Jennifer Cole and Christian Groes (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226405018
- eISBN:
- 9780226405292
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226405292.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Global
This book examines the simultaneously material, social and emotional exchanges involved when African migrants venture to Europe in search of a better life. As we argue, these exchange are part of a ...
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This book examines the simultaneously material, social and emotional exchanges involved when African migrants venture to Europe in search of a better life. As we argue, these exchange are part of a broader quest for social regeneration that involve negotiations of family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad as well as complicated encounters with state officials and laws hindering or facilitating their journeys. In this migratory process exchange of everything from money, goods and advice to sentiments, phone calls and assurances of belonging are part of transnational circuits that enable, block or control mobility through social networks. We call the circuits that emerge from the sending, withholding and receiving of goods, ideas, bodies and emotions affective circuits. We focus especially on how affective circuits operate in the context of contemporary African migration to Europe, following in the footsteps of migrants and their families, husbands, wives, friends, peers and lovers across African countries like Ghana, Gambia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Cameroon, Congo, Mauritania, Kenya, Madagascar and Mozambique and European countries like France, Italy, Portugal, UK, Germany and Denmark. Through fieldwork in both Africa and Europe the authors analyze how exchanges work, how they are socially, culturally, morally and historically embedded, and how they regenerate and reshape kin and other intimate formations in our times of worldwide migrations.Less
This book examines the simultaneously material, social and emotional exchanges involved when African migrants venture to Europe in search of a better life. As we argue, these exchange are part of a broader quest for social regeneration that involve negotiations of family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad as well as complicated encounters with state officials and laws hindering or facilitating their journeys. In this migratory process exchange of everything from money, goods and advice to sentiments, phone calls and assurances of belonging are part of transnational circuits that enable, block or control mobility through social networks. We call the circuits that emerge from the sending, withholding and receiving of goods, ideas, bodies and emotions affective circuits. We focus especially on how affective circuits operate in the context of contemporary African migration to Europe, following in the footsteps of migrants and their families, husbands, wives, friends, peers and lovers across African countries like Ghana, Gambia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Cameroon, Congo, Mauritania, Kenya, Madagascar and Mozambique and European countries like France, Italy, Portugal, UK, Germany and Denmark. Through fieldwork in both Africa and Europe the authors analyze how exchanges work, how they are socially, culturally, morally and historically embedded, and how they regenerate and reshape kin and other intimate formations in our times of worldwide migrations.
Marc Flandreau
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226360300
- eISBN:
- 9780226360584
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226360584.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Global
Starting with the discovery of a curious plot in which science became the handmaiden of white-collar crime, this book tracks a group of Victorian gentlemen-swindlers as they shuffled between the ...
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Starting with the discovery of a curious plot in which science became the handmaiden of white-collar crime, this book tracks a group of Victorian gentlemen-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned societies. It explores what the author calls “the stock exchange modality:” how the production of scientific truth became every bit as integral as financial engineering to investment and speculation in foreign government debt. This book underscores the crucial role of finance in shaping the contours of human knowledge and vice versa in an age of mercantile expansion. It argues that finance and science were at the heart of that new brand of imperialism, born under Benjamin Disraeli’s first term as Britain’s prime minister. This new imperialism built on the multiple covert links between the birth of social sciences and novel mechanisms of financial revenue creation and extraction. As anthropologists advocated the study of Miskito Indians or stated their views on a Jamaican Rebellion or Abyssinian Expedition, they responded and catered to the impulses of the Stock Exchange. The marriage between anthropological science and finance produced essential technologies of globalization, and formed the foundational structures of late nineteenth century British imperialismLess
Starting with the discovery of a curious plot in which science became the handmaiden of white-collar crime, this book tracks a group of Victorian gentlemen-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned societies. It explores what the author calls “the stock exchange modality:” how the production of scientific truth became every bit as integral as financial engineering to investment and speculation in foreign government debt. This book underscores the crucial role of finance in shaping the contours of human knowledge and vice versa in an age of mercantile expansion. It argues that finance and science were at the heart of that new brand of imperialism, born under Benjamin Disraeli’s first term as Britain’s prime minister. This new imperialism built on the multiple covert links between the birth of social sciences and novel mechanisms of financial revenue creation and extraction. As anthropologists advocated the study of Miskito Indians or stated their views on a Jamaican Rebellion or Abyssinian Expedition, they responded and catered to the impulses of the Stock Exchange. The marriage between anthropological science and finance produced essential technologies of globalization, and formed the foundational structures of late nineteenth century British imperialism
Simon Coleman and Rosalind I. J. Hackett (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780814772591
- eISBN:
- 9780814723517
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814772591.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Religion
The phenomenal growth of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism around the world in recent decades has forced us to rethink what it means to be religious and what it means to be global. The success of ...
