Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Anthropology - Cultural & Social

"For its intelligence and humanitarian achievements, for its political honesty, for its power and its beauty (there is no other word), this book deserves to be called a masterpiece." --American Ethnologist

Jerome R. Mintz's classic study of the lives of Andalusian campesinos who were swept up by one of the 20th century's pivotal social movements provided a new framework for understanding the tragic events that tilted Spain toward civil war. In a new foreword, James W. Fernandez reflects on the fieldwork that led to the book and its contribution to subsequent developments in the...

"Will be of interest to those working on conflict and peace studies, economic development, cultural studies, and women in the modern world. A key new publication." --Chandra R. de Silva, Old Dominion University

..". offers a superb overview of how a civil war, driven by ethnicity, can engender a new culture and a new political economy... Highly recommended."
-- Choice

Economy, Culture, and Civil War in Sri Lanka provides a lucid and up-to-date interpretation of Sri Lankan society and its 20-year civil conflict. An interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between...

" F]illed with rare encounters with Syria's oldest, most elite families. Critics of anthropology's taste for exoticism and marginality will savor this study of upper-class Damascus, a world that is urbane and cosmopolitan, yet in many ways as remote as the settings in which the best ethnography has traditionally been done.... Written] with a nuanced appreciation of the cultural forms in question and how Damascenes themselves think, talk about, and create them." --Andrew Shryock

In contemporary urban Syria, debates about the representation, preservation, and restoration of the Old...

"In a move still unusual in anthropology, Mines examines relations of power by providing perspectives from a variety of people who are differently, and differentially, empowered.... These points are made with an extraordinary richness of ethnographic detail." Sara Dickey

"With the publication of books of this quality the anthropological turn to practice theory announced in 1968 by Sherry Ortner comes to maturity. Intelligent, clear, humane and often gripping, this book will be of interest to readers who care about place and politics in the United States as well as those interested in...

In Goth's Dark Empire cultural historian Carol Siegel provides a fascinating look at Goth, a subculture among Western youth. It came to prominence with punk performers such as Marilyn Manson and was made infamous when it was linked (erroneously) to the Columbine High School murders. While the fortunes of Goth culture form a portion of this book's story, Carol Siegel is more interested in pursuing Goth as a means of resisting regimes of sexual normalcy, especially in its celebration of sadomasochism (S/M). The world of Goth can appear wide-ranging: from films such as Edward Scissorhands and...

" S]ure to interest a number of different audiences, from language and music scholars to specialists on North Africa.... a superb book, clearly written, analytically incisive, about very important issues that have not been described elsewhere." -John Bowen, Washington University

In this nuanced study of the performance of cultural identity, Jane E. Goodman travels from contemporary Kabyle Berber communities in Algeria and France to the colonial archives, identifying the products, performances, and media through which Berber identity has developed. In the 1990s, with a major Islamist...

During the long dry season, Tupuri men and women in northern Cameroon gather in gurna camps outside their villages to learn the songs that will be performed at widely attended celebrations to honor the year's dead. The gurna provides a space for them to join together in solidarity to care for their cattle, fatten their bodies, and share local stories. But why does the gurna remain meaningful in the modern nation-state of Cameroon? In Journey of Song, Clare A. Ignatowski explores the vitality of gurna ritual in the context of village life and urban neighborhoods. She shows how Tupuri songs...

In a small village beside a reed-lined lake in the Russian north, a cluster of farmers has lived for centuries-in the time of tsars and feudal landlords; Bolsheviks and civil wars; collectivization and socialism; perestroika and open markets. Solovyovo is about the place and power of social memory. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork in that single village, it shows how villagers configure, transmit, and enact social memory through narrative genres, religious practice, social organization, commemoration, and the symbolism of space. Margaret Paxson relates present-day beliefs,...

In southeast Africa, the power to heal is often associated with crossing borders, whether literal or metaphorical. This wide-ranging volume reveals that healers, whose power depends on the ability to broker therapeutic resources, also contribute to the construction of the borders they transgress. While addressing diverse healing practices such as herbalism, razor-blade vaccination, spirit possession, prophetic healing, missionary health clinics, and traumatic storytelling, the nine lively and provocative essays in Borders and Healers explore the creativity and resilience of the region's...

" I]t is extremely salubrious to see the ways Islam works in the lives of ordinary people who are not politicized in their religious lives.... No other book on South Asia has material like this." --Ann Grodzins Gold

In Amma's Healing Room is a compelling study of the life and thought of a female Muslim spiritual healer in Hyderabad, South India. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger describes Amma's practice as a form of vernacular Islam arising in a particular locality, one in which the boundaries between Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity are fluid. In the "healing room," Amma meets a diverse...

