SpringerBriefs in Anthropology – serie

​Ethics and Rock Art: Images and Power addresses the distinctive ways in which ethical considerations pertain to rock art research within the larger context of the archaeological ethical debate. Marks on stone, with their social and religious implications, give rise to distinctive ethical concerns within the scholarly enterprise as different perceptions between scholars and Native Americans are encountered in regard to worldviews, concepts of space, time, and in the interpretation of  the imagery itself.  This discourse addresses issues such as the conflicting paradigms of oral traditions and archaeological veracity, differing ideas about landscapes in which rock art occurs, the intrusion of “desired knowledge”, and how the past may be robbed by changing interpretations and values on both sides. Case studies are presented in regard to shamanism and war-related imagery. Also addressed are issues surrounding questions of art, aesthetics, and appropriation of imagery by outsiders. Overall, this discourse attempts to clarify points of contention between Euro-American scholars and Native Americans so that we can better recognize the origins of differences and thus promote better mutual understanding in these endeavors.

This volume is the result of the many years the authors have spent conducting ethnographic field research with sex workers, conversing with other researchers, and, perhaps most importantly, developing a deep sense of empathy for the sex worker participants in the research as well as the colleagues who carry out this work with the goal of advancing social justice. They have a combined total of twenty-five years’ experience carrying out research with sex workers, and this extensive period of time has given them ample opportunity to reflect upon the topic of ethics. Sex work, defined as the exchange of sexual or sexualized intimacy for money or something of value, encompasses a wide range of legal and illegal behaviors that present researchers with key ethical challenges explored in the volume. These ethical challenges include:· Research methodology· Distinguishing research from activism· Navigating the politically and ideologically charged environments in which researchers must remain constantly attuned to the legal and public policy implications of their work· Possibilities for participatory sex work research processes· Strategies for incorporating participants in a variety of collaborative waysSex work presents a unique set of challenges that are not always well understood by those working outside of anthropology and disciplines closely related to it. This book serves an important function by honestly and openly reviewing strategies for overcoming these ethical challenges with the end goal of producing path-breaking research that actively incorporates the perspectives of research participants on their own terms. Ever attuned to the reality that research on sex work remains a deeply political act, Ethical Research with Sex Workers: Anthropological Approaches aspires to begin a dialogue about the meanings and practices ascribed to ethics in a fraught environment. Drawing upon a reviewof published scholarly and activist work on the subject, as well as on interviews with researchers, social service providers, and sex workers themselves, this volume is an unprecedented contribution to the literature that will engage researchers across a variety of disciplines, such as academics and researchers in anthropology, sociology, criminal justice, and public health, as well as activists and policymakers.

​ This volume offers a new perspective on social dynamics and culture change in the North Central European Plains (NCEP) from 600 to 900 CE. It discusses long-term causal processes leading to the formation of state at the fringes of the Merovingian and Frankish Kingdoms, the Carolingian and the Holy Roman Empire, the Scandinavian Kingdoms, the Czech Kingdom, and the Kingdom of Rus. The central problem addressed is how to account for and explain the transition from noncomplex to supra-tribal polities between 600 and 900 CE. The examined evidence shows that a very basic community-level management of common pool resources seems a successful strategy to manage short term risk and may lead to sustainable higher level political organization. In conclusion it present a models of social dynamics of the NCEP, 600-900 CE that suggests that the state formation process was an outcome of spontaneous processes and deterministic factors occurring within a period of approximately 400 years, of which the last two hundred years (800-900 CE) were the most critical.  In a broader context, the point discussed is that decisions with short-term goals have long-term consequences.

This volume explores the forms of knowledge generated by exoticizing the subject studied. It analyzes monogamy in Western cultures from a cultural distance. First, from the cultural perspective of a Kenyan writer who underlines the moral evils unwittingly generated by a system imposing universal monogamy and generating annual cohorts of illegitimate children. Then, the essay considers the case of France, which, starting in the 1970’s, changed its laws regarding children born out of wedlock. Such children have now become legitimate. Unwittingly, this has allowed for polygyny or polyandry to become legal options for French males and females. The analysis is further extended to Western Europe, two Latin American nations and to the contemporary U.S.A. with its polyamory movement, where legal outcomes similar to those of France have occurred.The volume examines monogamy by using the epistemological approach that is typically used in the anthropological study of cultures other than one’s own, showing how exotic and strange the system of monogamy can look, when observed from afar, from the eyes of many non-Westerners. It gives insight into planes of the human Western experience that would normally remain invisible. Students and teachers will delight in the close-to-home debates stimulated by this evocative thought-provoking essay.

