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Interactions with a Violent Past
The Second and Third Indochina Wars are the subject of important ongoing scholarship, but there has been little research on the lasting impact of wartime violence on local societies and populations, in Vietnam as well as in Laos and Cambodia. Today's Lao, Vietnamese and Cambodian landscapes bear the imprint of competing violent ideologies and their perilous material manifestations. From battlefields and massively bombed terrain to reeducation camps and resettled villages, the past lingers on in the physical environment. The nine essays in this volume discuss post-conflict landscapes as contested spaces imbued with memory-work conveying differing interpretations of the recent past, expressed through material (even, monumental) objects, ritual performances, and oral narratives (or silences). While Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese landscapes are filled with tenacious traces of a violent past, creating an unsolicited and malevolent sense of place among their inhabitants, they can in turn be transformed by actions of resilient and resourceful local communities.
Ethnographies of Social Support
Why do elderly choose to move away from their children so as to not receive their support? Using a number of case studies, contributors explore social support as a tool of mutuality, or maintaining relatedness and sharing feelings, rather than preventing or patching up problems. This book helps correct the dominant framework of deliberate action.
Seeking the Self
This book is about the self in contemporary Japan. In contrast to Euro-American cultures, in which the self is considered to be the essence of personhood, in Japanese culture the self is constantly reconstructed in relation to others. This particular self is studied by examining the ways popular culture is consumed, with a special focus on manga, the Japanese word for comics and cartoons. The first part of the book contains an ethnographic research in which the author investigates the relationship between popular media and the search for self-knowledge. In the second part a historical analysis traces the development of self-seeking in Japan since the country's modernisation period.
Kinship, Cosmology and Support
Despite living in a state that honours science and debases `superstition', and despite making substantial use of the multiple medical resources available to them, Akha villagers in Yunnan still put their greatest trust for health and wellbeing into healing rituals, especially when it comes to their children. The book delves into these apparent contradictions. What is this Akha way of childcare that continues in twenty-first-century China? It is generally believed that children fall sick from soul loss or attack by spirits. Accordingly, parents frequently invite ritual experts to perform sacrificial rituals for the diagnosis and healing of their children. Relatives (kin and affines), big men, ancestors and spirits all play indispensable roles in these protective rituals. As the process of a healing ritual unfolds, a network of social organisation, kinship, and cosmology is woven.
Borders & Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa
Borders offer opportunities as well as restrictions, and in the Horn of Africa they are used as economic, political, identity and status resources by borderland peoples. State borders are more than barriers. They structure social, economic and political spaces and as such provide opportunities as well as obstacles for the communities straddling both sides of the border. This book deals with the conduits and opportunities of state borders in the Horn of Africa, and investigates how the people living there exploit state borders through various strategies. Using a micro level perspective, the case studies, which includethe Horn and Eastern Africa, particularly the borders of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, focus on opportunities, highlight the agency of the borderlanders, and acknowledge the permeabilitybut consequentiality of the borders. DEREJE FEYISSA, Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany; MARKUS VIRGIL HOEHNE, Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany.
Living Faithfully in an Unjust World
What does it mean to be a compassionate, caring person in Russia, which has become a country of stark income inequalities and political restrictions? How might ethics and practices of kindness constitute a mode of civic participation in which “doing good”—helping, caring for, and loving one another in a world marked by many problems and few easy solutions—is a necessary part of being an active citizen? Living Faithfully in an Unjust World explores how, following the retreat of the Russian state from social welfare services, Russians’ efforts to “do the right thing” for their communities have forged new modes of social justice and civic engagement. Through vivid ethnography base...
Is the Death Penalty Dying?
Drawing together an array of distinguished scholars from political science, criminology, sociology, and law, this volume examines the death penalty in the US.
Care and Ageing in North-West China
This book presents a pioneering ethnographic exploration of practices and ideologies of eldercare in the bingtuan - a paramilitary state organization composed largely of migrants (most of them very poor) to the north-western frontier province of Xinjiang since the 1949 Communist Revolution. In exploring the discourses and actions of the elderly, their relatives, and the state, the book uncovers the ways in which macro-level economic and social transformations are linked to the material and emotional realities of ordinary Chinese people. The light shed on gender and inter-generational relations within the modern urbanized bingtuan illuminates ageing, care and social support mechanisms in an era of rapid social change globally.
Southeast Asian Perspectives on Power
Southeast Asia has undergone innumerable far-reaching changes and dramatic transformations over the last half-century. This book explores the concept of power in relation to these transformations, and examines its various social, cultural, religious, economic and political forms. The book works from the ground up, portraying Southeast Asians’ own perspectives, conceptualizations and experiences of power through empirically rich case studies. Exploring concepts of power in diverse settings, from the stratagems of Indonesian politicians and the aspirations of marginal Lao bureaucrats, to mass ‘Prayer Power’ rallies in the Philippines, self-cultivation practices of Thai Buddhists and rela...
