Search

EmTech Anthropology: Careers at the Frontier emphasizes anthropology's critical role at the frontier of emerging technologies (EmTech). The book explores the opportunities and challenges that arise as anthropologists venture into the territory of EmTech, pushing the boundaries of traditional academic approaches and methodologies.By sharing the stories and insights of early to mid-career anthropologists working in AI, robotics, Web3, cybersecurity, and other cutting-edge fields, the book provides a possible roadmap for future practitioners seeking to make an impact in the world of EmTech. These anthropologists demonstrate how the discipline's unique perspective and skills can be applied to address the complex ethical, social, and cultural implications of emerging technologies.The volume showcases how anthropologists can act as visionaries, innovators, and early adopters, shaping the trajectory of EmTech towards more ethical, equitable, inclusive, and sustainable futures. It highlights the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, practical impact, and intervention in EmTech contexts while also acknowledging the need for anthropologists to challenge existing narratives and push the boundaries of the discipline itself.EmTech Anthropology: Stories from the Frontier serves as an essential resource for anthropologists, students, and professionals from related disciplines who are interested in exploring the frontiers of anthropology and emerging technologies. By offering a glimpse into the exciting possibilities and compelling insights that emerge when anthropology meets EmTech, the book inspires and guides the next generation of anthropological innovators.

Scene affiliations can be understood as socially produced and meaningful commonalities of action in style-specific practices. They are displayed, staged, stabilized, and disseminated in the respective style formations via material artifacts and their use, the body, and media forms of expression. Although the importance of artefacts, bodies and media for stylisation processes is continuously emphasised within youth culture and scene research, the systematic analysis of the material and medial dimensions of youth cultural action beyond the description of respective styles rarely comes into focus. Based on this observation, this volume aims to explore the question of which theoretical and methodological perspectives interdisciplinary youth culture and scene research can use to adequately understand the material and medial expressions of styles. The volume brings together contributions devoted to the significance of materiality and mediality in scenes from historical, social and cultural science, and psychological perspectives.The contentYouth culture theoretical perspectives on mediality and materiality - Formations of style via media - Formations of style via artefacts - Formations of style via bodiesThe editorsTim Böder is a research assistant at the AG Jugend- und Schulforschung at the University of Duisburg-Essen.Dr. Paul Eisewicht is a research associate at the Institute of Sociology at the Technical University of Dortmund.Prof. Dr. Günter Mey teaches developmental psychology and qualitative research at the University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal.Prof. Dr. Nicolle Pfaff is a university lecturer at the Faculty of Education at the University of Duisburg-Essen.The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.

This book introduces students to cultural anthropology with an emphasis on environmental and evolutionary approaches, focusing on how humans adapt to their environment and how the environment shapes culture. It shows how cultures evolve within the context of people's strategies for surviving and thriving in their environments.This approach is widely used among scholars as a cross-disciplinary tool that rewards students with valuable insights into contemporary developments. Drawing on anthropological case studies, the authors address immediate human concerns such as the costs and consequences of human energy requirements, environmental change and degradation, population pressure, social and economic equity, and planned and unplanned change. Impacts of increasingly rapid climatic change on equitable access to resources and issues of human rights are discussed throughout. Towards the end of the book the student is drawn into a challenging thought experiment addressing the possible impacts of climatic warming on Middle America in the year 2040.All chapters conclude with'Summary,''Key Terms,'and'Suggested Readings.'This book is an ideal text for students of introductory anthropology and archaeology, environmental studies, world history, and human and cultural ecology courses.

This book is an important contribution to narrative research and highlights how narratives can produce social change. The author demonstrates this through an analysis of concepts like future, uncertainty and risk, both in terms of individual impact and as collective forms of social life. The book reconstructs the relationships between future, uncertainty and risk through everyday how narratives exert power over individual and social life by influencing individual or collective decisions and choices. Narratives also change future prospects, thus producing social change. Some of the examples the author draws out for discussion are - in specific - the narration of the migration flows in the Mediterranean Sea, and the narration of the pandemic emergency from COVID-19. The result of different narratives has been the emergence of new ideologies and of a complex series of dynamics in which the local ends up becoming global and vice versa. Highly topical and interdisciplinary in its approach, this book is of interest to researchers and students of the sociology of culture and communication, media and communication studies, social and cultural psychology and cultural anthropology.