The goal of this monograph is to emphasize with empirical data the complexity of the relationship between climate change and violence. Bioarchaeology is the integration of human skeletal remains from ancient societies with the cultural and environmental context. Information on mortality, disease, diet and other factors provide important data to examine long chronologies of human existence, particularly during periods of droughts and life-threatening climate changes. Case studies are used to reconstruct the responses and short and long-term adaptations made by groups before, during and after dramatic changes in weather and climate. Interpersonal and group violence is also analyzed. The authors find that while in some cases there is an increase in trauma and violence, in other cases there is not. Human groups are capable of avoiding violent altercations and increasing broad networks of cooperation that help to mitigate the effects of climate change. A case study from the U.S. Southwest is provided that shows the variable and surprising ways that ancient farmers in the past dealt with long term droughts.

In this monograph, the ethical implications of engaging in research with vulnerable populations is explored and demonstrates how Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) both enhances the research while addressing these ethical complexities. Although CBPR encompasses different levels of community engagement, in general, the participants, or co-researchers, are involved in the formulation of the research questions and methodologies because they are central to the conversation about what should be researched and how. Participants are directly involved in formulating the study problems and finding solutions, and usually the goal is to create social change that can be applied to and potentially transform the community.Learning with Women in Jail: Creating Community Based Participatory Research  documents the research process to better understand the causes for incarceration and recidivism.The study used a (CBPR) framework so that the people who had directly experienced incarceration would lead the research as much as possible, from framing the research questions and methodologies to data capture and analysis. ​

This open access book describes methods for research on and research through design. It posits that ethnography is an appropriate method for design research because it constantly orients itself, like design projects, towards social realities. In research processes, designers acquire project-specific knowledge, which happens mostly intuitively in practice. When this knowledge becomes the subject of reflection and explication, it strengthens the discipline of design and makes it more open to interdisciplinary dialogue. Through the use of the ethnographic method in design, this book shows how design researchers can question the certainties of the everyday world, deconstruct reality into singular aesthetic and semantic phenomena, and reconfigure them into new contexts of signification. It shows that design ethnography is a process in which the epistemic and creative elements flow into one another in iterative loops. The goal of design ethnography is not to colonize the discipline of design with a positivist and objectivist scientific ethos, but rather to reinforce and reflect upon the explorative and searching methods that are inherent to it. This innovative book is of interest to design researchers and professionals, including graphic artists, ethnographers, visual anthropologists and others involved with creative arts/media.

This book reviews the evolutionary forces behind sex differences in fear responses and, crucially, delves into the mechanisms through which sexual selection might have driven sex differences in connection with fear. Fear is an evolved mechanism that helps us stay alive, but is also an emotion experienced more intensely, more frequently, and longer in women than in men. This book therefore asks the following question: Why might evolution have made women more motivated than men to avoid danger? It provides an overview of the brain areas underpinning the experience of fear and evaluates the evidence that these areas manifest sex-specific differences in their structure and function. Given its scope, the book will be essential reading for anyone interested in an evolutionary perspective on psychological sex differences.

This open access book includes socio-anthropological and anthropo-sociological conversations between one of the world’s leading anthropologists, Thomas Hyland Eriksen, and a young scholar, using his groundbreaking "overheating" approach.This book includes socio-anthropological and anthropo-sociological conversations between one of the world’s leading anthropologists, Thomas Hyland Eriksen, and a young scholar, using his groundbreaking "overheating" approach. From the pandemic to the spread of nationalism, from the Anthropocene to the Homogenocene, the authors discuss the most urgent issues of current society: e.g., the loss of biological and cultural diversity owing to the forces of globalisation; and the emergence of new forms of diversity through globalisation and migration; the intersectional dimension of climate change; the incredible rising of anger demonstrations around the world and resentful, overheated identities often linked to right-wing nationalism;the way digital devices have changed the meaning of temporality in people's life-worlds; the regulatory and competitive pressures on universities which are a result of many factors in the intersection of globalisation, massification and marketisation; youth's weakened belief in progress connected to changes in the contemporary world, such as growing inequality, political alienation and environmental destruction; recent pathbreaking research and original theory in sociology and anthropology related to the changes in an overheated world; and what post-Coronavirus social life might become. Highly topical, engaging and written in a conversational style, this book is a must-read for social scientists and discerning lay persons who want a fresh perspective on understanding the critical issues of our time.  This is an open access book.

