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A Baluch tribesman follows his goats as they search for a bit of vegetation; a Turkana youth guards his father's cattle against theft by raiders.... These pastoral inhabitants of mountain and desert waste are considered to be among the most geographically, economically, and politically peripheral of peoples, yet they are not entirely isolated from broader sociopolitical and economic forces. The lives of modern pastoralists are greatly affected by the policies of nations and the demands of world markets. They may face military control, forced settlement, stock reduction programs, or even efforts at "development" by governments claiming sovereignty over the lands they roam. The authors of this...
Studies the role played by nomads in the political, linguistic, socio-economic and cultural development of the sedentary world around them. Spans regions from Hungary to Africa, India and China, and periods from the first millennium BC to early modern times.
In this sweeping chronicle of guarana—a glossy-leaved Amazonian vine packed with more caffeine than any other plant—Seth Garfield develops a wide-ranging approach to the history of Brazil itself. The story begins with guarana as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the Satere-Mawe people in the Lower Amazon region, where it figured centrally in the Indigenous nation's origin stories, dietary regimes, and communal ceremonies. During subsequent centuries of Portuguese colonialism and Brazilian rule, guarana was reformulated by settlers, scientists, folklorists, food technologists, and marketers. Whether in search of pleasure, profits, professional distinction, or patriotic markers, promoters impa...
This book on the crafting of chocolate in contemporary France is itself delicious. It will be a classic of French ethnography and contribute in important ways to the ongoing debate about the role of national identity in the European Union."—Carole L. Crumley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill "A real pathbreaker. The intensity of Terrio's engagement with her respondents shines from almost every page. The work contributes to our understanding of the politics of heritage. . . . It is a thoroughly researched and descriptively rich analysis of how anthropologists can approach weighty problems of identity, national-local relations, and the ideology of self and other."—Michael Herzfeld, author of Portrait of a Greek Imagination
This book consists of three sections. The first, concentrating on ecology, further explores the theme of climate change. The second section focuses on exchange transactions and relations in a variety of situations and settings. Finally, papers in the third section share a concern with individual and group adaptations to certain conditions of life.
Ole Bruun focuses on a community of nomadic livestock herders in present-day Mongolia. He depicts their transition from a contained, Soviet-era collective to modern times and addresses the most essential conditions for their continued survival and prosperity in the age of the market: the adaptability of their own culture and working strategies, government policy, and international attention. By studying the nomadic practice of animal husbandry in the context of family farms, Bruun points out the similarity to the peasant economy defined by the Russian agricultural economist Alexander Chayanov nearly a century ago. In both economies, the labor-consumer balance and life-cycle variations commonly set the term for economic strategies, yet the pastoral economy involves a highly specialized form of agriculture in which the scale of exchange determines wealth and lifestyle. In a vast territory such as Mongolia, infrastructure, social benefits, and other means of state support are crucial to prevent herders from sliding into a subsistence orientation, eventually leading to poverty.
Abandoned airports. Shipping containers. Squatted hotels. These are just three of the many unusual places that have housed refugees in the past decade. The story of international migration is often told through personal odysseys and dangerous journeys, but when people arrive at their destinations a more mundane task begins: refugees need a place to stay. Governments and charities have adopted a range of strategies in response to this need. Some have sequestered refugees in massive camps of glinting metal. Others have hosted them in renovated office blocks and disused warehouses. They often end up in prefabricated shelters flown in from abroad. This book focuses on seven examples of emergency...
Adventure is currently enjoying enormous interest in public culture. The image of Tarzan provides a rewarding lens through which to explore this phenomenon. In their day, Edgar Rice Burrough's novels enjoyed great popularity because Tarzan represented the consummate colonial-era adventurer: a white man whose noble civility enabled him to communicate with and control savage peoples and animals. The contemporary Tarzan of movies and cartoons is in many ways just as popular, but carries different connotations. Tarzan is now the consummate "eco-tourist: " a cosmopolitan striving to live in harmony with nature, using appropriate technology, and helpful to the natives who cannot seem to solve their own problems. Tarzan is still an icon of adventure, because like all adventurers, his actions have universal qualities: doing something previously untried, revealing the previously undiscovered, and experiencing the unadulterated. Prominent anthropologists have come together in this volume to reflect on various aspects of this phenomenon and to discuss contemporary forms of adventure.
This cutting-edge volume is the first to address the burgeoning interest in drugs and Africa among scholars, policymakers, and the general public. It brings together an interdisciplinary group of leading academics and practitioners to explore the use, trade, production, and control of mind-altering substances on the continent
This first full-length study of the history of Iranian anthropology charts the formation and development of anthropology in Iran in the twentieth century. The text examines how and why anthropology and culture became part of wider socio-political discourses in Iran, and how they were appropriated, and rejected, by the pre- and post-revolutionary regimes. The author highlights the three main phases of Iranian anthropology, corresponding broadly to three periods in the social and political development of Iran: *the period of nationalism: lasting approximately from the constitutional revolution (1906-11) and the end of the Qajar dynasty until the end of Reza Shah’s reign (1941) *the period of Nativism: from the 1950s until the Islamic revolution (1979) *the post-revolutionary period. In addition, the book places Iranian anthropology in an international context by demonstrating how Western anthropological concepts, theories and methodologies affected epistemological and political discourses on Iranian anthropology.