This book explores the nature of cultural and culturally structured social and behavioral entities, their evolutionary interactions, and the central role purposive behaviors play in those interactions. It, first, makes the case for cultural and cultural structured systems being considered as true entities bounded in time and space, and not ephemera in a constant state of becoming another system. Second, it examines how these entities interact to produce evolutionary culture change. It then argues that the intent of purposive behaviors is reliably knowable in the aggregate, at least when dealing with expressions of behavioral tendencies in the animal kingdom, humans included. Finally, the book references well documented behavioral tendencies for examples of proximate causation in the evolution of settled village societies and, following that, socially complex societies. Through these efforts, the book synthesizes the various approaches to the evolution of culture and provides a completeand comprehensive picture of the process. It provides a corrective to the tendency to view cultural systems as entirely open ended and as capable of changing in any direction; and also to treating cultural evolution as solely a result of selective forces, that is, in terms of only ultimate causation. This book provides an engaging and critical counterview to established theories of cultural evolution and is of interest to scholars and students of different disciplines, from anthropology and archeology, to evolutionary biology and epigenetics.

Comment se transforment les contenus et les contenants sociaux du monde contemporain sous la pression de l'environnement? Les auteurs apportent des éclairages sur la dynamique des changements actuels où se mêlent nature, patrimoine et luttes sociales. Chacun avec sa spécialité, anthropologie, économie, géographie, histoire, apporte réflexions théoriques et analyses pratiques sur des terrains aussi variés que l'Argentine, la France, la Russie et la Roumanie. Cette dimension comparative et pluridisciplinaire trouve son intérêt dans la saisie d'une pluralité des modes d'internalisation des changements en cours.

The Anthropocene has become a field of studies in which the influence of human activity on the Earth System and nature is both the main threat and the potential solution. Social Representations Theory has been evolving since the 1960s.It links knowledge and practice in everyday life and is an effective way to deal with systemic crises based on common sense. This book assembles key contributions by Latin American scholars working with social representations in the social sciences that are of conceptual relevance to the study of the Anthropocene and that investigate the societal consequences of complex interrelations between common sense and topics of global relevance, such asthe contradictions of sustainable development, the construction of risks beyond risk-perception, health, negotiation and governance in the field of education, gender equality, the usefulness of longitudinal and systemic ethnography and case studies, and agency and the link between inequality, crises and risk society in the context of COVID-19, presenting theoretical and methodological innovations fromSpanish, Portuguese and Frenchresearchthat have rarely been available in English. •This is the first book to address the relevance of Social Representations Theory for the Anthropocene as a societal era•It presents the multidisciplinary scope of Social Representations•This book covers emerging research contributions in Social Representations Theory from Latin America•This book presents innovative research and commentaries by established researchers in the field•This multidisciplinary book should be in the libraries of many disciplines in the social sciences and humanities

First published in 1992. The Pacific Ocean is the largest geographical feature on the face of the earth, covering about one third of its entire surface. Occupying part of that large expanse are the far-flung islands of the Pacific. As the papers of this volume clearly indicate, the post-world war II era and decolonization have brought unprecedented change, and the Pacific is now experiencing problems that were formerly associated with other Third World nations. Most Pacific countries have rapidly expanding populations, and over half of all Pacific Islanders are now in their teenage years or younger. Education and modern communications have served to increase aspirations and attracted by hopes of employment and the distractions of urban life, islanders are gravitating to urban centers.

The fourteen lectures and essays that make up this volume deal mainly, though not exclusively, with Africa, and among the topics discussed are land tenure, chieftainship,'clientship', messianic movement, witchcraft, and'race, tribalism and nationalism'.

Work, Love, and Learning in Utopia breathes new life into the age-old human preoccupation with how to create a happier society. With a fascinating mix of research from cross-cultural psychology, macro history, and evolutionary biology, the book gives new credibility to the advocacy of radical equality. The author, a psychological anthropologist, argues that the negative emotions of sadness, anger, and fear evolved in tandem with hierarchy, while happiness evolved separately and in connection to prosociality and compassion. The book covers a wide range of human concerns, from economics and education, to media and communication, to gender and sexuality. It breaks new boundaries with its scope, arguing that equality of love is as important and possible as is economic equality. Its argument is provocative yet practical, and each chapter ends with concrete proposals that invite dialogue with any student of policy. Written in an easily accessible style, this book will appeal to anyone who has ever puzzled over how our social world could be remade. In particular, it will be very useful to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, and psychology.

This collection of essays in the honor of David Brokensha focuses on issues which had concerned him throughout his professional career as an anthropologist. He emphasized on combining indigenous perspectives and knowledge in development planning and on sustainable natural resource management.

