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An ethnographic study based on decades of field research, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain explores five sacred journeys to the peaks of venerated mountains undertaken by Nahua people living in northern Veracruz, Mexico. Punctuated with elaborate ritual offerings dedicated to the forces responsible for rain, seeds, crop fertility, and the well-being of all people, these pilgrimages are the highest and most elaborate form of Nahua devotion and reveal a sophisticated religious philosophy that places human beings in intimate contact with what Westerners call the forces of nature. Alan and Pamela Sandstrom document them for the younger Nahua generation, who live in a world where many are lured away from their communities by wage labor in urban Mexico and the United States. Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain contains richly detailed descriptions and analyses of ritual procedures as well as translations from the Nahuatl of core myths, chants performed before decorated altars, and statements from participants. Particular emphasis is placed on analyzing the role of sacred paper figures that are produced by the thousands for each pilgrimage. The work contains drawings of these cuttings of spirit entities along with hundreds of color photographs illustrating how they are used throughout the pilgrimages. The analysis reveals the monist philosophy that underlies Nahua religious practice in which altars, dancing, chanting, and the paper figures themselves provide direct access to the sacred. In the context of their pilgrimage traditions, the ritual practices of Nahua religion show one way that people interact effectively with the forces responsible for not only their own prosperity but also the very survival of humanity. A magnum opus with respect to Nahua religion and religious practice, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain is a significant contribution to several fields, including but not limited to anthropology, Indigenous literatures of Mesoamerica, Nahuatl studies, Latinx and Chicanx studies, and religious studies.

The final destination of the Long March and center of the Chinese Communist Party's red bases, Yan'an acquired mythical status during the Maoist era. Though the city's significance as an emblem of revolutionary heroism has faded, today's Chinese still glorify Yan'an as a sanctuary for ancient cultural traditions. Ka-ming Wu's ethnographic account of contemporary Yan'an documents how people have reworked the revival of three rural practices--paper-cutting, folk storytelling, and spirit cults--within (and beyond) the socialist legacy. Moving beyond dominant views of Yan'an folk culture as a tool of revolution or object of market reform, Wu reveals how cultural traditions become battlegrounds where conflicts among the state, market forces, and intellectuals in search of an authentic China play out. At the same time, she shows these emerging new dynamics in the light of the ways rural residents make sense of rapid social change. Alive with details, Reinventing Chinese Tradition is an in-depth, eye-opening study of an evolving culture and society within contemporary China.

Arriving in Mexico less than a decade after the Spanish conquest of 1521, the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún not only labored to supplant native religion with Christianity, he also gathered voluminous information on virtually every aspect of Aztec (Nahua) life in contact-period Mexico. His pioneering ethnographic work relied on interviews with Nahua elders and the assistance of a younger generation of bicultural, missionary-trained Nahuas. Sahagún's remarkably detailed descriptions of Aztec ceremonial life offer the most extensive account of a non-Western ritual system recorded before modern times. Representing Aztec Ritual: Performance, Text, and Image in the Work of Sahagún uses Sahagún's corpus as a starting point to focus on ritual performance, a key element in the functioning of the Aztec world. With topics ranging from the ritual use of sand and paper to the sacrifice of women, contributors explore how Aztec rites were represented in the images and texts of documents compiled under colonial rule and the implications of this European filter for our understanding of these ceremonies. Incorporating diverse disciplinary perspectives, contributors include Davíd Carrasco, Philip P. Arnold, Kay Read, H. B. Nicholson, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Guilhem Olivier, Doris Heyden, and Eloise Quiñones Keber.

University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 130 This publication presents the first volume (Las Vegas) of the early ethnographic field work of anthropologist Isabel T. Kelly. From 1932 to 1934, Kelly interviewed thirty Southern Paiute people from southeastern California, southern Nevada, and southern Utah about “the old ways.” During this time, she filled thirty-one notebooks, made several maps, took roughly fifty photographs, collected nearly 300 ethnobotanical specimens, purchased and shipped over 400 ethnographic artifacts to museums, and traveled more than 7,000 miles. Her notes comprise the most extensive primary ethnographic documentation of Southern Paiute/Chemehuevi lifeways of the middle to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries existing today. Although Kelly intended to publish these notes, she was unable to before her death. Fowler and Garey-Sage have now synthesized the first set of these handwritten field notes and sketches, providing commentary and illustrations to put them in context for the modern reader. Kelly's data, most of which could not be gathered anew today, are offered here for the use of generations to come.

The result of nearly twenty years of interdisciplinary research, this volume contributes to the archaeological and paleoenvironmental knowledge of an important but lightly investigated hyperarid coastline at the heart of the Sonoran Desert. Focused on the coast near Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, Mexico, Coastal Foragers of the Gran Desierto examines the diverse groups occupying the coast for salt, abundant food sources, and shells for ornament manufacturing. The archaeological patterns demonstrated by the data gathered lead to the conclusion that, since ancient times, this coastal landscape was not a marginal zone but rather an important source of food and trade goods, and a pilgrimage destination that influenced broad and diverse communities across the Sonoran Desert and beyond. Contributors Jenny L. Adams Karen R. Adams Thomas Bowen Tessa L. Branyan Bill Broyles Richard C. Brusca David L. Dettman Michael S. Foster Gary Huckleberry Jonathan B. Mabry Natalia Martínez-Tagüeña Richard J. Martynec Douglas R. Mitchell Kirsten Rowell Melissa R. Schwan M. Steven Shackley R. J. Sliva Kayla B. Worthey

University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 127 The Prehistory of Gold Butte uses a theoretical perspective rooted in human behavior ecology and other foraging models to present the results of one of the largest and most comprehensive archaeological investigations ever undertaken in southern Nevada, involving the systematic survey of more than 31,000 acres, the documentation of more than 377 sites, and the excavation of nine prehistoric sites. Gold Butte—at the crossroads of the Mojave Desert, the Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau in southern Nevada—has a 12,000-year record of human occupation with archaeological elements that can be traced to all three culture zones. Dramatic developments occurred in this area of the Desert West. Farmers suddenly appeared in the Virgin River basin about 1,600 years ago. At such iconic sites as Lost City, Main Ridge, and Mesa House, full village and agricultural life developed over the span of a few hundred years only to completely vanish by AD 1250 after a series of droughts and other cultural disruptions. The Patayan held sway for several hundred years, between AD 1100 and 1500, but didn't advance much beyond the Colorado River corridor. Finally, the Southern Paiute arrived and occupied not only the Virgin River basin and Gold Butte but much of the northwestern quadrant of the Southwest from at least the time of historic contact (AD 1500) to the present. This mix of cultures illustrates historical contingency, inplace development, and external relationships that should be expected along a boundary area such as Gold Butte. By looking at hinterlands adjoining the prehistoric settlements that clustered along the Virgin River corridor before, during, and after the Puebloan period, the authors suggest that changes in settlement- subsistence and lifeways at core settlements along the riverine corridor have corresponding effects on the character and intensity of hinterland occupation.

