Results by title

4413 books match the query 'Anthropology' and 163 start with e

cover of Embodied Encuentros: Oral History Archives of Latina/o/e Experiences

Embodied Encuentros

Oral History Archives of Latina/o/e Experiences

Elena Foulis

The Ohio State University Press, 2026

In Embodied Encuentros, Elena Foulis offers a practical guide for completing ethical fieldwork in Latina/o/e communities, emphasizing equitable and culturally sustaining practices for gathering oral histories. In her critical decolonial model, Foulis centers the agency of the people within these communities while considering the diversity and complexity of their experiences. In doing so, she advocates for the importance of building oral history archives that challenge our understandings of Latina/o/e peoples.

Foulis provides a conceptual framework for building on community knowledge that considers language, cultural practices, gender, and race. She suggests ways to involve students in ethical research; collect evolving oral histories; employ a language justice approach that acknowledges linguistic oppression, translanguaging, and bilingualism as essential aspects of this community; and consider the importance of digital archives for the creation of multimedia projects that foster community pláticas. Grounded in both theoretical approaches and a feminist ethics praxis, Embodied Encuentros ultimately outlines an important model for doing collaborative, ethical research—not only within Latina/o/e communities but within other minoritized communities as well.

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cover of Embodied Protests: Emotions and Women's Health in Bolivia

Embodied Protests

Emotions and Women's Health in Bolivia

Maria Tapias

University of Illinois Press, 2015

Embodied Protests examines how Bolivia's hesitant courtship with globalization manifested in the visceral and emotional diseases that afflicted many Bolivian women. Drawing on case studies conducted among market- and working-class women in the provincial town of Punata, Maria Tapias examines how headaches and debilidad, so-called normal bouts of infant diarrhea, and the malaise oppressing whole communities were symptomatic of profound social suffering. She approaches the narratives of distress caused by poverty, domestic violence, and the failure of social networks as constituting the knowledge that shaped their understandings of well-being. At the crux of Tapias's definitive analysis is the idea that individual health perceptions, actions, and practices cannot be separated from local cultural narratives or from global and economic forces.

Evocative and compassionate, Embodied Protests gives voice to the human costs of the ongoing neoliberal experiment.

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cover of Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty

Embodying Biodiversity

Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty

Terese V. Gagnon

University of Arizona Press, 2024

Harnessing a myriad of methodologies and research spanning multiple continents, this volume delves into the power of everyday forms of biodiversity conservation, motivated by sensory and embodied engagement with plants. Through an array of interdisciplinary contributions, the authors argue that the vast majority of biodiversity conservation worldwide is carried out not by large-scale, hierarchical initiatives but by ordinary people who cultivate sensory-motivated, place-based bonds with plants.

Acknowledging the monumental role of everyday champions in tending biodiversity, the contributors write that this caretaking is crucial to countering ecological harm and global injustice stemming from colonial violence and racial capitalism.

Contributors
Mike Anastario
Ally Ang
Antonia Barreau
Julián Caviedes
Chen Chen
Evelyn Flores
Terese V. Gagnon
José Tomás Ibarra
Fred L. Joiner
Gary Nabhan
Virginia D. Nazarea
Shannon A. Novak
Valentina Peveri
Emily Ramsey
Yasuaki Sato
Justin Simpson
David E. Sutton

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cover of Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas

Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas

Yolanda Covington-Ward and Jeanette S. Jouili, editors

Duke University Press, 2021

The contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and transformation of social relationships and political and economic power. Among other topics, the essays examine the dynamics of religious and racial identity among Brazilian Neo-Pentecostals; the significance of cloth coverings in Islamic practice in northern Nigeria; the ethics of socially engaged hip-hop lyrics by Black Muslim artists in Britain; ritual dance performances among Mama Tchamba devotees in Togo; and how Ifá practitioners from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, and the United States join together in a shared spiritual ethnicity. From possession and spirit-induced trembling to dance, the contributors outline how embodied religious practices are central to expressing and shaping interiority and spiritual lives, national and ethnic belonging, ways of knowing and techniques of healing, and sexual and gender politics. In this way, the body is a crucial site of religiously motivated social action for people of African descent.

Contributors. Rachel Cantave, Youssef Carter, N. Fadeke Castor, Yolanda Covington-Ward, Casey Golomski, Elyan Jeanine Hill, Nathanael J. Homewood, Jeanette S. Jouili, Bertin M. Louis Jr., Camee Maddox-Wingfield, Aaron Montoya, Jacob K. Olupona, Elisha P. Renne
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cover of Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel

Embodying Culture

Pregnancy in Japan and Israel

Ivry, Tsipy

Rutgers University Press, 2009

Embodying Culture is an ethnographically grounded exploration of pregnancy in two different cultures—Japan and Israel—both of which medicalize pregnancy. Tsipy Ivry focuses on "low-risk" or "normal" pregnancies, using cultural comparison to explore the complex relations among ethnic ideas about procreation, local reproductive politics, medical models of pregnancy care, and local modes of maternal agency.

The ethnography pieces together the voices of pregnant Japanese and Israeli women, their doctors, their partners, the literature they read, and depicts various clinical encounters such as ultrasound scans, explanatory classes for amniocentesis, birthing classes, and special pregnancy events.

The emergent pictures suggest that although experiences of pregnancy in Japan and Israel differ, pregnancy in both cultures is an energy-consuming project of meaning-making— suggesting that the sense of biomedical technologies are not only in the technologies themselves but are assigned by those who practice and experience them.

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cover of Embracing Age: How Catholic Nuns Became Models of Aging Well

Embracing Age

How Catholic Nuns Became Models of Aging Well

Anna I. Corwin

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Embracing Age: How Catholic Nuns Became Models of Aging Well examines a community of individuals whose aging trajectories contrast mainstream American experiences. In mainstream American society, aging is presented as a “problem,” a state to be avoided as long as possible, a state that threatens one’s ability to maintain independence, autonomy, control over one’s surroundings. Aging “well” (or avoiding aging) has become a twenty-first century American preoccupation. Embracing Age provides a window into the everyday lives of American Catholic nuns who experience longevity and remarkable health and well-being at the end of life. Catholic nuns aren’t only healthier in older age, they are healthier because they practice a culture of acceptance and grace around aging. Embracing Age demonstrates how aging in the convent becomes understood by the nuns to be a natural part of the life course, not one to be feared or avoided. Anna I. Corwin shows readers how Catholic nuns create a cultural community that provides a model for how to grow old, decline, and die that is both embedded in American culture and quite distinct from other American models.

Instructor's Guide is available at no cost (https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/media/wysiwyg/documents/corwin_instructor_guide_final.pdf).

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 

Download open access ebook here (https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/media/wysiwyg/documents/embracing_age_open_access.pdf).
 

