Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology – serie
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31 produkter
31 produkter
Häftad, Engelska, 1999
1 592 kr
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Few writers on the Irish in America have looked beyond the nineteenth-century ethnic enclaves of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago, or have asked how the notion of an Irish-American ethnic identity in contemporary America can be reconciled with five, six, or seven generations of intermarriage and assimilation over the last century and a half. This study, based on interviews with 500 people of Irish ancestry in Albany, New York, aims to discover in what senses and in what degrees the present-day descendants of nineteenth-century Irish immigrants possess distinctive social practices and ways of seeing the world, and raises questions about the social conditions in which ideas of Irishness have been created and re-created.
Inbunden, Engelska, 1998
2 551 kr
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Paul Spencer presents the definitive study of the ways of life of the cattle-herding peoples of East Africa, drawing on many years of research. This region has offered a prime example of a traditional culture resisting the inevitability of change; it provides the best-known and most extensive instance both of cattle-pastoralist society and of social organization based primarily on age. Pastoral peoples were once dominant in the East African interior, but development of the market economy has progressively polarized the region and forced them into the most marginal, drought-ridden areas; in this ecological trap they have become a peripheral underclass. The Pastoral Continuum examines the richness and resilience of their cultures and illuminates the role of indigenous practices and institutions in adaptation and survival. The pastoralists' systems of age organization in particular are notable for their resilience: it is demonstrated that these are bound up with problems of growth and succession in family enterprises, and that marriage is a critical link in the web of alliance that governs the problematic relations between old and young. Spencer's exploration of the development of the pastoralist phenomenon yields a unique view of its place in the modern world and its prospects for the future. This landmark work by a leading authority will be of lasting value to any reader interested in traditional social systems of this kind.
Inbunden, Engelska, 1998
2 443 kr
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Dancing through Time presents a rich and incisive analysis of person, time, and identity among the Karawari speakers of Ambonwari village in the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, through the examination of everyday practices, language, social institutions, kinship, myths, spirit-things, rituals, and dances. In addition to its descriptive value, the book offers a fresh theoretical approach to the study of Melanesian cultures.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2000
3 131 kr
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In this book the late Jeffrey Clark subjects the history of colonialism among the Wiru of Papua New Guinea to a fresh and subtle examination. He reflects upon his own fieldwork as an anthropologist as he scrutinizes the cultural construction of encounters and exchanges between New Guineans and Australians from the 1930s on. Colonized and colonizers alike are the focus of an analysis that draws upon theories of culture, temporality, discursive representation, and anthropology in the postcolonial era. Steel to Stone offers an original critique of several different theories and perspectives and, in its ensemble of frameworks, constitutes a highly innovative contribution to anthropological thinking about history and culture. Of especial interest is Clark's application, in a New Guinean context, of Foucault's analysis of `the way in which new regimes of power and knowledge are inscribed on the body'. The Wiru, faced with the impact of a colonizing culture, are shown to inscribe their own history on the body, and to read in it their understanding of particular events. Overall, Clark provides a compelling picture of a contemporary Melanesian culture, at the critical point at which the Wiru people are interpreting, invoking, and reinventing their history in the context of a developing nation state.
Inbunden, Engelska, 1998
3 103 kr
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A Place Apart offers a rich and reflective representation of Iceland and Icelanders today. Kirsten Hastrup draws upon extensive first-hand research, but also upon her original theory of what anthropology is and should be, which this book exemplifies. In two previous books she studied the processes and patterns which shaped Icelandic society from medieval times to the nineteenth century; now she brings this historical study up to date by drawing out the dominant themes in present-day Icelandic self-understanding. In many ways Icelanders' sustained image of themselves as a singular people in the world refracts the actual social reality. The image tends to favour particular interpretations of history as well as particular social groups, as Hastrup shows through analyses of tradition and ideology, landscape and memory, community and honour. She investigates the ways in which everyday life is informed by a living tradition and a stress on the historical depth and cultural uniqueness of this place apart. The result is a renewed sense of the texture of the Icelandic world, seen not as a static and prescriptive culture, but rather as a space within which Icelanders are suspended between modernity and consciousness of the antiquity of Icelandic values, between presentness and pastness.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2000
2 720 kr
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The Hai||om 'Bushmen' of northern Namibia are still a gathering people, living not only on mangetti [nuts] and other wild foods but also on the by-products of the cattle industry on the mangetti farms. Namibian independence in 1990 with its new options has created a dilemma which may result in a loss of autonomous modes of social organization. The personal quality of their social relations relies on a high degree of individual autonomy, cultural diversity, subsistence flexibility, social permeability, and of immediacy in religious affairs. This book describes the main strategies that the Hai||om have developed to deal with independence and dependency - their ways of accessing the new economic resources, their communication skills, their storytelling practices, their sophisticated ways of creating name and kin relations across spatial and social boundaries, and their way of co-operating in the medicine dance, their main religious ritual.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2000
4 239 kr
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Born and Bred is an ethnography of Bacup in the north-west of England. At the heart of the cotton industry in the nineteenth century, this Lancashire town has undergone deep social and economic change during the twentieth, yet it remains a hive of social activity. The book dwells on the way in which the past features large in people's talk about the place and about each other, but it questions the claim that such a preoccupation is simply due to nostalgia for better times. Narratives about the past, like narratives about the kind of place Bacup is, mobilize cultural understandings of kinship, which are also deployed when people talk about the implications of new reproductive technologies. Jeanette Edwards argues that kinship is resonant in the way in which residents of the town belong to pasts, places and persons. She challenges the idea that kinship is no longer an organizing principle in post-industrial Western society.