The papers in this book question the tyranny of typological thinking in archaeology through case studies from various South American countries (Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil) and Antarctica. They aim to show that typologies are unavoidable (they are, after all, the way to create networks that give meanings to symbols) but that their tyranny can be overcome if they are used from a critical, heuristic and non-prescriptive stance: critical because the complacent attitude towards their tyranny is replaced by a militant stance against it; heuristic because they are used as means to reach alternative and suggestive interpretations but not as ultimate and definite destinies; and non-prescriptive because instead of using them as threads to follow they are rather used as constitutive parts of more complex and connective fabrics. The papers included in the book are diverse in temporal and locational terms. They cover from so called Formative societies in lowland Venezuela to Inca-related ones in Bolivia; from the coastal shell middens of Brazil to the megalithic sculptors of SW Colombia. Yet, the papers are related. They have in common their shared rejection of established, naturalized typologies that constrain the way archaeologists see, forcing their interpretations into well known and predictable conclusions. Their imaginative interpretative proposals flee from the secure comfort of venerable typologies, many suspicious because of their association with colonial political narratives. Instead, the authors propose novel ways of dealing with archaeological data.

This archaeological study of the interactions between Western Shoshone families and Euro-American ranchers in the late nineteenth century helps fill the gap between what is known regarding Late Prehistoric foragers of the American West and ethnohistoric understanding of Native American peoples of the Great Basin. Pottery Hill, an archaeological site located in Grass Valley, Nevada, northeast of the historic mining town of Austin, represents a small settlement of Native Americans who lived there in the late 1800s. The Grass Valley Shoshone, whose environment and traditional lifeways were disrupted by the arrival of miners and settlers in the 1860s, found work on the ranches and farms in the valley. Archaeological fieldwork conducted in the 1970s investigated house remains, hearths, and artifacts. A recent analysis of these data, enhanced by the use of archival documents and oral history, provides new insights into the dynamics of late nineteenth-century life in central Nevada. The Pottery Hill Site addresses a critical period in the history of the Grass Valley Shoshone, who adopted and modified Euro-American artifacts and materials while maintaining important aspects of their traditional culture. It gives readers a deeper understanding of the effects of Euro-American settlement on the Shoshone, the history of the western United States, and the reciprocal impacts of cultural contact.

This book presents a collection of double-blind peer reviewed papers under the scope of sustainable and resilient approaches for rebuilding displaced and host communities. Forced displacement is a major development challenge, not only a humanitarian concern. A surge in violent conflict, as well as increasing levels of disaster risk and environmental degradation driven by climate change, has forced people to leave or flee their homes – both internally displaced as well as refugees. The rate of forced displacement befalling in different countries all over the world today is phenomenal, with an increasingly higher rate of the population being affected on daily basis than ever. These displacement situations are becoming increasingly protracted, many lasting over 5 years. Therefore, there is a need to develop more sustainable and resilient approaches to rebuild these displaced communities ensuring the long-term satisfaction of communities and enhancing the social cohesion between the displaced and host communities. Accordingly, chapters are arranged around five main themes of rebuilding communities after displacement.Response management for displaced communitiesThe Built environment in resettlement planningGovernance of displacementSocio-Economic interventions for sustainable resettlement

Going Indian explores Indian (as opposed to tribal) ethnic identity among Native American people in Oklahoma through their telling, in their own words, of how they became Indian and what being Indian means to them today. Divided into four parts, the book features Oklahoma Indians'constructions of their histories and their view of today's native populations, their experiences with forced removals and Indian educational institutions, the meaning they place on blood quantum and ancestry in relation to Indian identity, and their practice of religion in Native churches. James Hamill makes extensive use of the Indian Pioneer and Doris Duke material at the University of Oklahoma's Western History Library to assemble these narratives, using interviews collected between 1937-38 and 1967-70, as well as interviews he conducted from 2000 to 2001. While most books on Native American people in Oklahoma focus on tribes and their histories, Hamill instead explores the use of Indian symbolism across a wide field of experience to reveal what they thought and what they think about these various issues, and how these have influenced and affected their self-perceptions over time.

Speaking with Pictures offers a path-breaking exploration of visual narratives in folk art. It foregrounds folk art's engagement with modernity by re-looking at its figurative modes and the ways in which they are embedded in mythic thought. The book discusses folk art as a contemporary phenomenon which is a part of a complex visual culture where the ‘essence'of tradition is best captured in a ‘new'form or medium. Each chapter picks up a theme that moves between the local and the global, thereby attempting to problematise the stereotypical view of folk artists as carriers of ‘timeless tradition'. The volume provides an ethnographic account of innovations through a detailed analysis of the scroll painting tradition of the patuas of West Bengal and the Pardhan-Gond style of Madhya Pradesh, highlighting some recent attempts at inter-medium exchange in storytelling.The book will interest those in visual and popular culture in anthropology, sociology, literary criticism and folklore. It will also be of immense value to art historians, museologists, curators and NGOs working in media and communication, apart from those with a general interest in folk art.

