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Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic methods, Jackson explores a variety of compelling topics, including 9/11, episodes from the war in Sierra Leone and its aftermath, the marginalization of indigenous Australians, the application of new technologies, mundane forms of ritualization, the magical use of language, the sociality of violence, the prose of suffering, and the discourse of human rights. Throughout this compelling work, Jackson demonstrates that existentialism, far from being a philosophy of individual being, enables us to explore issues of social existence and coexistence in new ways, and to theorise events as the sites of a dynamic interplay between the finite possibilities of the situations in which human beings find themselves and the capacities they yet possess for creating viable forms of social life.
Issues of identity figure prominently in Native North American communities, mediating their histories, traditions, culture, and status. This is certainly true of the Mi?kmaw people of Nova Scotia, whose lives on reserves create highly complex economic, social, political, and spiritual realities. This ethnography investigates identity construction and negotiations among the Mi?kmaq, as well as the role of identity dynamics in Mi?kmaw social relationships on and off the reserve. Featuring direct testimonies from over sixty individuals, this work offers a vivid firsthand perspective on contemporary Mi?kmaw reserve life. Simone Poliandri begins First Nations, Identity, and Reserve Life with a se...
Tribal Worlds considers the emergence and general project of indigenous nationhood in several geographical and historical settings in Native North America. Ethnographers and historians address issues of belonging, peoplehood, sovereignty, conflict, economy, identity, and colonialism among the Northern Cheyenne and Kiowa on the Plains, several groups of the Ojibwe, the Makah of the Northwest, and two groups of Iroquois. Featuring a new essay by the eminent senior scholar Anthony F. C. Wallace on recent ethnographic work he has done in the Tuscarora community, as well as provocative essays by junior scholars, Tribal Worlds explores how indigenous nationhood has emerged and been maintained in the face of aggressive efforts to assimilate Native peoples.
In the Red Sea Hills of eastern Sudan, where poverty, famines, and conflict loom large, women struggle to gain the status of responsible motherhood through bearing and raising healthy children, especially sons. But biological fate can be capricious in impoverished settings. Amidst struggle for survival and expectations of heroic mothering, women face realities that challenge their ability to fulfill their prescribed roles. Even as the effects of modernity and development, global inequities, and exclusionary government policies challenge traditional ways of life in eastern Sudan and throughout many parts of Africa, reproductive traumas—infertility, miscarriage, children’s illnesses, and m...
This book seeks to explore historical changes in the lifeworld of the Mi'kmaq Indians of Eastern Canada. The Mi'kmaq culture hero Kluskap serves as a key persona in discussing issues such as traditions, changing conceptions of land, and human-environmental relations. In order not to depict Mi'kmaq culture as timeless, two important periods in its history are examined. Within the first period, between 1850 and 1930, Hornborg explores historical evidence of the ontology, epistemology, and ethics - jointly labelled animism - that stem from a premodern Mi'kmaq hunting subsistence. New ways of discussing animism and shamanism are here richly exemplified. The second study situates the culture hero...
An ethnographic examination of how northern Ugandans understand and attempt to control their moral universe and material circumstances in the midst of civil war.
Deals with the modern predicament of the Rabha (or Kocha) people, one of India;s indigenous peoples, traditionally practising shifting cultivation in the jungle tracts situated where the Himalayan mountains meet the plains of Bengal. When the area came under British rule and was converted into tea gardens and reserved forests, Rabhas were forced to become labourers under the forest department. Today, large-scale illegal deforestation and the global interest in wildlife conservation once again jeopardize their survival. Karlsson describes the development of the Rabha people, their ways of coping with the colonial regime of scientific forestry and the depletion of the forest, as well as with present day concerns for wilderness and wildlife restoration and preservation. Central points relate to the construction of identity as a form of subaltern resistance, the Rabha;s ongoing conversion to Christianity and their ethnic mobilisation, and the agency involved in the construction of cultural or ethnic identities.
The focus of this volume is on the various forms of local, informal and/or customary law and their interaction with human rights.
"A decade after James Horrox's pioneering work A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement, Merlin Becskey presents an engaging and well-written case study of a kibbutz trying to realise anarchist principles. Based on field research and interviews at kibbutz Samar, located in Israel's far south, Becskey provides valuable insight into an unlikely project under unlikely circumstances." Gabriel Kuhn, editor and translator of All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 19181919, Liberating Society from the State and Other Writings by Erich Mühsam, and Revolution and Other Writings by Gustav Landauer "In Samar, communal organisation and individual desire form a tense bond, worked out every day. It may be the last refuge of the free spirit that animated the earliest Kibbutz groups, where everything depends on people." Uri Gordon, author of Anarchy Alive! and Anarchy, State and Revolution Merlin Becskey is a cultural anthropologist, researcher, and lecturer in civic education living in Berlin, Germany.
Three stereotypical figures have come to represent the 'war on terror' - the 'dangerous' Muslim man, the 'imperilled' Muslim woman, and the 'civilized' European. Casting Out explores the use of these characterizations in the creation of the myth of the family of democratic Western nations obliged to use political, military, and legal force to defend itself against a menacing third world population. It argues that this myth is promoted to justify the expulsion of Muslims from the political community, a process that takes the form of stigmatization, surveillance, incarceration, torture, and bombing. In this timely and controversial work, Sherene H. Razack looks at contemporary legal and social...