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cover of Emergent Ecologies

Emergent Ecologies

Eben Kirksey

Duke University Press, 2015

In an era of global warming, natural disasters, endangered species, and devastating pollution, contemporary writing on the environment largely focuses on doomsday scenarios. Eben Kirksey suggests we reject such apocalyptic thinking and instead find possibilities in the wreckage of ongoing disasters, as symbiotic associations of opportunistic plants, animals, and microbes are flourishing in unexpected places. Emergent Ecologies uses artwork and contemporary philosophy to illustrate hopeful opportunities and reframe key problems in conservation biology such as invasive species, extinction, environmental management, and reforestation. Following the flight of capital and nomadic forms of life—through fragmented landscapes of Panama, Costa Rica, and the United States—Kirksey explores how chance encounters, historical accidents, and parasitic invasions have shaped present and future multispecies communities. New generations of thinkers and tinkerers are learning how to care for emergent ecological assemblages—involving frogs, fungal pathogens, ants, monkeys, people, and plants—by seeding them, nurturing them, protecting them, and ultimately letting go.
 
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cover of Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice

Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice

Michael M. J. Fischer

Duke University Press, 2003

Anthropology as Cultural Critique helped redefine cultural anthropology in the 1980s. Now, with Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, pathbreaking scholar Michael M. J. Fischer moves the discussion to a consideration of the groundwork laid in the 1990s for engagements with the fast-changing worlds of technoscience, telemedia saturation, and the reconstruction of societies after massive trauma. Fischer argues that new methodologies and conceptual tools are necessitated by the fact that cultures of every kind are becoming more complex and differentiated at the same time that globalization and modernization are bringing them into exponentially increased interaction. Anthropology, Fischer explains, now operates in a series of third spaces well beyond the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dualisms of us/them, primitive/civilized, East/West, or North/South. He contends that more useful paradigms—such as informatics, multidimensional scaling, autoimmunity, and visual literacy beyond the frame—derive from the contemporary sciences and media technologies.

A vigorous advocate of the anthropological voice and method, Fischer emphasizes the ethical dimension of cultural anthropology. Ethnography, he suggests, is uniquely situated to gather and convey observations fundamental to the creation of new social institutions for an evolving civil society. In Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice Fischer considers a dazzling array of subjects—among them Iranian and Polish cinema, cyberspace, autobiographical and fictional narrative, and genomic biotechnologies—and, in the process, demonstrates a cultural anthropology for a highly networked world. He lays the groundwork for a renewed and powerful twenty-first-century anthropology characterized by a continued insistence on empirical fieldwork, engagements with other disciplines, and dialogue with interlocutors around the globe.

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cover of Emotions in History – Lost and Found

Emotions in History – Lost and Found

Ute Frevert

Central European University Press, 2011

Coming to terms with emotions and how they influence human behaviour, seems to be of the utmost importance to societies that are obsessed with everything "neuro." On the other hand, emotions have become an object of constant individual and social manipulation since "emotional intelligence" emerged as a buzzword of our times. Reflecting on this burgeoning interest in human emotions makes one think of how this interest developed and what fuelled it. From a historian's point of view, it can be traced back to classical antiquity. But it has undergone shifts and changes which can in turn shed light on social concepts of the self and its relation to other human beings (and nature). The volume focuses on the historicity of emotions and explores the processes that brought them to the fore of public interest and debate.

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cover of Empathy and Performance: Enactments of Power in Latinx America

Empathy and Performance

Enactments of Power in Latinx America

Laura V. Sández

Vanderbilt University Press, 2024

Empathy and Performance advances a study of empathy and enactments of power by examining works from author-actors whose performances explore the boundaries between two kinship positions. Author Laura V. Sández studies the dramatized dilemma of cultural understanding in “Our America,” a notion that refers first to a collective political identity marking a common belonging in the Spanish-speaking America but also alludes to current struggles in the contemporary US. This book sees empathy as an affective response grounded in subjectivity and kinship. Sández argues that to conceptualize empathy one needs to understand how subjects organize, classify, and limit themselves, not only as agents, but also as interpreters. What sort of affiliations do these performances promote? How do they break, reinforce, or queer societal expectations about the Latinx body, the white body, or simply, the staged body?

To survey different answers to these queries, Sández studies Indigurrito (Nao Bustamante); Dominicanish (Josefina Báez); ¡Bienvenidos Blancos! or Welcome White People! (Alex Torra); the apology delivered by the group Veterans Stand with Standing Rock during protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline; and Kukuli Velarde’s body of work, from We, the Colonized Ones to A Mi Vida. In these artistic enactments, which range from 1992 to 2021, the historical construct of boundaries and bodies becomes evident. Following recent work on empathy by Lanzoni, Maibom, Calloway-Thomas, Bloom, Hogan, and Matravers, among others, Sández examines in-group/out-group divisions, the establishment of identity categories through performance, and the exploration of subaltern identities.
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cover of Empire's Endgame: Racism and the British State

Empire's Endgame

Racism and the British State

Gargi Bhattacharyya

Pluto Press, 2021

We are in a moment of profound overlapping crises. The landscape of politics and entitlement is being rapidly and unpredictably remade. As movements against colonial legacies and state violence coincide with the rise of new authoritarian regimes, it is the analytical lens of racism, and the politics of race, that offers the sharpest focus. In Empire's Endgame, eight leading scholars make a powerful collective intervention in debates around racial capitalism and political crisis in the British context. While the 'Hostile Environment' policy and Brexit Referendum have thrown the centrality of race into sharp relief, discussions of racism have too often focused on individual attitudes and behaviors. Foregrounding instead the wider political and economic context, the authors of Empire's Endgame trace the ways in which the legacies of empire have been reshaped by global capitalism, the digital environment and the instability of the nation-state. Engaging with contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, Empire's Endgame offers both an original perspective on race, media, the state and criminalization, and a vision of a political infrastructure that might include rather than expel in the face of crisis.
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cover of Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures, Revised Edition

Empires of Time

Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures, Revised Edition

Anthony Aveni

University Press of Colorado, 2002

"Aveni . . . explores the interplay of culture and time in this edifying and readable cross-cultural study of timekeeping through the ages."

—The Sciences


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cover of Empires, Nations, and Natives: Anthropology and State-Making

Empires, Nations, and Natives

Anthropology and State-Making

Benoît de L Estoile, Federico Neiburg and Lygia Sigaud, eds.

Duke University Press, 2005

Empires, Nations, and Natives is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the interplay between the practice of anthropology and the politics of empires and nation-states in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It brings together essays that demonstrate how the production of social-science knowledge about the “other” has been inextricably linked to the crafting of government policies. Subverting established boundaries between national and imperial anthropologies, the contributors explore the role of anthropology in the shifting categorizations of race in southern Africa, the identification of Indians in Brazil, the implementation of development plans in Africa and Latin America, the construction of Mexican and Portuguese nationalism, the genesis of “national character” studies in the United States during World War II, the modernizing efforts of the French colonial administration in Africa, and postcolonial architecture.

The contributors—social and cultural anthropologists from the Americas and Europe—report on both historical and contemporary processes. Moving beyond controversies that cast the relationship between scholarship and politics in binary terms of complicity or autonomy, they bring into focus a dynamic process in which states, anthropological knowledge, and population groups themselves are mutually constructed. Such a reflexive endeavor is an essential contribution to a critical anthropological understanding of a changing world.