Szenezugehörigkeiten können als in stilspezifischen Praktiken sozial hervorgebrachte und sinnstiftende Gemeinsamkeiten des Handelns verstanden werden. Sie werden in den jeweiligen Stilbildungen über materielle Artefakte und deren Gebrauch, den Körper sowie mediale Ausdrucksformen angezeigt, inszeniert, stabilisiert und verbreitet. Wenngleich die Bedeutung von Artefakten, Körpern und Medien für Stilisierungsprozesse innerhalb der Jugendkultur- und Szeneforschung kontinuierlich hervorgehoben wird, so rückt die systematische Analyse der materiellen und medialen Dimensionen jugendkulturellen Handelns über die Deskription jeweiliger Stile hinaus nur selten in den Blickpunkt. Von dieser Beobachtung ausgehend soll mit diesem Band der Frage nachgegangen werden, mit welchen theoretischen und methodischen Perspektiven eine interdisziplinäre Jugendkultur- und Szeneforschung die materiellen und medialen Ausdrucksformen von Stilen adäquat verstehen kann. Der Band versammelt Beiträge, die sich der Bedeutung von Materialität und Medialität in Szenen aus historischer, sozial- und kulturwissenschaftlicher sowie psychologischer Perspektive widmen.Der InhaltJugendkulturtheoretische Perspektiven auf Medialität und Materialität • Stilbildungen über Medien • Stilbildungen über Artefakte • Stilbildungen über Körper Die HerausgeberTim Böder ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter der AG Jugend- und Schulforschung an der Universität Duisburg-Essen.Dr. Paul Eisewicht ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Soziologie an der Technischen Universität Dortmund.Prof. Dr. Günter Mey lehrt Entwicklungspsychologie und qualitative Forschung an der Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal.Prof. Dr. Nicolle Pfaff ist Hochschullehrerin an der Fakultät für Bildungswissenschaften an der Universität Duisburg-Essen.

The essays address the cultural politics of our global present. They offer a contribution towards keeping the spirit of utopia alive by practicing it, promoting that the struggle for liberation may continue in an era whose landscape is not inhabited by the presence of great utopian constructs. The collection adapts the idea of utopia to the intercultural present using it as a metanarrative projected towards the future and rooted in local experiences and actions. The book presents an interdisciplinary and anti-canonical perspective, and methodological frames from Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Imagining social and cultural change outside hegemonic articulations of power is a practice of freedom opposed to the protective drive that raises borders and walls around potential islands to claim the right of keeping them isolated and self-sufficient.

Through nine ethnographic case-studies, Edges of Global Transformation explores situations where global transformations associated with neoliberalism meet local realities. The “edge” of transformation is characterized by uncertainty, as old patterns are consumed and new formed. The nine case studies from Africa, Europe and the Middle East shed light on how uncertainty plays an inevitable and essential role in the grey zone between macro-transformations and local responses. Despite the tremendous difference in precariousness between these cases, each contributor explores ways in which transformations are conceived and acted upon within the space of possibility that is opened and apprehended locally. The role of uncertainty as an active force is explored throughout the book. While in some cases, uncertainty has a clear restricting effect; other cases illustrate its potential as a productive force. As a contribution to understanding the dynamic of the local realities of global change, the book will be valuable reading for anyone interested in globalization and the neoliberal world order.

This book assesses how theorists explained processes of change set in motion by the rise of capitalism. It situates them in the milieu in which they wrote. They were never neutral observers standing outside the conditions they were trying to explain. Their arguments were responses to those circumstances and to the views of others commentators, living and dead. Some repeated earlier views; others built on those perspectives; a few changed the way we think. While surveying earlier writers, the author's primary concerns are theorists who sought to explain industrialization, imperialism, and the consolidation of nation-states after 1840. Marx, Durkheim, and Weber still shape our understandings of the past, present, and future. Patterson focuses on explanations of the unsettled conditions that crystallized in the 1910s and still persist: the rise of socialist states, anti-colonial movements, prolonged economic crises, and almost continuous war. After 1945, theorists in capitalist countries, influenced by Cold War politics, saw social change in terms of economic growth, progress, and modernization; their contemporaries elsewhere wrote about underdevelopment, dependency, or uneven development. In the 1980s, theorists of postmodernity, neoliberalism, globalization, innovations in communications technologies, and post-socialism argued that they rendered earlier accounts insufficient. Others saw them as manifestations of a new imperialism, capitalist accumulation on a global scale, environmental crises, and nationalist populism.

Community case studies are basic to anthropology, yet there are relatively few examples in which the promotion of social change has been the explicit goal of the research. The case studies included here are all'natural experiments'that involve long-term community-based research, close collaboration between researchers and representatives of the h

In recent years, digital technologies have become pervasive in academic and everyday life. This comprehensive volume covers a wide range of concepts for studying the new cultural dynamics that are evident as a result of digitisation. It considers how the cultural changes triggered by digitisation processes can be approached empirically. The chapters include carefully chosen examples and help readers from disciplines such as Anthropology, Sociology, Media Studies, and Science & Technology Studies to grasp digitisation theoretically as well as methodologically.

