Browse
By Area: Asia-Pacific
Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General)
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Contrary to persistent depictions of an ethnically and economically homogeneous Japan, “ghetto” or “gangsta” J-hop music gives voice to the suffering, deprivation, and social exclusion experienced by many modern Japanese. 24 Bars to Kill gives a fascinating ethnographic account of this music as well as the subculture around it.
Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology
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Exploring adoption in the Pacific, this book goes beyond the commonplace structural-functional analysis of adoption as a positive “transaction in parenthood.” It examines the effects it has on adoptees inner sense of self, their conflicted emotional lives, and familial relationships that are affected by a personal sense of rejection and not belonging.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
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Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General) History (General)
Since the arrival of the first Tibetans in exile in 1959, a vast and continuous wave of international support has permitted these refugees to survive and even to flourish in temporary residences. This book shows how Tibetan refugees continue to attract resources, while other refugee populations are largely forgotten.
Subject: Refugee and Migration Studies
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An exacting assessment of the bounty policies that facilitated the extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger and the Newfoundland Wolf, Animal Genocide and its Aftermath re-evaluates the legal, political, and social definition of animal killing, proposing it constitutes a form of genocide that requires a historical and cultural reckoning.
Subject: Environmental Studies (General) Cultural Studies (General)
Subject: Applied Anthropology
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Gender Studies and Sexuality
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Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
Set in a remote district of villagers and nomadic pastoralists in the northernmost part of Mongolia, this ethnography reveals an everyday universe where uncertain relations are as much internally cultivated in indigenous Mongolian perceptions of social relatedness, as it is externally confronted in postsocialist surroundings of unemployment and diminished social security.
Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General)
Artifak investigates the meaning and value of (art) objects as commodities in Vanuatu, in differing states of transit and transition: in the local place, on the market, and in the museum. It provides an ethnographic account of commoditization in the context of revitalization of culture and the arts in Vanuatu.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Museum Studies
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Comparing first-person ethnographic accounts of young people living, working, and creating relationships in cities across Asia, this volume explores their contemporary lives, pressures, ideals, and aspirations.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies
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Farmers, Indigenous organisations, government and private-sector intermediaries from remote Northern Australia often negotiate with private finance capital to gain funds for agricultural development.This book demonstrates that while financialisation is a useful signifier of patterns of global change, it is assembled by a diverse range of often contradictory work.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Sustainable Development Goals
Focusing on contemporary ideas about how aged care is provided, this book poses the question: How can people who are aged and frail live out the final phase of their lives with dignity? In seeking answers, the author examines what it means to be ‘at home’ in residential care in a novel and compassionate way.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
This book is a multi-sited ethnography of the migration of a minority of the aboriginal Warlpiri away from their traditional homeland to distant towns and cities. It follows a number of Warlpiri matriarchs into their new locations, exploring how they sustain their independent lives and examining their changing relationship with the traditional culture they represent.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
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Reconsidering issues of representation in the insular Pacific, this volume explores authenticity and authorship in practice as “traveling concepts” that spawn cross-fertilization along the cultural and historical routes they traverse. The chapters are contextualized by a strongly theorized introduction that considers how notions of authenticity and authorship have developed in Western societies too.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
Belonging can be understood by considering the intersections of movement, place-making and cultural identifications. The contributions present ethnographic case studies of such intersections in Oceania. Investigated are ongoing formations of place, self and community in connection with travelling, as well as with internal and international migration.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Mobility Studies Cultural Studies (General)
This collection of essays examines German-language cultural production pertaining to modern China and Japan, and explicitly challenges orientalist notions by proposing a conception of East and West not as opposites, but as complementary elements of global culture, thereby urging a move beyond national paradigms in cultural studies. Essays focus on the mid-century German-Japanese alliance, Chinese-German Leftist collaborations, global capitalism, travel, identity, and cultural hybridity. The authors include historians and scholars of film and literature, and employ a wide array of approaches from postcolonial, globalization, media, and gender studies. The collection sheds new light on a complex and ambivalentset of international relationships, while also testifying to the potential of Asian German Studies.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present
This volume explores emerging cultural meanings and social responses to population aging in contemporary East Asian societies. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, policy, archival, and media data, the authors trace both common patterns and diverging trends across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Korea.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
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Responding to recent scholarship, this book examines animal domestication and offers a Soiot approach to animals and landscapes, which transcends the wild-tame dichotomy. It is an ethnography intended to help us reinvent our relations with the earth in unpredictable times.
