Results by title
338 books match the query 'Ethnology' and 17 start with s
Saints Observed
Studies of Mormon Village Life, 1850-2005Howard M. Bahr
University of Utah Press, 2014
The most complete overview and assessment of Mormon village studies available, this volume extends the canon twofold. First, it presents a rich composite view of nineteenth-century Mormon life in the West as seen by qualified observers who did not just pass through but stopped and studied. Second, it connects that early protoethnography to scholarly Mormon village studies in the twentieth century, showing their proper context in the thriving field of community studies. Based mostly on nine famous travelers’ accounts of life among the Mormons, including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Kane, Howard Stansbury, John Gunnison, and Julius Benchley—Bahr’s volume introduces these talented observers, summarizes and analyzes their observation, and constructs a holistic overview of Mormon village life. He concludes by tracing the rise and continuity of Mormon village studies in the twentieth century, beginning with Lowry Nelson’s 1923 research in Escalante, Utah. Over the following three decades, the genre expanded beyond Nelson and his students, becoming more sophisticated and interdisciplinary; by the mid-1950s it was a subfield within the respected arena of community studies. Researchers continued to study Mormon communities in the following decades and into the twenty-first century.
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Secrecy and Insurgency
Socialities and Knowledge Practices in GuatemalaSilvia Posocco
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Secrecy and Insurgency deals with the experiences of guerrilla combatants of the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (Rebel Armed Forces) in the aftermath of the peace accords signed in December 1996 between the Guatemalan government and guerrilla insurgents.
Drawing on a broad field of contemporary theory, Silvia Posocco’s Secrecy and Insurgency presents a vivid ethnographic account of secrecy as both sociality and a set of knowledge practices. Informed by multi-sited anthropological fieldwork among displaced communities with experiences of militancy in the guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, the book traces the contours of dispersed and intermittent guerrilla social relations, unraveling the gendered dimensions of guerrilla socialities and subjectivities in a local context marked by violence and rapid social change.
The chapters chart shifting regimes of governance in the northern departamento of Petén; the inception of violence and insurgency; guerrilla practices of naming and secret relations; moral orders based on sameness and sharing; and forms of relatedness, embodiment, and subjectivity among the combatants. The volume develops new critical idioms for grappling with partiality, perspective, and incompleteness in ethnography and contributes to new thinking on the anthropology of Guatemala.
Secrecy and Insurgency will be of interest to social and cultural anthropologists, human geographers, and scholars in Latin American studies, human rights, women’s studies, and gender studies.
Drawing on a broad field of contemporary theory, Silvia Posocco’s Secrecy and Insurgency presents a vivid ethnographic account of secrecy as both sociality and a set of knowledge practices. Informed by multi-sited anthropological fieldwork among displaced communities with experiences of militancy in the guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, the book traces the contours of dispersed and intermittent guerrilla social relations, unraveling the gendered dimensions of guerrilla socialities and subjectivities in a local context marked by violence and rapid social change.
The chapters chart shifting regimes of governance in the northern departamento of Petén; the inception of violence and insurgency; guerrilla practices of naming and secret relations; moral orders based on sameness and sharing; and forms of relatedness, embodiment, and subjectivity among the combatants. The volume develops new critical idioms for grappling with partiality, perspective, and incompleteness in ethnography and contributes to new thinking on the anthropology of Guatemala.
Secrecy and Insurgency will be of interest to social and cultural anthropologists, human geographers, and scholars in Latin American studies, human rights, women’s studies, and gender studies.
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Self+Culture+Writing
Autoethnography for/as Writing StudiesRebecca Jackson
Utah State University Press, 2021
Literally translated as “self-culture-writing,” autoethnography—as both process and product—holds great promise for scholars and researchers in writings studies who endeavor to describe, understand, analyze, and critique the ways in which selves, cultures, writing, and representation intersect. Self+Culture+Writing foregrounds the possibility of autoethnography as a viable methodological approach and provides researchers and instructors with ways of understanding, crafting, and teaching autoethnography within writing studies.
Interest in autoethnography is growing among writing studies scholars, who see clear connections to well-known disciplinary conversations about personal narrative, as well as to the narrative turn in general and social justice efforts in particular. Contributions by authors from diverse backgrounds and institutional settings are organized into three parts: a section of writing studies autoethnographies, a section on how to teach autoethnography, and a section on how ideas about autoethnography in writing studies are evolving.
Self+Culture+Writing discusses the use of autoethnography in the writing classroom as both a research method and a legitimate way of knowing, providing examples of the genre and theoretical discussions that highlight the usefulness and limitations of these methods.