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The phenomenal growth of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism around the world in recent decades has forced us to rethink what it means to be religious and what it means to be global. The success of these religious movements has revealed tensions and resonances between the public and the private, the religious and the cultural, and the local and the global. This volume provides an interesting perspective on what has become a truly global religious trend, one that is challenging conventional analytical categories within the social sciences. This book considers the character of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism not only as they have spread across the globe, but also as they have become global movements. Adopting a broadly anthropological approach, the chapters synthesize the existing literature on Pentecostalism and evangelicalism even as they offer new analyses and critiques. They show how the study of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism provides a fresh way to approach classic anthropological themes; they contest the frequent characterization of these movements as conservative religious, social, and political forces; and they argue that Pentecostalism and evangelicalism are significant not least because they encourage us to reflect on the intersections of politics, materiality, morality, and law. Ultimately, the volume leaves us with a clear sense of the cultural and social power, as well as the theoretical significance, of forms of Christianity that we can no longer afford to ignore.Less
The phenomenal growth of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism around the world in recent decades has forced us to rethink what it means to be religious and what it means to be global. The success of these religious movements has revealed tensions and resonances between the public and the private, the religious and the cultural, and the local and the global. This volume provides an interesting perspective on what has become a truly global religious trend, one that is challenging conventional analytical categories within the social sciences. This book considers the character of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism not only as they have spread across the globe, but also as they have become global movements. Adopting a broadly anthropological approach, the chapters synthesize the existing literature on Pentecostalism and evangelicalism even as they offer new analyses and critiques. They show how the study of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism provides a fresh way to approach classic anthropological themes; they contest the frequent characterization of these movements as conservative religious, social, and political forces; and they argue that Pentecostalism and evangelicalism are significant not least because they encourage us to reflect on the intersections of politics, materiality, morality, and law. Ultimately, the volume leaves us with a clear sense of the cultural and social power, as well as the theoretical significance, of forms of Christianity that we can no longer afford to ignore.
Victoria C. Stead
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780824856663
- eISBN:
- 9780824872991
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824856663.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Becoming Landowners: Entanglements of Custom and Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste examines the impact of modernising processes of change—globalization, “development,” state- and ...
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Becoming Landowners: Entanglements of Custom and Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste examines the impact of modernising processes of change—globalization, “development,” state- and nation-building—on customary land tenures, and customary communities, in two Pacific countries. Moving between multiple sites, scales, and forms of collectivity, Becoming Landowners explores the entanglements of custom and modernity that emerge from these processes. These entanglements are deeply ambivalent, giving rise to competing cartographies of power. They lend themselves to the diminishing of local autonomy but also, importantly, create new possibilities for reasserting that autonomy, and for rearticulating the forms and sites of authority to which customary connection to land gives rise. Pacific peoples are becoming landowners, the book argues, both in the sense that modernising processes of change compel forms of property relations, and in the sense that “landowner” and “custom landowner” become identities to be wielded against the encroachment of both state and capital. In places where customary forms of land tenure have long been dominant, deeply intertwined with senses of self and relationships with others, land now becomes a crucible upon which social relations, power and culture are reconfigured and reimagined.Less
Becoming Landowners: Entanglements of Custom and Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste examines the impact of modernising processes of change—globalization, “development,” state- and nation-building—on customary land tenures, and customary communities, in two Pacific countries. Moving between multiple sites, scales, and forms of collectivity, Becoming Landowners explores the entanglements of custom and modernity that emerge from these processes. These entanglements are deeply ambivalent, giving rise to competing cartographies of power. They lend themselves to the diminishing of local autonomy but also, importantly, create new possibilities for reasserting that autonomy, and for rearticulating the forms and sites of authority to which customary connection to land gives rise. Pacific peoples are becoming landowners, the book argues, both in the sense that modernising processes of change compel forms of property relations, and in the sense that “landowner” and “custom landowner” become identities to be wielded against the encroachment of both state and capital. In places where customary forms of land tenure have long been dominant, deeply intertwined with senses of self and relationships with others, land now becomes a crucible upon which social relations, power and culture are reconfigured and reimagined.