The Eyes of the World focuses on the lives and experiences of Eastern Congolese people involved in extracting and transporting the minerals needed for digital devices. The digital devices that, many would argue, define this era exist not only because of Silicon Valley innovations but also because of a burgeoning trade in dense, artisanally mined substances like tantalum, tin, and tungsten. In the tentatively postwar Eastern DR Congo, where many lives have been reoriented around artisanal mining, these minerals are socially dense, fueling movement and innovative collaborations that encompass diverse actors, geographies, temporalities, and dimensions. Focusing on the miners and traders of some of these “digital minerals,” The Eyes of the World examines how Eastern Congolese understand the work in which they are engaged, the forces pitted against them, and the complicated process through which substances in the earth and forest are converted into commodified resources. Smith shows how violent dispossession has fueled a bottom-up social theory that valorizes movement and collaboration—one that directly confronts both private mining companies and the tracking initiatives implemented by international companies aspiring to ensure that the minerals in digital devices are purified of blood.

Across the global South, poor women's lives are embedded in their social relationships and governed not just by formal institutions – rules that exist on paper – but by informal norms and practices. Village Ties takes the reader to Bangladesh, a country that has risen from the ashes of war, natural disaster, and decades of resource drain to become a development miracle. The book argues that grassroots women's mobilization programs can empower women to challenge informal institutions when such programs are anti-oppression, deliberative, and embedded in their communities. Qayum dives into the work of Polli Shomaj (PS), a program of the development organization BRAC to show how the women of PS negotiate with state and society to alter the rules of the game, changing how poor people access resources including safety nets, the law, and governing spaces. These women create a complex and rapidly transforming world where multiple overlapping institutions exist – formal and informal, old and new, desirable and undesirable. In actively challenging power structures around them, these women defy stereotypes of poor Muslim women as backward, subservient, oppressed, and in need of saving.

David Freidel and Linda Schele's monumental work A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya (1990) offered an innovative, rigorous, and controversial approach to studying the ancient Maya, unifying archaeological, iconographic, and epigraphic data in a form accessible to both scholars and laypeople. Travis Stanton and Kathryn Brown's A Forest of History: The Maya after the Emergence of Divine Kingship presents a collection of essays that critically engage with and build upon the lasting contributions A Forest of Kings made to Maya epigraphy, iconography, material culture, and history. These original papers present new, cutting-edge research focusing on the social changes leading up to the spread of divine kingship across the lowlands in the first part of the Early Classic. The contributors continue avenues of inquiry such as the timing of the Classic Maya collapse across the southern lowlands, the nature of Maya warfare, the notion of usurpation and “stranger-kings” in the Classic period, the social relationships between the ruler and elite of the Classic period Yaxchilán polity, and struggles for sociopolitical dominance among the later Classic period polities of Chichén Itzá, Cobá, and the Puuc kingdoms. Many of the interpretations and approaches in A Forest of Kings have withstood the test of time, while others have not; a complete understanding of the Classic Maya world is still developing. In A Forest of History recent discoveries are considered in the context of prior scholarship, illustrating both the progress the field has made in the past quarter century and the myriad questions that remain. The volume will be a significant contribution to the literature for students, scholars, and general readers interested in Mesoamerican and Maya archaeology. Contributors: Wendy Ashmore, Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase, Wilberth Cruz Alvarado, Arthur A. Demarest, Keith Eppich, David A. Freidel, Charles W. Golden, Stanley P. Guenter, Annabeth Headrick, Aline Magnoni, Joyce Marcus, Marilyn A. Masson, Damaris Menéndez, Susan Milbrath, Olivia C. Navarro-Farr, José Osorio León, Carlos Peraza Lope, Juan Carlos Pérez Calderón, Griselda Pérez Robles, Francisco Pérez Ruíz, Michelle Rich, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Andrew K. Scherer, Karl A. Taube

This book of conference proceedings contains papers presented at the Art and Design International Conference (AnDIC 2016). It examines the impact of Cyberology, also known as Internet Science, on the world of art and design. It looks at how the rapid growth of Cyberology and the creation of various applications and devices have influenced human relationships. The book discusses the impact of Cyberology on the behaviour, attitudes and perceptions of users, including the way they work and communicate. With a strong focus on how the Cyberology world influences and changes the methods and works of artists, this book features topics that are relevant to four key players - artists, intermediaries, policy makers, and the audience - in a cultural system, especially in the world of art and design. It examines the development, problems and issues of traditional cultural values, identity and new trends in contemporary art. Most importantly, the book attempts to discuss the past, present and future of art and design whilst looking at some underlying issues that need to be addressed collectively.

The essays collected in African Print Cultures claim African newspapers as subjects of historical and literary study. Newspapers were not only vehicles for anticolonial nationalism. They were also incubators of literary experimentation and networks by which new solidarities came into being. By focusing on the creative work that African editors and contributors did, this volume brings an infrastructure of African public culture into view. The first of four thematic sections, “African Newspaper Networks,” considers the work that newspaper editors did to relate events within their locality to happenings in far-off places. This work of correlation and juxtaposition made it possible for distant people to see themselves as fellow travellers. “Experiments with Genre” explores how newspapers nurtured the development of new literary genres, such as poetry, realist fiction, photoplays, and travel writing in African languages and in English. “Newspapers and Their Publics” looks at the ways in which African newspapers fostered the creation of new kinds of communities and served as networks for public interaction, political and otherwise. The final section, “Afterlives, ” is about the longue durée of history that newspapers helped to structure, and how, throughout the twentieth century, print allowed contributors to view their writing as material meant for posterity.

The Maya. The Romans. The great dynasties of ancient China. It is generally believed that these once mighty empires eventually crumbled and disappeared. A recent trend in archaeology, however, focusing on what happened during and after the decline of once powerful societies has found social resilience and transformation instead of collapse. In Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies, editor Ronald K. Faulseit gathers scholars with diverse theoretical perspectives to present innovative approaches to understanding the decline and reorganization of complex societies. Essays in the book are arranged into five sections. The first section addresses previous research on the subject of collapse and reorganization as well as recent and historic theoretical trends. In the second section, contributors look at collapse and resilience through the concepts of collective action, eventful archaeology, and resilience theory. The third section introduces critical analyses of the effectiveness of resilience theory as a heuristic tool for modeling the phenomena of collapse and resilience. In the fourth section, contributors examine long-term adaptive strategies employed by prehistoric societies to cope with stresses. Essays in the fifth section make connections to contemporary research on post-decline societies in a variety of time periods and geographic locations. Contributors consider collapse and reorganization not as unrelated phenomena but as integral components in the evolution of complex societies. Using archaeological data to interpret how ancient civilizations responded to various stresses—including environmental change, warfare, and the fragmentation of political institutions—contributors discuss not only what leads societies to collapse but also why some societies are resilient and others are not, as well as how societies reorganize after collapse. The implications of the fate of these societies for modern nations cannot be underestimated. Putting in context issues we face today, such as climate change, lack of social diversity, and the failure of modern states, Beyond Collapse is an essential volume for readers interested in human-environment interaction and in the collapse—and subsequent reorganization—of human societies.