Contributors: Leslie Akst, Melissa Atienza, Ross Atkinson, Alison Cardinal, Sue Doe, Will Duffy, John Gagnon, Elena Garcia, Guadalupe Garcia, Caleb Gonzalez, Lilly Halboth, Rebecca Hallman Martini, Kirsten Higgins, Shereen Inayatulla, Aliyah Jones, Autumn Laws, Soyeon Lee, Louis M. Maraj, Kira Marshall-McKelvey, Jennifer Owen, Tiffany Rainey, Marcie Sims, Amanda Sladek, Trixie Smith, Anthony Warnke
Interest in autoethnography is growing among writing studies scholars, who see clear connections to well-known disciplinary conversations about personal narrative, as well as to the narrative turn in general and social justice efforts in particular. Contributions by authors from diverse backgrounds and institutional settings are organized into three parts: a section of writing studies autoethnographies, a section on how to teach autoethnography, and a section on how ideas about autoethnography in writing studies are evolving.
Self+Culture+Writing discusses the use of autoethnography in the writing classroom as both a research method and a legitimate way of knowing, providing examples of the genre and theoretical discussions that highlight the usefulness and limitations of these methods.
Contributors: Leslie Akst, Melissa Atienza, Ross Atkinson, Alison Cardinal, Sue Doe, Will Duffy, John Gagnon, Elena Garcia, Guadalupe Garcia, Caleb Gonzalez, Lilly Halboth, Rebecca Hallman Martini, Kirsten Higgins, Shereen Inayatulla, Aliyah Jones, Autumn Laws, Soyeon Lee, Louis M. Maraj, Kira Marshall-McKelvey, Jennifer Owen, Tiffany Rainey, Marcie Sims, Amanda Sladek, Trixie Smith, Anthony Warnke
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Sensual Relations
Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social TheoryDavid Howes
University of Michigan Press, 2003
With audacious dexterity, David Howes weaves together topics ranging from love and beauty magic in Papua New Guinea to nasal repression in Freudian psychology and from the erasure and recovery of the senses in contemporary ethnography to the specter of the body in Marx. Through this eclectic and penetrating exploration of the relationship between sensory experience and cultural expression, Sensual Relations contests the conventional exclusion of sensuality from intellectual inquiry and reclaims sensation as a fundamental domain of social theory.
David Howes is Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec.
David Howes is Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec.
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Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist
Edited by Fran Markowitz and Michael Ashkenazi
University of Illinois Press, 1999
Sex in the field—the dilemma of whether to cover up or display sexual identities and desires during the course of anthropological fieldwork—is one of the best-kept secrets in the discipline. Contending that the conventional pose of a genderless, asexual, ethnographic researcher is impossible to sustain, this volume brings sex and sexuality into the open as essential components of ethnographic study that must be overtly recognized and proactively addressed.
Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist recounts the real-life experiences of anthropologists who are forced to acknowledge that their hosts in the field view them as gendered beings in a social context, not as asexual, objective observers. Far from controlling the research environment and defining the terms of interviewer-informant relationships, these researchers find they must engage in a process of negotiating their position—including their sexual position—within the communities they study.
Ranging from public baths in Austria to lesbian bars in Taiwan and from Mexico to Nigeria to Finland to Japan, Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist raises critical questions about ethnographers' reflexivity, subjectivity, and detachment, confronting the challenge of a holistic approach to the anthropological enterprise.
Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist recounts the real-life experiences of anthropologists who are forced to acknowledge that their hosts in the field view them as gendered beings in a social context, not as asexual, objective observers. Far from controlling the research environment and defining the terms of interviewer-informant relationships, these researchers find they must engage in a process of negotiating their position—including their sexual position—within the communities they study.
Ranging from public baths in Austria to lesbian bars in Taiwan and from Mexico to Nigeria to Finland to Japan, Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist raises critical questions about ethnographers' reflexivity, subjectivity, and detachment, confronting the challenge of a holistic approach to the anthropological enterprise.
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Sex, Skulls, and Citizens
Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910)Ashley Elizabeth Kerr
Vanderbilt University Press, 2020
PROSE Awards Subject Category Finalist—Biological Anthropology, Ancient History, and Archaeology, 2021
Best Nineteenth-Century Book Award, Latin American Studies Association Nineteenth-Century Section, 2021
Analyzing a wide variety of late-nineteenth-century sources, Sex, Skulls, and Citizens argues that Argentine scientific projects of the era were not just racial encounters, but were also conditioned by sexual relationships in all their messy, physical reality.