Terence E. McDonnell
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226382012
- eISBN:
- 9780226382296
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226382296.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
Organizations strive to create campaign messages that yield clear, consistent, and resonant interpretations that motivate people to buy their product, support their cause, vote for their candidate, ...
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Organizations strive to create campaign messages that yield clear, consistent, and resonant interpretations that motivate people to buy their product, support their cause, vote for their candidate, or take active steps to improve or protect their health. However, once these campaigns leave the controlled environments of focus groups, advertising agencies, and stakeholder meetings to circulate through public space, people interpret and use campaigns in ways the designers never intended. Best Laid Plans explains why these instrumental-rational attempts to persuade the public through culture and media often fail. To explain these failures, the book identifies mechanisms that encourage “cultural entropy”: the process through which the intended meanings and uses of cultural objects fracture into alternative meanings, new practices, failed interactions, and blatant disregard. To develop the concept of cultural entropy, the book analyzes HIV/AIDS media campaigns in Accra, Ghana. AIDS organizations in Accra, and throughout the world, seek to control and organize how local communities make sense of the disease. They develop campaigns based on models of “Behavior Change Communication” that purport to use media to change sexual practices. AIDS organizations attempt to control the message by routinizing best practices like evidence-based design, involving opinion leaders in the design process, and getting all organizations behind a single message. Despite their best efforts to persuade the public, campaigns rarely work as intended, disrupted by misinterpretation and misuse. These cultural misfires are not random. Rather, these disruptions are patterned, widespread, and inevitable, indicative of a broader and important-to-understand process of cultural entropy.Less
Organizations strive to create campaign messages that yield clear, consistent, and resonant interpretations that motivate people to buy their product, support their cause, vote for their candidate, or take active steps to improve or protect their health. However, once these campaigns leave the controlled environments of focus groups, advertising agencies, and stakeholder meetings to circulate through public space, people interpret and use campaigns in ways the designers never intended. Best Laid Plans explains why these instrumental-rational attempts to persuade the public through culture and media often fail. To explain these failures, the book identifies mechanisms that encourage “cultural entropy”: the process through which the intended meanings and uses of cultural objects fracture into alternative meanings, new practices, failed interactions, and blatant disregard. To develop the concept of cultural entropy, the book analyzes HIV/AIDS media campaigns in Accra, Ghana. AIDS organizations in Accra, and throughout the world, seek to control and organize how local communities make sense of the disease. They develop campaigns based on models of “Behavior Change Communication” that purport to use media to change sexual practices. AIDS organizations attempt to control the message by routinizing best practices like evidence-based design, involving opinion leaders in the design process, and getting all organizations behind a single message. Despite their best efforts to persuade the public, campaigns rarely work as intended, disrupted by misinterpretation and misuse. These cultural misfires are not random. Rather, these disruptions are patterned, widespread, and inevitable, indicative of a broader and important-to-understand process of cultural entropy.
Laurel Boussen and Hill Gates
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780804799553
- eISBN:
- 9781503601079
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804799553.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This book examines the once widespread practice of footbinding from the perspective of China’s gendered labor system. In contrast to the common belief that footbinding was motivated by the quest for ...
