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Written by leading scholars in the field, this comprehensive and readable resource gives anthropology students a unique guide to the ideas, arguments and history of the discipline. The fully revised and expanded second edition reflects major changes in anthropology in the past decade. Alan Barnard is Professor of the Anthropology of Southern Africa at the University of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Jonathan Spencer is Professor of the Anthropology of South Asia at the University of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. How to Use this Book. List of Entries. List of Contributors. Analytical Table of Contents. Contributions by author. Entries A-Z. Biographical Appendix. Glossary. Name Index. People and Places Index. Subject Index. \"The best one-volume reference source on social and cultural anthropology ... Highly recommended.\" – Choice \"This is an inspired volume. If anyone doubts that anthropology is in a new phase, they should look at the manner in which Second Edition enlarges on the First. A formidable task this, here executed with wisdom, acumen and brilliant collaboration. But what is really inspiring is the way contributors have been teamed up with topics. Some classic pairings, but also interesting and surprising ones. And the quality of the entries makes this not just a book of reference but, almost wherever one lands, an exceedingly good read in its own right.\" - Marilyn Strathern, Emeritus Professor, Cambridge University \"This new edition is a magisterial work. Written by an erudite set of authors and edited with a sure hand, it is much more than a compendium of accumulated knowledge, although it is certainly that as well. It also maps the discipline as practiced today, pointing out its controversies and challenges, its critical edges, its areas of unsettlement. It is an indispensable source for anyone with an interest in things anthropological.\" - John and Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago \" Libraries that found the first edition useful should note that this, while it still contains much of what was in the previous version, has been very substantially expanded, updated and rewritten, so they will probably find it worth upgrading.\" – Reference Reviews \"...a useful addition to the toolkit that practitioners and students of the discipline already have for their research.\" \"...a good resource with many excellent contributions. It is a useful tool for students and scholars starting their research on new topics or wanting to know more about their discipline, its fields of research and different scholarly traditions that distinguish it.\" - Michele Filippo Fontefrancesco, Durham University

\"Created for map lovers by map lovers, this rich book explores the intriguing stories behind maps across history and illuminates how the art of cartography thrives today. In this visually stunning book, award-winning journalists Betsy Mason and Greg Miller--authors of the National Geographic cartography blog \"All Over the Map\"--explore the intriguing stories behind maps from a wide variety of cultures, civilizations, and time periods. Based on interviews with scores of leading cartographers, curators, historians, and scholars, this is a remarkable selection of fascinating and unusual maps. This diverse compendium includes ancient maps of dragon-filled seas, elaborate graphics picturing unseen concepts and forces from inside Earth to outer space, devious maps created by spies, and maps from pop culture such as the schematics to the Death Star and a map of Westeros from Game of Thrones. If your brain craves maps--and Mason and Miller would say it does, whether you know it or not--this eye-opening visual feast will inspire and delight\"-- Provided by publisher.

How religion, gender, and urban sociality are expressed in and mediated via television drama in Kinshasa is the focus of this ethnographic study. Influenced by Nigerian films and intimately related to the emergence of a charismatic Christian scene, these teleserials integrate melodrama, conversion narratives, Christian songs, sermons, testimonies, and deliverance rituals to produce commentaries on what it means to be an inhabitant of Kinshasa.

\"This book provides a comprehensive examination of the human face, providing fascinating information from biological, cultural, and social perspectives\"-- Provided by publisher.

The discipline of anthropology is, at its best, characterized by turbulence, self-examination, and inventiveness. In recent decades, new thinking and practice within the field has certainly reflected this pattern, as shown for example by numerous fruitful ventures into the \"politics and poetics\" of anthropology. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to the simple insight that anthropology is composed of claims, whether tacit or explicit, about anthropos and about logos--and the myriad ways in which these two Greek nouns have been, might be, and should be, connected.Anthropos Todayrepresents a pathbreaking effort to fill this gap. Paul Rabinow brings together years of distinguished work in this magisterial volume that seeks to reinvigorate the human sciences. Specifically, he assembles a set of conceptual tools--\"modern equipment\"--to assess how intellectual work is currently conducted and how it might change. Anthropos Todaycrystallizes Rabinow's previous ethnographic inquiries into the production of truth about life in the world of biotechnology and genome mapping (and his invention of new ways of practicing this pursuit), and his findings on how new practices of life, labor, and language have emerged and been institutionalized. Here, Rabinow steps back from empirical research in order to reflect on the conceptual and ethical resources available today to conduct such inquiries. Drawing richly on Foucault and many other thinkers including Weber and Dewey, Rabinow concludes that a \"contingent practice\" must be developed that focuses on \"events of problematization.\" Brilliantly synthesizing insights from American, French, and German traditions, he offers a lucid, deeply learned, original discussion of how one might best think about anthropos today.

Within a mere decade, hospital pharmacies throughout the Tibetan areas of the People's Republic of China have been converted into pharmaceutical companies. Confronted with the logic of capital and profit, these companies now produce commodities for a nationwide market. While these developments are depicted as a big success in China, they have also been met with harsh criticism in Tibet. At stake is a fundamental (re-)manufacturing of Tibetan medicine as a system of knowledge and practice. Being important both to the agenda of the Party State's policies on Tibet and to Tibetan self-understanding, the Tibetan medicine industry has become an arena in which different visions of Tibet's future clash.

From the 1990s onwards the 'ethnographic turn in contemporary art' has generated intense dialogues between anthropologists, artists and curators. While ethnography has been both generously and problematically re-appropriated by the art world, curation has seldom caught the conceptual attention of anthropologists. Based on two years of participant-observation in Mexico City, Tarek Elhaik addresses this lacuna by examining the concept-work of curatorial platforms and media artists. Taking his cue from ongoing critiques of Mexicanist aesthetics, and what Roger Bartra calls 'the post-Mexican condition', Elhaik conceptualises curation less as an exhibition-oriented practice within a national culture, than as a figure of care and an image of thought animating a complex assemblage of inter-medial practices, from experimental cinema and installations to curatorial collaborations. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Paul Rabinow, the book introduces the concept of the 'Incurable-Image,' an antidote to our curatorial malaise and the ethical substance for a post-social anthropology of images.

The highland region of the republic of Georgia, one of the former Soviet Socialist Republics, has long been legendary for its beauty. It is often assumed that the state has only made partial inroads into this region, and is mostly perceived as alien. Taking a fresh look at the Georgian highlands allows the author to consider perennial questions of citizenship, belonging, and mobility in a context that has otherwise been known only for its folkloric dimensions. Scrutinizing forms of identification with the state at its margins, as well as local encounters with the erratic Soviet and post-Soviet state, the author argues that citizenship is both a sought-after means of entitlement and a way of guarding against the state. This book not only challenges theories in the study of citizenship but also the axioms of integration in Western social sciences in general.

Integrating theoretical perspectives with carefully grounded ethnographic analyses of everyday interaction and experience,Living Translationexamines the worlds of international translators as well as U.S. teachers and students of Chinese medicine, focusing on the transformations that occur as participants engage in a \"search for resonance\" with foreign terms and concepts. Based on a close examination of heated international debates as well as specific texts, classroom discussions, and interviews with publishers, authors, teachers, and students, Sonya Pritzker demonstrates the \"living translation\" of Chinese medicine as a process unfolding through interaction, inscription, embodied experience, and clinical practice. By documenting the stream of conversations that together constitute this process, the book thus traces the translation of Chinese medicine from text to practice with an eye towards the social, political, historical, moral, and even personal dimensions involved in the transnational production of knowledge about health, illness, and the body.