How may we characterize contemporary society in a world so complex? Can looking at the diverse paths followed by various cultures in the modern world generate useful new social scientific typologies, or must a different set of questions be posed in this era of globalization? What, in short, is the nature of modernity? These are some of the questions addressed by the contributors to Multiple Modernities.Following the theme in an earlier work edited by Shmuel Eisenstadt, Public Spheres and Collective Identities, this book challenges conventional notions of how the world has changed politically, socially, and economically. The authors consider the meaning of modernity in contexts as different as communist Russia, modern India, the Muslim world, Latin America, China and East Asia, and the United States. Miscegenation, transnational migration, technological developments, and changing communications have shifted the ground on which theories of society were once built; political system, diaspora groups, religion, and''classical''theories of modernity have to be reconsidered in a new context.Authors and chapters include: S.N. Eisenstadt,''Multiple Modernities''; Bjrn Wittrock,''Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition''; Johann P. Arnason,''Communism and Modernity''; Nilfer Gle,''Snapshots of Islamic Modernities''; Dale F. Eickelman,''Island and the Languages of Modernity''; Sudipta Kaviraj,''Modernity and Politics in India''; Stanley J. Tambiah,''Transnational Movements, Diaspora, and Multiple Modernities''; Tu Weiming,''Implications of the Jrise of'Confucian'East Asia''; Jrgen Heideking,''The Pattern of American Modernity from the Revolution to the Civil War''; and Renato Ortiz,''From Incomplete Modernity to World Modernity.''Written in clear and non-technical language for both a scholarly and general audience, this volume confronts the problem of just what constitutes the common core of modernit

This festschrift commemorates Julian H. Steward. The essays were contributed by former students, colleagues, and other anthropologists whose research or thinking has been influenced by him. There was no preconceived attempt to give the volume any greater sense of unity or to impose upon the contributors any restrictions as to subject matter. On the contrary, each author was urged to write on an anthropological topic of greatest current interest to himself. Many of the essays could be placed just as handily within a division other than the one to which they have arbitrarily been assigned in the book. This kind of interchangeability may reflect, in some measure, the interrelatedness of Steward's contributions to anthropological theory.The broad relevance of all the selections to Steward's work could reflect also the extent to which his interests continue to be reflected in the work of anthropologists influenced by him. It could also reflect a parallelism of theoretical concerns within the profession that stem from the cultural ambience that produced Steward himself. Parallelisms and convergence are aspects of the kind of cultural determinism which has claimed Steward's attention during the many years that he fought a fairly lonely battle to establish the respectability of evolutionism in anthropology. Now that respectability has been achieved--with an almost bandwagon fervor--it is clear that Steward, as much as anyone else in anthropology, was'responsible'for the change.The essays in this collection are at once a vindication of his patience, an evidence of the high status he enjoys among anthropologists, and a testimony to the impact of his unusual creativity on his colleagues.

This book deals with one of the most pressing social and environmental issues that we face today. The transition to a post-carbon society, in which the consumption of fossil fuels decreases over time, has become an inevitability due to the need to prevent catastrophic climate change, the increasing cost and scarcity of energy, and complex combinations of both of these factors. As the authors point out, this will not only entail political adjustments and the replacement of some technologies by others, but will be accompanied by social and cultural changes that bring about substantial modifications in our societies and ways of life. This book examines whether the current conditions, which date back to the crisis that began in 2007, favour a benign and smooth transition or will make it more difficult and prone to conflict. It argues that, even if this transformation is unavoidable, the directions it will take and the resulting social forms are much less certain. There will be many post-carbon societies, the authors conclude, and any number of routes to social change. Transitioning to a Post-Carbon Society therefore represents a significant contribution to global debates on the environment, and is vital reading for academics, policymakers, business leaders, NGOs and the general public alike.

Changes in Censuses from Imperialist to Welfare States, the second of two volumes, uses historical and comparative methods to analyze censuses or census-like information in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Italy, starting in England over one-thousand years ago.

Marshall Sahlins (b. 1930) is an American anthropologist who played a major role in the development of anthropological theory in the second half of the twentieth century. Over a sixty-year career, he and his colleagues synthesized trends in evolutionary, Marxist, and ecological anthropology, moving them into mainstream thought. Sahlins is considered a critic of reductive theories of human nature, an exponent of culture as a key concept in anthropology, and a politically engaged intellectual opposed to militarism and imperialism. This collection brings together some of the world's most distinguished anthropologists to explore and advance Sahlins's legacy. All of the essays are based on original research, most dealing with cultural change - a major theme of Sahlins's research, especially in the contexts of Fijian and Hawaiian societies. Like Sahlins's practice of anthropology, these essays display a rigorous, humanistic study of cultural forms, refusing to accept comfort over accuracy, not shirking from the moral implications of their analyses. Contributors include the late Greg Dening, one of the most eminent historians of the Pacific, Martha Kaplan, Patrick Kirch, Webb Keane, Jonathan Friedman, and Joel Robbins, with a preface by the late Claude Levi-Strauss. A unique volume that will complement the many books and articles by Sahlins himself, A Practice of Anthropology is an exciting new addition to the history of anthropological study.

