This collection of original essays interrogates the nature of intercultural and intra-cultural encounters through anthropological case studies of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific Islands. The chapters show that parties involved in intercultural or intra-cultural encounters, each equipped with their own means and motivated by their own ends, reciprocally engage each other in a dynamic, emergent relationship. Through detailed empirical research, this volume seeks to advance the open question of how we may theorize the cultural interface.

This book is one of the most important works of modern anthropology. Starting from his studies of the Melanesian society on the Trobriand Islands off New Guinea, Malinowski describes and examines the ways in which Trobriand Islanders structure and maintain the social and economic order of their tribe. "The true problem”, Malinowski says, “is not to study how human life submits to rules; the real problem is how the rules become adapted to life. ” Crime and Custom in Savage Society is a necessary book to understand the articulate relationship between law and society.

The British Missionary movement, which began in earnest in the early 19th century, was one of the most extraordinary movements of the last two centuries, radically transforming the lives of people in large parts of the globe, including in Europe itself.By exploring a range of artefacts, photographs and archival documents that have survived, or emerged from, these transformations, this volume sheds an oblique light on the histories of British Missionaries in Africa and the Pacific, and the ways in which their work is remembered in different parts of the world today.Short contributions describing the histories of particular items, accompanied by rich visual imagery, showcase the extraordinary l items that were caught up in histories of conversion, and are still controversial for many today. By focusing on the varied forms of missionary heritage, this volume aims to question the often used categories of trophies, relics or curios, and highlight the complexity involved in the missionary encounter.This volume is the result of a research networking project bringing together specialists of missionary collections, i.e. artefacts, photographs or archival documents. These specialists are academics of various disciplines, museum curators and indigenous stakeholders who aim to show to a wide audience what missionary heritage constitutes and how varied it is. The heritage in focus is based in museums, archives, churches and archaeological sites in Britain, the Pacific and Africa.With contributions by Ben Burt of the British Museum, Sagale Buadromo of the Fiji Museum, Ghanaian artist, art historian and curator Atta Kwami, Jack Thompson of the University of Edinburgh, Steven Hooper of the Sainsbury Research Unit, Joshua Bell of the Smithsonian Institute, Samoan artist Greg Semu and many more.

Very rarely has peace and conflict studies been combined with public administration research. This book brings together theories from conflict resolution, public administration, and urban studies to present new theoretical and empirical insights from nine in-depth case studies. The authors employ the city as a prism to shed light on the complex, multidimensional processes of conflict, segregation, democratisation, and governance. They use the city as a diagnostic site for exploring the role of public administration and civil servants in resolving contested issues in divided societies. The researchers analyse nine multi-faceted cases: Toronto, Copenhagen, Malmö, Mostar, Cape Town, Belfast, Jerusalem, Nicosia and Mitrovica - all cities at different stages of conflict and stability and with disparate legacies. The contributors map the tools, strategies, and understandings of conflict resolution to be found in each city, and in so doing break new empirical and theoretical ground.

Every year, in the last month of the Islamic calendar, millions of Muslims from around the world come together in Mecca to perform the Hajj, the pilgrimage that all capable Muslims should perform at least once in their lives. In 2013, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden organised the exhibition Longing for Mecca. The Pilgrim’s Journey. The chapters in this volume are the outcome of the two-day symposium on the Hajj, which was held at the museum in connection to the exhibition.The central theme that runs through the book is how Hajj practices, representations of Mecca and the exchange of Hajj-related objects have changed over time. The chapters in the first part of the book discuss religious, social, and political meanings of the Hajj. Here the relationship is addressed between the significance of pilgrimage to Mecca for the religious lives of individuals and groups and the wider contexts that they are embedded in. Together, these anthropological contributions provide insights into the effects on Hajj practices and meanings for present-day Muslims caused by current dimensions of globalisation processes. The second part of the book takes material expressions of the Hajj as its starting point. It explores what Hajj-related artefacts can tell us about the import of pilgrimage in the daily lives of Muslims in the past and present. The contributions in this part of the volume point out that Mecca has always been a cosmopolitan city and the nodal point of global interactions far exceeding religious activities.Together, the chapters in this book depict the Hajj ritual as a living tradition. Each with its own focus, the various contributions testify to the fact that, while the rites that make up the Hajj were formulated and recorded in normative texts in early Islam, details in the actual performance and interpretations of these rites are by no means static, but rather have evolved over time in tandem with changing socio-political circumstances.

