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Explores the theme of aesthetic agency and its potential for social and political progress.
This book examines the relationship between migration and socioeconomic status. In particular, it charts a set of middle-class aspirations that lead people to move to a nearby nation that is similar in wealth and social indicators – a type of horizontal relocation that it terms "sideways migration." It chronicles the experiences of a diverse group of French middle-class citizens who moved to London during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork over a ten-year period, this book engages at length with their strategies of emplacement through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social space. Against a backdrop of heightened anxieties about imm...
What is the sixth sense? Is it physical, mental or spiritual? Do we all possess it or is it unique to exceptional individuals? Might there be a seventh sense and an eighth sense as well? What role does culture play in determining the range of our perceptual abilities? The search for a supplementary sense has taken many directions and yielded numerous possibilities for an "additional faculty" of perception - from magnetism and movement to dreaming and clairvoyance. Stimulating reflection and debate, The Sixth Sense Reader explores the cultural contexts which give rise to such reports of "psychic" and other powers that exceed the ordinary bounds of sense. In this groundbreaking volume, leading scholars in history, anthropology and biology take the reader on a tour of the far borderlands of consciousness. From the world beneath to the world beyond the five senses, every potential avenue of sensation is opened up for investigation.
"One of the most disturbing spectacles of recent decades has been brutal acts of genocidal violence committed among neighboring communities who once lived together in peace: ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia; the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda; or the Sunni versus Shia violence in today's Iraq. As these cases illustrate, lethal violence does not always come at the hands of outsiders or foreigners. Rather, it can just as easily come at the hand of someone who once was considered a friend. Killing Our Neighbors employs a multi-sited approach and multi-vocal ethnography to examine how once-peaceful neighbors become transformed into perpetrators and victims of lethal violence. It engages ...
In Mastering the Niger, David Lambert recalls Scotsman James MacQueen (1778–1870) and his publication of A New Map of Africa in 1841 to show that Atlantic slavery—as a practice of subjugation, a source of wealth, and a focus of political struggle—was entangled with the production, circulation, and reception of geographical knowledge. The British empire banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery itself in 1833, creating a need for a new British imperial economy. Without ever setting foot on the continent, MacQueen took on the task of solving the “Niger problem,” that is, to successfully map the course of the river and its tributaries, and thus breathe life into his scheme ...
The Maa of East Africa are a cluster of related pastoral peoples who share a social organization based on age. This groups men into life-long cohorts from their initiation in youth, regardless of family wealth. Historically, this type of pre-market society has been described in every continent, but East Africa provides the principal surviving region of age-based societies, among whom the Maasai are the best known. In this volume, comparison between three branches of Maa highlights different aspects of their society: the dynamics of power with age and gender among the Maasai, of ritual performance and belief among the Samburu, and of historical change among the Chamus. Here it is argued that understanding another culture can only be approached through models derived in the first instance from the representations conveyed by members of that culture. The social anthropologist may then elaborate these images through the choice of analytical parallels, even extending to other disciplines and personal experience. Each chapter in this volume views Maa institutions through a different lens, exploring models relevant to a comprehensive analysis of their social life.
Going beyond the frameworks of the anthropology of death, Articulate Necrographies offers a dramatic new way of studying the dead and their interactions with the living. Traditional anthropology has tended to dichotomize societies where death “speaks” from those where death is “silent” – the latter is deemed “scientific” and the former “religious” or “magical”. The collection introduces the concept of “necrography” to describe the way death and the dead create their own kinds of biographies in and among the living, and asks what kinds of articulations and silences this in turn produces in the lives of those affected.
Chariton Review Fall/Winter 2016
Harrison's collection of essays focuses on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and (ethno)nation that influence the dynamics of human rights conflicts in different parts of the world. The authors investigate human rights conflicts in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia, and reflect upon the political concerns and anxieties that have taken center stage since the catastrophe of 9/11. The contributors are an internationally diverse group of anthropologists and human rights activists concerned with global culturally diverse gendered experiences. This book will be valuable to instructors and applied professionals in anthropology, gender studies, ethnic studies, and international human rights.
The image on the cover of this book represents the idea that brain state alterations at sacred sites allow us to re-experience memories that are woven into the morphogenetic fields of that place, an idea that originates with Paul Devereux's empirical enquiry into dreams at sacred sites in Wales and England. This books examines how this investigation provides us with a new way of understanding consciousness, and a new direction toward a reconciliation of the divorce between matter and spirit. We explore the work of David Lukoff, and Stanislav and Christina Grof, the connections between the varieties of transformative experience in dream studies, ecopsychology, transpesonal psychology, and the anthropology of consciousness, as well as the overlap between David Bohm's interpretation of quantum theory and Rupert Sheldrake's hypothesis of formative causation.