Häftad, Engelska, 2000
703 kr
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A serious illness may bring other events into focus. This book is about the circumstances surrounding an illness which struck a man in middle life, its impact on him and on the people of his West Sepik village. It records both failure and continuing belief the failure of local treatments, Western medicine, and of a great communal effort to bring a spirit to heal him. The issues of distress, isolation in illness, and the hope of relief are universal ones, but in this setting in New Guinea they have to be placed in a framework of tentative explanations because of the harsh material conditions. To follow the course of this man's illness is to see how illness can reshape events and test social ties. The book unfolds a social drama, as it traces people's anxieties, the pressure upon them to take immediate action to try to remedy the situation, and their growing realization that they have failed.Through the text runs the problem of hope and belief in healing.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2000
1 619 kr
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This book combines the interdisciplinary insights of history, anthropology, and computing to examine the interrelationships between politics, kinship, and marriage in a late-medieval city-state. At the heart of the study is a reconsideration of `office' and the ways in which ties of kinship and marriage were mobilized to build electoral success. In fifteenth-century Ragusa (present-day Dubrovnik) membership of the Great Council, which nominated and elected office-holders, was restricted to the legitimate male offspring of patrician brides and grooms. The patrician class was highly endogamous, and the relationship between endogamy and electoral support is an important theme running through this book. A related theme concerns the age differences between spouses, which are shown to have important structural implications for the organization of the casata, kinship relations, and marriage ties. These implications are investigated using a variety of innovative methods, including cohort analysis and computer simulation.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2000
3 527 kr
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Since the Chinese Communists took control of Inner Mongolia, very little has been written about the region. This book is an attempt to redress the balance. It is a study of the effect of decades of social engineering on a Minority Nationality in China. David Sneath charts the recent history of the pastoral Mongolians of Inner Mongolia since they became the subjects of the Chinese Communist state, and examines the society that has emerged since the abolition of the Communes in the 1980s. He explores the history of local economic and political forms to illuminate the transformations and continuities of life in pastoral Mongolian society, and offers an account that includes both the swings of national and regional government policy and the experiences of individuals subject to those changes. By taking a historical perspective his study reveals underlying modes of symbolism, and notions of domestic organization and paternalistic authority, that have remained fundamental to pastoralism in Inner Mongolia. It suggests an indigenous mechanism for economic inequality and dependency in pastoral society, one that has helped to shape the pastoral nomadic sociopolitical order of the past.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2001
2 677 kr
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In 1925 the influential Dutch anthropologist W. H. Rassers posed the question of the relationship of myth to ritual, taking as his case study the Javanese myth of the birth of the man-eating demon, Kala. The light shed by this myth, and its re-enactment, on the social morphology of Java was immediately the subject of debate among students of Javanese culture. Stephen C. Headley translates and studies ritual and myth in their variant forms. He expands illuminatingly upon Rasser's general proposition, that the movement from cosmogony to exorcism founds fundamental social forms within which values circulate in Javanese society. Richly detailed descriptions confirm the permanence of these networks of circulating values in modern-day Java, and their persistence in the face of contemporary individualism.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2001
2 326 kr
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Society in the Keo region of the eastern Indonesian island of Flores reveals a pervasive pairing of villages, clans, and other groups. Apart from introducing a hitherto undescribed population, this study, deriving from fieldwork conducted by the author over a period of 15 years, analyses a form of society that has occupied anthropologists since the inception of their discipline: morphological dualism, or dual organization. Drawing on a notion of encompassment inspired by Dumont's theory of 'hierarchy', the author interprets dualistic social forms as products of a continuous process of combination and a tendency to create binary wholes through the partial assimilation of junior by senior partners. While Keo exemplifies a variant of a widespread eastern Indonesian pattern of binary classification and asymmetric marriage alliance, the analysis shows how Keo morphological dualism cannot be reduced to the categories of a dual classification nor to unique or exclusive forms of reciprocity or functional complementarity. Exploring these issues through original ethnographic studies of numerous Keo domains and settlements, the book is of critical relevance not just to dualism, but to a variety of continuing concerns in contemporary social anthropology, including the concept of 'descent', the social construction of inequality, and connections between ritual practice (especially animal sacrifice), and social order.