Subject: Environmental Studies (General)
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Biomedical Entanglements is an ethnographic study of the Giri people of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the indigenous population’s interaction with modern medicine. The study bridges medical anthropology and global health, exploring how the ‘biomedical’ is imbued with social meaning and how biomedicine affects Giri ways of life.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology
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Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
The different ways of understanding borders, through culture, politics, or even religion, is transforming and requires multi-disciplinary approaches the complexity of interactions and tensions that may arise. Borders in East and West focuses on the relationships between Europe and East Asia through comparative case studies to challenge discourses and build new perspectives.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present History: 18th/19th Century Colonial History
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Subject: Development Studies
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Capturing Quicksilver considers the use, promotion, and legislation of Chinese medicine in Singapore in relation to government policies favoring international investment, urban redevelopment, healthcare regulation, “multiracial” nationalism, and the management of history and heritage. Theoretically and methodologically developed within medical anthropology, it explores embodied experience and individual and group creativity vis-à-vis state agendas.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology (General)
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This book analyzes, within the realms of national literature and film, recent Australian and Canadian attempts to reconcile with Indigenous populations in the wake of forced child removal. As Hanna Teichler demonstrates, their systematic emphasis on the subjectivity of the victim is carnivalesque, temporarily overturning discursive hierarchies.
Subjects: Memory Studies Literary Studies Film and Television Studies
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Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
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Academic appointments can bring forth unexpected and unforeseen contests and tensions, cause humiliation and embarrassment for unsuccessful applicants and reveal unexpected allies and enemies. Chicanery deals with how the founding Chairs at Sydney, the Australian National University, Auckland and Western Australia dealt with this process.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) History: 20th Century to Present Theory and Methodology
An illuminating ethnographic study of Balinese dance traditions, Children Dancing in Bali examines how children navigate the nexus of power, practice, and performance through the medium of Balinese culture, in order to negotiate fluctuations in their identity and society.
Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
This book illustrates how indigenous Christians perceive social change and how their historical perceptions inform the creation of their own Christianity in an increasingly modernised French Polynesian society.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Colonial History Sociology
Explores how ‘care’, defined as ‘work done on behalf of others’, allows villagers to forge belonging and stake claims over the locality, its values, and each other, in defiance of the social exclusion projected by China’s politics of place and localization of class.
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)
Subject: Anthropology (General)
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Brings together different generations of Timor-Leste scholars into dialogue to reconsider a diversity of such critical topics as the incorporation of strangers, the meanings of colonial documents, the value of sacred heirlooms, or the remembering (and forgetting) of colonial violence.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Sociology
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Subjects: Urban Studies Cultural Studies (General)
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Analyzing perceived and performed cultural change by members of the Bena Bena language group in Papua New Guinea, Knapp offers a new understanding by conjoining traditional anthropological models as well as recent pursuits such as collaborative, reflexive and reverse anthropology.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion
The idea of culture has become a creative framework in Marshall Islanders’ quest to realise a community based on communality, meaningful work, and self-reliance. Culturing Money analyses what sort of conceptual and practical work that the dialectics of culture and economy can do for Marshall Islanders in their quest for a meaningful life where self-reliance is the ultimate goal.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General) Development Studies
Cutting and Connecting rethinks anthropology’s comparative endeavor by calling in a conceptual debt that theoretical innovations from Melanesian anthropology owe to network analysis originally developed in African contexts. The contributors adopt and employ concepts from recent anthropological studies of Melanesia to analyze contemporary life on the African continent.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
Exploring the notion of masculinity among the Bugkalot, Cutting Cosmos is not only an experimental, anthropological study of the paradoxes around which Bugkalot society revolves, but also a reflection on anthropological theory and writing.