Volumes 14 and 15 of the Handbook of Middle American Indians, published in cooperation with the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University under the general editorship of Robert Wauchope (1909–1979), constitute Parts 3 and 4 of the Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources. The Guide has been assembled under the volume editorship of the late Howard F. Cline, Director of the Hispanic Foundation in the Library of Congress, with Charles Gibson, John B. Glass, and H. B. Nicholson as associate volume editors. It covers geography and ethnogeography (Volume 12); sources in the European tradition (Volume 13); and sources in the native tradition: prose and pictorial materials, checklist of repositories, title and synonymy index, and annotated bibliography on native sources (Volumes 14 and 15). The present volumes contain the following studies on sources in the native tradition: “A Survey of Native Middle American Pictorial Manuscripts,” by John B. Glass “A Census of Native Middle American Pictorial Manuscripts,” by John B. Glass in collaboration with Donald Robertson “Techialoyan Manuscripts and Paintings, with a Catalog,” by Donald Robertson “A Census of Middle American Testerian Manuscripts,” by John B. Glass “A Catalog of Falsified Middle American Pictorial Manuscripts,” by John B. Glass “Prose Sources in the Native Historical Tradition,” by Charles Gibson and John B. Glass “A Checklist of Institutional Holdings of Middle American Manuscripts in the Native Historical Tradition,” by John B. Glass “The Botutini Collection,” by John B. Glass “Middle American Ethnohistory: An Overview” by H. B. Nicholson The Handbook of Middle American Indians was assembled and edited at the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University with the assistance of grants from the National Science Foundation and under the sponsorship of the National Research Council Committee on Latin American Anthropology.

Obsolescence is fundamental to the experience of modernity, not simply one dimension of an economic system. The contributors to this book investigate obsolescence as a historical phenomenon, an aesthetic practice, and an affective mode.

People have long been fascinated about times in human history when different cultures and societies first came into contact with each other, how they reacted to that contact, and why it sometimes occurred peacefully and at other times was violent or catastrophic. Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick,seeks to define the role of culture contact in human history, to identify issues in the study of culture contact in archaeology, and to provide a critical overview of the major theoretical approaches to the study of culture and contact. In this collection of essays, anthropologists and archaeologists working in Europe and the Americas consider three forms of culture contact—colonization, cultural entanglement, and symmetrical exchange. Part I provides a critical overview of theoretical approaches to the study of culture contact, offering assessments of older concepts in anthropology, such as acculturation, as well as more recently formed concepts, including world systems and center-periphery models of contact. Part II contains eleven case studies of specific contact situations and their relationships to the archaeological record, with times and places as varied as pre- and post-Hispanic Mexico, Iron Age France, Jamaican sugar plantations, European provinces in the Roman Empire, and the missions of Spanish Florida. Studies in Culture Contact provides an extensive review of the history of culture contact in anthropological studies and develops a broad framework for studying culture contact's role, moving beyond a simple formulation of contact and change to a more complex understanding of the amalgam of change and continuity in contact situations.

Plantation sites, especially those in the southeastern United States, have long dominated the archaeological study of slavery. These antebellum estates, however, are not representative of the range of geographic locations and time periods in which slavery has occurred. As archaeologists have begun to investigate slavery in more diverse settings, the need for a broader interpretive framework is now clear. The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion, edited by Lydia Wilson Marshall, develops an interregional and cross-temporal framework for the interpretation of slavery. Contributors consider how to define slavery, identify it in the archaeological record, and study it as a diachronic process from enslavement to emancipation and beyond. Essays cover the potential material representations of slavery, slave owners'strategies of coercion and enslaved people's methods of resisting this coercion, and the legacies of slavery as confronted by formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Among the peoples, sites, and periods examined are a late nineteenth-century Chinese laborer population in Carlin, Nevada; a castle slave habitation at San Domingo and a more elite trading center at nearby Juffure in the Gambia; two eighteenth-century plantations in Dominica; Benin's Hueda Kingdom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; plantations in Zanzibar; and three fugitive slave sites on Mauritius—an underground lava tunnel, a mountain, and a karst cave. This essay collection seeks to analyze slavery as a process organized by larger economic and social forces with effects that can be both durable and wide-ranging. It presents a comparative approach that significantly enriches our understanding of slavery.

Following their first contact in 1519, accounts of Aztecs identifying Spaniards as gods proliferated. But what exactly did the Aztecs mean by a “god” (teotl), and how could human beings become gods or take on godlike properties? This sophisticated, interdisciplinary study analyzes three concepts that are foundational to Aztec religion—teotl (god), teixiptla (localized embodiment of a god), and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles containing precious objects)—to shed new light on the Aztec understanding of how spiritual beings take on form and agency in the material world. In The Fate of Earthly Things, Molly Bassett draws on ethnographic fieldwork, linguistic analyses, visual culture, and ritual studies to explore what ritual practices such as human sacrifice and the manufacture of deity embodiments (including humans who became gods), material effigies, and sacred bundles meant to the Aztecs. She analyzes the Aztec belief that wearing the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim during a sacred rite could transform a priest into an embodiment of a god or goddess, as well as how figurines and sacred bundles could become localized embodiments of gods. Without arguing for unbroken continuity between the Aztecs and modern speakers of Nahuatl, Bassett also describes contemporary rituals in which indigenous Mexicans who preserve costumbres (traditions) incorporate totiotzin (gods) made from paper into their daily lives. This research allows us to understand a religious imagination that found life in death and believed that deity embodiments became animate through the ritual binding of blood, skin, and bone.

