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The first look at self-made men and women from a multicultural perspective.

Brings gender, race, and ethnicity to bear on the myth of the “self-made man.”

Made to be Seen brings together leading scholars of visual anthropology to examine the historical development of this multifaceted and growing field. Expanding the definition of visual anthropology beyond more limited notions, the contributors to Made to be Seen reflect on the role of the visual in all areas of life. Different essays critically examine a range of topics: art, dress and body adornment, photography, the built environment, digital forms of visual anthropology, indigenous media, the body as a cultural phenomenon, the relationship between experimental and ethnographic film, and more.

The first attempt to present a comprehensive overview of the many aspects of an anthropological approach to the study of visual and pictorial culture, Made to be Seen will be the standard reference on the subject for years to come. Students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, visual studies, and cultural studies will greatly benefit from this pioneering look at the way the visual is inextricably threaded through most, if not all, areas of human activity.

A powerful account of the deep connection between the Koyukon people of western Alaska and the natural world that sustains them

A blending of ethnography, personal reflections, and natural history, Make Prayers to the Raven is a moving account of the Koyukon people of western Alaska, who follow a traditional lifeway of hunting, trapping, and fishing in remote villages scattered across the boreal forest. Intimacy with nature is the foundation of their existence, and they have accumulated a masterly knowledge of their environment. The Koyukon hunter moves through a watchful forest, kills with humility and respect, and treats his catch as a being filled with power.

In Make Prayers to the Raven, Nelson describes, from a Koyukon point of view, , elements of the earth, sky, and atmosphere of the boreal forest, as well as the significant plants and animals. He retells their origins in the dreamlike Distant Time, their spirit powers, their behavior and personality, and the rules dictating their proper treatment by men and women. Make Prayers to the Raven leads the reader to an appreciation of the power and substantiality of Koyukon beliefs, and it serves the Koyukon people themselves by educating others about their way of life and by providing the Koyukon with a means of passing on traditional knowledge to their children.

Making Down Syndrome: Motherhood and Kinship Futures in Urban Jordan draws on ethnographic research conducted primarily in Jordan’s capital city of Amman to explore how the label and identity of Down syndrome is gaining increasing cohesiveness. Focused on the experiences of mothers, who serve as an entry point for understanding broader family dynamics and choices, the book argues that practices and ideologies of care play a central role in making Down syndrome’s embodied and political realities. They do so through the momentum of kinship futures, or futures imagined through the prism of kinship roles and relations, which shape how families organize and distribute care between and beyond kinship networks and under conditions of economic and political uncertainty. By approaching everyday life in Jordan through the lens of disability, Making Down Syndrome offers new insights into how people navigate structures of family, gender, power, inequality, and precarity, all while trying to maintain hope for and cultivate better futures.

After a brief period of active combat in 2002, the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire settled into a pattern of neither war nor peace until the 2010 elections led to a new phase of direct conflict. During these taut years, short bursts of intense violence alternated with long periods of standoff. When things were peaceful, the Ivorian political elite and the press produced inflammatory rhetoric while soldiers and militias used the state of emergency as an excuse to shake down civilians at roadblocks. What kept this perpetually tense, dismal, and destructive situation simmering? In this groundbreaking book, Mike McGovern suggests the answer lies in understanding war as a process, not a series of events, and that rather than focusing on the role of political institutions, we should be paying attention to the flawed and unpredictable people within them.

McGovern argues that only deep knowledge of a region—its history, languages, literature, and popular culture—can yield meaningful insights into political decision making. Putting this theory into action, he examines an array of issues from the micro to the macro, including land tenure disputes, youth boredom, organized crime, and the international cocoa trade. Drawn from McGovern’s academic research and experience working for a conflict resolution think tank and the political access that position gave him, Making War in Côte D’Ivoire will be the definitive work on the Ivorian conflict and an innovative example of how anthropology can address the complexities of politics.

In the three largest cities in Sweden, social movement “scenes”—networks of social movement actors and the places they inhabit—challenge threats such as gentrification. The geography of the built environment influences their ability to lay claim to urban space and to local political processes. In Making a Scene, Kimberly Creasap emphasizes that it is the centrality, concentration, and visibility of these scenes that make them most effective. Whereas some scenes become embedded as part of everyday life—as in Malmö—in contrast, scenes in Göteborg and Stockholm often fail to become part of the fabric of urban neighborhoods. 

Creasap investigates key spaces for scenes, from abandoned industrial areas and punk clubs to street festivals, bookstores, and social centers, to show how activists create sites and develop structures of resistance that are anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-gentrification, queer, and feminist. She also charts the relationship between scenes and city spaces to show these autonomous social movements create their own cultural landscapes. Making a Scene encourages critical thinking about spatiality and place in the sociology of social movements and the role of social movements as important actors in urban development.

Contributors: P. Wenzel Geissler; Murray Last; Rebecca Marsland; Lotte Meinert; Benson A. Mulemi;  Ruth J. Prince; and Noemi Tousignant.

Making the Right Choice unravels the entangled relationship between marriage, morality, and the desire for modernity as it plays out in the context of middle-class status concerns and aspirations for upward social mobility within the Sinhala-Buddhist community in urban Sri Lanka. By focusing on individual life-histories spanning three generations, the book illuminates how narratives about a gendered self and narratives about modernity are mutually constituted and intrinsically tied to notions of agency. The book uncovers how "becoming modern" in urban Sri Lanka, rather than causing inter-generational conflict, is a collective aspiration realized through the efforts of bringing up educated and independent women capable of making "right" choices. The consequence of this collective investment is a feminist conundrum: agency does not denote the right to choose, but the duty to make the "right" choice; hence agency is experienced not as a sense of "freedom," but rather as a burden of responsibility.

Whether humans crossed the seas between the Old World and the New in the times before Columbus is a tantalizing question that has long excited scholarly interest and tempted imaginations the world over. From the myths of Atlantis and Mu to the more credible, perhaps, but hardly less romantic tales of Viking ships and Buddhist missionaries, people have speculated upon what is, after all, not simply a question of contact, but of the nature and growth of civilization itself.

To the specialist, it is an important question indeed. If people in the Western Hemisphere and in the Eastern Hemisphere developed their cultures more or less independently from the end of the last Ice Age until the voyages of Columbus, the remarkable similarities between New World and Old World cultures reveal something important about the evolution of culture. If, on the other hand, there were widespread or sustained contacts between the hemispheres in pre-Columbian times, these contacts represent events of vast significance to the prehistory and history of humanity.

Originally delivered at a symposium held in May 1968, during the national meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, the papers presented here, by scholars eminent in the field, offer differing points of view and considerable evidence on the pros and cons of pre-Columbian contact between the Old World and the New. Various kinds of data—archaeological, botanical, geographical, and historical—are brought to bear on the problem, with provocative and original results. Introductory and concluding remarks by the editors pull together and evaluate the evidence and suggest ground rules for future studies of this sort.

Man across the Sea provides no final answers as to whether people from Asia, Africa, or Europe visited the American Indian before Columbus. It does, however, present new evidence, suggested lines of approach, and a fresh attempt to delineate the problems involved and to establish acceptable canons of evidence for the future.