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology
Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
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Continuous government reforms to make universities ‘world class’, entrepreneurial and drivers of the knowledge economy, are transforming the traditional mission and meaning of the public university and its ability to act as ‘critic and conscience’ of society. This collection explores the new landscapes of higher education emerging across Europe and Australasia.
Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)
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Dreams Made Small offers an in-depth, ethnographic look at journeys of education among young Papuans under Indonesian rule, ultimately revealing how dreams of transformation, equality, and belonging are shaped and reshaped in the face of multiple constraints.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Educational Studies Cultural Studies (General)
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Dreams, Gender, and Artisanal Mining in Papua New Guinea uses dreams to explore the value of gold in a multigenerational community of New Guinean migrant miners. It broadens research on Melanesian mining ontologies and women’s role in mining. It explores how women creatively use dreams to challenge hegemonic masculine discourses that exclude them from accessing mineral wealth.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology
This ethnography details changing Ewenki ways of life brought China’s recent ecological migration policies, which aim to preserve and restore the badly damaged ecologies of western China. This ethnography examines these policies and their effects on Aoluguya Ewenki hunters, who have been relocated.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
Paperback available
Subjects: Educational Studies History (General) Sociology
An ethnography of elite polygamy in urban Malaysia, this volume explores the impact this growing practice has on Malay gender relations, examining the varied and often-conflicted polygamy narratives of elite Malay women, who manage their lives and loves under the “threat” of husbands able to marry another woman without their knowledge or consent.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology
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This volume is dedicated to the New Zealander ethnographer Elsdon Best (1856-1931) who is a key figure in the history of anthropology due to his involuntary triggering of a fundamental and long-lasting anthropological debate on the Māori concept of hau.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
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Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)
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As critical voices question the quality, authenticity, and value of people, goods, and words in post-Mao China, accusations of emptiness render things open to new investments of meaning, substance, and value. Exploring the production of lack and desire through fine-grained ethnography, this volume examines how diagnoses of emptiness operate in a range of very different domains in contemporary China.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Enacted Relations explores the Yolngu relational ontology and epistemology in the context of everyday practices, ritual ceremonies, bicultural education, vernacular Christianity and the production of popular music.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
On March 11, 2011, a tsunami warning was issued for Tonga in Polynesia. On the low and small island of Kotu, people were unperturbed in the face of pending catastrophe. The book is an ethnography of the relationship between people and their environment based on fieldwork over three decades.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies
Paperback available
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Writing of Ranongga Island, the author tracks engagements with foreigners across many realms of life, describing startling reversals in which strangers become attached to local places, even as kinspeople are estranged. Against stereotypes of rural insularity, she argues that a distinctive cosmopolitan openness to others is evident in the rural Solomons in times of war and peace.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies
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In 1908 Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers brought about a turning point in modern anthropology. The two pioneers’ fieldwork in Island Melanesia brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. Contributors to this volume—who have all carried out fieldwork in Melanesian locations—situate the scholars’ efforts in the contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History
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Ethnography in the Raw describes the author’s encounters with a Philippine family into which he has married, his wife’s friends and acquaintances, and their lives in a remote rural village in the rice basin of Luzon, about 130 miles north east of Manila. It is both anthropological fieldwork ‘in the raw,’ and an incisive analysis of contemporary Philippine society and culture.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
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The idea of an informal economy emerged from, and is a critique of, the ideology of ‘economic development’. It originated from Keith Hart’s recognition of informal economic activity in 1960s Ghana. In the context of four colonialisms – German, British, Australian and Dutch – this book recounts Hart’s effort in 1972 to introduce the informal ‘sector’ into development planning in Papua New Guinea.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Colonial History
Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)
Explorations and Entanglements reconstructs the German elements in the overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits of the “Pacific Worlds.” It concentrates on the pre-1914 period and encompasses scientific, cultural, religious and commercial exchanges. It opens a gate to a fascinating and hitherto much neglected arena of transnational encounters.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Colonial History
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As the practice of divination, long stigmatized as an immoral superstition, enjoys a revival in contemporary China, Fate Calculation Experts explores the various ways in which diviners attempt to achieve legitimation in a society which identifies strongly with modernity, science, and rationality.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision’. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on Ahamb between 2010 and 2017, this book investigates how upheavals like the Ahamb revival can emerge to address and sometimes resolve social problems.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
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Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)
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In Okinawa, ecotourism promises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride. Footprints in Paradise explores how sense of place in Okinawa is transformed as language, landscapes, and wildlife are reconstituted as treasured and vulnerable resources.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
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Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
Using interviews with scholars from Tunisia and Japan, this book examines the manner in which Foucault experienced and explained his encounters with non-Western cultures, unraveling the anthropological implications of his unwavering commitment to cultural difference. It also traces the philosophical-theoretical sources of his conception of difference, and uncovers the contradictions of his dismissal of empirical anthropology to know human beings.
Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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Subject: Anthropology (General)
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This book explores how more than 100 communities who speak nearly fifty languages from five unrelated language phyla interact by developing persistent relations known as “hereditary friendship.” These relations provide everyone along the coast with fish, sago, and earthenware pots as well as many other useful commodities that resulted in peace and harmony.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sociology
Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General)
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Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies
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Subjects: Genocide History Colonial History
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Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
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Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, and in recognition of the increasingly non-territorial nature of religion in the contemporary world, Going to Pentecost offers an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements, and Pentecostalism in particular.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Paperback available
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Heritage Studies
This volume presents recent and original studies of life experiences outside the institutional settings of childcare and education, of those growing up in contemporary Central Australia or with strong links to the region.
Subject: Anthropology (General)
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Tanu offers the first ethnographic study of young people who experience high levels of international mobility while growing up, either moving across national borders or by attending international schools with trans-national student bodies.
Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Educational Studies
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Gulag Memories explores the impact of the Gulag on collective memory as it applies to the language of commemoration in Russia, focusing on four regions particularly affected by the Gulag: Solovetsky Islands, the Komi Republic, the Perm region, and Kolyma.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies
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This volume is unique in that it is dedicated to approaching the analysis of heritage through the concepts of social movements. Adapting the latest developments in the field of social movements, the chapters examine the formation, use and contestation of heritage by various official, non-official and activist players and the spaces where such ongoing negotiations and contestation take place.
Subjects: Heritage Studies Museum Studies Anthropology (General)
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Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology
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Explores how design and innovation shape people’s lives in the Pacific. Focusing on plant materials from the region, it reveals ways in which a variety of people – from craftswomen and scientists to architects and politicians – work with materials to transform worlds.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
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Subjects: Museum Studies Theory and Methodology Colonial History Heritage Studies
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Focusing on the small island of Paama, Vanuatu, and the capital, Port Vila, this book presents a rare and recent study of the ongoing significance of urbanization and internal migration in the Global South.
Subjects: Mobility Studies Refugee and Migration Studies
After the end of the Second World War, major federally funded industries in Australia depended on the employment of large numbers of refugees displaced by the war. This book aims to bring to the foreground post-war industry and immigration to comprehensively document a uniquely Australian shaping of the built environment.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
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Drawing on twenty years of research, this book examines the historical perspective of a Pacific people who saw “globalization” come and go. It asks the question: What does it mean to claim that global connections are in the past rather than the present or the future?
Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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Nearly half the people born on the remote Mbuke Islands become teachers, businessmen, or bureaucrats in urban centers, while those who stay at home ask migrant relatives “What about me?” This detailed ethnography sheds light on remittance motivations and documents how terms like “community” can be useful in places otherwise permeated by kinship.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Sociology
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In this book, Veth develops a model of settlement and subsistence in the Western Desert of Australia, drawing on his own archaeological investigations, as well as ethnographic and environmental data. Building on this model, he concludes with a plausible reconstruction of the colonization of the harsh, arid interior of this continent.
