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"SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY"
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Yearnings in the Meantime
Shortly after the book's protagonists moved into their apartment complex in Sarajevo, they, like many others, were overcome by the 1992-1995 war and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia More than a decade later, in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, they felt they were collectively stuck in a time warp where nothing seemed to be as it should be. Starting from everyday concerns, this book paints a compassionate yet critical portrait of people's sense that they were in limbo, trapped in a seemingly endless \"Meantime.\" Ethnographically investigating yearnings for \"normal lives\" in the European semi-periphery, it proposes fresh analytical tools to explore how the time and place in which we are caught shape our hopes and fears.
eBook
Life : a critical user's manual
\"How can we think of life in its dual expression, matter and experience, the living and the lived? Philosophers and, more recently, social scientists have offered multiple answers to this question, often privileging one expression or the other; the biological or the biographical. But is it possible to conceive of them together and thus reconcile naturalist and humanist approaches? Using research conducted on three continents and drawing on the ideas of Wittgenstein, Benjamin and Foucault, Didier Fassin attempts to do so by developing three concepts: forms of life, ethics of life and politics of life. In the conditions of refugees and asylum-seekers, through humanitarian gestures and sacrifices for a cause, in light of mortality statistics and death benefits, and via a genealogical and ethnographical inquiry, the moral economy of life reveals troubling tensions in the way contemporary societies treat human beings. Once the pieces of this anthropological composition are assembled, like in Georges Perec's jigsaw puzzle, an image appears: that of unequal lives. Emerging from the prestigious Adorno Lectures delivered by Fassin in 2016, this profound investigation of life in contemporary societies, enriched by ethnographic fieldwork and written by one of the most distinguished anthropologists today, will be of great interest to readers across the humanities and social sciences\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The death of the big men and the rise of the big shots
In 1994, the Pacific island village of Matupit was partially destroyed by a volcanic eruption. This study focuses on the subsequent reconstruction and contests over the morality of exchanges that are generative of new forms of social stratification. Such new dynamics of stratification are central to contemporary processes of globalization in the Pacific, and more widely. Through detailed ethnography of the transactions that a displaced people entered into in seeking to rebuild their lives, this book analyses how people re-make sociality in an era of post-colonial neoliberalism without taking either the transformative power of globalization or the resilience of indigenous culture as its starting point. It also contributes to the understanding of the problems of post-disaster reconstruction and development projects.
eBook
Tracking anthropological engagements
\"Histories of Anthropology Annual series presents diverse perspectives on the discipline's history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology. Volume 12, Tracking Anthropological Engagements, examines the work and influence of Hans Sidonius Becker, Franz Boas, Sigmund Freud, Margaret Mead, Karl Popper, and Anthony F.C. Wallace, as well as anthropological perspectives on the 1964 Project Camelot, Latin American cultures at the 1892 Madrid International Expositions, sixteenth-century cosmography and topography in Amazonia, the launch of the Great War Centenary Association website, and community-produced wartime narratives in Ontario, Canada.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Black Atlantic Religion
Black Atlantic Religion illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. This book contests both the recent conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations. In fact, African culture in the Americas has most flourished among the urban and the prosperous, who, through travel, commerce, and literacy, were well exposed to other cultures. Their embrace of African religion is less a \"survival,\" or inert residue of the African past, than a strategic choice in their circum-Atlantic, multicultural world.
eBook
Social and cultural anthropology: the key concepts
\"Social and Cultural Anthropology: the Key Concepts is an easy to use A-Z guide to the central concepts that students are likely to encounter in this field.Now fully updated, this third edition includes entries on:Material CultureEnvironmentHuman RightsHybridityAlterityCosmopolitanismEthnographyApplied AnthropologyGenderCyberneticsWith full cross-referencing and revised further reading to point students towards the latest writings in Social and Cultural Anthropology, this is a superb reference resource for anyone studying or teaching in this area. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Pregnancy in Practice
Babies are not simply born-they are made through cultural and social practices. Based on rich empirical work, this book examines the everyday experiences that mark pregnancy in the US today, such as reading pregnancy advice books, showing ultrasound \"baby pictures\" to friends and co-workers, and decorating the nursery in anticipation of the new arrival. These ordinary practices of pregnancy, the author argues, are significant and revealing creative activities that produce babies. They are the activities through which babies are made important and meaningful in the lives of the women and men awaiting the child's birth. This book brings into focus a topic that has been overlooked in the scholarship on reproduction and will be of interest to professionals and expectant parents alike.
eBook
Making Virtual Worlds
The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online.
Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created.
Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? \"Lindens\"-as the Linden Lab employees call themselves-found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions.
InMaking Virtual Worlds, Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.
eBook