Contributors: Alban Bensa, Marcio Goldman, Adam Kuper, Benoît de L’Estoile, Claudio Lomnitz, David Mills, Federico Neiburg, João Pacheco de Oliveira, Jorge Pantaleón, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Lygia Sigaud, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Florence Weber

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cover of Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event

Enabling Creative Chaos

The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event

Katherine K. Chen

University of Chicago Press, 2009

In the summer of 2008, nearly fifty thousand people traveled to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to participate in the countercultural arts event Burning Man. Founded on a commitment to expression and community, the annual weeklong festival presents unique challenges to its organizers. Over four years Katherine K. Chen regularly participated in organizing efforts to safely and successfully create a temporary community in the middle of the desert under the hot August sun.

Enabling Creative Chaos tracks how a small, underfunded group of organizers transformed into an unconventional corporation with a ten-million-dollar budget and two thousand volunteers. Over the years, Burning Man’s organizers have experimented with different management models; learned how to recruit, motivate, and retain volunteers; and developed strategies to handle regulatory agencies and respond to media coverage. This remarkable evolution, Chen reveals, offers important lessons for managers in any organization, particularly in uncertain times.

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cover of Enchanted Modernities: Ancestral Vitalizations in the Upper Mekong

Enchanted Modernities

Ancestral Vitalizations in the Upper Mekong

Micah F. Morton

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

Enchanted Modernities tells the story of an Indigenous community’s work to decolonize and reclaim its collective ancestral identity. In this rich, theoretically informed ethnography, Micah F. Morton follows a transregional network of Indigenous Akha people from Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), China, and Laos as they spearhead a new movement for a pan-Akha identity. In the face of enormous historical and present-day colonialist pressures, this neo-traditionalist movement has focused on revitalizing (or “vitalizing,” in Morton’s suggestive term) Akha ancestral ways, preventing ongoing conversion to Christianity, and facilitating return conversion to the ways of the Ancestors. Morton focuses especially on the community’s work to ensure their Ancestors live on and thus remain a dynamic part of their, and their descendants’, lives.

Although modernity and its colonial legacies are often portrayed as severing or at least attenuating people’s ancestral ties, Enchanted Modernities shows that those ties persist and, in fact, are on the rise. Akha and other Indigenous ancestral and animist resurgences are blossoming despite the paradigmatic Western framing of modernity as fundamentally at odds with Ancestors and, for that matter, kinship and even religion. Morton demonstrates that modernity and modernization proceed alongside the reproduction of new and old forms of enchantment.
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cover of Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin

Encoding Race, Encoding Class

Indian IT Workers in Berlin

Sareeta Amrute

Duke University Press, 2016

In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the work and private lives of highly skilled Indian IT coders in Berlin to reveal the oft-obscured realities of the embodied, raced, and classed nature of cognitive labor. In addition to conducting fieldwork and interviews in IT offices as well as analyzing political cartoons, advertisements, and reports on white-collar work, Amrute spent time with a core of twenty programmers before, during, and after their shifts. She shows how they occupy a contradictory position, as they are racialized in Germany as temporary and migrant grunt workers, yet their middle-class aspirations reflect efforts to build a new, global, and economically dominant India. The ways they accept and resist the premises and conditions of their work offer new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies. Demonstrating how these coders' cognitive labor realigns and reimagines race and class, Amrute conceptualizes personhood and migration within global capitalism in new ways.
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cover of Encompassing Others: The Magic of Modernity in Melanesia

Encompassing Others

The Magic of Modernity in Melanesia

Edward LiPuma

University of Michigan Press, 2001

An engaging, beautifully written account by an ethnographer who lived in the mountains of Papua New Guinea, Encompassing Others is at once a history of the encounter of two cultures and an attempt to challenge theoretically the main concepts that have informed the study of modernity. Going beyond accounts that grasp modernity solely in terms of domination, imperialism, and local resistance, it explores how capitalism, Christianity, and mass commercial culture enchant the senses, create a carnival of new goods, and open up new possibilities for thought and action.
Focusing on the Maring people of Highland New Guinea and on the Westerners who interacted with them, Edward LiPuma presents issues from the perspectives of both sides. We hear the voice of the Anglican priest from San Francisco as well as the most powerful Maring shamans. Further, the book seeks to develop a theory of generations that helps explain how change accelerates and societies take on new directions across generations.
Theoretical, descriptive, but almost entirely free of jargon, this book is intended for all those who are interested in how the West's encompassment of other peoples influences how these others conceive of their past, imagine their future, and experience the present. It will have wide appeal for anthropologists and others concerned with colonialism, globalization, and the formation of the nation-state.
Edward LiPuma is Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of Miami.
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cover of Encounters with American Ethnic Cultures

Encounters with American Ethnic Cultures

Edited by Philip L. Kilbride, Jane C. Goodale, and Elizabeth R. Ameisen

University of Alabama Press, 1990

Encounters with American Ethnic Cultures represents a cultural approach to understanding ethnic diversity in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.

Thirteen chapters, each using an ethnographic field methodology, explore such ethnic experience as the "invisible" (WASPS and African-Americans); "self-chosen" (Welsh-American, Irish-American, and Ukrainian-American); "gender-related" (the Lubovitcher); "religious" (Jewish, Native American, Greek-American, and Puerto Rican); and "dislocated" (Cambodians and the homeless). Ethnographic fieldwork focuses an insider's view on the meaning of ethnic experience in the lives of participants in the research. This volume examines the role and function of various ethnic endeavors in the preservation and maintenance of ethnic identity by contemporary Americans.

This five part volume includes:
 

Introduction: Ethnic Culture Analysis—A Course of Study, Jane C. Goodale and Philip L. Kilbride
 

Methodology, Elizabeth R. Ameisen and Carolyn G. Friedman

Part I. Black and WASP in American Cultural Experience: The Invisible Ones
 

Exclusivity in an Ethnic Elite: Racial Prejudice as Boundary Maintenance, Elizabeth R. Ameisen
 

Africans and African-Americans: An Ethnohistorical View and Symbolic Analysis of Food Habits, Carolyn G. Friedman

Part II. Self-Chosen Ethnicity

Unique Americans: The Welsh-American Ethnic Group in the Philadelphia Area, Lorraine Murray
 

Irish-Americans and Irish Dance: Self-Chosen Ethnicity, Erin McGauley Hebard
 

Art and Identity: Ukrainian-American Ethnicity, Jennifer Krier

Part III. Interpretations of Gender and Ethnicity: The Lubavitcher Experience
 

Equality Does Not Mean Sameness: The Role of Women within the Lubavitcher Marriage, Philip Baldinger
 

Strategies for Strength: Women and Personal Empowerment in Lubavitcher Hasidism, Gita Srinivasan

Part IV. Ethnicity and Religion: The Persistence of Collective Representations
 

Our Lives Revolve around the Holidays: Holidays in the Transmission of Jewish Ethnicity, Anna Dahlem
 

Fayetteville or Raleigh? An Analysis of an American Indian Baptist Church, Beth Batten
 