This book presents a critical review of the ethics of conservation-related resettlement. We examine what has become known as the” parks versus people” debate, also known as the “new conservation debate,” which has pitted indigenous and other local people against nation states and social scientists against ecologists and conservationists for the past several decades. Aiming to promote biodiversity conservation and habitat preservation, some biologists, park planners, and conservation organizations have recommended that indigenous and other people should be removed from protected areas.Local people, for their part, have argued that residents of the areas that were turned into protected areas, national parks, game reserves and monuments had managed them in productive ways for generations and that they should have the right to remain there and to use natural resources as long as they do so sustainably. This position is often supported by indigenous rights organizations and social scientists, especially anthropologists. There are also some conservation-oriented NGOs that have policies involving a more human rights-oriented approach aimed at poverty alleviation, sustainable development, and social justice.The book discusses biodiversity conservation, indigenous peoples (those who are ethnic minorities and who are often marginalized politically), and protected areas, those categories of land set aside by nation-states that have various kinds of rules about land use and residence. The focus initially is on case studies from protected areas in the United States including Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Park, and Glacier National Park and on national monuments and historical parks where resettlement took place. We then consider issues of coercive conservation in southern Africa, including Hwange National Park (Zimbabwe), the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (Botswana), Etosha National Park, and Bwabwata National Park (Namibia), andKgalagadi Transfrontier Park (South Africa and Botswana). All of these cases involved involuntary resettlement at the hands of the governments.In the book we consider some of the social impacts of conservation-forced resettlement (CfR), many of which tend to be negative.   After that, we assess some of the strategies employed by indigenous peoples in their efforts to recover rights of access to protected areas and the cultural and natural resources that they contain. Examples are drawn from cases in Asia, Africa, and South America.  Conclusions are provided regarding the ethics of conservation-related resettlement and some of the best practices that could be followed, particularly with regard to indigenous peoples.

This innovative work tells the story of a unique partnership between a state prison administration and a team of incarcerated women, prison administrators, researchers, artists, and students known as The WoW Collective due to their joint efforts in developing a peer mentoring program called “Women’s Words/Women’s Worlds (WoW).” Using the example of WoW, the book provides a guide to doing community-based participatory research (CBPR) with women in prison that takes a collaborative—rather than the typically adversarial—approach to working together toward the goal of transformative social change. This book provides a ground-breaking example of how incarcerated women, prison administrators, researchers, and artists successfully worked together on a community-based project that led to meaningful results in the form of a peer mentoring program designed by women in prison for women in prison. Remaining closely attuned to the ethical dimensions of doing CBPR in a highly structured prison environment, this book provides inspiration to CBPR practitioners who seek to work within the criminal justice system to create real and meaningful change for the better. Co-authored by two criminologists, a senior prison administrator, and the unique collective known as WoW, this book provides both a clear step-by-step CBPR guide and a visionary approach to working with criminal justice practitioners.

This book presents an intimate portrayal of African migration through Mexico, based on a four-year longitudinal ethnography (2021-2025) conducted in Tijuana, Tapachula, and Mexico City. Through the lives of five African migrants, it explores the complex and ever-changing migration systems that shape their journeys, decisions, and ultimate destinations—be it the United States, Canada, a return to their home countries, or settling in Mexico. Each chapter delves into a migrant's life story, offering a nuanced examination of forced migration infrastructures, smuggling networks, and the unique vulnerabilities faced by women in the asylum system. It also highlights how gender roles, expectations, and intersectional inequalities influence mobility, protection, and belonging across borders. The narratives reveal a complex web of interactions with corrupt migration authorities, compassionate smugglers, activists, and researchers, all navigating the intricacies of migration regimes. This ethnographic approach provides readers with authentic, bittersweet accounts of contemporary migration trajectories across the Americas. It challenges preconceived notions, revealing that smugglers are not uniformly malevolent, researchers often extend beyond their academic roles, and migrants' decisions are frequently driven by factors beyond rational calculation. By illuminating these multifaceted realities, the book offers a profound understanding of the human experiences underlying current migration patterns in the region. It also provides the views and strategies of different actors, not only the migrants, but also other people sharing part of the migrants’ stories and making their journeys possible (e.g. researchers, smugglers and activists). Even though it originates from academic research, the tone and contents are intended to be accessible to anyone interested in the topic.