Inbunden, Engelska, 1991
2 290 kr
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Of Mixed Blood is an ethnography of the native people of the Bajo Urubamba river in Peruvian Amazonia.The people of this region appear very acculturated when compared to better-known indigenous Amazonian peoples. Peter Gow's analysis focuses on features of social organization which would seem to demonstrate this most clearly: the role of schools and recent land reform laws in the definition of the community, and native people's claim to be `of mixed blood'.By stressing that these claims are made by native people themselves, he challenges the dominant vision of them as passive victims of history. Dr Gow argues that when native people's claims are viewed from the perspective of their own values, and in the context of their creation of life through the productive transformation of the forest and the commodity economy, they can be seen to form a coherent part of kinship.Historical change is thus revealed as interior to the ongoing creation of kinship for native people, rather than alien to it. This study offers a new approach to the issue of historical and ethnographic analysis of Amazonian cultures.
Inbunden, Engelska, 1992
392 kr
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The Arabesk Debate describes the way in which Turkish musicians discuss, dispute, and attribute meaning to their music. Martin Stokes examines the debate over 'Arabesk', a musical genre popular throughout Turkey. His book is an ethnographic study of urban music-making in Istanbul, focusing on the activities of professional musicians and their audiences in the city.Dr Stokes looks at the Arabesk debate in the context of state cultural politics, Islam, and the experience of urbanization in Turkey. Within this context he discusses the role of the media, music education, the technology of popular music-making, the construction of gender and the emotions through musical performance, and concepts of musicianship in Turkish society.In looking at the interplay between national cultural politics and urban music-making at a local level, this book challenges both `mass culture' theory and more general assumptions about the study of music in society.
Inbunden, Engelska, 1992
923 kr
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Although the Jains have a religious history spanning two-and -a-half millennia Western scholars have shown little interest in them until recently. Drawing on fieldwork conducted among Jains in the Indian state of Gujarat and a migrant Gujarati Jain group in Leicester, England, Marcus Banks aims to provide an understanding of contemporary Jain identity through an examination of their social and religious organizations.The first part of the book describes the array of religious and caste organizations found among Jains in the Indian city of Jamnagar and how Jains from Jamnagar and elsewhere in Gujarat migrated to East Africa, transforming their organizations in the process. The second part looks at the new forms of organization that have developed among the Jains who came to Leicester from East Africa and the part these have played in changing perceptions of Jainism itself. Throughout the book Dr Banks plays special attention to the use and transformation of urban space by religious and other groups, and he concludes with comments on the definition of religion and religious identity.This is one of the first book-length studies of the Jains as a migrant group overseas, where they are studied in their own right rather than simply as an ethnic minority. It will be valuable both for its documentation of a small but influential population and for its direct comparison of aspects of communal and religious organization in India and the UK.
Inbunden, Engelska, 1991
2 240 kr
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In their previous book, Structural Models in Anthropology, anthropologist Per Hage and mathematician Frank Harary used graph theory, a branch of pure mathematics, to develop a family of models for the study of social, symbolic, and cognitive relations.In this book the authors extend these models and apply them to the analysis of exchange structures in Oceania, presenting graph theory in a form accessible to the non-mathematical reader. Using ethnographic data from Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, they demonstrate that the language, techniques, and theorems of graph theory provide the essential basis for the description, quantification, simulation, enumeration, and notation of the great variety of exchange forms actually found in Oceanic societies.
