New books
Katherine Smith, 2012
Fairness, Class and Belonging in Contemporary England
As an insight into contemporary British society, Fairness, Class and Belonging in Contemporary England is a timely ethnographic exploration of the ways in which the 'white', 'English' 'working classes' in a north Manchester neighbourhood expressed feelings of being 'ignored' and 'neglected' by local and national governments. Providing important insights into the implications of policy-making, the book focuses on local idioms and individual articulations of 'fairness', exploring governmental ideologies and policies of 'equality' to question the disparate connotations concerning these topics. Discussing what it means to be both 'fair' and a good English person and what this means for 'belonging' in this part of northern England, it seeks to specify how each narrative of 'belonging' and 'fairness' is marked and changed by the interlocking concerns and effects of geographical origin, familiarity between individuals and groups, political orientations, ethnicities, genders and shared histories of racial and cultural imaginations.
Petra Tjitske Kalshoven, 2012
Crafting 'The Indian' Knowledge, Desire, and Play in Indianist Reenactment
In Europe, Indian hobbyism, or Indianism, has developed out of a strong fascination with Native American life in the 18th and 19th centuries. “Indian hobbyists” dress in homemade replicas of clothing, craft museum-quality replicas of artifacts, meet in fields dotted with tepees and reenact aspects of North American Indian lifeworlds, using ethnographies, travel diaries, and museum collections as resources. Grounded in fieldwork set among networks of Indian hobbyists in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Czech Republic, this ethnography analyzes this contemporary practice of serious leisure with respect to the general human desire for play, metaphor, and allusion. It provides insights into the increasing popularity of reenactment practices as they relate to a deeper understanding of human perception, imagination, and creativity.
Jeanette Edwards (eds), 2011
Recasting Anthropological Knowledge
This collection of original essays provides an innovative and multifaceted reflection on the impact and inspiration of the scholarship of eminent anthropologist Marilyn Strathern. A distinguished team of international contributors, all former students of Strathern, reflect on the impact of their relationship with their teacher and address the wider conceptual contribution of her work through their own writings. The essays provide an accessible entry into Strathern's scholarship for those new to her work and a rich source of material which mobilises and deploys her concepts, including new ethnographic examples and discussion of contemporary political issues, for those more familiar with her scholarship. The result is a collection that dissects, contextualises and reroutes concepts of relationality, inspiration and knowledge in novel and unpredictable ways. Recasting Anthropological Knowledge will prove invaluable to all students of anthropology and will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences.
Jeanette Edwards, Penelope Harvey, and Peter Wade (eds), 2010
Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies
Combining approaches from three of the most dynamic and popular fields of contemporary social anthropology – the study of the visual, the study of the technological, and the study of the human body – this volume draws these together and interrogates their intersection using insights from ethnographic approaches. Offering a fascinating and wide range of perspectives, the chapters in this volume reflect the authors’ shared interest in “the body” and visualizing technologies, thus representing an innovative focus. Read a review of this book.
Peter Wade 2010
The intersection of race and sex in Latin America is a subject touched upon by many disciplines but this is the first book to deal solely with these issues.
Peter Wade 2010
Race and ethnicity in Latin America, 2nd edition
For over ten years, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America has been an essential text for students studying the region. This second edition adds new material and brings the analysis up to date.
Jens Kjaerulff 2010
Internet and Change. An Anthropology of Knowledge and Flexible Work
This study of people working from their homes via internet, explores how processes of change may relate to information technology engagements. Through a rich ethnography of paid work as cultural practice, and drawing on social science studies of knowledge, it develops a theory of change where particular attention is devoted to the materiality of internet use, and to situated experience, reflection and agency.
Adi Kuntsman 2009
Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Queerness, Nationalism and Violence in Cyberspace and Beyond
Based on an ethnographic study of Russian-speaking, queer immigrants in Israel/Palestine, and also in cyberspace, this book traces the interplay between the different forms of violence – physical and verbal, social and psychic, material and semiotic – and offers insights into the analysis of nationalism, on-line sociality and queer migranthood.
Karen Sykes, 2009
Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning
These astute essays describe the way ordinary people value human relationships and reason through the commonplace contradictions of their local way of life in a global age, rather than measure the actions of their subjects as evidence of either universal rationality or shared cultural beliefs. Each contributor conveys the ways in which people challenge the ascribed moral standards of custom, religious belief, bureaucratic policies through passionate words such as anecdotes, joke, rumors, and gossip. By evaluating moral reasoning at a local level, contributors work to answer the question, what is a good life?
Soumhya Venkatesan, 2009
Craft Matters: Artisans, development and the Indian nation
This book explores the ways in which ‘traditional Indian craft producers’ engage with the efforts of government and non governmental agencies to preserve, promote and develop their crafts. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the Labbai Muslim mat weavers of Pattamadai town in South India, this anthropological study explores the ways in which the famous pattu pai or high-quality silk-like mats of Pattamadai became classified as traditional craft objects, and what this classification has meant to the weavers who are now simultaneously national heroes and (paradoxically) marginalized and suspect Muslims.
Paul Henley 2009
The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the craft of ethnographic cinema.
This book offers a comprehensive analysis of Jean Rouch's (1917-2004) ethnographic film making methods. It examines the technical strategies, aesthetic considerations, and ethical positions that contribute to Rouch's cinematographic legacy.
Jeanette Edwards 2009
European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology
Edited by Jeanette Edwards and Carles Salazar, 2009.
The volume draws on research carried out on and EU funded project which focused on the impact of new reproductive and genetic technologies on contemporary understandings of kinship. Authors reveal the complexity of kinship thinking in present-day Europe and, through a range of ethnographic examples, investigate the impact of biotechnology on notions of family, belonging and personhood.
Sharon Macdonald 2009
Difficult Heritage. Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg
How does a city and a nation deal with a legacy of perpetrating atrocity? How are contemporary identities negotiated and shaped in the face of concrete reminders of a past that most wish they did not have? Difficult Heritage focuses on the case of Nuremberg - a city whose name is indelibly linked with Nazism - to explore these questions and their implications.