Martha Mundy – författare

This collection of interdisciplinary essays explores how persons and things - the central elements of the social - are fabricated by legal rituals and institutions. The contributors, legal and anthropological theorists alike, focus on a set of specific institutional and ethnographic contexts, and some unexpected and thought-provoking analogies emerge from this intellectual encounter between law and anthropology. For example, contemporary anxieties about the legal status of the biotechnological body seem to resonate with the questions addressed by ancient Roman law in its treatment of dead bodies. The analogy between copyright and the transmission of intangible designs in Melanesia suddenly makes western images of authorship seem quite unfamiliar. A comparison between law and laboratory science presents the production of legal artefacts in new light. These studies are of particular relevance at a time when law, faced with the inventiveness of biotechnology, finds it increasingly difficult to draw the line between persons and things.

In this 2000 book, Martha Mundy and Basim Musallam bring together an international team of contributors consisting of archaeologists, geographers, historians, anthropologists and agronomists in a penetrating, interdisciplinary account of the transformation of nomadic society. The chapters provide an integrated analysis of the changing relations of ecology, economy and socio-political organisation in the steppes of the central Middle East, documenting the longue-durée of history alongside the more rapid transformations of the twentieth century. A series of maps and figures illustrate the narrative while a bibliographic essay analyses the existing literature. This is an accessible and interactive book which provides a comprehensive overview of a fascinating and complex society. It will attract readers from a variety of disciplines, including those interested in contemporary environmental and development issues.

This collection of interdisciplinary essays explores how persons and things - the central elements of the social - are fabricated by legal rituals and institutions. The contributors, legal and anthropological theorists alike, focus on a set of specific institutional and ethnographic contexts, and some unexpected and thought-provoking analogies emerge from this intellectual encounter between law and anthropology. For example, contemporary anxieties about the legal status of the biotechnological body seem to resonate with the questions addressed by ancient Roman law in its treatment of dead bodies. The analogy between copyright and the transmission of intangible designs in Melanesia suddenly makes western images of authorship seem quite unfamiliar. A comparison between law and laboratory science presents the production of legal artefacts in new light. These studies are of particular relevance at a time when law, faced with the inventiveness of biotechnology, finds it increasingly difficult to draw the line between persons and things.

This volume provides an introduction to the major themes and theoretical perspectives of contemporary work in Law and Anthropology. It reflects both important recent ethnography of law and the state, and the dialogue of jurists and anthropologists concerning legal institutions in the present era of economic globalization and renewed civil and international conflict.

At a time when Yemen has been ravaged by a decade of war and subject to myriad political and military interventions, the essays in this collection serve as a timely reminder of the need for grounded anthropological study in even the harshest of circumstances. From tribesmen to refugees, revolutionaries to farmers, state workers to charity workers, intellectuals to the unemployed and the destitute, we learn of the everyday political languages through which people in the country live their lives. This volume is a call for an anthropology attuned not only to locally significant political concepts, but also to the ways in which people actively confront and reorient them while challenging their worlds and engaging the political imagination in a spirit of abiding critique. This concise collection is the fruit of decades of ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen and will be of interest to students and scholars seeking an intimate and nuanced account of life in the country.

At a time when Yemen has been ravaged by a decade of war and subject to myriad political and military interventions, the essays in this collection serve as a timely reminder of the need for grounded anthropological study in even the harshest of circumstances. From tribesmen to refugees, revolutionaries to farmers, state workers to charity workers, intellectuals to the unemployed and the destitute, we learn of the everyday political languages through which people in the country live their lives. This volume is a call for an anthropology attuned not only to locally significant political concepts, but also to the ways in which people actively confront and reorient them while challenging their worlds and engaging the political imagination in a spirit of abiding critique. This concise collection is the fruit of decades of ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen and will be of interest to students and scholars seeking an intimate and nuanced account of life in the country.

Was 'modernity' in the Middle East merely imported piecemeal from the West? Did Ottoman society really consist of islands of sophistication in a sea of tribal conservatism, as has so often been claimed? In this groundbreaking new book, Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez Smith draw on over a decade of primary source research to argue that, contrary to such stereotypes, a distinctively Ottoman process of modernisation was achieved by the end of the nineteenth century with great social consequences for all who lived through it. Modernisation touched women as intimately as men: the authors' careful work explores the impact of Ottoman legal reforms, such as granting women equal rights to land. Mundy and Saumarez Smith have painstakingly recreated a picture of such processes through both new archival material and the testimony of surviving witnesses to the period. This book will not only affect the way we look at Ottoman society, it will change our understanding of the relationship between East, West and modernity.