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This book is an ethnographic and historical study of the main Albania-Greece highway. But more than an ethnography on the road, it is an anthropology of the road. Highways are part of an explicit cultural-material nexus that includes houses, urban architecture and vehicles. Complex socio-political phenomena such as EU border security, nationalist politics, post-Cold War capitalism and financial crises all leave their mark in the concrete. This book explores anew classical anthropological and sociological categories of analysis in direct reference to infrastructure, providing unique insights into the political and cultural processes that took place across Europe after the Cold War. More specifically, it sheds light on political and economic relationships in the Balkans during the socialist post-Cold War period, focusing especially on Albania, one of the most under-researched countries in the region.

The subject of race and identity is a burning issue which continues to occupy the attention not only of South Africans but also the wider residents of the continent of Africa and those who are Africans in the Diaspora. The outburst of xenophobic attacks against foreigners mostly of Black African origins in some communities of Kwa-Zulu Natal and areas of Johannesburg during 2008 and 2015 has raised questions about the social cohesion of South African society linked to unresolved structural identity issues bequeathed by the nation’s past colonial and apartheid legacy. This publication argues that there is an embedded schizophrenic identity crisis within the society that requires scholarly interrogation. The chapters assemble scholarly voices from different ethnic groups that examine the central research question of this study: Who is an African? Within the wider Southern African context, identity and ethnicity politics are framing nationalist economic policies and are impacting on social cohesion within many countries. Writing from different social and racial locations the authors have critically engaged with the central question and offer some important insights that can serve as a resource for all nations grappling with issues of race, ethnicity, identity constructed politics, and social cohesion.

\"How do deaf people in different societies perceive and conceive the world around them? Drawing on three years of anthropological fieldwork in Nepali deaf communities, Being and Hearing shows how questions of cultural difference are profoundly shaped by local habits of perception. Beginning with the premise that philosophy and cultural intuition are separated only by genre and pedigree, Peter Graif argues that Nepali deaf communities—in their social sensibilities, political projects, and aesthetics of expression—present innovative answers to the very old question of what it means to be different. From pranks and protests, to diverse acts of love and resistance, to renewed distinctions between material and immaterial, deaf communities in Nepal have crafted ways to foreground the habits of perception that shape both their own experiences and how they are experienced by the hearing people around them.

Sitting next to the Great Barrier Reef, marinated in coal and gas, the industrial boomtown of Gladstone, Australia embodies many of the contradictions of the 'overheated' world: prosperous yet polluted; growing and developing yet always on the precipice of uncertainty. Capturing Gladstone at the peak of its accelerated growth in 2013-14, Thomas Hylland Eriksen dissects the boomtown phenomenon in all its profound ambivalence. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores the tensions and resentments surrounding migrant workers, and examines local identity, family life, infrastructure and local services. Writ large in Boomtown are the clashes of scale at the heart of the town's contradictions - where the logic of big industry and the state compete with that of the individual, local communities and ecology, revealing the current crisis of political legitimacy across the world.

Bronislaw Malinowski's path-breaking research in the Trobriand Islands shaped much of modern anthropology's disciplinary paradigm.Yet many conundrums remain.For example, Malinowski asserted that  baloma  spirits of the dead were responsible for procreation but had limited influence on their living descendants in magic and other matters, claims.

This concise introduction to social and cultural anthropology has become a modern classic, revealing the rich global variation in social life and culture. The text provides a clear overview of anthropology, focusing on central topics such as kinship, ethnicity, ritual and political systems, offering a wealth of examples that demonstrate the enormous scope of anthropology and the importance of a comparative perspective. Unlike other texts on the subject, Small Places, Large Issues incorporates the anthropology of complex modern societies. Using reviews of key monographs to illustrate his argument, Eriksen's lucid and accessible text remains an established introductory text in anthropology. This new, fourth edition is updated throughout and increases the emphasis on the interdependence of human worlds. There is a new discussion of the new influence cultural studies and natural science on anthropology. Effortless bridging the perceived gap between \"classic\" and \"contemporary\" anthropology, Small Places, Large Issues is as essential to anthropology undergraduates as ever.