Issues in Greek Orthodoxy That Define and Maintain Greek-American Ethnicity, Karen L. Belsley
 

Es como si fuera la casa de uno: The Role of the Community Church in Maintaining Puerto Rican Ethnicity, Monica Schoch-Spana

Part V. Dislocation and Ethnicity

Cambodian Marriage: Marriage and How it is Changing among Cambodian Refugees in Philadelphia, Rebecca C. Popenoe
 

Ethnic Expression in a Jewish Street Person, Andrew Millstein

Conclusion, Philip L. Kilbride and Jane C. Goodale

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cover of Encounters with Korean Folk Religion: The Goddesses of Eight Peaks Mountain

Encounters with Korean Folk Religion

The Goddesses of Eight Peaks Mountain

Clark W. Sorensen

Rutgers University Press, 2027

Encounters with Korean Folk Religion is an account of forty-five years of engagement with the cult of goddesses on Eight Peaks Mountain in Korea’s western Kangwŏn Province, the shaman who tended to the goddesses there from 1977 to 2015, and the folk religion of the surrounding village of Eight Peaks. Since the 1980s, South Korea has urbanized and the village of Eight Peaks has been transformed from a remote agricultural village into a rafting and ski resort. While communal worship ceremonies have been dying out in most of Korea, they have only grown on Eight Peaks Mountain, which has been a site of worship since at least the 15th century. What was a small-scale local ceremony in 1977 has grown into a large-scale regional celebration attracting shamans and tourists from far and wide. The manuscript delves in a historically and anthropologically innovative way into the social, religious, and historical reasons for this efflorescence.

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cover of Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá

Endangered City

The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá

Austin Zeiderman

Duke University Press, 2016

Security and risk have become central to how cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited in the twenty-first century. In Endangered City, Austin Zeiderman focuses on this new political imperative to govern the present in anticipation of future harm. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Bogotá, Colombia, he examines how state actors work to protect the lives of poor and vulnerable citizens from a range of threats, including environmental hazards and urban violence. By following both the governmental agencies charged with this mandate and the subjects governed by it, Endangered City reveals what happens when logics of endangerment shape the terrain of political engagement between citizens and the state. The self-built settlements of Bogotá’s urban periphery prove a critical site from which to examine the rising effect of security and risk on contemporary cities and urban life.
 
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cover of Enduring Cancer: Life, Death, and Diagnosis in Delhi

Enduring Cancer

Life, Death, and Diagnosis in Delhi

Dwaipayan Banerjee

Duke University Press, 2020

In Enduring Cancer Dwaipayan Banerjee explores the efforts of Delhi's urban poor to create a livable life with cancer as patients and families negotiate an overextended health system unequipped to respond to the disease. Owing to long wait times, most urban poor cancer patients do not receive a diagnosis until it is too late to treat the disease effectively. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the city's largest cancer care NGO and at India's premier public health hospital, Banerjee describes how, for these patients, a cancer diagnosis is often the latest and most serious in a long series of infrastructural failures. In the wake of these failures, Banerjee tracks how the disease then distributes itself across networks of social relations, testing these networks for strength and vulnerability. Banerjee demonstrates how living with and alongside cancer is to be newly awakened to the fragility of social ties, some already made brittle by past histories, and others that are retested for their capacity to support.
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cover of Enduring Polygamy: Plural Marriage and Social Change in an African Metropolis

Enduring Polygamy

Plural Marriage and Social Change in an African Metropolis

Bruce Whitehouse

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Why hasn’t polygamous marriage died out in African cities, as experts once expected it would? Enduring Polygamy considers this question in one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities: Bamako, the capital of Mali, where one in four wives is in a polygamous marriage. Using polygamy as a lens through which to survey sweeping changes in urban life, it offers ethnographic and demographic insights into the customs, gender norms and hierarchies, kinship structures, and laws affecting marriage, and situates polygamy within structures of inequality that shape marital options, especially for young Malian women. Through an approach of cultural relativism, the book offers an open-minded but unflinching perspective on a contested form of marriage. Without shying away from questions of patriarchy and women’s oppression, it presents polygamy from the everyday vantage points of Bamako residents themselves, allowing readers to make informed judgments about it and to appreciate the full spectrum of human cultural diversity.

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cover of Enemies for a Day: Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuania under the Tsars

Enemies for a Day

Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuania under the Tsars

Darius Staliunas

Central European University Press, 2015

It begins by illustrating how widespread anti-Jewish feelings were among the Christian population in 19 th century, focusing on blood libel accusations as well as describing the role of modern antisemitism. Secondly, it tries to identify the structural preconditions as well as specific triggers that turned anti-Jewish feelings into collective violence and analyzes the nature of this violence. Lastly, pogroms in Lithuania are compared to anti-Jewish violence in other regions of the Russian Empire and East Galicia.

This research is inspired by the cultural turn in social sciences, an approach that assumes that violence is filled with meaning, which is “culturally constructed, discursively mediated, symbolically saturated, and ritually regulated.” The author argues that pogroms in Lithuania instead followed a communal pattern of ethnic violence and was very different from deadly pogroms in other parts of the Russian Empire.

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cover of Enemies from the East?: V. S. Soloviev on Paganism, Asian Civilizations, and Islam

Enemies from the East?

V. S. Soloviev on Paganism, Asian Civilizations, and Islam

Edited by Vladimir Wozniuk

Northwestern University Press, 2007

As cultural conflicts roil the world, the idea of a “clash of civilizations” has lately taken hold, with commentators from both East and West weighing the religious and political disparities that affect global unity. For all its present currency and urgency, the idea is nothing new.  In various contexts V. S. Soloviev (1853–1900), the most distinguished representative of nineteenth-century Russian religious philosophy, anticipated our current global dilemma by more than a hundred years. These essays, presented together for the first time in English, consider from a number of perspectives how a future clash of cultures between East and West threatens human progress toward the harmonic unity that, for Soloviev, represented the ultimate human telos.

The six essays comprising this book span Soloviev’s publishing career, beginning with “The Mythological Process in Ancient Paganism,” written at the age of twenty, and ending with “Muhammad, His Life and Religious Teaching,” which appeared four years before Soloviev’s death at forty-seven.  Throughout, Soloviev grapples with commonalities and differences apparent in the moral frameworks of civilizations since antiquity; and in religious and cultural practices, from Europe through the Middle East to Asia.   His probing of the sources of religious morality and political authority in human history reinvigorated Russian intellectual interest in the East/West question in his time and still resonates powerfully in our own.
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cover of Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

Energopolitics

Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

Dominic Boyer

Duke University Press, 2019

Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions.

In his volume, Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind power and how it is shaped by myriad factors, from the legacies of settler colonialism and indigenous resistance to state bureaucracy and corporate investment. Drawing on interviews with activists, campesinos, engineers, bureaucrats, politicians, and bankers, Boyer outlines the fundamental impact of energy and fuel on political power. Boyer also demonstrates how large conceptual frameworks cannot adequately explain the fraught and uniquely complicated conditions on the isthmus, illustrating the need to resist narratives of anthropocenic universalism and to attend to local particularities.
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cover of Energy and Structure: A Theory of Social Power

Energy and Structure

A Theory of Social Power

By Richard Newbold Adams

University of Texas Press, 1975

All social structures are essentially power structures dependent on energy. The concept of power and the role of energy in social organization are crucial and timely concerns, especially in light of the current apprehension about future energy resources. In Energy and Structure, Richard N. Adams argues that social power affects humanity's approach to ecological, economic, and political problems, directing people to seek solutions that are often deceptively shortsighted.