This book explores the challenges and opportunities that arise when high-tech innovation crosses cultural boundaries—and how it can be thoughtfully adapted before reaching the end user. Drawing on a real-world case of a European Virtual Reality (VR) training system prepared for deployment in Malaysia’s aerospace sector, this book investigates the cultural and cognitive translations necessary to ensure any design tool's success in a new context. Rather than documenting failure, it offers a blueprint for preventing it—by listening, adapting, and designing with local realities in mind. Drawing from ethnographic research, interviews, and human-centered design principles, this book explores the concept of anthropotechnology, aligning technology with local learning habits, social dynamics, and cultural expectations. It introduces the concept of the Anthropotechnological Islet, a bridging structure that enables imported systems to fit meaningfully into different environments before they are operationalized. The Islet is not a compromise between systems but a generative space for innovation that fosters cross-cultural adaptation and learning. This book is both a research monograph and a design manifesto. It tells the story of how a VR tool was reshaped—not just through technical refinement, but through cultural insight, institutional collaboration, and cognitive empathy. It offers practical guidance for those working in training, design, and technology transfer, especially in transnational or cross-cultural settings. In an increasingly globalized world, this book invites readers to rethink how we design for difference—early, intentionally, and with respect for local ways of knowing and learning.

This short book unites seven case studies from Africa, Europe, and the Americas to offer new solution-oriented ways of thinking about seemingly insurmountable social problems. These solution-oriented ways of thinking, as detailed in each of the seven case study chapters, emphasize how understanding the micro-dynamics of conflicts (and their rootedness in local sociocultural and associated institutional norms) is essential to developing ethical and pro-social responses to global social problems.

This work documents the impact that the Great Awakening had on the inhabitants of colonial America’s Southern Backcountry. Special emphasis is placed on how this religious revival furrowed the ground on which the seeds of the American Revolution would sprout. The investigation shows how the Great Awakening can be traced to the Europe’s Age of Enlightenment. This effort also demonstrates how and why this revival spread so rapidly throughout the colonies. Special focus is placed on how the Great Awakening impacted the mindset of colonists of the Southern Backcountry. Most significantly, this research demonstrates how this 18thcentury revival not only cultivated a sense of American national identity, but how it also fostered a colonial mindset against established authority which, in turn, facilitated the success of the American Revolution. Additionally, this investigation will document (from a cross-cultural perspective) how religious revivals have fueled other revolutionarymovements around the world. Such analysis will include the Celtic Druid Revolt, the Maji-Maji Rebellion of East Africa along with the Mad Man’s War in Southeast Asia. Lastly, the ethical ramifications of minimizing (or denying) the role that religion played in political and social transformations around the world will be addressed. This final point is of paramount importance given current trend in academia to minimize the role that religion played in spurring revolutions while emphasizing material (i.e. economic) causal factors. This attempt at divorcing religion from history is misguided and unethical because it is not only misleading but it also fails to fully acknowledge the beliefs and values that motivated individuals to take certain actions in the first place.

The concept of this volume is that the paradigm of European national languages (official orthography; language standardization; full use of language in most everyday contexts) is imposed in cookie-cutter fashion on most language revitalization efforts of Native American languages.  While this model fits the sovereign status of many Native American groups, it does not meet the linguistic ideology of Native American communities, and creates projects and products that do not engage the communities which they are intended to serve.  The concern over heritage language loss has generated since 1990 enormous activity that is supposed to restore full private and public function of heritage languages in Native American speech communities. The thinking goes:  if you do what the volume terms the "Lost Language Ghost Dance," your heritage language will flourish once more. Yet the heritage language only flourishes on paper, and not in any meaningful way for the community it is trying to help.   Instead, this volume proposes a model of Native American language revitalization that is different from the national/official language model, one that respects and incorporates language variation, and entertains variable outcomes.  This is because it is based on Native American linguistic ideologies.  This volume argues that the cookie-cutter application of the official language ideology is unethical because it undermines the intent of language revitalization itself:  the continued daily, meaningful use of a heritage language in its speech community.

