Social and cultural anthropology Books

This collection focuses on the existential predicaments and choices that underpin current debates and developments in the governance of crime and criminal justice and argues for the relevance of existentialist thought for enhancing a critical and...

This monograph is a detailed linguistic analysis of the discourse of German nationalism, colonialism and Anti-Semitism using a methodological framework devised by Ruth Wodak et al., the Discourse Historical Approach. It pays particular attention to the...

This book explores the social and political significance of contemporary recognition contests in areas such as disability, race and ethnicity, nationalism, class and sexuality, drawing on accounts from Europe, the USA, Latin America, the Middle East and...

In a series of stinging analyses, this book examines the current sorry state of higher education. The second half of the volume offers "alternative futures" for the academy, visions that involve academic organizations, public outreach through the...

Acclaimed author, James Elkins, presents a road map of the field of visual studies, describing its major concerns and its principal theoretical sources. He takes the reader down a side road where visual studies becomes a more interesting place.

This book presents the concerns, visions and struggles of women in Chiapas, Mexico in the context of the uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). The book is organized around three issues that have taken center state in women's...

Providing an account of the role of informal institutions in Chinese rural development, this book, based on a decade of fieldwork of village life in the Chinese countryside, puts forth a distinctive argument on a very important topic in Chinese economic...

Fierce competitiveness between established and emerging major cities, such as Berlin, London, Shanghai and Sydney, has led to a pressure to excel as desirable locations for business, cultural activities, highly skilled migrants and tourists. At the same...

Capturing a unique historical moment, this book examines the changes in urban life since the collapse of the Soviet Union from an ethnographic perspective, thus addressing significant gaps in the literature on cities, Central Asia and post-socialism.

 The idea of 'national identity' is an ambiguous one for Hong Kong. Returned to the national embrace of China on 1 July 1997 after 150 years as a British colony, the concept of national identity and what it means to "belong to a nation" is a matter...

Spanning the period from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, The Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology contains almost six hundred individually-signed entries from a global team of contributors and offers an...

Exploring the cultural boundaries of what is means to 'Greek' or 'Turk', this book draws upon anthropological data to compare the opinions of diverse social groups and shed light on the politics of identity-making.

This innovative volume examines both China and Chinese overseas in relation to qiaoxiang. The clearly presented chapters from a team of international contributors provide essential insights into Chinese culture and society.

It is widely assumed that humanity should be able to learn from calamities (e.g., emergencies, disasters, catastrophes) and that the affected individuals, groups, and enterprises, as well as the concerned (disaster-) management organizations and...

This thought- provoking and challenging collection focuses on how anthropologists can define and use indigenous knowledge without compromising anthropological expectations.

From sugar to indentured labourers, tobacco to reggae music, Europe and North America have been relentlessly consuming the Caribbean and its assets for the past five hundred years. In this fascinating book, Mimi Sheller explores this troublesome history,...

In this title, the authors focus primarily on methods of researching children's popular culture as well as offering analyses of such phenomena as children's websites and the internet, and popular toys like Barbie.

Media and Politics in Pacific Asia is the first book to provide a detailed account of the political influences exerted by both domestic and international media in Pacific Asia. Duncan McCargo argues that the media are political actors and institutions in...

This book advances an interdisciplinary understanding of moral injury by analysing the stories of military veterans of combat and peace missions.

This book examines the intersectionality and stratified lived experience of rural poor and urban middle-class childless women in Bangladesh.

Communism in twentieth-century Europe is predominantly narrated as a totalitarian movement and/or regime. This book aims to go beyond this narrative and provide an alternative framework to describe the communist past. This reframing is possible thanks to...

Presents a history of the senses in the fields of anthropology, psychology, and law, identifying important shifts and key disciplinary concerns.

Protagonists of the book are twelve women who tell their personal stories and their dramas from their jails. They were compelled to fight against me, who had betrayed or disappointed them, against social injustices or against hardship of life. From...

Suitable for 2nd and 3rd year students taking courses on drug use/misuse principally in departments such as Sociology, Law, Cultural and Media Studies, and Psychology. Also particularly relevant for students taking courses leading to a profession, such...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

This book investigates the role that the visual and performing arts play in our experience and understanding of the past. The essays highlight the role of oral history in the documentation of the visual and performing arts.

Bringing together a group of leading scholars from Asia, Europe, Australia and North America, this volume discusses multiple issues regarding religious commodifications and their consequences across Asia's diverse religious traditions.

Mixed race studies is one of the fastest growing, as well as one of the most important and controversial areas in the field of race and ethnic relations. Bringing together pioneering and controversial scholarship from both the social and the biological...

A study of East Asian masculinities in an increasingly globalized Asia. It examines masculine ideals, homosexuality, women's perceptions of men, the role of sport and food, and Asian men in the Chinese diaspora.

New Horizons in Medical Anthropology is a festschrift in honor of Charles Leslie whose influential career helped shape this subfield of anthropology. This collection of cutting-edge essays explores medical innovation and medical pluralism at the turn of...

Conceptualised in 1920s Japan by Yanagi Sôetsu, the Mingei movement has spread world wide since the 1950s, creating phenomena as diverse as Mingei museums, Mingei connoisseurs and collectors, Mingei shops and Mingei restaurants. The theory, at its core...

This book examines the growing trend for housing models that shrink private living space and seeks to understand the implications of these shrinking domestic worlds. Small spaces have become big business. Reducing the size of our homes, and the amount of...

Though not a systematic theologian, Thomas Merton spent a lifetime writing in an immensely appealing way about the monastic tradition and mystical theology. One of the fundamental questions he examined was that of the self; for Merton the recovery of the...

Egypt's January 2011 uprising spurred millions to action with a cacophony of demands-including the call to address Egypt's education crisis and adult literacy rates. Read in the Name of Your Lord traces the push for universal literacy as a project caught...