The world is overheated. Too full and too fast; uneven and unequal. It is the age of the Anthropocene, of humanity's indelible mark upon the planet. In short, it is globalisation - but not as we know it. In this groundbreaking book, Thomas Hylland Eriksen breathes new life into the discussion around global modernity, bringing an anthropologist's approach to bear on the three interrelated crises of environment, economy and identity. He argues that although these crises are global in scope, they are perceived and responded to locally, and that contradictions abound between the standardising forces of information-age global capitalism and the socially embedded nature of people and local practices. Carefully synthesising the ethnographic and comparative methods of anthropology with macrosocial and historical material, Overheating offers an innovative new perspective on issues including energy use, urbanisation, deprivation, human (im)mobility, and the spread of interconnected, wireless information technology.

Sociologist-lawyer Larry D. Barnett advances the macrosociological thesis that, in nations that are structurally complex and democratically governed, concepts and doctrines of law on society-central social activities are fashioned by society-level conditions, not by particular (or even prominent) individuals. Because a substantial body of social science research has found that law in a modern nation does not have a large, permanent effect on the frequency of such activities, the book contends that the content of law on the activities is a product, not a determinant, of the society in which the law exists. Explaining Law bolsters this contention with several original studies, and illustrates types of quantitative evidence that can be used to build a macrosociological theory of law.

This volume, the first major study in its field, offers an invaluable stepping-stone to a more informed understanding of the fundamental social changes taking place in Asia – defined as ‘a reconstruction of the intimate and public spheres'. Such changes are being observed worldwide, but previous studies relating to this phenomenon are largely based on Western experiences dating back to the 1970s. Developments in Asia, however, are manifesting both similarities and differences between the two regions. The book's strongest appeal, therefore, lies in its theoretical orientation, seeking to define frameworks that are most relevant to the Asian reality. These frameworks include compressed and semi-compressed modernity, familialism, familialization policy, unsustainable society, the second demographic dividend, care diamonds, and the transnational public sphere. Such concepts are seen as essential in any discussion concerning the intimate and public spheres of contemporary Asia. Accordingly, Transformation of the Intimate and the Public in Asian Modernity can be seen as a valuable text as well as a work of reference and will be welcomed by social scientists and cultural anthropologists alike.The book comprises an in-depth introduction and ten chapters contributed by scholars from Japan, Korea, Thailand and Canada covering topics ranging from low fertility, changing life course, increasing non-regular employment, care provision, migrant workers, social policies, and family law, to the activities of transnational NGOs, with a special focus on distinctive features of Asian experiences.

Once celebrated as a model development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction as the nation's suicide capital, with suicide rates soaring to triple the national average since 1990. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand this crisis to be the bitter fruit borne of these historical struggles and the aspirational dilemmas they have produced in everyday life. Suicide, therefore, offers a powerful lens onto the experiential and affective dimensions of development and global change in the postcolonial world.In the long shadow of fear and uncertainty that suicide casts in Kerala, living acquires new meaning and contours. In this powerful ethnography, Jocelyn Chua draws on years of fieldwork to broaden the field of vision beyond suicide as the termination of life, considering how suicide generates new ways of living in these anxious times.

The new mobilities paradigm has yet to have the same impact on archaeology as it has in other disciplines in the social sciences - on geography, sociology and anthropology in particular - yet mobility is fundamental to archaeology: all people move. Moving away from archaeology's traditional focus upon place or location, this volume treats mobility as a central theme in archaeology. The chapters are wide-ranging and methodological as well as theoretical, focusing on the flows of people, ideas, objects and information in the past; they also focus on archaeology's distinctiveness. Drawing on a wealth of archaeological evidence for movement, from paths, monuments, rock art and boats, to skeletal and DNA evidence, Past Mobilities presents research from a range of examples from around the world to explore the relationship between archaeology and movement, thus adding an archaeological voice to the broader mobilities discussion. As such, it will be of interest not only to archaeologists and historians, but also to sociologists, geographers and anthropologists.

Social Change in a Peripheral Society: The Creation of a Balkan Colony focuses on the nature of social change in peripheral societies, societies on the margins of the capitalist European world that have been absorbed by the dynamic industrial economies and turned into'colonial or'neocolonial societies. This book emphasizes the theory of an interdependent world-system dominated by core societies that subject, by direct or indirect means, peripheral societies. Studies on several peripheral societies, primarily those in the contemporary'third world, that are in the former colonies of Europe in Latin America, Asia, and Africa are also described. This text likewise explains the tremendous vitality of European capitalism by deliberating the difference between Ottoman and capitalist exploitation of Romania. This publication is beneficial to historians, economists, and anthropologists interested in the social change in peripheral society.