Adams, an anthropologist, proposes that social power is directly derived from control over energy processes. He identifies how power and mentalistic structures constitute fundamental determinants that shape the lives of people at all stages of cultural development, forcing them to accept alternatives often far removed from their desires. His central thesis is that the amount of power in any system varies with the amount of control exercised over the environment and that increasing power and control lead to increasing centralization of decision-making, social marginalization, and environmental despoliation. Thus the more highly developed societies, by virtue of their greater controls, are responsible for the greater ultimate subordination and destruction of human potential, as humanity combines technological advances with a growing inability to exercise good judgment with respect to our own survival.

Energy and Structure begins with an examination of the basic theory of social power—what it is and how it works. Adams defines and differentiates between the concepts of power and control, authority and legitimacy, power domains and levels. He then examines the underlying metatheory of energetic and mentalistic structures and provides an analytic model of the evolution of power, from the primitive band to modern nations. He predicts the emergence of supranational blocs and discusses other future possibilities. Throughout, his theoretical points are solidly supported by examples drawn from a wide range of cultures.

[more]
cover of Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity

Energy without Conscience

Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity

David McDermott Hughes

Duke University Press, 2017

In Energy without Conscience David McDermott Hughes investigates why climate change has yet to be seen as a moral issue. He examines the forces that render the use of fossil fuels ordinary and therefore exempt from ethical evaluation. Hughes centers his analysis on Trinidad and Tobago, which is the world's oldest petro-state, having drilled the first continuously producing oil well in 1866. Marrying historical research with interviews with Trinidadian petroleum scientists, policymakers, technicians, and managers, he draws parallels between Trinidad's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave labor energy economy and its contemporary oil industry. Hughes shows how both forms of energy rely upon a complicity that absolves producers and consumers from acknowledging the immoral nature of each. He passionately argues that like slavery, producing oil is a moral choice and that oil is at its most dangerous when it is accepted as an ordinary part of everyday life. Only by rejecting arguments that oil is economically, politically, and technologically necessary, and by acknowledging our complicity in an immoral system, can we stem the damage being done to the planet.
[more]
cover of Engaged Anthropology: Research Essays on North American Archaeology, Ethnobotany, and Museology

Engaged Anthropology

Research Essays on North American Archaeology, Ethnobotany, and Museology

Edited by Michelle Hegmon and B. Sunday Eiselt

University of Michigan Press, 2005

This collection of essays is based on the 2005 Society for American Archaeology symposium and presents research that epitomizes Richard I. Ford’s approach of engaged anthropology. This transdisciplinary approach integrates archaeological research with perspectives from ethnography, history, and ecology, and engages the anthropologist with Native partners and with socio-natural landscapes. Research papers largely focus on the U.S. Southwest, but also consider other areas of North America, issues related to museums collections, and indigenous approaches to materials research.
[more]
cover of Engaged Archaeology in the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico

Engaged Archaeology in the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico

Kelley A. Hays-Gilpin

University Press of Colorado, 2021

This volume of proceedings from the fifteenth biennial Southwest Symposium makes the case for engaged archaeology, an approach that considers scientific data and traditional Indigenous knowledge alongside archaeological theories and methodologies. Focusing on the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, the contributors show what can be gained when archaeologists engage with Indigenous communities and natural scientists: improved contemporary archaeological practice through better understandings of heritage and identity, anthropogenic landscapes, and societal potential for resilience.
 
Organized around the theme of interdisciplinary perspectives, the book highlights collaborations with those who have other ways of knowing the past, from the traditional and proprietary knowledge of communities to new scientific methods, and considers the social context of archaeological practice and the modern relationships that inform interpretations of the past. Chapters show how cutting-edge practices lead to new archaeological understandings when archaeologists work in partnership with descendant and stakeholder communities and across international and disciplinary borders. Authors work across anthropological subfields and with the sciences, demonstrating that anthropological archaeology’s methods are starting points for investigation that allow for the expansion of understanding by incorporating long-remembered histories with innovative analytic methods.
 
Engaged Archaeology in the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico identifies current and near-future trends in archaeological practice in the US Southwest and northwestern Mexico, including repatriation, community engagement, and cross-disciplinary approaches, and focuses on Native American archaeologists and their communities, research, collaborations, and interests. It will be of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists working in the Southwest and to any researchers interested in interdisciplinary approaches to archaeology, heritage studies, and the natural sciences.
 
Contributors: Christopher Caseldine, Chip Colwell, Guillermo Córdova Tello, Patrick Cruz, T. J. Ferguson, Cécile R. Ganteaume, Vernelda Grant, Neysa Grider-Potter, Christopher Grivas, Michael Heilen, Jane H. Hill, Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, Teresita Majewski, Debra L. Martin, Estela Martínez Mora, John A. McClelland, Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc, Darsita R. North, Scott Ortman, Peter J. Pilles Jr., Susan Sekaquaptewa, Arleyn W. Simon, Kimberly Spurr, Sarah Striker, Kerry F. Thompson, John A. Ware, Peter M. Whiteley, Lisa C. Young
 
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cover of Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy, and Activism

Engaged Observer

Anthropology, Advocacy, and Activism

Sanford, Victoria

Rutgers University Press, 2006

Anthropology has long been associated with an ethos of “engagement.” The field’s core methods and practices involve long-term interpersonal contact between researchers and their study participants, giving major research topics in the field a distinctively human face. Can research findings be authentic and objective? Are anthropologists able to use their data to aid the participants of their study, and is that aid always welcome?

In Engaged Observer, Victoria Sanford and Asale Angel-Ajani bring together an international array of scholars who have been embedded in some of the most conflict-ridden and dangerous zones in the world to reflect on the role and responsibility of anthropological inquiry.  They explore issues of truth and objectivity, the role of the academic, the politics of memory, and the impact of race, gender, and social position on the research process. Through ethnographic case studies, they offer models for conducting engaged research and illustrate the contradictions and challenges of doing so.