Inbunden, Engelska, 1995
1 839 kr
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Long-term migration is one of the most important factors in the formation of cultural identities in the modern world. Immigrant communities are usually studied in the context of the country people have migrated to; Katy Gardner, however, looks at the neglected `sending' side of the equation. In the sending communities, out-migration has become a central economic and social resource - the route to social, as well as physical, mobility, transforming those who gain access to it.Dr Gardner examines the cultural context and effects of the long-term migration from Bangladesh to Britain and the Middle East, drawing on her fieldwork in the Sylhet district,an area of exceptional migration. Major aspects of Bangledeshi life such as land, family structure, marriage and religion - all of which have been affected by the heavy out-migration - are covered in detail, and the transformation of the social structure is mapped.In focusing on local ideology, this book shows how local cultural meanings are constantly negotiated and contested by different groups in the context of rapid economic change. At the heart of this important contribution to the anthropology of migration is a presentation of the dynamic nature of migration and the concomitant possibility of self-transformation it holds for migrant cultures.
Häftad, Engelska, 1994
1 610 kr
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Religious rituals can provoke a deeply ambigious reaction in those who practise them. What happens in religious traditions when the nature of the ritual is questioned, but the practice of performing rituals is not itself abandoned? This book draws on the authors' observations of such reactions among Jains in western India, and asks why they can tell us about ritual as a universal mode of human action.Most anthropologists have assumed that ritual is a special kind of happening, which requires a special kind of interpretation. The authors argue that 'ritual' is a quality which can in principle apply to any kind of action. The question they try to answer is: what is distinctive about actions which are ritualized? They reject the common view that ritual carries intrinsic meaning, and explore the apparent paradox that ritualization, which makes action in an important sense non-intentional, is itself the result of an intentional act - the adoption by the actor of what the authors call the 'ritual commitment'.
Inbunden, Engelska, 1995
1 115 kr
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The urban civilization of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley provides a paradigm for the study of caste and Hindu kingship. In this book, six anthropologists, in a genuinely collaborative international endeavour, pool their knowledge of the three ancient Newar cities of Kathmandu, Lalitpur, and Bhaktapur, and settlements nearby. The social institutions of all the main case groups - priests, patrons, artisans, farmers, and low castes - are given extended consideration, and the study is framed by a historical introduction and a comparative conclusion. In addition, it is well illustrated with fascinating black and white photos which have been specially taken to illustrate aspects of the society under study.The result is the most complete description and analysis yet of a regional caste system. Located within wider theoretical debates surrounding the nature of caste, the book should appeal not only to students of Hinduism and South Asia, but to all anthropologists and comparative sociologists interested in the interrelations of politics, ritual, kinship, economy, and ideology in complex, pre-industrial societies.
Inbunden, Engelska, 1995
3 290 kr
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For the past thirty years, adherents of a millenarian cult in Papua New Guinea, known as the Pomio Kivung, have been awaiting the establishment of a period of supernatural bliss, heralded by the return of their ancestors bearing `cargo'. The author, Harvey Whitehouse, was taken for a reincarnated ancestor, and was thus able to observe the dynamics of the cult from within. From the stable mainstream of the cult, localized splinter groups periodically emerge, hoping to expedite the millennium; the core of this volume concerns the close study of one such group in two Baining villages.The two aspects of the cult studied here - on the one hand a large, uniform, and stable mainstream organization with a well-defined hierarchy demanding orthodoxy of views, and on the other hand a small-scale and temporary movement, emotional and innovative in its views - stand in sharp contrast one to the other, but are here seen as divergent manifestations of the same religious ideology, implemented in differing ways. This original theory of `modes of religiosity' which Whitehouse here develops draws on recent findings in cognitive psychology to link styles of codification and cultural transmission to the political scale, structure, and ethos of religious communities.
Häftad, Engelska, 1995
1 725 kr
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Landscape has long had a submerged presence within anthropology, both as a framing device which informs the way the anthropologist brings his or her study into "view", and as the meaning imputed by local people to their cultural and physical surroundings. A principal aim of this volume follows from these interconnected ways of considering landscape: the conventional, Western notion of "landscape" may be used as a productive point of departure from which to explore analogous ideas; local ideas can in turn reflexively be used to interrogate the Western construct.The Introduction argues that landscape should be conceptualized as a cultural process: a process located between place and space, foreground actuality and background potentiality, image and representation. In the chapters that follow, nine noted anthropologists and an art historian exemplify this approach, drawing on a diverse set of case studies. These range from an analysis of Indian calendar art to an account of Israeli nature tourism, and from the creation of a metropolitan "gaze" in nineteenth-century Paris to the soundscapes particular to the Papua New Guinean rainforests. The anthropological perspectives developed here are of cross-disciplinary relevance; geographers, art historians, and archaeologists will be no less interested than anthropologists in this re-envisaging of the notion of landscape.
