Becoming the Other, Being Oneself
For millennia, the Wangazidja people have absorbed cultural influences from across the Indian Ocean. This book examines their strategies for negotiating this encounter, incorporating a variety of influences while remaining “authentic.”
In Sub-Saharan Africa, millions of children are AIDS orphans, street children vulnerable to exploitation, or child soldiers. This book identifies the critical problems they face, using an ethnographic approach to understand the plight of children in the world’s poorest region.
Reveries of Home
Reveries of Home considers understandings of home in a globalized world. A series of case-studies reveals how home-making is an ongoing work, cementing the close connections that remain between home and identity, even in a world of movement.
Cocoon Communities
This innovative volume proposes the concept of Cocoon Communities: groups that are highly significant for members, yet voluntary and not binding. It offers interdisciplinary perspectives on communities of students, online mourners, expatriates, and more.
We Are Playing Football
This pioneering study of grassroots sport in Papua New Guinea explores how Panapompom villagers’ attempts to recreate global football entangle them in circuits of colonial power, challenging what it means to be “globalised.”
Dimensions of Social Exclusion
This book revolves around the societal institutions that exclude, discriminate, and deprive groups based on identities such as caste or ethnicity. It examines social exclusion as a complex, multi-dimensional process across a wide spectrum of societies.
A radical reappraisal of the relationship between East and West. This inter-disciplinary volume refutes Euro-centric assumptions, exploring the complex cultural, diplomatic, mercantile, and military encounters between 1453 and 1699.
The Polyphony of Food
Food is more than a basic need. It satisfies the entire range of human motivations, from feeling safe and secure to affirming cultural identity. It is a vehicle for bonding, love, esteem, and even a means of self-actualization.
The Goddess and the Dragon
How are ordinary Japanese affected by globalization? This study of a fisheries community near Tokyo examines the risks and opportunities of mass tourism. Residents depend economically on tourists, yet maintain exclusive community bonds to assert their cultural identity.
This book covers the author’s field experiences as an ethnographer in Central America and an applied anthropologist in the US. It highlights the importance of incorporating ethnography into work tasks across a range of social fields and diverse socio-cultural groups.
Place, Culture and Community
Hear the voices of the Ottawa Valley. This book reveals a vibrant heritage of fiddling, step dancing, and storytelling forged in hardship, as told by the lumbermen, priests, and families who lived its triumphant history.
These essays document a way of life that has now virtually disappeared. Based on anthropological fieldwork in a remote Greek village in the 1970s, they focus on family, kinship, and gender, and the profound transformation of rural society as it was occurring at the time.
This book uses food and feasts as a tool to understand the social organisation of the Newāḥ of Nepal. It details life-cycle rituals and kinship obligations to exchange food, considering married daughters’ special role, to show how sharing is an integral part of their culture.
These essays feature an international collective of museum professionals, indigenous cultural historians and anthropologists, who address the historical role of weapon collections in ethnographic museums and the value of studying arms in order to write richer cultural histories.
In-Between Fiction and Non-Fiction
This title invites the reader to participate in the recent emphasis on subjectivity and self-reflection as the means of understanding and engaging with current social changes through storytelling. It centres its attention on the symbiosis between anthropology and fiction.
In an age of relativism and uncertainty, how can sociology move forward? This book charts a new path by critically re-examining Durkheim and Giddens. It outlines new approaches to social processes, time, and predicting the future, transforming contemporary sociological thought.
In India, individuals cannot escape the inequalities of gender, ethnic, and social hierarchies, a struggle for survival and status. This volume highlights these realities through four decades of empirical anthropological research across India, considering their historical roots.