Kosher pork--an oxymoron? Anna Shternshis's fascinating study traces the creation of a Soviet Jewish identity that disassociated Jewishness from Judaism. The cultural transformation of Soviet Jews between 1917 and 1941 was one of the most ambitious experiments in social engineering of the past century. During this period, Russian Jews went from relative isolation to being highly integrated into the new Soviet culture and society, while retaining a strong ethnic and cultural identity. This identity took shape during the 1920s and 1930s, when the government attempted to create a new Jewish...

" I]ntersects with very active areas of research in history and anthropology, and links these domains of inquiry spanning Europe and North Africa in a creative and innovative fashion." --Douglas Holmes, Binghamton University

Maltese settlers in colonial Algeria had never lived in France, but as French citizens were abruptly "repatriated" there after Algerian independence in 1962. In France today, these pieds-noirs are often associated with "Mediterranean" qualities, the persisting tensions surrounding the French-Algerian War, and far-right, anti-immigrant politics. Through their...

Ethnic violence is a widespread concern, but we know very little about the micro-mechanics of coexistence in the neighborhoods around the world where inter-group peace is maintained amidst civic strife. In this ethnographic study of a multi-ethnic, middle-class high-rise apartment building in Karachi, Pakistan, Laura A. Ring argues that peace is the product of a relentless daily labor, much of it carried out in the zenana, or women's space. Everyday rhythms of life in the building are shaped by gender, ethnic and rural/urban tensions, national culture, and competing interpretations of...

For its citizens, contemporary Central Asia is a land of great promise and peril. While the end of Soviet rule has opened new opportunities for social mobility and cultural expression, political and economic dynamics have also imposed severe hardships. In this lively volume, contributors from a variety of disciplines examine how ordinary Central Asians lead their lives and navigate shifting historical and political trends. Provocative stories of Turkmen nomads, Afghan villagers, Kazakh scientists, Kyrgyz border guards, a Tajik strongman, guardians of religious shrines in Uzbekistan, and...

Why is there so much violence in the developing countries? What does it have to do with economic development? What does it have to do with globalization? Christopher Cramer takes a hard look at war, recent uprisings, insurgencies, and violence in Angola, Brazil, and Iraq. Cramer explains the financing of wars and compares post-conflict reconstruction efforts. He takes special issue with common perspectives on violence, which deny that war has any positive effects and believe that peace can be easily achieved through democratization and free trade. Cramer identifies common fallacies and...

In this innovative and thought-provoking study, Kira Kosnick explores the landscape of Turkish-language broadcasting in Berlin. From 24-hour radio broadcasting in Turkish to programming on Germany's national public broadcasting and local public access channels, Germany's largest immigrant minority has made its presence felt in German media. Satellite dishes have appeared in migrant neighborhoods all over the city, giving viewers access to Kurdish channels and broadcasts from Turkey. Kosnick draws on interviews with producers, her own participation in production work, and analysis of...

This compelling ethnographic study describes how two groups of Romanian industrial workers have fared since the end of socialism. Once labor's elite, the celebrated coal miners of the Jiu Valley and the chemical workers of the Fagaras region had many social privileges and often derived genuine satisfaction from their work. Today, they are a rarely noted casualty of postsocialist transformations. Fear, distance, and alienation are the physical manifestations of stress experienced due to their precarious job status, declining health, and loss of a social safety net. Kideckel traces these...

This engaging book, based on Atreyee Sen's immersion into the low-income, working-class slums of Bombay, tells the story of the women and children of the Shiv Sena, one of the most radical and violent of the Hindu nationalist parties that dominated Indian politics throughout the 90s and into the present. The Sena women's front has been instrumental in creating and sustaining communal violence, directed primarily against their Muslim neighbors. The author presents the Sena women's own rationale for organizing themselves along paramilitary lines, as poor women and children have used violence...

In this moving ethnographic portrait of Hindu renouncers--sadhus or ascetics--in northern India and Nepal, Sondra L. Hausner considers a paradox that shapes their lives: while ostensibly defined by their solitary spiritual practice, the stripping away of social commitments, and their break with family and community, renouncers in fact regularly interact with "householder" society. They form a distinctive, alternative community with its own internal structure, but one that is not located in any single place. Highly mobile and dispersed across the subcontinent, its members are regularly...

Griots, a uniquely African profession, fulfill a variety of roles as genealogists, historians, spokespersons, diplomats, musicians, teachers, praise singers, and advisors. Telling the story of these remarkable wordsmiths and performers, Thomas A. Hale addresses the nature of their verbal and musical art, the role of female griots, or griottes, how griots and griottes fit into their societies, and what their future might be in Africa and the rest of the world.