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Drawing on rich ethnographic data as well as archaeological evidence, The Boundaries of Ancient Trade challenges long-standing conceptions of highly centralized sociopolitical and economic organization and trade along the Afar salt trail—one of the last economically significant caravan-based trade routes in the world. For thousands of years, farmers in the Tigray, Amhara, and Afar regions of Ethiopia and Eritrea have run caravans of nearly 250,000 people and pack animals annually along an eighty-mile route through both cold, high-altitude farmlands and some of the hottest volcanic desert terrain on earth. In her fieldwork, archaeologist Helina Solomon Woldekiros followed the route with her...
Chinese academic traditions take zuo ren—self-fulfillment in terms of moral cultivation—as the ultimate goal of education. To many in contemporary China, however, the nation seems gripped by moral decay, the result of rapid and profound social change over the course of the twentieth century. Placing Chinese children, alternately seen as China's greatest hope and derided as self-centered "little emperors," at the center of her analysis, Jing Xu investigates the effects of these transformations on the moral development of the nation's youngest generation. The Good Child examines preschool-aged children in Shanghai, tracing how Chinese socialization beliefs and methods influence their const...
The study of historic foodways is as multifaceted and varied as food itself. The changes we see in food habits and choices over history reveal evolving social and political climates and help us envision our ancestors' everyday lives and imagined afterlives. Food certainly played a role in funerary rites; it was offered to the dead, of course, but also shared at the grave among the living family members, symbolically bridging between this world and the next. Choosing the food was embedded in a series of traditions and norms; how it relates to what was actually eaten in associated settlements enables an understanding of its meaning. Feasts, whether for the dead or the living, were laden with p...
This book provides the first truly comprehensive multi-period study of the archaeology of Ethiopia, surveying the country's history, detailing the discoveries from the late Stone Age, including the famous 'Lucy' and moving onto the emergence of food production, prehistoric rock art and an analysis of the increasing social complexity that can be obs
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. The Scarcity Slot is the first book to critically examine food security in Africa’s deep past. Amanda L. Logan argues that African foodways have been viewed through the lens of ‘the scarcity slot,’ a kind of Othering based on presumed differences in resources. Weaving together archaeological, historical, and environmental data with food ethnography, she advances a new approach to building long-term histories of food security on the continent in order to combat these stereotypes. Focusing on a case study in Banda, Ghana that spans the past six centuries, The Scarcity Slot reveals that people thrived during a severe, centuries-long drought just as Europeans arrived on the coast, with a major decline in food security emerging only recently. This narrative radically challenges how we think about African foodways in the past with major implications for the future.
This publication is the third in a series of annual reports giving a comparative analysis of business regulations and their enforcement across 155 countries and over time. Comparable data indicators are given for 10 topics: starting a business, dealing with licences, hiring and firing workers, registering property, getting credit, investment protection, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, and closing a business. These indicators are used to assess socio-economic outcomes including levels of unemployment and poverty, productivity, investment and corruption; and to identify which regulatory measures enhance business activity and those that work to constrain it. This is a co-publication of the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation.
"This study challenges a range of stereotypes about pastoralists' social life, pastoral economy, resource use and tenure, livestock raising, and ecology in the semi-arid lands of northeastern Africa. An outstanding study into the problems pastoral people face when resource conflicts threaten their sources of livelihood."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The first comprehensive study of the most important ceramic innovation of the 19th century Colorful, wildly imaginative, and technically innovative, majolica was functional and aesthetic ceramic ware. Its subject matter reflects a range of 19th-century preoccupations, from botany and zoology to popular humor and the macabre. Majolica Mania examines the medium’s considerable impact, from wares used in domestic settings to monumental pieces at the World’s Fairs. Essays by international experts address the extensive output of the originators and manufacturers in England—including Minton, Wedgwood, and George Jones—and the migration of English craftsmen to the U.S. New research including information on important American makers in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia is also featured. Fully illustrated, the book is enlivened by new photography of pieces from major museums and private collections in the U.S. and Great Britain.
"The late medieval world was marked by a culture of refinement and sophistication. The period's media of choice--paintings, manuscripts, prints, tapestries, embroideries, ivory sculpture, metalwork, and enamels--speak volumes about the pleasures of sensory engagement. This sumptuous new book brings together sacred and secular art to reveal the shared intellectual culture that governed perception in Europe in the 13th through the 16th centuries. The essays explore these themes through representations of religious practices, royal rituals, feasts and celebrations, music, and literature"--