Macrosociology—the study of large-scale social structures and the fundamental principles of social organization—was the style of sociology practiced by the founders of the discipline. Today, the social theories of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Herbert Spencer (among others) are commonly studied as part of the history of the field, but, although the macrosociological approach that these thinkers advocated is still employed, it no longer dominates the discipline. Instead, sociologists typically adopt a narrower focus, specializing in areas such as social psychology, medicine, religion, or the study of social stratification. Examining the bigger picture is a task often left to public intellectuals. Sociocultural Systems aims to reinstate macrosciology as the heart of the discipline by demonstrating that both classical and contemporary macrosociologists stand upon common ground. Focusing on the broad issues that concerned the founders, Elwell addresses questions such as: Historically, what factors accounted for the origin, survival, and evolution of sociocultural systems? Why were some societies more technologically advanced than others? What is the origin of capitalism? What factors determine the allocation of goods and services within and among societies? What effects do changes in government and economic institutions have on communities? Elwell argues that, as evolution does for biology, the macrosociological paradigm offers an analytical strategy that can be used both to guide and prioritize research in all of the myriad specialties within sociology and to lay forth an orderly body of knowledge for students. Clearly articulating important sociological principles, Sociocultural Systems provides a critical understanding of social institutions and issues, while also furnishing a framework for possible solutions to the perennial social crises that are part and parcel of the development of human societies.

Development Begins at Home: Problems and Prospects of the Sociology of Development examines the challenges posed by development to the field of sociology. The book first reviews colonialism and the emergent One World in terms of the history of ideas; discusses attitudes towards development; and examines the definitions of development. These are followed by separate chapters on the contributions of sociology to development studies. The considerable wealth of sociology in dealing with change and, to a lesser extent, with development is identified. Subsequent chapters examine points of departure for current and prospective work in the sociology of development. One is the profile of underdevelopment, sociologically understood, along with the matching configuration of development goals. Another is the true meaning of social development, as opposed to economic development. The main finding is that development may well cause the general outlook of sociology to change. The prospect is for a sociology of human dignity in the social nexus.

State capitalism is back. It never went away. This book looks at the role of state capitalism in major European and Asian societies. It confronts neo-liberal pieties about the role of markets and private property in capitalist development and radical accounts which see the state as the antithesis of capitalism. State capitalism is a normal form of capitalist development. Its extremes may vary but it has been, and remains, central to an understanding of modern capitalism. This is especially the case in the so called Communist and Communist worlds of Russia and China, and for alternative economies like that of India and the Philippines, which are the focus of this timely and challenging book.

Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics is a theoretically informed reconceptualization of museum ethics discourse as a dynamic social practice central to the project of creating change in the museum. Through twenty-seven chapters by an international and interdisciplinary group of academics and practitioners it explores contemporary museum ethics as an opportunity for growth, rather than a burden of compliance. The volume represents diverse strands in museum activity from exhibitions to marketing, as ethics is embedded in all areas of the museum sector. What the contributions share is an understanding of the contingent nature of museum ethics in the twenty-first century—its relations with complex economic, social, political and technological forces and its fluid ever-shifting sensibility. The volume examines contemporary museum ethics through the prism of those disciplines and methods that have shaped it most. It argues for a museum ethics discourse defined by social responsibility, radical transparency and shared guardianship of heritage. And it demonstrates the moral agency of museums: the concept that museum ethics is more than the personal and professional ethics of individuals and concerns the capacity of institutions to generate self-reflective and activist practice.

This collection of works by critical sociologists of various nationalities focuses on cutting-edge approaches to conflict-driven social change. By emphasizing the role played by contemporary social movements such as environmentalists, migrant organizations, world social forum activists and others, these studies grapple with diverse forms of organized resistance in the 21st Century. From homeless peoples displaced by Hurricane Katrina to young Muslim women refusing to shun their veils in French schools, the logic of a new generation of protest is deciphered with an eye to learning from as well as informing new social forces demanding progressive change. The result is an affirmation of the continuing relevance of critical sociology in analyzing key social contradictions in the United States, Mexico, and beyond.

Many professionals in health, education, and community service roles are caught in a particular bind of identity—they live in a complex social borderland of credibility and professional authority while experiencing or having experienced the same discrimination, violence or trauma that they are committed to conquering. For some, the disclosure of their own stories of marginalization has become a tool for advocacy, for telling a larger truth; for others, self-disclosure is a more personal action, intended to assist isolated others in developing trust and connection. Linde Zingaro, a lifelong social service worker and activist, interviewed several colleagues who have chosen to speak out in this way, talking with them about their ethics and intentions, and collaborating to identify some of the risks of negative personal and professional consequences for the practitioner. She uses their voices—and her own—to illustrate some of the ways that these people have learned to safely and effectively use the transformative potential of storytelling as significant social action. This examination of speaking out as a meaningful social practice may help other workers, activists, and community researchers in their efforts to be heard in the interests of a more just society.