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This book examines the once widespread practice of footbinding from the perspective of China’s gendered labor system. In contrast to the common belief that footbinding was motivated by the quest for beauty and was practiced primarily to attract a husband, this book emphasizes that footbinding was extremely widespread, not limited to the elite, and must be understood in the context of girls’ and women’s labor. In preindustrial China, rural women and girls produced vast amounts of cloth and other handcraft goods at home for local use and for market networks with a global reach. Up to the early twentieth century, footbinding coincided with and corresponded to a household labor regime in which small girls were required to help their mothers by performing tedious sedentary work with their hands. Drawing on interviews and surveys with thousands of rural women who grew up in the era when footbinding was being abandoned, this book reconnects footbinding to the intensive hand labor expected of young girls and women. Examining the decline of footbinding in early twentieth-century China, the book argues that in the aggregate, industrialization and the disruption of traditional handcraft occupations that used the labor of young girls, particularly in textiles, hastened the demise of footbinding.Less
This book examines the once widespread practice of footbinding from the perspective of China’s gendered labor system. In contrast to the common belief that footbinding was motivated by the quest for beauty and was practiced primarily to attract a husband, this book emphasizes that footbinding was extremely widespread, not limited to the elite, and must be understood in the context of girls’ and women’s labor. In preindustrial China, rural women and girls produced vast amounts of cloth and other handcraft goods at home for local use and for market networks with a global reach. Up to the early twentieth century, footbinding coincided with and corresponded to a household labor regime in which small girls were required to help their mothers by performing tedious sedentary work with their hands. Drawing on interviews and surveys with thousands of rural women who grew up in the era when footbinding was being abandoned, this book reconnects footbinding to the intensive hand labor expected of young girls and women. Examining the decline of footbinding in early twentieth-century China, the book argues that in the aggregate, industrialization and the disruption of traditional handcraft occupations that used the labor of young girls, particularly in textiles, hastened the demise of footbinding.
Daniel L. Everett
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226070766
- eISBN:
- 9780226401430
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226401430.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This book discusses the unarticulated unconscious and tacit knowledge, termed “dark matter of the mind,” which underlies and enables verbal communication. Humans, when they speak or interpret, make ...
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This book discusses the unarticulated unconscious and tacit knowledge, termed “dark matter of the mind,” which underlies and enables verbal communication. Humans, when they speak or interpret, make use of a wide variety of skills and distinctions, in grammar, phonetics, organization of information by importance, and assumptions taken for given, for example, which compose this dark matter. The book’s contention is that this unconscious knowledge is not a product of innate human psychology, but rather of cultural influences and experiences. The book draws on the author’s experience attempting to translate the Bible and its cultural context for the Pirahãs in the Brazilian Amazon as a missionary activity. This missionary activity was hindered by a large number of underlying, largely unspoken, assumptions on the part of the American author on one side and the Pirahãs on the other which it impossible to translate the New Testament in such a way that it would be accessible for the Pirahãs in the same way that is to Americans. The author’s experience as a missionary, along with other studies of cultural conditioning, confirms an understanding of the individual which echoes the Buddhist concept of Anatman, which asserts that there is no innate human nature, but only the self which is entirely composed of memory and experience.Less
This book discusses the unarticulated unconscious and tacit knowledge, termed “dark matter of the mind,” which underlies and enables verbal communication. Humans, when they speak or interpret, make use of a wide variety of skills and distinctions, in grammar, phonetics, organization of information by importance, and assumptions taken for given, for example, which compose this dark matter. The book’s contention is that this unconscious knowledge is not a product of innate human psychology, but rather of cultural influences and experiences. The book draws on the author’s experience attempting to translate the Bible and its cultural context for the Pirahãs in the Brazilian Amazon as a missionary activity. This missionary activity was hindered by a large number of underlying, largely unspoken, assumptions on the part of the American author on one side and the Pirahãs on the other which it impossible to translate the New Testament in such a way that it would be accessible for the Pirahãs in the same way that is to Americans. The author’s experience as a missionary, along with other studies of cultural conditioning, confirms an understanding of the individual which echoes the Buddhist concept of Anatman, which asserts that there is no innate human nature, but only the self which is entirely composed of memory and experience.
Signithia Fordham
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816689668
- eISBN:
- 9781452955216
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816689668.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, American and Canadian Cultural Anthropology
Downed by Friendly Fire examines the ubiquity of violence and the need to rehabilitate its prevailing physical classification, especially as it relates to gender. The book seeks to change the meaning ...