Sex work continues to provoke controversial legal and public policy debates world-wide that raise fundamental questions about the state’s role in protecting individual rights, status quo social relations, and public health. This book unites ethnographic research from China, Canada, and the United States to argue that criminalization results in a totalizing set of negative consequences for sex workers’ health, safety, and human rights. Such consequences are enabled through the operations of an exclusionary regime, a dense coalescence of punitive forces that involves both governance, in the form of the criminal justice system and other state agents, and dynamic interpersonal encounters in which individuals both enforce and negotiate stigma-related discrimination against sex workers. Chapter Two demonstrates how criminalization harms sex workers by isolating their work to potentially dangerous locations, fostering mistrust of authority figures, further limiting their abilities to find legal work and housing, and restricting possibilities for collective rights-based organizing. Criminalized sex workers report police harassment, seizure of condoms, and adversarial police-sex worker relations that enable others to abuse them with impunity. Chapter Three describes how sex workers negotiate these restrictions on their rights and personal autonomy via their arrest avoidance and client management strategies, self-treatment of health issues, selective mutual aid, rights-based organizing, and entrenchment in sex work or other criminalized activities. Chapter Four describes how researchers working in countries or locales that criminalize sex work face ethical concerns as well as barriers to their work at the practical, institutional, and political levels.

​The science of human physical activity and fitness is ripefor a novel theoretical framework that can integrate the ecological, genetic,physiological and psychological factors that influence physical activity inhumans.  Physical inactivity dominates most developed nations around theworld, and is among the leading causes of disease burden and death worldwide. Despitethe wide array of physical and mental health benefits, few people get therecommended level of physical activity to achieve these benefits. Currentresearch on physical activity has not, as of yet, been successful for thedevelopment of effective exercise interventions. Several researchers haveadvocated a more integrative approach that takes evolutionary history intoaccount, but such a framework has yet to be advanced. To that aim, the firstgoal of this book is to present a comprehensive evolutionary and life historyframework that highlights the domain-specific aspects of the evolved psychologyand physiology that can lead to a more integrated and complete understanding ofphysical activity across the lifespan. It summarizes and extends previous workthat has been done to understand the ways natural selection has shaped physicalactivity in humans in traditional and modern economies and environments. In many ways, humans are adaptedto be physically active. Overall, however, natural selection has shaped aflexible, but energy conscious system that responds to environmental andindividual costs and benefits of physical activity to optimally allocate afinite energetic budget across the lifespan. This system is adapted to respondto cues of resource scarcity and high levels of obligatory physical activity, andconserves energy to favor allocation in ways that increase the likelihood ofreproductive success and survival. This nuanced application leads to a morethorough understanding of the circumstances that natural selection is predictedto favor both sedentary and active behaviors in predictable ways across thelifespan. The second goal of this book is to synthesizeand interpret cross-disciplinary research (from biological and evolutionaryanthropology and psychology; epidemiology; health psychology; and exercisephysiology) that can illuminate original approaches to increase physicalactivity in modern, primarily sedentary contexts. This includes a breakdown ofthe human lifespan to discuss the predicted costs and benefits of physicalactivity at each stage of life in order to differentiate the obstacles tophysical activity and exercise that are functionally adaptive—or were in theenvironments that they evolved—and identifying which factors are moremodifiable than others in order to develop interventions and environments thatare more conducive to physical activity. Normal0 falsefalsefalse EN-USJAX-NONE /* Style Definitions */table.MsoNormalTable{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;mso-style-noshow:yes;mso-style-priority:99;mso-style-parent:"";mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;mso-para-margin-top:0in;mso-para-margin-right:0in;mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;mso-para-margin-left:0in;line-height:115%;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

This volume explores the arts-based methodology of body mapping, a participant-driven approach wherein people create richly illustrated life-size maps that articulate their embodied experiences with various health issues. First developed in the global South as a means of community mobilization and advocacy regarding women’s health and HIV-related care needs, body mapping is now used by researchers, health practitioners, and community agencies globally to explore social determinants of health among diverse groups. However, the selective borrowing of certain tenets of the approach and the disregard for others in these studies raises the issue of cultural appropriation, and this is one of the key issues the explored. The second issue examined relates to the analysis of body mapping data, which remains an under-developed aspect of the methodology that the author addresses through the new mixed-method approach she created to more fully understand these arts-baseddata. Orchard also examines and seeks to explain the transformative nature of the body mapping research experience, for herself and the study participants. The data for this book come from an ethnographic study with HIV-positive women and men who struggle with addictions, HIV stigma, and historical traumas stemming from colonialism in two Canadian cities, including the beautiful body maps, individual interviews, and field notes. The author provides a compelling and deeply empathetic account of the powerful role that the arts, therapeutic practice, and human connection play in the production of research that yields rich data and can transform the lives of those involved.  Remembering the Body will be of interest to social science and health scholars, community agencies, and those in activist circles who are interested in using body mapping in their mindful academic and applied work.