Häftad, Engelska, 1995
1 610 kr
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How can one live by impossible ideals and values? The Jains of India are a flourishing and prosperous community, but their religion is focused on the teaching and example of ascetic renouncers, whose austere regime is actually dedicated to ending worldly life and often culminates in a fast to death. This book draws upon a detailed study of an urban Jain community in Jaipur, north-west India, to offer the fullest account yet given of Jain religious belief and practice. It shows how renunciation and asceticism play a central part in the life of a thriving business community, and how world-renunciation combines for Jain families with the pursuit of worldly happiness.The book is in five parts. Part I introduces the vivid mythology and doctrine of Jainism, and the traditions of Jain renouncers. Part II discusses the relations of Jains with other groups in Indian society, the politics of leadership on Jain communities, and the history, character, and composition of the Jain community in Jaipur. Part III contains detailed analyses of lay ascetic practices such as fasting and confession, traditions of imagery and iconography, and key religious ideas, such as the paradoxical doctrine of 'non-violence' (ahimsa). These are shown to turn on complex conceptions of the body and contrasting moral topographies of self. Part IV concerns relations between lay Jains and renouncers, and draws on recent writing on exchange and value to analyse the pivotal place of alms-giving in the Jain religion. Part V describes some of the closest connections between riches and renunciation, and shows how the pan-Indian festival of Diwali is adapted to distinctively Jain values and concerns.
Häftad, Engelska, 1997
1 668 kr
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Janet Carsten offers a vivid and original investigation of the nature of kinship in Malaysia, based upon her own experience of life as a foster daughter in a family on the island of Langkawi. Kinship relations are crucial to personal and social identity, and in Malay culture identity is mutable and fluid: it is given at birth through ties of procreation, but it is also acquired throughout life by living together and sharing food. The author shows that the heat of the hearth is not only necessary for cooking and sharing food, but central to domestic life, including childbirth and reproduction. Kinship is a process not a state; people become kin largely through the everyday actions of women in and between households. The incorporation and assimilation of newcomers--`making kinship'--is central to the social reproduction of the village communities; domestic life is thus central to the political process. Janet Carsten gives the reader a fascinating `anthropology of everyday life', including a compelling view of gender relations; she urges reassessment of recent anthropological work on gender, and a new approach to the study of kinship.
Häftad, Engelska, 1995
381 kr
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For the past thirty years, adherents of a millenarian cult in Papua New Guinea, known as the Pomio Kivung, have been awaiting the establishment of a period of supernatural bliss, heralded by the return of their ancestors bearing `cargo'. The author, Harvey Whitehouse, was taken for a reincarnated ancestor, and was thus able to observe the dynamics of the cult from within. From the stable mainstream of the cult, localized splinter groups periodically emerge, hoping to expedite the millennium; the core of this volume concerns the close study of one such group in two Baining villages.The two aspects of the cult studied here - on the one hand a large, uniform, and stable mainstream organization with a well-defined hierarchy demanding orthodoxy of views, and on the other hand a small-scale and temporary movement, emotional and innovative in its views - stand in sharp contrast one to the other, but are here seen as divergent manifestations of the same religious ideology, implemented in differing ways. This original theory of `modes of religiosity' which Whitehouse here develops draws on recent findings in cognitive psychology to link styles of codification and cultural transmission to the political scale, structure, and ethos of religious communities.
Häftad, Engelska, 1996
1 316 kr
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Shamans and Elders is a major study of Mongolian shamanism and society, past and present. It presents a wealth of new information, and offers a fresh understanding of the widespread phenomenon of shamanism.This unique and detailed analysis of a fascinating subject combines a discussion of Urgunge Onon's memories of shamanism with Caroline Humphrey's text- and field-based analytical knowledge of Central and North Asian shamanism. It covers among other things: notions of gender in Mongolian society, including male and female traditions in ritual, female shamans, and goddess worship; attitudes to death, and funeral rituals; the importance of old men and of ancestors; and Daur notions of landscape within their direct experience (the importance of the sky, of the mountains, of the forest, rivers, etc.) and beyond.In covering these diverse areas, the authors depart from the general cultural models usually offered in discussions of shamanism, providing a new vision of 'shamanism' as made up of fragmentary, non-formularized parts. It presents much-needed insight on a little-known world, and points to an original new way of doing anthropology.
