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Emotions are a loaded topic. From love and hate to grief, fear and envy, emotions are increasingly understood as driving forces in social life. The Emotions: A Cultural Reader applies a cross-cultural perspective on emotions. It examines the fact that emotions are socially and culturally constructed, while highlighting problems of comparison and translation of local terms and emotional experiences. Are emotions cultural or universal? To what extent are there culturally distinct emotions? The Emotions closes the traditional Western gap where emotions are separated from rationality and thought: the heart versus mind debate. By presenting both classic essays and new cutting-edge chapters from anthropology, sociology and psychology with important contributions from philosophy and neuroscience, the volume connects a rich range of cross-cultural studies to form a thriving interdisciplinary debate on emotions.
Dancing at the crossroads used to be young people ́s opportunity to meet and enjoy themselves on mild summer evenings in the countryside in Ireland - until this practice was banned by law, the Public Dance Halls Act in 1935. Now a key metaphor in Irish cultural and political life, ́dancing at the crossroads ́ also crystallizes the argument of this book: Irish dance, from Riverdance (the commercial show) and competitive dancing to dance theatre, conveys that Ireland is to be found in a crossroads situation with a firm base in a distinctly Irish tradition which is also becoming a prominent part of European modernity. Helena Wulff is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Publications include Twenty Girls (Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1988), Ballet across Borders (Berg, 1998), Youth Cultures (co-edited with Vered Amit-Talai, Routledge, 1995), New Technologies at Work (co-edited with Christina Garsten, Berg, 2003). Her research focusses on dance, visual culture, and Ireland.
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.
This book analyses the making of the international world of ‘natural’ disasters by its professionals. Through a long-term ethnographic study of this arena, the author unveils the various elements that are necessary for the construction of an international world: a collective narrative, a shared language, and standardized practices. The book analyses the two main framings that these professionals use to situate themselves with regards to a disaster: preparedness and resilience, arguing that the making of the world of ‘natural’ disasters reveals how heterogeneous, conflicting, and sometimes competing elements are put together.
Moving Memory is an ethnography of remembrance in the field of tension between post-dictatorship Chile and occupied Palestine that offers new insights into memory politics as a globally resurgent and increasingly transnational phenomenon. It tells a largely untold story of a Palestinian diaspora: how a predominantly Christian, conservative, and wealthy elite has come to form the backbone of a diasporic community to which the Palestinian struggle remains a central mobilizing force. Schwabe explores how Palestinian diaspora politics play into larger attempts to obscure the recent Chilean past and its consequences, all the while working to counter Zionist efforts to negate and erase Palestinian existence. Despite considerable efforts to contain them, memories move. They travel across porous and ever-changing geographical and socio-political boundaries, reconfiguring realities in the process. In exploring the paradoxes of remembering and forgetting between Palestine and Chile as intertwining nodes in the complex field of global memory politics, the book demarcates the limits and possibilities of forging solidarity at the fault lines of memory.
This book explores the issue of love and its place in the reproduction of gender asymmetry in Nicaragua. The theme is discussed in the context of specific religious and work practices, living arrangements, gender values and norms, and the gender practices and legislation of the Sandinista revolution. The study uses lifeworld phenomenology as its theoretical approach, placing people's own experience center stage. Therefore, a case study of the Esperanza sewing cooperative is presented, built on life stories, interview materials and participant observation with the cooperative women and their husbands. The material and discursive practices and emotional experiences of men and women are examined in this particular socio-cultural setting. How do we account for the highly unequal bargains the women strike with their husbands, accepting large material responsibilities and «time-share» love even if they experience this as emotionally hurtful? The study testifies to women's autonomy in family maintenance and religious practices, an autonomy which seems to falter in the fields of love and sexuality; some of the men and women, however, negotiate subtle changes in gender norms and values.
Remembering the Liberation Struggles in Cape Verde: A Mnemohistory takes as its reference from the anti-colonial struggles against the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s and the ways this period has been publicly remembered. Drawing on original and detailed empirical research, it presents novel insights into the complex entanglements between colonial pasts and political memories of anti-colonialism in shaping new nations arising out of liberation struggles. Broadening postcolonial memory studies by emphasising underdeveloped research cases, it provides the first comprehensive research into how the liberation struggle is memorialised in Cape Verde and why it changes o...
Andean Meltdown examines how climate change and its consequences for Peru's glaciers are affecting the country's water supply and impacting Andean society and culture in unprecedented ways. Drawing on forty years of extensive research, relationship building, and community engagement in Peru, Karsten Paerregaard provides an ethnographic exploration of Andean ritual practices and performances in the context of an altered climate. By documenting Andean peoples' responses to rapid glacier retreat and urgent water shortages, Paerregaard considers the myriad ways climate change intersects with environmental, social, and political change. A pathbreaking contribution to cultural anthropology and environmental humanities, Andean Meltdown challenges prevailing theoretical thinking about the culture-nature nexus and offers a new perspective on Andean peoples' understanding of their role as agents in the shifting relationship between humans and nonhumans.
The Handbook provides a comprehensive statement and reference point for hazard and disaster research, policy making, and practice in an international and multi-disciplinary context. It offers critical reviews and appraisals of current state of the art and future development of conceptual, theoretical and practical approaches as well as empirical knowledge and available tools. Organized into five inter-related sections, this Handbook contains sixty-five contributions from leading scholars. Section one situates hazards and disasters in their broad political, cultural, economic, and environmental context. Section two contains treatments of potentially damaging natural events/phenomena organized...
During the past four years, the countries of the European periphery – the so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) – have been experiencing an economic-financial crisis that can only be compared to the Great Depression. To solve the crisis, the EU and the IMF instituted bailout programs for the debit countries on conditions of austerity and structural reforms. In this volume 20 social scientists, using both theoretical and empirical tools, delve into the causes and the social impacts of this crisis. The volume also provides an excellent background for a better comprehension of the dynamics of structural and political changes now taking place within the European Union....