"Her great virtue as an advocate is that she is not a reductionist. Her awareness of the complex connections among economy and nature and culture preserves her from oversimplification. So does her understanding of the importance of diversity. " -- Wendell Berry, from the forewordMotivated by agricultural devastation in her home country of India, Vandana Shiva became one of the world's most influential and highly acclaimed environmental and antiglobalization activists. Her groundbreaking research has exposed the destructive effects of monocultures and commercial agriculture and revealed the links between ecology, gender, and poverty.In The Vandana Shiva Reader, Shiva assembles her most influential writings, combining trenchant critiques of the corporate monopolization of agriculture with a powerful defense of biodiversity and food democracy. Containing up-to-date data and a foreword by Wendell Berry, this essential collection demonstrates the full range of Shiva's research and activism, from her condemnation of commercial seed technology, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and the international agriculture industry's dependence on fossil fuels, to her tireless documentation of the extensive human costs of ecological deterioration.This important volume illuminates Shiva's profound understanding of both the perils and potential of our interconnected world and calls on citizens of all nations to renew their commitment to love and care for soil, seeds, and people.

Between 1840 and 1940, over one million people emigrated from Sweden to America. The fact that so many chose to leave to seek a better life across the Atlantic was a major trauma for the Swedish nation. Filmmakers were not slow to pick up on an exodus that proved to be of lasting importance for the Swedes' national identity. In Welcome Home Mr Swanson, the film studies scholar Ann-Kristin Wallengren analyses the ways in which Swedish emigrants and Swedish-American returnees are depicted in Swedish film between 1910 and 1950, continuing on to recent films and television shows. Were Sweden's emigrants seen as national traitors or as brave trailblazers who might return home with modern ideas? Many of the Swedish films were distributed to the US, and Wallengren discusses the notions of Sweden and Swedishness that circulated there as a result. She also considers the image of Swedish immigrant women in American filmsa representation that bore little resemblance to the Swedes' idealized view. Wallengren shows how ideologies of nationality had a prominent place in the films' narratives, resulting in films that project enduring perceptions of Swedish national identity and the American way of life.

Los mercados de la Mixteca son colectividades vibrantes y dinámicas que funcionan y forman parte del macrocontexto de la globalización, desde el consumismo hasta el movimiento mundial de productos y personas. Por lo general, la historia económica más formal deja mudos a los actores que definen esta economía: los comerciantes. Por medio de sus relatos, este libro documenta una historia informal que ha sido poco registrada. Cincuenta entrevistas, hechas entre 2004 y 2006 en algunas de las plazas principales de la Mixteca Alta, forman el eje central del libro. Son las historias de emprendedores mexicanos, que por ser tan personales y reales son estimulantes, alarmantes y atractivas a la vez. Por un lado, son analizadas desde la perspectiva del mercader individual, su agencia local y personal, y por otro lado, desde un punto de vista diacrónico, ya que se presentan, en la medida de lo posible, datos históricos que documentan historias de la vida de los mercaderes y de los mercados de la época precolonial, colonial y del siglo XIX. Además, se han incorporado una serie de mapas detallados de varios centros comerciales locales importantes de la Mixteca, como por ejemplo el mercado de Tlaxiaco, Chalcatongo, Yanhuitlán, Teposcolula y Coixtlahuaca.

From the protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square to the Tea Party in the United States to the campaign to elect indigenous leader Evo Morales in Bolivia, modern populist movements command international attention and compel political and social change. When citizens demand "power to the people," they evoke corrupt politicians, imperialists, or oligarchies that have appropriated power from its legitimate owners. These stereotypical narratives belie the vague and often contradictory definitions of the concept of "the people" and the many motives of those who use populism as a political tool. In The Promise and Perils of Populism, Carlos de la Torre assembles a group of international scholars to explore the ambiguous meanings and profound implications of grassroots movements across the globe. These trenchant essays explore how fragile political institutions allow populists to achieve power, while strong institutions confine them to the margins of political systems. Their comparative case studies illuminate how Latin American, African, and Thai populists have sought to empower marginalized groups of people, while similar groups in Australia, Europe, and the United States often exclude people whom they consider to possess different cultural values. While analyzing insurrections in Latin America, advocacy groups in the United States, Europe, and Australia, and populist parties in Asia and Africa, the contributors also pose questions and agendas for further research.This volume on contemporary populism from a comparative perspective could not be more timely, and scholars from a variety of disciplines will find it an invaluable contribution to the literature.