Since the nineteenth century, museums have kept their artifacts in glass cases to better preserve them, and drawings and photographs have become standard ways of presenting the past. These practices have led to an archaeology dominated by visual description, even though human interaction with the surrounding world involves the whole body and all of its senses. In the past few years, sensory archaeology has become more prominent, and Making Senses of the Past is one of the first collected volumes on this subject. This book presents cutting-edge research on new theoretical issues. The essays presented here take readers on a multisensory journey around the world and across time. In ancient Peru, a site provides sensory surprises as voices resound beneath the ground and hidden carvings slowly reveal their secrets. In Canada and New Zealand, the flicker of reflected light from a lake dances on the faces of painted rocks and may have influenced when and why the pigment was applied. In Mesopotamia, vessels for foodstuffs build a picture of a past cuisine that encompasses taste and social activity in the building of communities. While perfume and flowers are examined in various cultures, in the chamber tombs of ancient Roman Palestine, we are reminded that not all smells are pleasant. Making Senses of the Past explores alternative ways to perceive past societies and offers a new way of wiring archaeology that incorporates the senses.

In recent years, archaeologists have used the terms hybrid and hybridity with increasing frequency to describe and interpret forms of material culture. Hybridity is a way of viewing culture and human action that addresses the issue of power differentials between peoples and cultures. This approach suggests that cultures are not discrete pure entities but rather are continuously transforming and recombining. The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture discusses this concept and its relationship to archaeological classification and the emergence of new ethnic group identities. This collection of essays provides readers with theoretical and concrete tools for investigating objects and architecture with discernible multiple influences. The twenty-one essays are organized into four parts: ceramic change in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; ethnicity and material culture in pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin America; culture contact and transformation in technological style; and materiality and identity. The media examined include ceramics, stone and glass implements, textiles, bone, architecture, and mortuary and bioarchaeological artifacts from North, South, and Central America, Hawai‘i, the Caribbean, Europe, and Mesopotamia. Case studies include Bronze Age Britain, Iron Age and Roman Europe, Uruk-era Turkey, African diasporic communities in the Caribbean, pre-Spanish and Pueblo revolt era Southwest, Spanish colonial impacts in the American Southeast, Central America, and the Andes, ethnographic Amazonia, historic-era New England and the Plains, the Classic Maya, nineteenth-century Hawai‘i, and Upper Paleolithic Europe. The volume is carefully detailed with more than forty maps and figures and over twenty tables. The work presented in The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture comes from researchers whose questions and investigations recognized the role of multiple influences on the people and material they study. Case studies include experiments in bone working in middle Missouri; images and social relationships in prehistoric and Roman Europe; technological and material hybridity in colonial Peruvian textiles; ceramic change in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; and flaked glass tools from the leprosarium at Kalawao, Moloka‘i. The essays provide examples and approaches that may serve as a guide for other researchers dealing with similar issues.

Foreign News gives us a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look into the practices of the global tribe we call foreign correspondents. Exploring how they work, Ulf Hannerz also compares the ways correspondents and anthropologists report from one part of the world to another. Hannerz draws on extensive interviews with correspondents in cities as diverse as Jerusalem, Tokyo, and Johannesburg. He shows not only how different story lines evolve in different correspondent beats, but also how the correspondents'home country and personal interests influence the stories they write. Reporting can go well beyond coverage of a specific event, using the news instead to reveal deeper insights into a country or a people to link them to long-term trends or structures of global significance. Ultimately, Hannerz argues that both anthropologists and foreign correspondents can learn from each other in their efforts to educate a public about events and peoples far beyond our homelands. The result of nearly a decade's worth of work, Foreign News is a provocative study that will appeal to both general readers and those concerned with globalization.

How does prehistoric material get from its place of origin to its location of archaeological recovery? While this question may seem basic, a moment's reflection suggests that the answers carry important implications for arc-haeological interpretation about social organization, settlement, and subsistence practices. Archaeologists know much about the temporal and spatial distribution of materials in prehistoric western North America, but comparatively little has emerged regarding the causes of such distributions. Trade and exchange, mobility, and direct access all have been credited with observed distributions, but the reasons for settling on specific behavioral linkages is rarely made clear. This volume investigates the circumstances and conditions under which trade/exchange, direct access, and/or mobility best account for material conveyance across varying distances at different times in the past. Each chapter contextualizes distributional and chemical data, evaluates competing distribution hypotheses, and addresses the reasoning and inferences employed to arrive at conclusions about the human behaviors responsible for the distributions of materials. Contributors showcase a range of diverse and creative ways of thinking about these issues in the California and Great Basin archaeological record, and why it matters.

In Andean Bolivia, racial and cultural differences are most visibly marked on women, who often still wear native dress and speak an indigenous language rather than Spanish. In this study of modernity in Bolivia, Marcia Stephenson explores how the state's desire for a racially and culturally homogenous society has been deployed through images of womanhood that promote the notion of an idealized, acculturated female body. Stephenson engages a variety of texts—critical essays, novels, indigenous testimonials, education manuals, self-help pamphlets, and position papers of diverse women's organizations—to analyze how the interlocking tropes of fashion, motherhood, domestication, hygiene, and hunger are used as tools for the production of dominant, racialized ideologies of womanhood. At the same time, she also uncovers long-standing patterns of resistance to the modernizing impulse, especially in the large-scale mobilization of indigenous peoples who have made it clear that they will negotiate the terms of modernity, but always'as Indians.'

Cajun Women and Mardi Gras is the first book to explore the importance of women's contributions to the country Cajun Mardi Gras tradition, or Mardi Gras “run.” Most Mardi Gras runs--masked begging processions through the countryside, led by unmasked capitaines--have customarily excluded women. Male organizers explain that this rule protects not only the tradition's integrity but also women themselves from the event's rowdy, often drunken, play. Throughout the past twentieth century, and especially in the past fifty years, women in some prairie communities have insisted on taking more active and public roles in the festivities. Carolyn E. Ware traces the history of women's participation as it has expanded from supportive roles as cooks and costume makers to increasingly public performances as Mardi Gras clowns and (in at least one community) capitaines. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork interviews and observation in Mardi Gras communities, Ware focuses on the festive actions in Tee Mamou and Basile to reveal how women are reshaping the celebration as creative artists and innovative performers.