Inbunden, Engelska, 1996
3 369 kr
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Sea Hunters of Indonesia is a comprehensive study of the coastal community of Lamalera, whose traditional ways of life make it unique. One is an unusual kind of sea-fishing: the hunting of whales, porpoises, and giant manta rays. The other is the production, by the women of the community, of remarkable fine dyed textiles.Recently these traditions have come under intense pressure from external economic influences, and the people of Lamalera are starting to move into modern occupations. The community, famous for the beauty of its setting as well as for its crafts, is now a major tourist attraction, and it may now survive only as part of the tourist industry.At this crucial point in the history of the region, R. H. Barnes offers a richly detailed and beautifully illustrated picture of the culture and economy of Lamalera, the fruit of many years' study. He records all aspects of life in Lamalera, and places it in the broader context of the past, present, and future of Indonesia as a whole.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2000
3 156 kr
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This is a study of continuity and change in rural France based on fieldwork carried out over a period of 25 years, and on historical documents spanning more than 300 years. Producer co-operatives have existed in Franche-Comté since the thirteenth century. Communities there, unlike modern English villages, are highly corporate. Robert Layton explores the relationships between inheritance rules, management of common land, household labour, and inter- household relations, as well as the impact on villages of national politics and economy. Comparison with other regions of Western Europe allows a reinterpretation of the eighteenth-century enclosures in England. Layton presents a dialogue between ethnography and social theory, and argues for a revision of the theories of Marx, Giddens, and Bourdieu so as to better explain the mechanisms of continuity, change, and adaptation in social life.
Häftad, Engelska, 2002
749 kr
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This is a first-hand account of a reindeer-herding collective in the remote Taimyr peninsula of Siberia. The author gives an intimate description of the day-to-day lives of a little-known group of Evenkis as they face both economic and ecological challenges. His book therefore fills a gap in our understanding of the historical and political dynamics of northern Asia, and traces the changes caused in the region by the formation of, and the recent break-up of, the Soviet Union. It also addresses wider questions of ecological theory, nationalism, and the formation of identity. Professor Anderson's idea of `nationality inflation' provides a valuable new perspective on these topics. He shows how the Soviet state contributed to this `inflation' through its creation of `authorized identities' and suggests how identity policy and the discourse it generated became a powerful historical force integrating the social dynamics of economy, politics, and culture.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2002
3 149 kr
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Catherine Alexander charts how Turkish people, both within and outside the state bureaucracy, attempt to personalise the impersonality of the state. Based on a detailed study of the nationalized Turkish Sugar Corporation, she considers how people from the highest levels of the state bureaucracy to farming villages understand 'the state', and how, in turn, they imagine themselves to be perceived. The narratives and metaphors used in these constructions draw on resources close to hand such as the material organization of state factory compounds, state personnel encountered in the course of everyday life, and the image of the family structure. By also exploring notions of state and personhood within the highest echelons of the administration itself, Alexander shows how ideas of 'the state' recede once one is actually 'within'. For officials the state becomes other institutions and Ministries with which they have little contact. The continual process of striving to make connections with other groups and people occurs both at all hierarchical levels of the Sugar Corporation and between farmers and factory engineers. This elegant, nuanced ethnography of modernity will cause scholars of state institutions across a broad range of disciplines radically to rethink what 'the state' actually is, and the relations that create it, thus taking understandings of the state to an entirely new level.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2004
2 856 kr
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Sigrid Rausing describes the changing world of the Estonian Swedes, and the way in which this minority identity was constructed in the various ideologies that have dominated the region since the early twentieth century. In particular she is concerned with the latest of these changes: the post-Soviet attempt to 'restore' Swedish cultural identity. Rausing touches on a wide range of issues, debates, and insights: the relationship between ideology and form, nationalist and Soviet notions of ethnicity and traditional culture and historically-framed notions of an imagined normality. The ethnographic location for these discussions is a particular former collective farm, now subject to economic decline, the Estonian nation-building ideological project, and new relationships of dependency with Sweden. One of the author's central arguments is that these changes reflect a conscious attempt to 'reform habitus' so as to match that of the local image of the West, but that the location of ethnic culture and many of the operative concepts still reflect the tropes of the Soviet era.