After the “digital turn,” sexual representations have been increasing both quantitatively (thanks to the multiplication of production and distribution channels) and qualitatively (giving rise to a plurality of new representational forms). In this context, several social groups – including women and non-normative sexual subcultures – have obtained full citizenship rights within the “pornosphere,” moving beyond their traditional marginalization or, indeed, exclusion. These “nonconventional” pornographies exist in a dialectical relationship with mainstream production insofar as they are at the same time a development and a repudiation of the latter (on an aesthetic, economic and political level). This volume investigates the emergences of alternative pornographies, highlighting their discursive heterogeneity, their cultural status and connections to identities and non-normative practices, as well as their role in redefining the very idea of pornography. This publication will map the main areas relating to alternative pornographies, such as alt porn, queer pornography, indie porn, post porn, feminist pornography, and amateur porn. With a foreword by Feona Attwood.

This publication unveils creative ideas on knowledge transfer from historical references to commercialization of cultural products. It adopts multidisciplinary, cross cultural, and experimental approaches to study the cultural industries, including art, music, popular culture, psychology, entrepreneurship, and economic studies. These scholarly thoughts and ideas were presented in the two conferences held at the Hong Kong Institute of Education in the summer of 2013. The chapters critically evaluate the current situation of the cultural industries and review the underlying relationships between the different sectors in the field. By assessing the development of the cultural industries, the authors hope that market and government intervention can enhance further consolidation and minimize hindrance to the growth of creativity.

Archaeology has long dealt with issues of identity, and especially with ethnicity, with modern approaches emphasising dynamic and fluid social construction. The archaeology of the Iron Age in particular has engendered much debate on the topic of ethnicity, fuelled by the first availability of written sources alongside the archaeological evidence which has led many researchers to associate the features they excavate with populations named by Greek or Latin writers. Some archaeological traditions have had their entire structure built around notions of ethnicity, around the relationships existing between large groups of people conceived together as forming unitary ethnic units. On the other hand, partly influenced by anthropological studies, other scholars have written forcefully against Iron Age ethnic constructions, such as the Celts.The 24 contributions to this volume focus on the south east Europe, where the Iron Age has, until recently, been populated with numerous ethnic groups with which specific material culture forms have been associated. The first section is devoted to the core geographical area of south east Europe: Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia, as well as Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The following three sections allow comparison with regions further to the west and the south west with contributions on central and western Europe, the British Isles and the Italian peninsula. The volume concludes with four papers which provide more synthetic statements that cut across geographical boundaries, the final contributions bringing together some of the key themes of the volume. The wide array of approaches to identity presented here reflects the continuing debate on how to integrate material culture, protohistoric evidence (largely classical authors looking in on first millennium BC societies) and the impact of recent nationalistic agendas.

How was national consciousness developed? The present book aims to investigate such matter trough a series of different case studies, in which the terms nation, homeland and people have been applied. This Romantic lexicon identifies similar conceptions of the national idea in some countries dominated by Italian, German and Slavic cultures, and in some groups or minorities such as the Jews and the Vlachs in Central and Mediterranean Europe. In order to clarify the cultural framework, the authors explore the construction of identity through folk tunes, poetry inspired by popular culture, and opera in which the national myths or heroes appear. In the self-making tradition, the national traits are sustained by the process of embodiment of any regional utterance, and also by the elimination of the ‘other’, especially the minorities. The symbols of the nation, as an achievement of the power that flourishes from the sense of belonging, are defined per differentiam.

These original essays debate two ways of theorizing social life. One way is the integrative or holistic model of thought typified in the writings of Confucius. The other, the revolutionary tradition, is suspicious of holism and harmony as principles of social thought because harmony is seen as something that can genuinely occur only when a society has rectified deeply ingrained injustice. This volume evaluates the alternative priorities of order and revolt, harmony and spontaneity, in social life.

The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of writings on queer theories and practices. Drawingtogether established and emerging scholars in the field, this volume offers a broad, transdisciplinaryand international approach to queer studies. In the light of recent critical perspectives, it proposes a number of theoretical developments concerning three key thematic fields: theories, bodies and texts. The first section of the volume considers the embodied, sexed and gendered self and its problematic relation with queer theories, animal studies as well as with the representation of non-human and intersex identities. The second section explores a variety of modes of representation, and/or misrepresentation, of queer embodied subjectivities, ranging from literature to media and performance. In analysing a variety of classic and contemporary texts, the contributors call into question and reconceptualise key issues such as queer subjectivity, homophobia, gender performativity, masquerade and cross-dressing.

In the contemporary world, the figure of the migrant, moving across spaces, cultures and languages,has acquired unprecedented centrality. Migrants have transformed the ways of representingand narrating the transnational world in which they live, responding in new fashions to one of the oldest impulses of men and women of every place and time: the impulse to tell stories. By engaging with the notions of diaspora, postcoloniality, nomadism, translation, and exile, Di Maio moves across the Anglophone and Italophone spectra offering a compelling definition of migrant literature at the turn of the millennium.