An intimate account of an anthropologist's relationship with his non-verbal son and how it has shaped and transformed his understanding of closeness and communication. Home Signs grew out of the anthropologist Joshua Reno's experience of caring for and trying to communicate with his teenage son, Charlie, who cannot speak. To manage interactions with others, Charlie uses what are known as “home signs,” gestures developed to meet his need for expression, ranging from the wiggle of a finger to a subtle sideways glance. Though he is nonverbal, he is far from silent: in fact, he is in constant communication with others. In this intimate reflection on language, disability, and togetherness, the author invites us into his and Charlie's shared world. Combining portraits of family life and interviews with other caregivers, Reno upends several assumptions, especially the idea that people who seem not to be able to speak for themselves need others to speak on their behalf. With its broad exploration of nonverbal communication in both human and nonhuman contexts, Home Signs challenges us to think harder about what it means to lead a “normal” life and to connect with another person.

This book explores Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and the integration of Islamic culture with the diverse ethnic cultures of the region, offering a look at the practice of cultural and religious coexistence in various realms.The volume traces the origins and processes of adoption, transmission, and adaptation of Islam by diverse ethnic communities such as the Malay, Acehnese, Javanese, Sundanese, the Bugis, Batak, Betawi, and Madurese communities, among others. It examines the integration of Islam within local politics, cultural networks, law, rituals, education, art, and architecture, which engendered unique regional Muslim identities.Additionally, the book illuminates distinctive examples of cultural pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and syncretism that persisted in Islamic religious practices in the region owing to its maritime economy and reputation as a marketplace for goods, languages, cultures, and ideas.As part of the Global Islamic Cultures series that investigates integrated and indigenized Islam, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of theology and religion, Islamic studies, religious history, political Islam, cultural studies, and Southeast Asian studies. It also offers an engaging read for general audiences interested in world religions and cultures.

This book aims to extract a kind of Critical Humanism from the works of prominent members of the Frankfurt School. Oliver Kozlarek argues that what is compelling about this kind of restitution of humanism is the fact that it sought to be understood not as a conceptual-theoretical construction, but as a practice of critical social and cultural research. This means that it does not orient itself to an ideal image of the human being, but to making inhuman conditions of our current societies visible. It is above all in this sense that humanism is no longer understood in a Humboldtian, educational sense. Rather, it is about using critical social research as a political practice.

This book encapsulates a long period of history of human progress by highlighting crucial social, economic, and cultural dynamics. It presents recent historiography and new analytical tools used to analyse multi-dimensional themes involved in social formations in different parts of the world. This is a reader-friendly book with simple and lucid language and fulfils the pressing needs of students studying the course on Social Formations and Cultural Patterns of the ancient and medieval world at various universities across the world. The summary, key words, and representative questions at the end of each chapter would assist in revision and a better understanding of the issues dealt with therein. A detailed chapter-end reference would enable and motivate the readers to engage in further studies for a better understanding of the themes.This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and academics in the area of history – ancient and medieval world history, in particular, and anthropology. It will also be an interesting read for general readers interested in knowing about the ancient and medieval world.

An examination of planning, place, and the politics of repair in post-genocide Rwanda. Master Plans and Minor Acts examines a “material politics of repair” in post-genocide Rwanda, where in a country saturated with deep historical memory, spatial master planning aims to drastically redesign urban spaces. How is the post-conflict city reconstituted through the work of such planning, and with what effects for material repair and social conciliation? Through extended ethnographic and qualitative research in Rwanda in the decades after the genocide of 1994, this book questions how repair after conflict is realized amidst large-scale urban transformation. Bridging African studies, urban studies, and human geography in its scope, this work ties Rwanda's transformation to contexts of urban change in other post-conflict spaces, bringing to the fore critical questions about the ethics of planning in such complex geographies.

This book explores the origins of Butoh in post-war Japan through orality and transmission, in conjunction with an embodied research approach.The book is a gathering of seminal artistic voices – Yoshito Ohno, Natsu Nakajima, Yukio Waguri, Moe Yamamoto, Masaki Iwana, Ko Murobushi, Yukio Suzuki, Takao Kawaguchi, Yuko Kaseki, and the philosopher, Kuniichi Uno. These conversations happened during an extended research trip I made to Japan to understand the context and circumstances that engendered Butoh. Alongside these exchanges are my reflections on Butoh's complex history. These are primarily informed by my pedagogical and performance encounters with the artists I met during this time, rather than a theoretical analysis. Through the words of these dancers, I investigate Butoh's tendency to evade categorization. Butoh's artistic legacy of bodily rebellion, plurality of authorship, and fluidity of form seems prescient and feels more relevant in contemporary times than ever before.This book is intended as a practitioner's guide for dancers, artists, students, and scholars with an interest in non-Western dance and dance history, postmodern performance, and Japanese arts and culture.

This book examines the process of domination of a civilization and the creation of a vast empire by the British in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores how they extended and maintained their tenuous rule over India through coercion, violent oppression, and exploration of knowledge of this vast region and its people.Excavating archival materials, this volume looks at extensive ethnographic surveys, the study of history, cartography, archaeology, native languages, and literatures from colonial times. It takes a critical look at the attempts of unravelling the social structural principles such as caste and religious groups and also how power was used in multiple forms and contexts to establish dominance over the people of the subcontinent and its resources. The essays in this volume are from a period when the technologies of colonization were being experimented with and reect a mixed bag of admiration, derogation, and paternalism from those holding positions of power and responsibility, including some elite Indians. It further examines the emergence of a sense of nationalism, a critique of the Eurocentric views of the colonial masters, indicating the contribution of Western education to the formation of an Indian identity that finds resonance in modern times.This book will be useful to students and researchers of anthropology, sociology, public administration, modern history, colonial studies, and demography. It will also be of interest to civil servants, students of history, Indian culture and society, religions, colonial history, law, and South Asia studies.

A powerful ethnographic study of South Baltimore, a place haunted by toxic pasts in its pursuit of better futures. Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. In Futures after Progress, anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on this edge of the city and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Writing from the community of Curtis Bay, where two hundred years of technocratic hubris have carried lethal costs, Ahmann also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors. Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground for competing political futures whose stakes reverberate beyond its six square miles in a present after progress has lost steam. And yet—as one young resident explains—“that's not how the story ends.” Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress probes the deep roots of our ecological predicament, offering insight into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change.

