You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Inside and Outside the Law analyses the relationship between the law, the state and its citizens. Drawing on general theories and specific case-studies, it examines the diverse ways in which people in different cultural and historical settings have experienced the ambiguities of law. Its theme develops to engage with current debates concerning the status of rules and codification in social life and to the revival of interest in moralities. With chapters that encompass countries such as Peru, Mozambique, Spain, Iran, the US and Britain this book has a strong global perspective.
This volume opens a new series by the Institute of Latin American Studies dedicated to collecting the best work of leading Latin Americanists in the United Kingdom. The book brings together previously published ethnographic essays based on anthropological fieldwork in Northern Potosí, Bolivia, spanning the last 25 years. The introduction puts into context the pieces within the empirical and analytical developments in Latin American and Andean anthropology. The essays discuss key concerns and cultural symbols of the indigenous peasants of the Andes: the importance of the land and practices relating to its continued fertility; the cult of the dead; the complex division of labor and forms of circulation within the indigenous economy; the work of gender; and the mythological figure of the earth-mother. While based upon detailed ethnographic research, all the chapters also engage in theoretical and analytical debate both within and beyond the discipline.
Anthropology today seems to shy away from the big, comparative questions that ordinary people in many societies find compelling. Questions of Anthropology brings these issues back to the centre of anthropological concerns.Individual essays explore birth, death and sexuality, puzzles about the relationship between science and religion, questions about the nature of ritual, work, political leadership and genocide, and our personal fears and desires, from the quest to control the future and to find one's 'true' identity to the fear of being alone. Each essay starts with a question posed by individual ethnographic experience and then goes on to frame this question in a broader, comparative context. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Questions of Anthropology presents an exciting introduction to the purpose and value of Anthropology today.
Many debates in feminism centre round the issue of subordination of woman. Anthropologists and sociologists have tried to trace the origin of subordinate position of woman by giving various explanatory theories. The author examines the reductionist and constructionist theories and using a hermeneutic device of the Beejakshetra model explores the images of feminity to be found in the Mahabharata and in the rules of conduct in the Manusmriti. She shows how these models of feminity have shaped the life experiences and self-interpretation of woman down to present day. The last part attempts formulation of a feminist ethic of friendship and raises the discussion beyond protest and recrimination.
"Major compilation of historical and anthropological articles focuses on the nature of markets and exchange structures in the Andes. Prominent scholars explore Andean participation in the European market structure, the influence of migration in changing ethnic boundaries and spheres of exchange, and the politics of market exchange during the colonial period. Larson's introduction places articles within the context of Andean economic systems, while Harris concludes with an appreciation of the relationships between mestizo and indigenous ethnic identities in the context of market relations. Both introduction and conclusion lend a greater coherence to this carefully-crafted and monumental volume"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.
This sophisticated book presents new theoretical and analytical insights into the momentous events in the Arab world that began in 2011 and, more importantly, into life and politics in the aftermath of these events. Focusing on the qualities of the sensory world, Maria Frederika Malmström explores the dramatic differences after the Egyptian revolution and their implications for society—the lack of sound in the floating landscape of Cairo after the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, the role of material things in the sit-ins of 2013, the military evocation of masculinities (and the destruction of alternative ones), and how people experience pain, rage, disgust, euphoria, and passion in the body. While focused primarily on changes unfolding in Egypt, this study also investigates how materiality and affect provide new possibilities for examining societies in transition. A book of rare honesty and vulnerability, The Streets Are Talking to Me is a brilliant, unconventional, and self-conscious ethnography of the space where affect, material life, violence, political crisis, and masculinities meet one another.
None
As ethnographic fieldwork blurs the boundaries between ›private‹ and ›professional‹ life, ethnographers always appear to be on duty, looking out for valuable encounters and waiting for the next moment of disclosure. Yet what lies in the gaps and pauses of fieldwork? The contributions in this volume dedicated to anthropologist Martin Sökefeld explore methodological and ethical dimensions of multi-sided ethnographic research. Based on diverse cases ranging from hobbies over kinship ties to political activism, the contributors show how personal relationships, passions and commitments drive ethnographers in and beyond research, shaping the knowledge they create together with others.
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical “repressed” of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Bec...
This volume deals with the way in which money is symbolically represented in a range of different cultures, from South and South-east Asia, Africa and South America. It is also concerned with the moral evaluation of monetary and commercial exchanges as against exchanges of other kinds. The essays cast radical doubt on many Western assumptions about money: that it is the acid which corrodes community, depersonalises human relationships, and reduces differences of quality to those of mere quantity; that it is the instrument of man's freedom, and so on. Rather than supporting the proposition that money produces easily specifiable changes in world view, the emphasis here is on the way in which e...