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Debates on the meaning of religious belief in an advanced technological age have established the emergence of religion as a fact of daily life. The nineteenth-century imagery of "warfare" between science and religion is long dismissed. Emphasizing this fact of the continuing relevance and importance of religion as a driving force in contemporary life is the stunning emergence on the world scene of militant Muslim beliefs in a period of relatively inactive religious belief elsewhere. In this volume of Culture and Civilization, religion is examined in the context of post-modern societies. The collection of essays is divided by themes: religions, civilizations, cultures, and the history of idea...
Having safely delivered her brother to the portal against impossible odds and unimaginable foes, and choosing not to follow him through it to a shared destiny, Khia Ashworth must forge a new path to an uncertain future. But she is not alone. Whisked away to the questionable sanctuary of the Vatican’s hallowed halls, Khia and her trusted companions must keep themselves from being buried beneath the weight of its history and power, learning who to trust and from whom they need to run. Unwittingly breathing life into ancient prophecies long dismissed as rhetoric and legend, and setting deadly wheels in motion, Khia’s unique family of friends must face the forces of evil that are pitted against them once more, enlisting the help of unlikely allies in their attempt to escape the grasping reach of the church’s army and the deadly enemies hidden within its ranks. Pursued by legendary creatures of mist and fire, across merciless deserts and countless worlds connected by the slimmest of threads, Khia must learn to move beyond the borders of time and place to discover her own power—hidden somewhere along the Corridor of Doors.
What can we learn from tribal societies about the ways in which, in a variety of social settings, groups of men resolve their conflicts with other men? In order to answer this question, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society compares nearly forty case study societies, most of them in Africa, in their reconstructed pre-colonial tribal condition, comparing their small-scale social relations to their large-scale social context. At the outset Gluckman explains to the reader that custom is the focus of interest of all types of anthropology. Yet his approach manifests a strong interest in economy, politics, and social relationships.In the volume, Max Gluckman offers a succinct version of a lif...
Recent debates about sustainable development have shifted their focus from fixing environmental problems in a technocratic and economic way to more fundamental changes in social-political processes and relations. In this context, participation is a genuinely transformative approach to sustainable development, yet the process by which participation leads to transformation is not sufficiently understood. This book considers how the act of participating in sustainable development projects can bring about social transformation that is considered to be fair and just by the participants and non-participants in a broader societal context. Drawing on ideas from social theory and applied anthropology...
This Open Access edited collection seeks to improve collaboration between criminal justice and welfare services in order to help prepare offenders for life after serving a prison sentence. It examines the potential tensions between criminal justice agencies and other organisations which are involved in the rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders, most notably those engaged in mental health care or third sector organisations. It then suggests a variety of different methods and approaches to help to overcome such tensions and promote inter-agency collaboration and co-working, drawing on emerging research and models, with a focus on the practice in European and Scandinavian countries. For academics and practitioners working in prisons and the penal system, this collection will be invaluable.
"This book is an anthropological study of the relationship of formal political democracy and the cultivation of active citizenship in one particular rural setting in India, studied from 1998 to 2013. It draws on deep ethnographic engagement with the people and social life in two villages both during elections and in the time in between them, to show how these two temporalities connect. The analysis shows how an agrarian village society produces the social imaginaries required for democratic and republican values. The ethnographic microscope on a single paddy growing setting allows us to examine how the various social institutions of kinship, economy and religion are critical sites for the continual civic cultivation of cooperation, vigilance, redistribution, inviolate commitment and hope - values that are essential for democracy"--
Focusing on the social construction of morality, The Ethnography of Moralities discusses a topic which is complex but central to the study and nature of anthropology. With the recent shift towards an interest in indigenous notions of self and personhood, questions pertaining to the moral and ethical origins of beliefs relating to human rights become increasingly relevant. Some of the questions that the contributors address are: * How is the ethical knowledge grounded? * Which social domains most profoundly articulate moral values and which are most affected? * Who defines and who enforces what is right and wrong? * What constitutes an ethical breach? Suggested answers are made with reference to empirical material so that the complexities and varieties of theoretical and methodological issues are highlighted. They are also discussed with reference to a wide array of ethnographic studies from Argentina, Mongolia, Melanesia, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Britain and The Old Testament.
This volume presents both a historical exploration of ethnography and a thematic discussion of major trends that, over different periods, have oriented and re-oriented research practice. As it overviews ethnography from different geographic and thematic perspectives, it further explores new lines of ethnographic research, including as feminist ethnography and visual research, that uncover non-traditional routes to anthropological knowledge. As the great ethnographer E. E. Evans-Pritchard wrote, “Anyone who is not a complete idiot can do fieldwork... but will [his contribution] be to theoretical, or just to factual knowledge?” As Evans-Pritchard highlights and as this book argues, successful ethnography must be connected to a sophisticated theoretical reflection rooted in social and cultural anthropology.