This book chronicles over two decades of critical, artistic investigations by Paul Vanouse. His bio-media artwork utilizes the tools of the life sciences reflexively, to challenge tropes and cultural politics surrounding DNA, biotechnology, and life itself. DNA has been called a “Truth Machine”, “God's Blueprint”, the “Code of Codes” and the “Book of Life”. Vanouse's work explores questions at the heart of such evocative metaphor and hyperbole: how does DNA link us together, how does it differentiate us and how are the grand metaphors, which grant DNA complete centrality, misconstruing the complexity of life. Furthermore, how do technologies of genetic typing and identification fit within a broader cultural and political history of difference making, particularly the construction of race. Melding critical theory, artist's manifesto, participatory observation and histories of the sciences, this book offers insight into both an artistic practice and the bio-techno-sciences it interrogates.

Digital technology has revolutionized connectivity, but it has also overwhelmed spatial boundaries that used to shield people from subjugating gazes and unlimited exercise of power. The home as an auratic space is dead, and this alienation has hindered our social capacities creating complex political and sociopsychological crises. The Death of Home aims to intellectually engage readers through enhancing spatial literacy to critically confront today's oppressive regimes of spatial production.

A provocative book arguing that the workplace is where we learn to live democratically. In The Pandemic Workplace, anthropologist Ilana Gershon turns her attention to the US workplace and how it changed—and changed us—during the pandemic. She argues that the unprecedented organizational challenges of the pandemic forced us to radically reexamine our attitudes about work and to think more deeply about how values clash in the workplace. These changes also led us as workers to engage more with the contracts that bind us as we rethought when and how we allow others to tell us what to do. Based on over two hundred interviews, Gershon's book reveals how negotiating these tensions during the pandemic made the workplace into a laboratory for democratic living—the key place where Americans are learning how to develop effective political strategies and think about the common good. Exploring the explicit and unspoken ways we are governed (and govern others) at work, this accessible book shows how the workplace teaches us to be democratic citizens.

This book examines the development of Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) in China through the angle of Chinese Theatre, xiqu. It focuses on the political and socio-economic transition period at the turn of the 21st century, as China evolves from ‘Made in China'to ‘Created in China', highlighting associated class reconstruction and cultural production and consumption. There are many forms of Chinese Theatre, the most popular one throughout Chinese history to date is the sing-song drama, collectively refers to as xiqu, which currently has over 300 regional styles across China. In 2014, President Xi Jinping's Beijing Talk on Arts and Literature, which serves as China's latest Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideological direction and cultural policy, stressed that ‘the future of Chinese cultural and creative industries is to be anchored on traditional art forms, such as xiqu'. Such Chinese cultural and creative industry distinction will be addressed in this book.

Drawing on published works as well as personal correspondences written between 1948-1994, this book conceptualizes Guy Debord's politics of communication and how it sought to undermine the hierarchical, monological language of the spectacle. Matthews traces Debord's search for critical communication strategies that could subvert the reified “language of manufacturing” from the philosopher's early activities in anti-aesthetic'terrorism'(e.g., the neo-poem, metagraphics, and détournement) to advocating forms of horizontal communication between autonomous revolutionary groups or individuals using'native'language. Matthews ultimately finds that to critique the language of the spectacle, Debord relied on the power of the negative to speak the ironic language of contradiction, of critical theory, and of the incommunicable.

In both local and international imaginations, Vancouver, Canada, is often celebrated as one of the world's most beautiful, cosmopolitan, and livable cities. Simultaneously, the city continues to be ground zero for successive waves of public health emergency and intervention, including a recent and unprecedented drug overdose crisis driven by the proliferation of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and related analogs in the local drug supply. In The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver, Danya Fast explores these politics of place from the perspectives of young people who use drugs. Those who are the subject of this book were in many ways relegated to the social, spatial, and economic margins of the city. Yet, they were also often at the very center of city life and state projects, including the project of protecting life in the context of the current overdose crisis.

A surprising look at the meaningful social changes in Jordan as lived and navigated by educated women. Jordan has witnessed tremendous societal transformation in its relatively short history. Today it has one of the most highly educated populations in the region, and women have outnumbered and outperformed their male counterparts for more than a decade. Yet, despite their education and professional status, many women still struggle to build a secure future and a life befitting of their aspirations. In Working Women in Jordan anthropologist Fida J. Adely turns to college-educated women in Jordan who migrate from rural provinces to Amman for employment opportunities. Building on twelve years of ethnographic research and extensive interviews with dozens of women, as well as some of their family members, Adely analyzes the effects of developments such as expanded educational opportunities, urbanization, privatization, and the restructuring of the labor market on women's life trajectories, gender roles, the institution of marriage, and kinship relations. Through these rich narrative accounts and the analysis of broader socio-economic shifts, Adely explains how educational structures can act as both facilitators and obstacles to workforce entry—along with cascading consequences for family and social life. Deeply thorough and compelling, Working Women in Jordan asks readers to think more critically about what counts as development, and for whom.

The first one thousand days of human life, or the period between conception and age two, is one of the most pivotal periods of human development. Optimizing nutrition during this time not only prevents childhood malnutrition but also determines future health and potential. The Politics of Potential examines early life interventions in the first one thousand days of life in South Africa, drawing on fieldwork from international conferences, government offices, health-care facilities, and the everyday lives of fifteen women and their families in Cape Town. Michelle Pentecost explores various aspects of a politics of potential, a term that underlines the first one thousand days concept and its effects on clinical care and the lives of childbearing women in South Africa. Why was the First One Thousand Days project so readily adopted by South Africa and many other countries? Pentecost not only explores this question but also discusses the science of intergenerational transmissions of health, disease, and human capital and how this constitutes new forms of intergenerational responsibility. The women who are the target of first one thousdand days interventions are cast as both vulnerable and responsible for the health of future generations, such that, despite its history, intergenerational responsibility in South Africa remains entrenched in powerfully gendered and racialized ways.