Subject: Archaeology
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Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present
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Subjects: Travel and Tourism Sociology
Paperback available
Subject: Medical Anthropology
Paperback available
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology Sociology
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Donatas Brandišauskas probes the strategies that Orochen reindeer herders of southeastern Siberia have developed to navigate dramatic environmental and social changes that have unfolded in post-Soviet Siberia.
Subject: Anthropology (General)
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“Schachter has produced a powerful and moving account of Native Hawaiian elders who have now passed physically but continue to live on in spirit in the prose that she has assembled from the writings gifted to her. This work represents the best that anthropology has to offer Indigenous peoples seeking to remain Native in a decidedly anti-Native world—a document that gives voice to the truths they know and which connects generations in a lineage of discourse.” · Ty Tengan, University of Hawaii
Subjects: Anthropology (General) History: 20th Century to Present
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Whether in the form of warfare, forced migration, or social prejudice, Australia’s sense of nationhood was born from experiences of violence. Legacies of Violence probes this brutal legacy through case studies that range from the colonial frontier to modern domestic spaces, exploring empathy, isolation, and Australians’ imagined place in the world.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present History: 18th/19th Century Colonial History
Papua New Guinea’s two most powerful legal orders — customary law and state criminal law — undermine each other in criminal matters. This phenomenon, called legal dissonance, can lead to an activity being advanced by one legal order and punished by the other, leading to injustice and each legal order’s diminished ability to deter wrongdoing.
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Museum Studies History (General) Archaeology
Focusing on transformation and continuity over time in Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, among others, contributors assert that kinship is a lived and living dimension of contemporary human lives. The ethnographic case studies add to the understanding of kinship as — according to Unaisi Nabobo-Baba — “knowledge that counts.”
Subject: Anthropology (General)
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Integrating theoretical perspectives with carefully grounded ethnographic analyses of everyday interaction and experience, Living Translation examines 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.
Subject: Medical Anthropology
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General)
This collection of essays locates recent Chinese experience with development in a historical and comparative perspective. Contributors − social scientists employed by international development banks, national government agencies, and sub-contracting groups – use real-life experience to examine development policies from a practitioner’s perspective.
Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)
Subject: Theory and Methodology
Paperback available
Subject: Medical Anthropology
Contemporary public discourses about archaeology are routinely characterized by scientific and historical narratives that leave the water blank. This book weaves together voices from across the Asia Pacific region, revealing maritime archaeology as a labour of love rooted in connection, compassion and community.
Subjects: Archaeology Heritage Studies
Based on ethnographic research conducted during several years, Market Frictions examines the tensions and frictions that emerge from the interaction of global market forces, urban planning policies, and small-scale trading activities in the Vietnamese border city of Lào Cai.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Cultural Studies (General)
Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
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Based in extensive ethnographic research, Melanesian Mainstream provides a detailed representation of the roots, context, evolution, and impact of stringband music in the Melanesian Republic of Vanuatu.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Performance Studies
Subject: Anthropology (General)
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Merchant Kings offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the rapid industrialization of the Netherlands and its colonial holdings in Java during the nineteenth century. By placing colony and metropole into a single analytical frame, it offers a bracing new approach to understanding the development of modern corporations within the context of empire.
Subjects: Colonial History History: 18th/19th Century Political and Economic Anthropology
How do images circulating in Pacific cultures and exchanged between them and their many visitors transform meanings for all involved? This fascinating collection explores how through mimesis, wayfarers and locales alike borrow images from one another to expand their cultural repertoire of meanings or borrow images from their own past to validate their identities.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Paperback available
Combining theoretical discussions with shorter case studies, this book offers an anthropological exploration of the emergence in Malaysia of lifestyle bloggers. It tracks the transformation of personal blogs, which attracted readers with spontaneous, authentic accounts of everyday life, into lifestyle blogs that generate income through advertising and foreground consumerist lifestyles.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Media Studies
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Since the Colonial era, gambling has come to dominate nighttime activity in Papua New Guinea. This richly detailed ethnography intersects with theories of money, value, play, money, exchange, informal economy, materiality, social change, leadership, and the anthropology of Melanesia.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General)
Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through its set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral persons and community amid modernity, and its enormous transformations.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
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Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
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Subjects: Museum Studies Refugee and Migration Studies
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
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First published in 2007, The Nanking Atrocity remains an essential resource for understanding the massacre. This second edition includes an extensive new introduction reflecting on the historiographical developments of the last decade, making this even more relevant as we approach the 80th anniversary of the Nanking massacre.