[more]
cover of Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies

Engaging Cultural Differences

The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies

Richard A., Shweder

Russell Sage Foundation, 2002

Liberal democracies are based on principles of inclusion and tolerance. But how does the principle of tolerance work in practice in countries such as Germany, France, India, South Africa, and the United States, where an increasingly wide range of cultural groups holds often contradictory beliefs about appropriate social and family life practices? As these democracies expand to include peoples of vastly different cultural backgrounds, the limits of tolerance are being tested as never before. Engaging Cultural Differences explores how liberal democracies respond socially and legally to differences in the cultural and religious practices of their minority groups. Building on such examples, the contributors examine the role of tolerance in practical encounters between state officials and immigrants, and between members of longstanding majority groups and increasing numbers of minority groups. The volume also considers the theoretical implications of expanding the realm of tolerance. Some contributors are reluctant to broaden the scope of tolerance, while others insist that the notion of "tolerance" is itself potentially confining and demeaning and that modern nations should aspire to celebrate cultural differences. Coming to terms with ethnic diversity and cultural differences has become a major public policy concern in contemporary liberal democracies, as they struggle to adjust to burgeoning immigrant populations. Engaging Cultural Differences provides a compelling examination of the challenges of multiculturalism and reveals a deep understanding of the challenges democracies face as they seek to accommodate their citizens' diverse beliefs and practices.
[more]
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Engaging Humor

Elliott Oring

University of Illinois Press, 2002

Exploring the structure, motives, and meanings of humor in everyday life

In Engaging Humor, Elliott Oring asks essential questions concerning humorous expression in contemporary society, examining how humor works, why it is employed, and what its messages might be. This provocative book is filled with examples of jokes and riddles that reveal humor to be a meaningful--even significant--form of expression.

Oring scrutinizes classic Jewish jokes, frontier humor, racist cartoons, blonde jokes, and Internet humor. He provides alternate ways of thinking about humorous expressions by examining their contexts--not just their contents. He also shows how the incongruity and absurdity essential to the production of laughter can serve serious communicative ends.

Engaging Humor examines the thoughts that underlie jokes, the question of racist motivation in ethnic humor, and the use of humor as a commentary on social interaction. The book also explores the relationship between humor and sentimentality and the role of humor in forging national identity. Engaging Humor demonstrates that when analyzed contextually and comparatively, humorous expressions emerge as communications that are startling, intriguing, and profound.

[more]
cover of Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings

Engendering Song

Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings

Jane C. Sugarman

University of Chicago Press, 1997

For Prespa Albanians, both at home in Macedonia and in the diaspora, the most opulent, extravagant, and socially significant events of any year are wedding ceremonies. During days and weeks of festivities, wedding celebrants interact largely through singing, defining and renegotiating as they do so the very structure of their social world and establishing a profound cultural touchstone for Prespa communities around the world.

Combining photographs, song texts, and vibrant recordings of the music with her own evocative descriptions, ethnomusicologist Jane C. Sugarman focuses her account of Prespa weddings on notions of gendered identity, demonstrating the capacity of singing to generate and transform relations of power within Prespa society. Engendering Song is an innovative theoretical work, with a scholarly importance extending far beyond southeast European studies. It offers unique and timely contributions to the analysis of music and gender, music in diaspora cultures, and the social constitution of self and subjectivity.
[more]
cover of Engineering Mountain Landscapes: An Anthropology of Social Investment

Engineering Mountain Landscapes

An Anthropology of Social Investment

Laura L. Scheiber and María N. Zedeño

University of Utah Press, 2015

Humans have occupied mountain environments and relied on mountain resources since the terminal Pleistocene. Their continuous interaction with the land from generation to generation has left material imprints ranging from anthropogenic fires to vision quest sites. The diverse case studies presented in this collection explore the material record of North American mountain dwellers and habitual users of high-elevation resources in terms of social investment—the intergenerational commitment of a group to a particular landscape. Contributors look creatively at the significance of social investment and its material and nonmaterial consequences, addressing landscape engineering at different times through diverse theoretical standpoints and archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data from varied mountain environments. Together, these original contributions demonstrate that social investment encompasses timeless ecological and ritual knowledge as well as innovation born from daily practice, tradition, and periodic adjustment to fit new social and political imperatives. Engineering Mountain Landscapes offers both substantive ideas of broad intellectual interest, specific case studies with state-of-art methodology, and a wealth of comparative data.
[more]
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Enigma of Ethnicity

Another American Dilemma

Wilbur Zelinsky

University of Iowa Press, 2000

In The Enigma of Ethnicity Wilbur Zelinsky draws upon more than half a century of exploring the cultural and social geography of an ever-changing North America to become both biographer and critic of the recent concept of ethnicity. In this ambitious and encyclopedic work, he examines ethnicity's definition, evolution, significance, implications, and entanglements with other phenomena as well as the mysteries of ethnic identity and performance.
Zelinsky begins by examining the ways in which “ethnic groups” and “ethnicity” have been defined; his own definitions then become the basis for the rest of his study. He next focuses on the concepts of heterolocalism—the possibility that an ethnic community can exist without being physically merged—and personal identity—the relatively recent idea that one can concoct one's own identity. In his final chapter, which is also his most provocative, he concentrates on the multifaceted phenomenon of multiculturalism and its relationship to ethnicity. Throughout he includes a close look at African Americans, Hispanics, and Jews as well as such less-studied groups as suburbanized Japanese, Cubans in Washington, Koreans, Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago, Estonians in New Jersey, Danish Americans in Seattle, and Finns.
Reasonable, nonpolemical, and straightforward, Zelinsky's text is invaluable for readers wanting an in-depth overview of the literature on ethnicity in the United States as well as a well-thought-out understanding of the meanings and dynamics of ethnic groups, ethnicity, and multiculturalism.
[more]
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Entrepreneurial Selves

Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class

Carla Freeman

Duke University Press, 2014

Entrepreneurial Selves is an ethnography of neoliberalism. Bridging political economy and affect studies, Carla Freeman turns a spotlight on the entrepreneur, a figure saluted across the globe as the very embodiment of neoliberalism. Steeped in more than a decade of ethnography on the emergent entrepreneurial middle class of Barbados, she finds dramatic reworkings of selfhood, intimacy, labor, and life amid the rumbling effects of political-economic restructuring. She shows us that the déjà vu of neoliberalism, the global hailing of entrepreneurial flexibility and its concomitant project of self-making, can only be grasped through the thickness of cultural specificity where its costs and pleasures are unevenly felt. Freeman theorizes postcolonial neoliberalism by reimagining the Caribbean cultural model of 'reputation-respectability.' This remarkable book will allow readers to see how the material social practices formerly associated with resistance to capitalism (reputation) are being mobilized in ways that sustain neoliberal precepts and, in so doing, re-map class, race, and gender through a new emotional economy.
[more]
cover of Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region: Sea Changes

Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region

Sea Changes

William Wheeler

University College London, 2021

Presents a political ecology of life amid overlapping environmental and political upheaval.
 
Once the fourth largest lake in the world, Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea dried into an unrecognizable fraction of its size during a period of dramatic political change. Through the experiences of local fisheries across the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region explores the diverse ways people in different socioeconomic contexts understand environmental change. In this book, William Wheeler offers a rigorous political ecology of life amid overlapping upheavals, attentive both to the legacies of Sovietism and the possibilities of transnationalism. 
 
[more]
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Environmental Change and Human Adaptation in the Ancient American Southwest

Doyel and Dean

University of Utah Press, 2006

Archaeology provides an ideal avenue for examining long-term processes and interrelationships between human behavior and environmental stability, variation, and change. The American Southwest is particularly well suited for such 'deep-time' investigations because of its comprehensive archaeological record, rich ethnographic and historical data on its peoples, and unmatched reconstructions of multiple environmental variables across a broad range of spatial and temporal scales.
 