Following the routinization of assisted reproduction in the industrialized world, technologies such as in vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and DNA-based paternity testing have traveled globally and are now being offered to couples in numerous non-Western countries. This volume explores the application and impact of these advanced reproductive and genetic technologies in societies across the globe. By highlighting both the cross-cultural similarities and diverse meanings that technologies may assume as they enter multiple contexts, the book aims to foster understanding of both the technologies and the settings. Enhanced by cross-cultural perspectives, the book addresses the challenges that globalization presents to local understandings of science, technology, and medicine.

Who made Mama Raja ill? This question, buzzing around the village, starts off this anthropological study on healing performances in the context of religious change. The fascinating case is presented of a seriously ill woman of high standing in northwest Ayfat, located in the interior of the Bird's Head in West Papua. By unravelling the various explanations of the cause of the illness, and the path Mama Raja followed in search of healing, the author documents how, why, and when Papuan people make their choices in their search for healing.The study offers an ethnographically rich journey through the variety of healing methods in current Ayfat society: indigenous (obtained during female and male initiation rites), biomedical (the missionary hospital), and Christian (created by ritual healers since the coming of the missionaries). Likewise, the causes ascribed to illness range from sorcery, witchcraft, violation of ancestral or biblical rules, to biomedical conditions, a multiplicity of ways of understanding illness and healing that emerged in the context of religious change. Making choices among the variety of healing performances, and the creation of new performances, are shown to be dynamic processes.At the core are the innovative contributions of local healers, particularly women, who chose to create new performances in the face of religious change. Restoring the Balance looks at indigenous and Christian religious practices, and how people in northwest Ayfat have found a way to integrate the two and bring both sides into balance.This book will be hightly useful to anthropologists and others interested in Melanesian and eastern Indonesian cultures, healing, spiritual healing, or religious change. It would make an attractive case study for university courses at any level.

The story of how the feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves has been adapted and reworked by women of different cultures around the world.

Eating Spring Rice is the first major ethnographic study of HIV/AIDS in China. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research (1995-2005), primarily in Yunnan Province, Sandra Teresa Hyde chronicles the rise of the HIV epidemic from the years prior to the Chinese government's acknowledgement of this public health crisis to post-reform thinking about infectious-disease management. Hyde combines innovative public health research with in-depth ethnography on the ways minorities and sex workers were marked as the principle carriers of HIV, often despite evidence to the contrary.Hyde approaches HIV/AIDS as a study of the conceptualization and the circulation of a disease across boundaries that requires different kinds of anthropological thinking and methods. She focuses on'everyday AIDS practices'to examine the links between the material and the discursive representations of HIV/AIDS. This book illustrates how representatives of the Chinese government singled out a former kingdom of Thailand, Sipsongpanna, and its indigenous ethnic group, the Tai-Lüe, as carriers of HIV due to a history of prejudice and stigma, and to the geography of the borderlands. Hyde poses questions about the cultural politics of epidemics, state-society relations, Han and non-Han ethnic dynamics, and the rise of an AIDS public health bureaucracy in the post-reform era.

This book is the analysis of the civilizational and historical context of the development of the Great Modern Revolutions; their relations to modernity, to the civilization of modernity, and to the development of multiple modernities; and the fate of revolutionary symbolism and dynamics in modern regimes, in the continually changing civilization of modernity, its dynamics and tribulations.

What happens when economies'heat up'? This book looks at the 1990s, years of intense economic experimentation, when buzz words such as'network society','the experience economy','creative cities'and'glocalization'were everywhere. A fascinating perspective on'The New Economy'emerges as the authors explore the worlds of coolhunters, biotech brokers, career coaches, software entrepreneurs and event managers and tackle such questions as: - how is magic used in the quest for newness and change? - what happens when cultural techniques such as branding and styling colonize new arenas? - what turns out to be just a flash-in-the-pan and what has a lasting impact? This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand how economies operate in periods of rapid transformation.

This book presents findings based on a unique source of insight into the role of human values--the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey, covering 78 societies containing over 80 per cent of the world's population. The findings reveal large and coherent cross-national differences in what people want out of life.Four waves of surveys, from 1981 to 1999-2001, reveal the impact of changing values on societal phenomena. Evidence from eleven Islamic societies demonstrates that a distinctive Islamic culture exists-but the democratic ideal is endorsed overwhelmingly. Other analyses examine Gender Equality and Democracy; Corruption and Democracy; Social Capital in Vietnam; the Clash of Civilization; political satisfaction in global perspective; Trust in International Governance; and Israeli and South African values.