The writers studied here (an eclectic group of scientists, anthropologists, and novelists, including Estanislao Zeballos, Lucio and Eduarda Mansilla, Ramón Lista, and Florence Dixie) reflect on Indigenous sexual practices, analyze the advisability and effects of interracial sex, and use the language of desire to narrate encounters with Indigenous peoples as they try to scientifically pinpoint Argentina's racial identity and future potential.
Kerr's reach extends into history of science, literary studies, and history of anthropology, illuminating a scholarly time and place in which the lines betwixt were much blurrier, if they existed at all.
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Significant Others
Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in AnthropologyEdited by Richard Handler
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
Anthropology is by definition about "others," but in this volume the phrase refers not to members of observed cultures, but to "significant others"—spouses, lovers, and others with whom anthropologists have deep relationships that are both personal and professional. The essays in this volume look at the roles of these spouses and partners of anthropologists over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially their work as they accompanied the anthropologists in the field. Other relationships discussed include those between anthropologists and informants, mentors and students, cohorts and partners, and parents and children. The book closes with a look at gender roles in the field, demonstrated by the "marriage" in the late nineteenth century of the male Anthropological Society of Washington to the Women’s Anthropological Society of America. Revealing relationships that were simultaneously deeply personal and professionally important, these essays bring a new depth of insight to the history of anthropology as a social science and human endeavor.
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Sites of Desire/Economies of Pleasure
Sexualities in Asia and the PacificEdited by Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Discussions of sexuality in Asia and the Pacific have long been tinged with conceptions of the exotic Orient. Examining a world of erotic encounter between European, Asian, and Pacific people, these essays explore how sexual practices and sexual meanings have been constructed across cultural borders in Thailand, the Philippines, Burma/Myanmar, Japan, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and the Polynesian islands. Considering sexuality as embedded in a complex social and political world structured and saturated by gender, race, and class relations, these scholars challenge the categories with which sex and gender have been named and studied. They examine these sites of desire through specific historic and cultural circumstances, from the first explorations of Europeans, through colonial power, to the contemporary issues of sexual tourism, prostitution, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
A unique and important contribution to the study of sexuality, this book also suggests that the history of sexuality in the West was shaped by myths of the legendary Orient and the exotic "Other."
A unique and important contribution to the study of sexuality, this book also suggests that the history of sexuality in the West was shaped by myths of the legendary Orient and the exotic "Other."
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Small Places, Large Issues
An Introduction to Social and Cultural AnthropologyThomas Hylland Eriksen
Pluto Press, 2015
This concise introduction to social and cultural anthropology has become a modern classic, introducing countless students to the field and the tools it offers for exploring some of the most complicated questions of human life and interaction. This fourth edition is fully updated, incorporating recent debates and controversies in the field, ranging from globalization and migration research to problems of cultural translation and the challenges of interdisciplinarity. Effortlessly bridging the gap between classic and contemporary anthropology, Small Places, Large Issues remains an essential text for undergraduates embarking on the study of this field.
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Social Life in Northwest Alaska
The Structure of Inupiaq Eskimo NationsErnest Burch Jr.
University of Alaska Press, 2006
This landmark volume will stand for decades as one of the most comprehensive studies of a hunter-gatherer population ever written. In this third and final volume in a series on the early contact period Iñupiaq Eskimos of northwestern Alaska, Burch examines every topic of significance to hunter-gatherer research, ranging from discussions of social relationships and settlement structure to nineteenth-century material culture.
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Stigmas of the Tamil Stage
An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in South IndiaSusan Seizer
Duke University Press, 2005
A study of the lives of popular theater artists, Stigmas of the Tamil Stage is the first in-depth analysis of Special Drama, a genre of performance unique to the southernmost Indian state of Tamilnadu. Held in towns and villages throughout the region, Special Drama performances last from 10 p.m. until dawn. There are no theatrical troupes in Special Drama; individual artists are contracted “specially” for each event. The first two hours of each performance are filled with the kind of bawdy, improvisational comedy that is the primary focus of this study; the remaining hours present more markedly staid dramatic treatments of myth and history. Special Drama artists themselves are of all ages, castes, and ethnic and religious affiliations; the one common denominator in their lives is their lower-class status. Artists regularly speak of how poverty compelled their entrance into the field.
Special Drama is looked down upon by the middle- and upper-classes as too popular, too vulgar, and too “mixed.” The artists are stigmatized: people insult them in public and landlords refuse to rent to them. Stigma falls most heavily, however, on actresses, who are marked as “public women” by their participation in Special Drama. As Susan Seizer’s sensitive study shows, one of the primary ways the performers deal with such stigma is through humor and linguistic play. Their comedic performances in particular directly address questions of class, culture, and gender deviations—the very issues that so stigmatize them. Seizer draws on extensive interviews with performers, sponsors, audience members, and drama agents as well as on careful readings of live Special Drama performances in considering the complexities of performers’ lives both on stage and off.