This book presents an overview of engineering as it relates to humanitarian engineering, service-learning engineering, peace engineering, or engineering for community-led development, programs that are often grouped under Engineering for Good or Engineering for Change. By placing “community” at the center of these endeavors, this book invites readers and practitioners to strive for sustainable community development (SCD). This 2nd edition is centered on new concepts of community-led development and includes topics on the history of engineers and development, the problems of using industry-based practices when designing for communities, how engineers can prepare to work with communities, and listening in community development. Two case studies are provided to highlight the book's concepts using first-hand experiences of engineers engaged with communities—one of engineers developing a windmill for a community in India, and a second of an engineer mapping communities inHonduras for improved water management. The book concludes with student perspectives and experiences from a curricular model focused on engineering for sustainable community development. Overall, the text invites engineers to reflect and prepare themselves for global careers that involve international development in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. This 2nd edition places community-led practices at the heart of these endeavors. The book is for engineering faculty, students and practicing engineers, involved in current or future community collaborations. The authors wrote this book with a goal to help readers critically reflect on their own practices and perceptions. Readers learn to question past, current, and future frameworks in the project of development, and are encouraged to adopt practices of community-led development. This 2nd edition is aimed at engineering students who, as future global engineers, are faced with opportunities and challenges when working with communities. As funding for renewable energy, “green jobs,” and community-based initiatives continue to increase, engineers will need to rely on the social and historical concepts presented in this book.

How the international war on poverty shapes identities, relationships, politics, and urban space in Peru. Unruly Domestication investigates how Peru's ongoing, internationally endorsed'war on poverty'shapes politics, intimate identities, and urban space in Lima. Drawing on a decade of embedded, ethnographic research in Lima's largest and most recently founded “extreme poverty zone,” Kristin Skrabut demonstrates how Peru's efforts to fight poverty by formalizing property, identity, and family status perpetuate environmentally unsustainable urban sprawl, deepen discrimination against single mothers, and undermine Peruvians'faith in public officials and in one another. In the process, Skrabut reveals myriad entanglements of poverty, statecraft, and private life, exploring how families are made and unmade through political practices, how gender inequalities are perpetuated through policy, and how Peruvians'everyday pursuits of state-sanctioned domestic ideals reproduce informality and landscapes of poverty in the urban periphery. The only full-length ethnography written about Lima's iconic and policy-inspiring shantytowns in thirty years, Unruly Domestication provides valuable insight into the dynamics of housing and urban development in the Global South, elucidating the most intimate and profound effects of global efforts to do good.

This volume explores the historical trajectory of the spread of Islam in South Asia and how the engagements of the past have played a crucial role in the making of the present outfits of South Asian Islam.Islam in South Asia has maintained a distinct role while imbibing cultural, social, ethnic, folk, and artistic networks of the subcontinent in diverse echelons. In an unequivocal analysis, this volume showcases the visible varieties of Islam from an array of regional cultural, ethnic, and vernacular groups. While many characteristics remain distinct in different provinces or regions of South Asia, similarities are palpable in etiquettes, customary laws, art, and architecture. More than regional differences, various ethnic groups from all poles of the Indian subcontinent have paved the way for the dissimilar landscapes of Islam, in tandem with differences in language, culture, and festivals. The case studies in this book exhibit forms of cultural pluralism in the communities, which have helped in building a cohesive community.Part of the ‘Global Islamic Cultures'series that looks at integrated and indigenized Islam, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of religion, religious history, theology, study of Islamic law and politics, cultural studies, and South Asian Studies. It will also be useful to general readers who are interested in world religions and cultures.

On a remote island in the South Pacific, the Lavongai have consistently struggled to obtain development through logging and commercial agriculture. Yet many Lavongai still long to move beyond the grind of subsistence work that has seemingly defined their lives on New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, for generations. Following a long history of smaller-scale and largely unsuccessful resource development efforts, New Hanover became the site of three multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover over 75 percent of the island for ninety-nine-year lease terms. These agroforestry projects were part of a national effort to encourage “sustainable” rural development by tapping into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels. They were supposed to succeed where the smaller-scale projects of the past had failed. Unfortunately, these SABLs resulted in significant forest loss and livelihood degradation, while doing little to promote the type of economic development that many Lavongai had been hoping for. It is within this context that We Stay the Same grounds questions of hope for transformative economic change within Lavongai assessments of the inequitable relationships between global processes of resource development and the local lives that have become increasingly defined by the necessities and failures of these processes. Written in a clear and relatable style for students, We Stay the Same combines ethnographic and ecological research to show how the Lavongai continue to survive and make meaningful lives in a situation where their own hopes for a better future have often been used against them as a mechanism of a more distantly profitable dispossession.

This fascinating urban anthropological analysis of Sarajevo and its cultural complexities examines contemporary issues of social divisiveness, pluralism, and intergroup dynamics in the context of national identity and state formation. Rather than seeing Bosnia-Herzegovina as a volatile postsocialist society, the book presents its capital city as a vibrant yet wounded center of multicultural diversity, where citizens live in mutual recognition of difference while asserting a lifestyle that transcends boundaries of ethnicity and religion. It further illuminates how Sarajevans negotiate group identity in the tumultuous context of history, authoritarian rule, and interactions with the built environment and one another. As she navigates the city, Fran Markowitz shares narratives of local citizenry played out against the larger dramas of nation and state building. She shows how Sarajevans'national identities have been forged in the crucible of power, culture, language, and politics. Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope acknowledges this Central European city's dramatic survival from the ravages of civil war as it advances into the present-day global arena.

This book explores the idea of Muslim diaspora in context of Muslim communities in the United Kingdom. It critically looks at the notion of ummah and presents a comprehensive account of South Asian Muslims in London.Employing qualitative research methods and drawing on extensive fieldwork, it delves into the identification and transnational connections of Muslims in Britain. It shows the ways in which religious identity, practices and experiences may instigate diasporas focusing on South Asian Muslims in London — Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims — who account for 3.6 per cent of the total population. Further, the inter as well as intra group dynamics and studies how Muslims of different ethnic background settled in the same geo-political context engage with the notion of ummah.The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of religion, especially Islam, politics, British studies and South Asian studies.