Long a favorite on dance floors in Latin America, the porro, cumbia, and vallenato styles that make up Colombia's musica tropical are now enjoying international success. How did this music-which has its roots in a black, marginal region of the country-manage, from the 1940s onward, to become so popular in a nation that had prided itself on its white heritage? Peter Wade explores the history of musica tropical, analyzing its rise in the context of the development of the broadcast media, rapid urbanization, and regional struggles for power. Using archival sources...

Drawing on extensive anthropological fieldwork, Peter Wade shows how the concept of -blackness- and discrimination are deeply embedded in different social levels and contexts--from region to neighborhood, and from politics and economics to housing, marriage, music, and personal identity.

What does it mean to know something - scientifically, anthropologically, socially? What is the relationship between different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing? How is knowledge mobilised in society and to what ends? Drawing on ethnographic examples from across the world, and from the virtual and global 'places' created by new information technologies, Anthropology and Science presents examples of living and dynamic epistemologies and practices, and of how scientific ways of knowing operate in the world. Authors address the nature of both scientific and experiential knowledge, and look...