This volume contains a varied and instructive set of studies of human behavioral adaptation to environmental change in the ancient Southwest. It makes significant contributions to southwestern prehistory, settlement pattern studies, agriculture, behavioral ecology, paleo-environmental reconstruction, and statistical and computer-aided modeling. The mix of case studies and syntheses covers the Colorado Plateau, Sonoran Desert, Mogollon Highlands, and Rio Grande Valley and summarizes the work of some of the leading researchers in the region.
[more]
cover of Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary

Envisioning Taiwan

Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary

June Yip

Duke University Press, 2004

In discussions of postcolonial nationhood and cultural identity, Taiwan is often overlooked. Yet the island—with its complex history of colonization—presents a particularly fascinating case of the struggle to define a “nation.” While the mainland Chinese government has been unequivocal in its resistance to Taiwanese independence, in Taiwan, government control has gradually passed from mainland Chinese immigrants to the Taiwanese themselves. Two decades of democratization and the arrival of consumer culture have made the island a truly global space. Envisioning Taiwan sorts through these complexities, skillfully weaving together history and cultural analysis to give a picture of Taiwanese identity and a lesson on the usefulness and the limits of contemporary cultural theory.

Yip traces a distinctly Taiwanese sense of self vis-à-vis China, Japan, and the West through two of the island’s most important cultural movements: the hsiang-t’u (or “nativist”) literature of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Taiwanese New Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. At the heart of the book are close readings of the work of the hsiang-t’u writer Hwang Chun-ming and the New Cinema filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien. Key figures in Taiwan’s assertion of a national identity separate and distinct from China, both artists portray in vibrant detail daily life on the island. Through Hwang’s and Hou’s work and their respective artistic movements, Yip explores “the imagining of a nation” on the local, national, and global levels. In the process, she exposes a perceptible shift away from traditional models of cultural authenticity toward a more fluid, postmodern hybridity—an evolution that reflects both Taiwan’s peculiar multicultural reality and broader trends in global culture.

[more]
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Epidemiological Change and Chronic Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa

Social and Historical Perspectives

Edited by Megan Vaughan, Kafui Adjaye-Gbewonyo, and Marissa Mika

University College London, 2020

New perspectives on the changing epidemiology of sub-Saharan Africa.

Epidemiological Change and Chronic Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa offers new and critical perspectives on the causes and consequences of recent epidemiological changes in sub-Saharan Africa, with a special focus on the increasing incidence of “non-communicable” and chronic conditions. In this book, historians, social anthropologists, public health experts, and social epidemiologists present important insights into epidemiological change in Africa beyond theories of “transition.” The volume covers a broad thematic range, including the trajectory of maternal mortality in East Africa, the smoking epidemic, the history of sugar consumption in South Africa, the causality between infectious and non-communicable diseases in Ghana and Belize, the complex relationships between adult hypertension and pediatric HIV in Botswana, and stories of cancer patients and their families in Kenya. In all, the volume provides insights drawn from historical perspectives and from the African social and clinical experience that are of value to students and researchers in global health, medical anthropology, public health, and African studies.
 
[more]
cover of Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer

Eros and Inwardness in Vienna

Weininger, Musil, Doderer

David S. Luft

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Although we usually think of the intellectual legacy of twentieth-century Vienna as synonymous with Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theories, other prominent writers from Vienna were also radically reconceiving sexuality and gender. In this probing new study, David Luft recovers the work of three such writers: Otto Weininger, Robert Musil, and Heimito von Doderer. His account emphasizes the distinctive intellectual world of liberal Vienna, especially the impact of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in this highly scientific intellectual world.

According to Luft, Otto Weininger viewed human beings as bisexual and applied this theme to issues of creativity and morality. Robert Musil developed a creative ethics that was closely related to his open, flexible view of sexuality and gender. And Heimito von Doderer portrayed his own sexual obsessions as a way of understanding the power of total ideologies, including his own attraction to National Socialism. For Luft, the significance of these three writers lies in their understandings of eros and inwardness and in the roles that both play in ethical experience and the formation of meaningful relations to the world-a process that continues to engage artists, writers, and thinkers today.

Eros and Inwardness in Vienna will profoundly reshape our understanding of Vienna's intellectual history. It will be important for anyone interested in Austrian or German history, literature, or philosophy.
[more]
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Erotic Islands

Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean

Lyndon K. Gill

Duke University Press, 2018

In Erotic Islands, Lyndon K. Gill maps a long queer presence at a crossroads of the Caribbean. This transdisciplinary book foregrounds the queer histories of Carnival, calypso, and HIV/AIDS in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. At its heart is an extension of Audre Lorde's use of the erotic as theory and methodology. Gill turns to lesbian/gay artistry and activism to insist on eros as an intertwined political-sensual-spiritual lens through which to see self and society more clearly. This analysis juxtaposes revered musician Calypso Rose, renowned mas man Peter Minshall, and resilient HIV/AIDS organization Friends For Life. Erotic Islands traverses black studies, queer studies, and anthropology toward an emergent black queer diaspora studies.
[more]
cover of Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java

Erotic Triangles

Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java

Henry Spiller

University of Chicago Press, 2010

In West Java, Indonesia, all it takes is a woman’s voice and a drum beat to make a man get up and dance. Every day, men there—be they students, pedicab drivers, civil servants, or businessmen—breach ordinary standards of decorum and succumb to the rhythm at village ceremonies, weddings, political rallies, and nightclubs. The music the men dance to varies from traditional gong ensembles to the contemporary pop known as dangdut, but they consistently dance with great enthusiasm. In Erotic Triangles, Henry Spiller draws on decades of ethnographic research to explore the reasons behind this phenomenon, arguing that Sundanese men use dance to explore and enact contradictions in their gender identities.

Framing the three crucial elements of Sundanese dance—the female entertainer, the drumming, and men’s sense of freedom—as a triangle, Spiller connects them to a range of other theoretical perspectives, drawing on thinkers from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lévi-Strauss, and Freud to Euclid. By granting men permission to literally perform their masculinity, Spiller ultimately concludes, dance provides a crucial space for both reinforcing and resisting orthodox gender ideologies.

[more]
cover of Eskimo Essays: Yup'ik Lives and How We See Them

Eskimo Essays

Yup'ik Lives and How We See Them

Ann Fienup-Riordan

Rutgers University Press, 1991

Eskimo Essays introduces the reader to important aspects of the ideology and practice of the Yup’ik Eskimos of western Alaska, past and present. The essays point the way toward a fuller recognition of how Yup’ik Eskimos differ from the popular Western image of the Eskimo that was born largely without reference to Yup’ik reality. By describing the reality  of Yup’ik life, Eskimo Essays extends our understanding of Esimos in general and Yup’ik Eskimos in particular.