Subjects: Genocide History History: 20th Century to Present
Paperback available
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
Norwegians in colonial Africa and Oceania had varying aspirations and adapted in different ways to changing social, political and geographical circumstances in foreign, colonial settings. This collection reveals narratives of the colonial era that are often ignored or obscured by the national histories of former colonial powers.
Subject: Colonial History
In exploring the insights that the Australian case has for theorising civil-military relations, the book serves as a model for other country case studies. This antipodean contribution to the field includes analysis of the changing demographics, new domestic and international responsibilities, Industry-Defence cooperation, women in the armed forces and contemporary veteran wellbeing.
Subjects: Sociology Peace and Conflict Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
The trajectory of Hong Kong films had been drastically affected long before the city’s official sovereignty transfer from the British to the Chinese in 1997. The author introduces the “Cinema of Transitions,” using examples from the 1980s to the present, to study New Hong Kong Cinema and on- and off-screen life against this background.
Subjects: Film and Television Studies Cultural Studies (General)
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Subjects: Medical Anthropology Development Studies
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Subject: Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
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Malinowski’s pioneering work remains critical for anthropology in a postcolonial age. This volume uses ethnographic studies from around the world to contextualize the work politically and intellectually, examining its gestation and influence from multiple perspectives.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
Subject: Medical Anthropology
Pacific Futures asks how our understanding of social life in the Pacific would be different if we approached it from the perspective of the futures which Pacific people dream of, predict or struggle to achieve, not the reproduction of cultural tradition. From Christianity to gambling, marriage to cargo cult, military coups to reflections on childhood fishing trips, the contributors to this volume show how Pacific people are actively shaping their lives with the future in mind.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
In the context of dramatic changes and processes of “glocalization” across the Pacific region, and avoiding conventional “local-global” dichotomies, this volume explores the new and multifaceted forms of resistance and resilience through which communities attempt to regain their original social, political, and economic status and structure after disruption or displacement.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
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Delving into Pacific spaces from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and interpretations, this book looks at how the anthropological and architectural can be connected.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Development Studies
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
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Pedagogies of Value explores how China is reshaping global hierarchies of worth. This book investigates how value is taught, contested, and transformed in everyday encounters and reveals how foreign intermediary attempts to ‘educate’ Chinese consumers only confronts shifting power dynamics that challenge Western authority.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)
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Persistently Postwar approaches the topics of social memory and political discourse through an exploration of Japan’s post-war mass media. Diverse disciplinary backgrounds and contrasting perspectives offer a nuanced dialogue in which the functions of mass media are explored as more than a simple ideological tool.