Inspired by Heidegger's concept of the clearing of being, and by Wittgenstein's ideas on human practice, Theodore Schatzki offers a novel approach to understanding the constitution and transformation of social life. Key to the account he develops here is the context in which social life unfolds—the'site of the social'—as a contingent and constantly metamorphosing mesh of practices and material orders. Schatzki's analysis reveals the advantages of this site ontology over the traditional individualist, holistic, and structuralist accounts that have dominated social theory since the mid-nineteenth century. A special feature of the book is its development of the theoretical argument by sustained reference to two historical examples: the medicinal herb business of a Shaker village in the 1850s and contemporary day trading on the Nasdaq market. First focusing on the relative simplicity of Shaker life to illuminate basic ontological characteristics of the social site, Schatzki then uses the sharp contrast with the complex and dynamic practice of day trading to reveal what makes this approach useful as a general account of social existence. Along the way he provides new insights into many major issues in social theory, including the nature of social order, the significance of agency, the distinction between society and nature, the forms of social change, and how the social present affects its future.

In this exciting and challenging work, Norman Long brings together years of work and thought in development studies to provide a key text for guiding future development research and practice.Using case studies and empirical material from Africa and Latin America, Development Sociology focuses on the theoretical and methodological foundations of an actor-oriented and social constructionist form of analysis. This style of analysis is opposed to the traditional structuralist/institutional analysis which is often applied in development studies.With an accessible mix of general debate, critical literature reviews and original case study materials this work covers a variety of key development issues. Among many important topics discussed, the author looks at commoditisation, small-scale enterprise and social capital, knowledge interfaces, networks and power, globalisation and localisation as well as policy formulation and planned intervention processes.This book should be read for its desire to pursue a form of analysis that helps us to understand better (and more realistically) the kinds of development interventions and social transformations that have characterised the second half of the twentieth century and will no doubt continue to characterise future development studies.

This book reexamines the interconnectedness of culture and creativity in an increasingly hybrid world. They argue that while many of the old certainties about high culture and artistic canons may now be disintegrating, culture and creativity themselves are still very much a reflection of social processes involving power and the control of resources. Case studies include youth subcultures in Europe; experimental theatre derived from the Brazilian candomblé dance; the role of memory in mythology among the Pukapukan of Polynesia; the evolution of football and polo in Argentina; gender relations in Algerian raï music; the notion of authenticity in artistic movements in Zanzibar; traditional and modern practices of the Lio in Indonesia; and kula exchange and social movements in the Trobriand Islands in the Pacific.

When forces of globalisation and local culture converge, distinctive social habitats are created. Drawing on case studies of South Asian, East African, Melanesian and European societies, Identity and Affect provides a contextual analysis of the formation and expression of local identities and of the affective self-constitution of social agents. The contributors examine in particular the growing fragmentation of social relations in these areas and the impact this is having on individuals and communities who, forced into an increasingly outward orientation, are initiating processes of cultural redefinition and social realignment. The different effects of colonialism on identity formation are examined in studies of communalism in Sri Lanka, untouchables in India, cargo cults in New Guinea and the substitution of food exchange for cannibalism in Kaluana. Focusing on Italians in London and south Asians in East Africa, the formation and experience of belonging to cultural diaspora is explored from the perspective of the individual and the social collectivity. The authors conclude with an exploration of some of the defining experiences of modernity, specifically how individuals in industrial capitalist societies have come to see their identity as dependent on modern forms of industrial, public sector work.

Readings in the Sociology of Migration deals with migration as a sociological problem, with greater emphasis on internal migrations than on international migrations. Some of the problems covered by sociological inquiry in the study of migration are discussed, along with theories of migration such as the push-pull theory, differential migration, and motivation for migration. This book is comprised of 16 chapters and opens by outlining types of migration according to the professional and social composition of migrants: mass migration, economic migration from an underdeveloped country, economic emigration from an industrial country, and immigration into an industrial nation. A general typology of migration is then presented before the problem of migration in various countries such as Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United States is considered. The final chapter presents preliminary findings from a demographic and socioeconomic sample survey of the population of the metropolitan area of San Salvador, El Salvador. This monograph will be a useful resource for sociologists and policymakers concerned with migration.

Readings in Social Evolution and Development presents a collection of articles on a specialized aspect of sociology, or social psychology. The book starts by describing social change and development and the role of institutionalization, individual behavior, and role performance on such change and development. The text also discusses the basic problems of evolutionary perspective in sociology and studies of development and modernization. The theories of social change, the problem of evolution, and the major trends of change in the contemporary setting, such as changes in the industrial societies and alternative courses of political development in the new states are also encompassed. Sociologists and social psychologists and students taking sociology courses will find the book useful.