Special Drama is looked down upon by the middle- and upper-classes as too popular, too vulgar, and too “mixed.” The artists are stigmatized: people insult them in public and landlords refuse to rent to them. Stigma falls most heavily, however, on actresses, who are marked as “public women” by their participation in Special Drama. As Susan Seizer’s sensitive study shows, one of the primary ways the performers deal with such stigma is through humor and linguistic play. Their comedic performances in particular directly address questions of class, culture, and gender deviations—the very issues that so stigmatize them. Seizer draws on extensive interviews with performers, sponsors, audience members, and drama agents as well as on careful readings of live Special Drama performances in considering the complexities of performers’ lives both on stage and off.
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Stitches on Time
Colonial Textures and Postcolonial TanglesSaurabh Dube
Duke University Press, 2004
Destined to become a key work of subaltern studies and a crucial intervention in postcolonial scholarship, Stitches on Time probes the relationships between empire and modernity, nation and history, the colonial and the postcolonial, and power and difference. Saurabh Dube combines history and anthropology to provide critical understandings of the theory and practice of historical ethnography and contemporary historiography. Drawing on extensive archival research and innovative fieldwork as well as political economy and social theory—including considerations of gender—he unpacks the implications of specific Indian pasts from the middle of the nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century.
Dube provides incisive accounts of the interactions between North American evangelical missionaries and Christian converts of central India, and between colonial legal systems and Indian popular laws. He reflects on the difficulties of history writing by considering the production and reception of recent Hindu nationalist histories. Assessing the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, he offers substantial critical readings of major writings by Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, and others. Dube develops the concept and practice of a “history without warranty” as a means of rigorously rethinking categories such as modernity, colonialism, the West, the postcolonial, and the nation.
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Stone Masters
Power Encounters in Mainland Southeast AsiaEdited by Holly High
National University of Singapore Press, 2022
A new analytical perspective on stones and stone masters across Southeast Asia that extends and deepens the recent literature on animism.
Stones and stone masters are an important focus of animist religious practice in Southeast Asia. Recent studies on animism see animist rituals not as a mere metaphor for community or shared values, but as a way of forming and maintaining relationships with occult presences. This book features city pillars, statues, megaliths, termite mounds, mountains, rocks found in forests, and stones that have been moved to shrines, as well as the territorial cults which can form around them. The contributors extend and deepen the recent literature on animism to form a new analytical perspective on these cults across mainland Southeast Asia. Not just a collection of exemplary ethnographies, Stone Masters is also a deeply comparative volume that develops its ideas through a meshwork of regional entanglements, parallels, and differences, before entering into a dialogue with debates on power, mastery, and the social theory of animism globally.
Stones and stone masters are an important focus of animist religious practice in Southeast Asia. Recent studies on animism see animist rituals not as a mere metaphor for community or shared values, but as a way of forming and maintaining relationships with occult presences. This book features city pillars, statues, megaliths, termite mounds, mountains, rocks found in forests, and stones that have been moved to shrines, as well as the territorial cults which can form around them. The contributors extend and deepen the recent literature on animism to form a new analytical perspective on these cults across mainland Southeast Asia. Not just a collection of exemplary ethnographies, Stone Masters is also a deeply comparative volume that develops its ideas through a meshwork of regional entanglements, parallels, and differences, before entering into a dialogue with debates on power, mastery, and the social theory of animism globally.
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Stories Find You, Places Know
Yup'ik Narratives of a Sentient WorldHolly Cusack-McVeigh
University of Utah Press, 2017
Grounded in existing understandings of Yup’ik cosmology and worldview, this work is the first to look at how a Yup’ik community uses stories of place in social life. On the Bering coast of southwest Alaska, Cusack-McVeigh accompanied storytellers during their daily activities. Hearing many narratives repeatedly over a span of years, she came to understand how stories reflected interactions of people and places.
For the Yup’ik people, places are also social actors that react to human actions and emotions. Stories tell how people learn about each other through encounters on the land, and thereby places also learn about people. Places comment on human behavior through the land's responses to specific actions. Stories variously reveal ideas about human associations and relationships between humans and nonhuman beings. Pointing to a systematic correlation between places and narrative elements that has not been previously explored, this volume makes a unique contribution to the literature on place.
Winner of the Brian McConnell Book Award from the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research.
