Carnival songs resemble a tabloid newspaper in their verve, spirit and range of themes. They are a measure of social change and an annual summary of events and opinion. The songs involve considerable artistry and are renowned as well for their raucous humor and vulgar concerns. (Promiscuity and sexual misalliances are common subjects.)

Banned by Franco during the Spanish Civil War, the Cadiz carnival began a revival in the 1960's following decades of repression. This fascinating book examines carnival song and society during the last years of the Franco dictatorship and the...

Exchanges are fundamental to human societies. The authors show that the study of exchanges not only serves as a key to understanding particular societies as totalities but also helps to frame a comparative mode of analysis expressed in terms of a hierarchy of values. Starting with a comparative analysis of the different vocabularies used when dealing with exchange, the authors go on to provide a detailed account of how each society's exchanges form a genuine value-oriented system. Their conclusions shed light on important issues in anthropology such as the difference between subject and...

This is a remarkable work which captures the reader's imagination as only few books do. From a description of the counting system of Iqwaye people of Papua New Guinea, the author develops a deeper and broader interpretation of the Iqwaye kinship system and cosmology, culminating in a powerful critique of western assumptions about the development of rational thought.

"I always thought that building] bridges is the best job there is because roads go over bridges, and without roads we'd still be like savages. In short, bridges are like the opposite of borders, and borders are where wars start." --Primo Levi, 'La chiave a stella' (The Wrench)

Primo Levi (1919-1987) was one of Italy's most distinguished writers. A survivor of the Holocaust, his memoirs on the Nazi death camps (If This Is a Man and The Truce) are internationally recognised as among the most powerful and profound testimonies to have come out of the extermination of the European...

In Pacific societies, local knowledge, which has been accumulated over thousands of years and is irreplaceable, is rapidly disappearing. With the extinction of languages, the ability to observe and interpret the world from varying perspectives is also being lost. At the same time, an enormous body of knowledge about nature, plants and animals is vanishing.

However, in parallel with this, the people of the Pacific are confronted with new modes of knowledge and newly introduced technologies through imported educational systems, missions of various denominations, and the media. They do...

From cultural studies, sociology, media studies, gender studies and elsewhere there have been a spate of books recently which have attempted to characterize the state of modernity. Many of these have also argued that what is required is an ethnographic work to determine how far these supposed trends actually apply to a given population. This book explicitly accepts this challenge and, in so doing, demonstrates the potential of modern anthropology studies. It starts by summarizing some debates on modernity and then argues that the Caribbean island of Trinidad is particularly apt for such a...

The complex and sometimes contradictory articulation of ethnicity, religion and gender informs this book on the cultural construction of identity for Jamaican migrants in Britain. The author argues that religion -- in this case Pentecostalism -- cannot be understood simply as a means of spiritual compensation for the economically disadvantaged. Rather, in the New Testament Church of God, one of Britain's largest African Caribbean churches, the cosmology of the church resolves the questions surrounding identity as well as suffering. Religious participation is one way in which African...

This pathbreaking ethnography of population movements between rural and urban places in Peru addresses the conceptual and methodological problems of studying 'deterritorialized' populations and the implications of this for anthropology's notions of culture and identity.

Based on extensive fieldwork, this book explores the economic, social and ritual bonds which link migrants in Peru's major cities to their Andean native village. Many urban migrants establish networks based on kinship and marriage ties to exploit resources in the city as well as the village. These networks ensure they...

This innovative book finally takes seriously the need for anthropologists to produce in-depth ethnographies of children's play. In examining the subject from a cross-cultural perspective, the author argues that our understanding of the way children transform their environment to create make-believe is enhanced by viewing their creations as oral poetry. The result is a richly detailed 'thick description' of how pretence is socially mediated and linguistically constructed, how children make sense of their own play, how play relates to other imaginative genres in Huli life, and the...

This compelling study of gender and sexual diversity in the Southern Philippines addresses general questions about the relationship between the making of gender and sexualities, the politics of national and ethnic identities and processes of cultural transformation in a world of contract labourers and transnational consumers. The book focuses, in particular, on the meaning and experience of local 'gays' -- transvestite/transgender-homosexual men -- who are at once celebrated as purveyors of beauty (defined in terms of a global American otherness) and valorized as impotent men and defiled...