneis, Stephanie Fried, Nancy Peluso, Marina Roseman, Anna Tsing, Charles Zerner

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cover of Culture, Ethnicity, and Justice in the South: The Southern Anthropological Society, 1968-1971

Culture, Ethnicity, and Justice in the South

The Southern Anthropological Society, 1968-1971

Southern Anthropological Southern Anthropological Society

University of Alabama Press, 2004

An important anthology putting the leading topics in Southern anthropology in the context of the 1960s

Proceedings of the Southern Anthropological Society:

No. 1, Essays on Medical Anthropology (1968), edited by Thomas Weaver, with contributions by Frank J. Essene, Thomas Weaver, Charles Hudson, Helen Phillips, Hazel Hitson Weidman, Dorothea C. Leighton, Nora F. Cline, Peter Goethals, Berton H. Kaplan, Alice H. Murphree, John G. Peck, and Gianna Hochstein

No. 2, Urban Anthropology: Research Perspectives and Strategies (1968, edited by Elizabeth M. Eddy, with contributions by Charles Hudson, Elizabeth M. Eddy, Conrad M. Arensberg, Charles H. Fairbanks, H. W. Hutchinson, Anthony Leeds, Hans C. Buechler, Brian M. de Toit, Emilio Willems, Michael D. Olien, and John Gulick

No. 3, Concepts and Assumptions in Contemporary Anthropology (1969), edited by Stephen A. Tyler, with contributions by Charles Hudson, Stephen A. Tyler, Eric R. Wolf, Ann Fischer, E. Pendleton Banks, Munro S. Edmonson, Francis E. Johnston, William G. Haag, Arden R. King, and Jan Brukman

No. 4, The Not So Solid South: Anthropological Studies in a Regional Subculture (1971), edited by J. Kenneth Morland, with contributions by Charles Hudson, J. Kenneth Morland, Helen Phillips Keber, Jared Harper, Edward E. Knipe, Helen M. Lewis, Milton B. Newton Jr., Ronald J. Duncan, John Gordon, H. Eugene Hodges, William L. Partridge, Max E. Stanton, Robert Sayers, James L. Peacock, and Christopher Crocker

No. 5, Red, White, and Black: Symposium on Indians in the Old South (1971), edited by Charles M. Hudson, with contributions by Charles Hudson, Louis De Vorsey Jr., William S. Pollitzer, Mary R. Haas, David J. Hally, Charles H. Fairbanks, F. N. Boney, Joseph L. Brent III, William S. Willis Jr., John H. Peterson Jr., and Charles Crowe.
 

Originally distributed by the University of Georgia Press, are all combined herein with a historical overview in the new introduction by Miles Richardson and with a new index to the complete anthology.

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