For the Yup’ik people, places are also social actors that react to human actions and emotions. Stories tell how people learn about each other through encounters on the land, and thereby places also learn about people. Places comment on human behavior through the land's responses to specific actions. Stories variously reveal ideas about human associations and relationships between humans and nonhuman beings. Pointing to a systematic correlation between places and narrative elements that has not been previously explored, this volume makes a unique contribution to the literature on place.
Winner of the Brian McConnell Book Award from the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research.
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Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond
Mario Blaser
Duke University Press, 2010
For more than fifteen years, Mario Blaser has been involved with the Yshiro people of the Paraguayan Chaco as they have sought to maintain their world in the face of conservation and development programs promoted by the state and various nongovernmental organizations. In this ethnography of the encounter between modernizing visions of development, the place-based “life projects” of the Yshiro, and the agendas of scholars and activists, Blaser argues for an understanding of the political mobilization of the Yshiro and other indigenous peoples as part of a struggle to make the global age hospitable to a “pluriverse” containing multiple worlds or realities. As he explains, most knowledge about the Yshiro produced by non-indigenous “experts” has been based on modern Cartesian dualisms separating subject and object, mind and body, and nature and culture. Such thinking differs profoundly from the relational ontology enacted by the Yshiro and other indigenous peoples. Attentive to people’s unique experiences of place and self, the Yshiro reject universal knowledge claims, unlike Western modernity, which assumes the existence of a universal reality and refuses the existence of other ontologies or realities. In Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond, Blaser engages in storytelling as a knowledge practice grounded in a relational ontology and attuned to the ongoing struggle for a pluriversal globality.
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Subject to Colonialism
African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial LibraryGaurav Desai
Duke University Press, 2001
Subject to Colonialism provides a much needed revisionist perspective on the way twentieth-century Africa is viewed and analyzed among scholars. Employing literary, historical, and anthropological techniques, Gaurav Desai attempts to generate a new understanding of issues that permeate discussions of Africa by disrupting the centrality of postcolonial texts and focusing instead on the cultural and intellectual production of colonial Africans. In particular, Desai calls for a reevaluation of the “colonial library”—that set of representations and texts that have collectively “invented” Africa as a locus of difference and alterity.
Presenting colonialism not as a singular, monolithic structure but rather as a practice frought with contradictions and tensions, Desai works to historicize the foundation of postcolonialism by decentering both canonical texts and privileged categories of analysis such as race, capitalism, empire, and nation. To achieve this, he focuses on texts that construct or reform—rather than merely reflect—colonialism, placing explicit emphasis on processes, performances, and the practices of everyday life. Reading these texts not merely for the content of their assertions but also for how they were created and received, Desai looks at works such as Jomo Kenyatta’s ethnography of the Gikuyu and Akiga Sai’s history of the Tiv and makes a particular plea for the canonical recuperation of African women’s writing.
Scholars in African history, literature, and philosophy, postcolonial studies, literary criticism, and anthropology will welcome publication of this book.
Presenting colonialism not as a singular, monolithic structure but rather as a practice frought with contradictions and tensions, Desai works to historicize the foundation of postcolonialism by decentering both canonical texts and privileged categories of analysis such as race, capitalism, empire, and nation. To achieve this, he focuses on texts that construct or reform—rather than merely reflect—colonialism, placing explicit emphasis on processes, performances, and the practices of everyday life. Reading these texts not merely for the content of their assertions but also for how they were created and received, Desai looks at works such as Jomo Kenyatta’s ethnography of the Gikuyu and Akiga Sai’s history of the Tiv and makes a particular plea for the canonical recuperation of African women’s writing.
Scholars in African history, literature, and philosophy, postcolonial studies, literary criticism, and anthropology will welcome publication of this book.
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Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, Volume 6
EthnologyVictoria Reifler Bricker, general editor; John D. Monaghan, volume editor, with the assistance of Barbara W. Edmonson
University of Texas Press, 2000
In 1981, UT Press began to issue supplemental volumes to the classic sixteen-volume work, Handbook of Middle American Indians. These supplements are intended to update scholarship in various areas and to cover topics of current interest. Supplements devoted to Archaeology, Linguistics, Literatures, Ethnohistory, and Epigraphy have appeared to date.
In this Ethnology supplement, anthropologists who have carried out long-term fieldwork among indigenous people review the ethnographic literature in the various regions of Middle America and discuss the theoretical and methodological orientations that have framed the work of areal scholars over the last several decades. They examine how research agendas have developed in relationship to broader interests in the field and the ways in which the anthropology of the region has responded to the sociopolitical and economic policies of Mexico and Guatemala. Most importantly, they focus on the changing conditions of life of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. This volume thus offers a comprehensive picture of both the indigenous populations and developments in the anthropology of the region over the last thirty years.
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