Ann Fienup-Riordan argues that Western observers have simultaneously naturalized Eskimos as paragons of simplicity and virtue and Western imperialism. This process has often ignored Eskimo concepts of society, history, and personhood. An original assumption of similarity to Western society has profoundly affected the current Euro-American view of Eskimo history and action. Non-natives have taken an idealized Western individual, dressed that person up in polar garb, and then assumed they understood the garment’s maker. The result is a presentation of Eskimo society that often tells us more about the meaning we seek in our own. Moreover, modern Eskimos have risen to the challenge and to some extent become what we have made them.

Bridging the gap between informed scholarships and popular concepts, Fienup-Riordan  provides a compelling and fresh presentation of Yup’ik life—cosmology, the missionary experience, attitudes toward conservation, Eskimo art, the legal system, warfare, and ceremonies.

[more]
cover of Ethics or the Right Thing?: Corruption and Care in the Age of Good Governance

Ethics or the Right Thing?

Corruption and Care in the Age of Good Governance

Sylvia Tidey

HAU, 2021

A sympathetic examination of the failure of anti-corruption efforts in contemporary Indonesia. 

Combining ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kupang with an acute historical sensibility, Sylvia Tidey shows how good governance initiatives paradoxically perpetuate civil service corruption while also facilitating the emergence of new forms of it. Importing critical insights from the anthropology of ethics to the burgeoning anthropology of corruption, Tidey exposes enduring developmentalist fallacies that treat corruption as endemic to non-Western subjects. In practice, it is often indistinguishable from the ethics of care and exchange, as Indonesian civil servants make worthwhile lives for themselves and their families. This book will be a vital text for anthropologists and other social scientists, particularly scholars of global studies, development studies, and Southeast Asia.
[more]
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Ethnic Conflict

Religion, Identity, and Politics

S. A. Giannakos

Ohio University Press, 2001

The outbreak of numerous and simultaneous violent conflicts around the globe in the past decade resulted in immense human suffering and countless lost lives. In part, both results were aided by inactivity or by belated and often misplaced responses by the international community to the embattled groups. The apparent inability of the international community to respond firmly and purposefully to violent conflicts can be attributed partially to a general confusion and misunderstanding of the root causes of such conflicts. In some cases, the international community argued that violent conflicts could be attributed to irreconcilable ethnic differences, which, like earthquakes, are impossible to prevent or control.

At other times, the argument was that such conflicts were the results of evil leaders capable of engineering mass violent acts. Ethnic Conflict presents an interdisciplinary and comparative effort to explain the root causes of ethnic conflicts in terms of political, economic, and social common denominators that characterize all such conflicts. It seeks to dispel misplaced assumptions about violent domestic conflicts and, by providing a clearer picture of the mechanics of such conflicts, it hopes to assist in the process of conflict resolution and prevention.

[more]
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Ethnic Medicine in the Southwest

Edited by Edward H. Spicer; (by) Eleanor Bauwens, Margarita Artschwager Kay, Mary Elizabeth Shutler, and Loudell F. Snow

University of Arizona Press, 1977

Health is a major concern to all people. In this volume, four writers examine the medical arts of Yaqui, Anglo, Black and Mexican American communities to further understand the relationship between alternative and scientific medicine.

Edward H. Spicer's informative Introduction sets the stage for comparing "popular" and "scientific" medicine. "Graduates of medical schools have been taught that their body of knowledge is the one true medical tradition. The world has many medicines and thousands of practitioners who do not believe that "Western" medicine is a universal cure-all. These practitioners may be as certain that what they practice is the one true medical tradition," says Spicer. In the communities studied, the belief is that illnesses may be caused by overwork, withcraft or sin, and treatment may include herbs, prayer, or massage. Practitioners are successful and respected although they are not licenses in the legal sense.

In these alternative medical traditions, "Western" medicine may find a key to new growth and effectiveness. Ethnic Medicine in the Southwest is a fascinating look at commonly practiced arts that will interest not only ethnic and health services specialists but all those interested in cultural traditions.
[more]
cover of Ethnic Relations in the Ancient Mediterranean: Social Life Under Empire

Ethnic Relations in the Ancient Mediterranean

Social Life Under Empire

Philip A. Harland

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A fresh perspective revealing how ethnographic thinking shaped the sociocultural landscape of the ancient Mediterranean.
 
With this book, Philip A. Harland presents a large-scale rereading of social and cultural life in the eastern part of the ancient Mediterranean in particular, examining social interactions among peoples, from culturally dominant groups to minority populations. Harland assesses literary and archaeological evidence to yield fresh insights into the dynamics of ethnic relations in the region and to explore how the population navigated questions of identification, differentiation, categorization, stratification, criminalization, and population production.
 
Harland considers encounters between peoples as well as their representations of one another, reframing the social landscape of the ancient world by focusing on the influence and ubiquity of the ethnographic imagination between the fifth century BCE and the third century CE. Drawing insights from anthropology, sociology, and postcolonial studies, Harland offers close readings of papyri, inscriptions, monuments, sculptures, and other materials that reflect interactions between different populations at all levels of society. He gives careful attention to the perspectives of enslaved, immigrant, and subject peoples, including Egyptians, Babylonians, Syrians, and Judeans under Persian, Hellenistic, or Roman rule.
 
Offering an innovative reading of social and cultural life from the ground up, this book reveals the extent to which ethnographic thinking structured the sociocultural landscape of the ancient world.
 
[more]
cover of Ethnicity and Conflict in the Horn of Africa

Ethnicity and Conflict in the Horn of Africa

Katsuyoshi Fukui

Ohio University Press, 1994

Conflicts in the Horn have all too often dominated press coverage of Africa. This book exposes the subtle and ambiguous role ethnicity can plan in social conflict, a role that is nowhere as simple and direct as commonly assumed.

Social conflict is routinely attributed to ethnic differentiation because dividing lines between rival groups often follow ethnic contours and cultural symbolism has proved a potent ideological weapon. The purpose of this book is to examine the nature of the bond linking ethnicity to conflict in a variety of circumstances.

The diverse groups are involved in confrontations at different levels and varying intensity, ranging from elemental struggles for physical survival of groups at the margin of society, to contests for state power and control of resources at the center.

These ten studies from Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya are based on primary research by anthropologists and historians who have long experience of the region. The insights gained from this comparative work help to refine common assumptions about conflict among ethnic groups.

[more]
cover of Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives

Ethnicity and Nationalism

Anthropological Perspectives

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Pluto Press, 2010

Ethnicity and nationalism are pervasive features of the contemporary world, but how far is ethnicity a result of cultural differences, and how much is it in fact dependent on the practical use of, and belief in, such differences? In this book, Thomas Hylland Eriksen demonstrates that far from being an immutable property of groups, ethnicity is a dynamic and shifting aspect of social relationships. Drawing on a wide range of classic and recent studies in anthropology and sociology, Eriksen examines the relationship between ethnicity, class, gender and nationhood and more in a lucid and comprehensive manner.

A core text for all students of social anthropology and related subjects, Ethnicity and Nationalism has been a leading introduction to the field since its original publication in 1993. This new edition - expanded and thoroughly revised - is indispensable to anyone seriously interested in understanding ethnic phenomena. New topics covered include cultural property rights, the role of genetics in the public understanding of identification, commercialisation of identity, and the significance of the internet.

[more]