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Downed by Friendly Fire examines the ubiquity of violence and the need to rehabilitate its prevailing physical classification, especially as it relates to gender. The book seeks to change the meaning of violence by redefining it to include intended, nonphysical harm cloaked in the presumed banality of normality. Specifically, it looks at the social practices that dehumanize or are exploitative—either emotionally or physically—, which compels individuals to endure shame, humiliation, starvation, exclusion, marginalization, health disparities poverty, etc. This is done through the framework of the unmasking of female aggression, bullying, and competition that are evoked by the structural violence embedded in the racialized and gendered social order.Less
Downed by Friendly Fire examines the ubiquity of violence and the need to rehabilitate its prevailing physical classification, especially as it relates to gender. The book seeks to change the meaning of violence by redefining it to include intended, nonphysical harm cloaked in the presumed banality of normality. Specifically, it looks at the social practices that dehumanize or are exploitative—either emotionally or physically—, which compels individuals to endure shame, humiliation, starvation, exclusion, marginalization, health disparities poverty, etc. This is done through the framework of the unmasking of female aggression, bullying, and competition that are evoked by the structural violence embedded in the racialized and gendered social order.
Brian Hayden
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780824856267
- eISBN:
- 9780824873059
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824856267.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
Feasting emerges from the pages of this book as far more than gustatory and social diversions from daily work routines. Instead, feasting in tribal societies plays a critical role in village social, ...
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Feasting emerges from the pages of this book as far more than gustatory and social diversions from daily work routines. Instead, feasting in tribal societies plays a critical role in village social, political, and economic dynamics. Alliances are brokered by feasts, debts created, political battles waged, and large amounts of food are produced. A main argument of the book is that feasting has been one of the most important forces in creating cultural changes since the end of the Paleolithic. Enormous pressures are created by feasts and their promoters to increase food and prestige item production to achieve social and political goals. The domestication of plants and animals probably resulted from such feasting pressures. This volume documents the dynamics of traditional feasting and the ways in which the bewildering array of feasts benefits hosts. It argues that people’s abilities to marry, reproduce, defend themselves against threats and attacks, and to defend their interests in village politics all depend on their ability to engage in feasting networks. As such feasting in these societies has important survival and fitness consequences. To be excluded from feasting networks means to be subject to attack from social predators, in some cases leading to enslavement.Less
Feasting emerges from the pages of this book as far more than gustatory and social diversions from daily work routines. Instead, feasting in tribal societies plays a critical role in village social, political, and economic dynamics. Alliances are brokered by feasts, debts created, political battles waged, and large amounts of food are produced. A main argument of the book is that feasting has been one of the most important forces in creating cultural changes since the end of the Paleolithic. Enormous pressures are created by feasts and their promoters to increase food and prestige item production to achieve social and political goals. The domestication of plants and animals probably resulted from such feasting pressures. This volume documents the dynamics of traditional feasting and the ways in which the bewildering array of feasts benefits hosts. It argues that people’s abilities to marry, reproduce, defend themselves against threats and attacks, and to defend their interests in village politics all depend on their ability to engage in feasting networks. As such feasting in these societies has important survival and fitness consequences. To be excluded from feasting networks means to be subject to attack from social predators, in some cases leading to enslavement.
Élisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781526107381
- eISBN:
- 9781526120694
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526107381.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This book addresses the practices, treatment and commemoration of victims’ remains in post-genocide and mass violence contexts. Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publically displayed, ...
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This book addresses the practices, treatment and commemoration of victims’ remains in post-genocide and mass violence contexts. Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publically displayed, human remains raise a vast number of questions regarding their legal, ethical and social uses.
Human Remains in Society will raise these issues by examining when, how and why bodies are hidden or exhibited. Using case studies from multiple continents, each chapter will interrogate their effect on human remains, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices. How, for instance, do issues of confiscation, concealment or the destruction of bodies and body parts in mass crime impact on transitional processes, commemoration or judicial procedures?Less
This book addresses the practices, treatment and commemoration of victims’ remains in post-genocide and mass violence contexts. Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publically displayed, human remains raise a vast number of questions regarding their legal, ethical and social uses.
Human Remains in Society will raise these issues by examining when, how and why bodies are hidden or exhibited. Using case studies from multiple continents, each chapter will interrogate their effect on human remains, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices. How, for instance, do issues of confiscation, concealment or the destruction of bodies and body parts in mass crime impact on transitional processes, commemoration or judicial procedures?
Names are Thicker than Blood
Anthropological Knowledge, Secrecy and Bolivip, Papua New Guinea
Rhetorics of Self-Making
Respectable Lives
Counterplay
America and the Misshaping of a New World Order
Before HIV
Harnessing Fortune
Conversion to Christianity