Subjects: Media Studies Film and Television Studies Cultural Studies (General) Memory Studies
Paperback available
Subject: Anthropology (General)
“This is a groundbreaking book…that represents a sophisticated assemblage of ideas to frame and drive the analysis of data gleaned through long-term engagement with each site…Using the well-delineated concepts of travel, assemblage, and translation, [Kingfisher] explains the contradictory ways in which policy discourse is produced and through which traveling ideas ‘touch down’ in varied places and times and are selectively taken up by people in varied systems of social relations and grounded experiences.” · Judith Goode, Temple University
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
Paperback available
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
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Seeking an answer to why the event occurred the way that it did,The Polynesian Iconoclasm explores the ten years in the early nineteenth century during which inhabitants of Tahiti, Hawaii and fifteen related societies destroyed or desecrated their temples and god-images. In the aftermath, hundreds of architecturally innovative churches were constructed, and oppressive laws and courts were introduced — and rebelled against.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
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Subjects: History (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
Subjects: Development Studies Sociology
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Subject: Anthropology (General)
On Malaita in Solomon Islands, an evangelical Israelite-inspired movement centers on a distinctive time-consciousness that reads the historical past and present as prophetic signs of an imminent future. This book examines how these ‘prophetic histories’ interweave biblical narrative, theological reflection, local accounts, kastom practice, spiritual journeys and Old-Testament political theory.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Development Studies
The 1970s saw the Aboriginal people of Australia struggle for recognition of their postcolonial rights. Rural communities, where large Aboriginal populations lived, were provoked as a consequence of social fragmentation, unparalleled unemployment, and other major economic and political changes. The ensuing riots, protests, and law-and-order campaigns in New South Wales captured the tense relations that existed between indigenous people, the police, and the criminal justice system.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
Foods are changed by those who produce and supply them, and also by those who consume them. The contributors of this volume have expanded the discussion of food to include its social and cultural meanings and functions, thereby using it as a way to explain a culture and its changes.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition
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The reindeer herders of Aoluguya, China, are a group of former hunters who today see themselves as “keepers of reindeer.” To some, their future seems troubled, but this volume’s literary and academic contributions instead focus on the present, as the Ewenki attempt to reclaim their forest lifestyle and develop new forest livelihoods.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
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Based on seventeen months of ethnographic research among Indonesian eldercare workers in Japan, this book is the first ethnography to research Indonesian care workers’ relationships with the cared-for elderly, their Japanese colleagues and their employers.
Subject: Medical Anthropology
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The Frieda River area in Papua New Guinea is home to one of the biggest undeveloped gold and copper deposits in the Pacific. This book offers an account of local stakeholder strategies as they unfolded at Frieda over forty years and provides a strong and novel commentary on sustainability and social accountability of the mining industry operating in indigenous territories.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
The book is an ethnography of belian, a lively tradition of shamanistic curing rituals performed by the Luangans of Indonesian Borneo. This volume demonstrates the importance of understanding rituals as emergent within their specific historical and social settings, and highlights the irreducibility of lived reality to epistemological certainty.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
Subject: Colonial History
Subjects: History: World War II Colonial History
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Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General)
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
Subject: Theory and Methodology
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This book offers an ethnographic account of young people growing up in the slums of Bangkok, exploring their struggles to get by in conditions of severe structural constraint and the outcomes and side effects of their endeavours; in doing so, it offers an antidote to neoliberal assumptions about personal responsibility.
Subject: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies
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The disciplines of philosophy and cultural anthropology have one thing in common: human behavior. Yet surprisingly, dialogue between the two fields has remained largely silent until now. Selfhood and Recognition combines philosophical and cultural anthropological accounts of the perception of individual action, exploring the processes through which a person recognizes the self and the other.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
In responding to the perceived threat posed by venereal diseases in Germany’s colonies, doctors took a biopolitical approach that employed medical and bourgeois discourses of modernization, health, productivity, and morality. Their goal was to change the behavior of targeted groups, or at least to isolate infected individuals from the healthy population. However, the Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Asians they administered to were not passive recipients of these strategies.
Subjects: Colonial History
Anthropology in Australia has been both celebrated and contested, particularly in its engagements with Indigenous people. This book delves into senses of place and belonging across diverse sectors of society with a particular focus on the intimacies and tensions of engagements with Indigenous Australia.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
A fastidious investigation into the nature of self-identity, Silent Dilemmas of Project Managers uses the context of project management to challenge the perceived separation of objective experience from subjective perception, highlighting how these adopted self-notions act as the object of existential anxiety.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology
Despite growing affluence, a large number of urban Chinese have problems making ends meet. Based on ethnographic research in Guangzhou, China, Soup, Love and a Helping Hand examines different modes and ideologies of help/support, as well as reciprocity, relatedness (kinship), and changing state-society relations in contemporary China.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
Over world history, Southeast Asia’s contribution to the world economy (during the late prehistoric and early historic periods) has not been given much attention. This book attempts to recalibrate these interactions of Southeast Asia with other parts of the world economy, and gives the region its due instead of treating it as little more than a region of peripheral entrepôts.
Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
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Exploring notions of activism and space as narrated by Karen displaced persons and refugees in the Thai-Burma borderlands, this book looks beyond refugees as passive victims or a ‘humanitarian case’. Instead, the book examines the active engagement the Karen have with their persecution and displacement, and their subsequent emplacement in the borderlands.
Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Cultural Studies (General)
The Wa people have a rich civilization of their own and a deep history in the mountains of Southeast Asia. This book introduces aspects of Wa culture, including their approach to the world’s troubles, and the lessons others might learn from it.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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This book examines the settlement patterns and intersite variability in lithic assemblages of Early Jomon (ca. 5000 BP) hunter-gatherers in Japan. The results of this study suggest that the Early Jomon people were not sedentary, as previously assumed, but instead moved their residential basis seasonally. The implications of this result are discussed in the context of the development of hunter-gatherer cultural complexity in general and the course of Japanese prehistory in particular.
Subject: Archaeology
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Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
Subject: Colonial History
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Set against a discussion of the contemporary vitality of Aboriginal musical traditions in Australia and embedded in the historical background of this region, Curran lays out the features of Warlpiri songs and ceremonies, and centers on a focal case study of the Warlpiri Kurdiji ceremony to illustrate the modes in which core cultural themes are being passed on through song to future generations.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Cultural Studies (General)
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Urban areas in Arctic Russia are experiencing unprecedented social and ecological change. This collection outlines the key challenges that city managers will face in navigating this shifting political, economic, social, and environmental terrain.
Subjects: Urban Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Sustainable Development Goals
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Increasingly, scholarly works are approaching the challenges of peoples’ spatial movements across state frontiers as tied to various forms of mobilities that people experience. Using a plural and comparative lens with case studies, Tangled Mobilities brings fresh insight to the wider social phenomenon of mobility and the way places, affects, and personhood are shaped by and connected to it.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
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The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Temple Tracks critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion.
Subjects: Transport Studies Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Development Studies
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Set at the forested edge of Cambodia’s frontier, this book shares stories and insights from migrants, loggers, and soldiers carving homesteads into a new village. The stories included in this book show the fluid boundaries of social, economic and political classifications in the area, and that the inhabitants’ poverty or wealth reveal the legacy of imperial power.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General) Memory Studies
Subjects: Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)
Subject: Anthropology (General)
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Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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Trapped in the Gap explores what happens when a group of state-supported, intelligent and well-meaning people attempt to help without harming. This group of “white anti-racists” find themselves trapped by endless ambiguities, contradictions, and double binds, a microcosm of the broader dilemmas of postcolonial societies.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
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Traumatic Pasts in Asia extends Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, explores how these new terrains of investigation inform and enrich earlier understandings.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies Medical Anthropology
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Trees, Knots and Outriggers (Kaynen Muyuw) is the culmination of twenty-five years of work by Frederick H. Damon and his attention to cultural adaptations to the environment in Melanesia.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
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Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General) Applied Anthropology
Paperback available
Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork undertaken since 2006, the book addresses some of the most topical aspects of remote Aboriginal life in Australia. This includes the role of kinship and family, relationships to land and sea, and cross-cultural relations with non-Aboriginal residents.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
Paperback available
There is a World Heritage Craze in China. China claims to have the longest continuous civilization in the world and is seeking the recognition from UNESCO. With a sociological lens, this book offers comprehensive insights into World Heritage, as well as China’s deep social, cultural, and political structures.
Subjects: Heritage Studies Archaeology Sociology Travel and Tourism
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The practice of affiliating the female child with the mother and the male child with the father was considered a rare and inexplicable practice in Papua New Guinean ethnography at the time the original data was collected some forty years ago. Marta Rohatynskyj undertakes a shift in her analytical concepts to reveal the deep-seated disjuncture between female and male that this practice represents.