Download or read book Recasting Anthropological Knowledge written by Jeanette Edwards and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays provides an innovative and multifaceted reflection on the impact and inspiration of the scholarship of eminent anthropologist Marilyn Strathern. A distinguished team of international contributors, all former students of Strathern, reflect on the impact of their relationship with their teacher and address the wider conceptual contribution of her work through their own writings. The essays provide an accessible entry into Strathern's scholarship for those new to her work and a rich source of material which mobilises and deploys her concepts, including new ethnographic examples and discussion of contemporary political issues, for those more familiar with her scholarship. The result is a collection that dissects, contextualises and reroutes concepts of relationality, inspiration and knowledge in novel and unpredictable ways. Recasting Anthropological Knowledge will prove invaluable to all students of anthropology and will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences.

Download or read book Recasting Anthropological Knowledge written by Jeanette Edwards and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This collection of original essays provides an innovative and multifaceted reflection on the impact and inspiration of the scholarship of eminent anthropologist Marilyn Strathern. A distinguished team of international contributors, all former students of Strathern, reflect on the impact of their relationship with their teacher and address the wider conceptual contribution of her work through their own writings. The essays provide an accessible entry into Strathern's scholarship for those new to her work and a rich source of material which mobilises and deploys her concepts, including new ethnographic examples and discussion of contemporary political issues, for those more familiar with her scholarship. The result is a collection that dissects, contextualises and reroutes concepts of relationality, inspiration and knowledge in novel and unpredictable ways. Recasting Anthropological Knowledge will prove invaluable to all students of anthropology and will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences"--

Download or read book Barter Exchange and Value written by Caroline Humphrey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-06-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel treatment of barter represents a topical addition to the literature on economic anthropology.

Download or read book Knowledge and Ethics in Anthropology written by Lisette Josephides and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the work of world-renowned anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, this collection of essays features contributions from a range of internationally recognized scholars – including Strathern herself – which examine a range of methodologies and approaches to the anthropology of knowledge.The book investigates the production of knowledge through a variety of themes, centered on the question of the researcher’s obligations and the requirements of knowledge. These range from the obligation to connect with local culture and existing anthropological knowledge, to the need to draw conclusions and circulate what has been learned. Taking up themes that are relevant for anthropology as a whole – particularly the topic of knowledge and the ethics of knowing others, as well as the notion of the local in a global world – Knowledge and Ethics in Anthropology is key reading for students and scholars alike. A thorough introduction to the key concepts and terms used in Strathern’s work is provided, making this a fantastic resource for anyone encountering her work for the first time.

Download or read book Extracting Accountability written by Jessica M. Smith and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries attempt to reconcile competing domains of public accountability. The growing movement toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) urges corporations to promote the well-being of people and the planet rather than the sole pursuit of profit. In Extracting Accountability, Jessica Smith investigates how the public accountability of corporations emerges from the everyday practices of the engineers who work for them. Focusing on engineers who view social responsibility as central to their profession, she finds the corporate context of their work prompts them to attempt to reconcile competing domains of accountability—to formal guidelines, standards, and policies; to professional ideals; to the public; and to themselves. Their efforts are complicated by the distributed agency they experience as corporate actors: they are not always authors of their actions and frequently act through others. Drawing on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, Smith traces the ways that engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries accounted for their actions to multiple publics—from critics of their industry to their own friends and families. She shows how the social license to operate and an underlying pragmatism lead engineers to ask how resource production can be done responsibly rather than whether it should be done at all. She analyzes the liminality of engineering consultants, who experienced greater professional autonomy but often felt hamstrung when positioned as outsiders. Finally, she explores how critical participation in engineering education can nurture new accountabilities and chart more sustainable resource futures.

Download or read book The Imagined Juror written by Anna Offit and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the outsized influence of jurors on prosecutorial discretion Thanks to television and popular media, the jury is deeply embedded in the American public’s imagination of the legal system. For the country’s federal prosecutors, however, jurors have become an increasingly rare sight. Today, in fact, less than 2% of their cases will proceed to an actual jury trial. And yet, when federal prosecutors describe their jobs and what the profession means to them, the jury is a central theme. Anna Offit’s The Imagined Juror examines the counterintuitive importance of jurors in federal prosecutors’ work at a moment when jury trials are statistically in decline. Drawing on extensive field research among federal prosecutors, the book represents “the first ethnographic study of US attorneys,” according to legal scholar Annelise Riles. It describes a world of legal practice in which jurors are frequently summoned—as make-believe audiences for proposed arguments, hypothetical evaluators of evidence, and invented decision-makers who would work together to reach a verdict. Even the question of moving forward with a prosecution often hinges on how federal prosecutors assume a jury will react to elements of the case—an exercise where the perspectives of the public are imagined and incorporated into every stage of trial preparation. Based on these findings, Offit argues that the decreasing number of jury trials at the federal level has not eliminated the influence of the jury but altered it. As imaginary figures, jurors continue to play an important and understudied role in shaping the work and professional identities of federal prosecutors. At the same time, imaginary jurors are not real jurors, and prosecutors at times caricature the public by leaning on stereotypes or preconceived and simplistic ideas about how laypeople think. Imagined jurors, it turns out, are a critical, if flawed, resource for introducing lay perspective into the legal process. As Offit shows, recentering laypeople and achieving the democratic promise of our legal system will require renewed commitment to the jury trial and juries that reflect the diversity of the American public.

Download or read book In Memory of Times to Come written by Melissa Demian and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-06-11 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on twenty years of research, this book examines the historical perspective of a Pacific people who saw “globalization” come and go. Suau people encountered the leading edge of missionization and colonialism in Papua New Guinea and were active participants in the Second World War. In Memory of Times to Come offers a nuanced account of how people assess their own experience of change over the course of a critical century. It asks two key questions: What does it mean to claim that global connections are in the past rather than the present or the future, and what does it mean to claim that one has lost one’s culture, but not because anyone else took it away or destroyed it?

Download or read book European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology written by Jeanette Edwards and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in the study of kinship, a key area of anthropological enquiry, has recently reemerged. Dubbed 'the new kinship', this interest was stimulated by the 'new genetics' and revived interest in kinship and family patterns. This volume investigates the impact of biotechnology on contemporary understandings of kinship, of family and 'belonging' in a variety of European settings and reveals similarities and differences in how kinship is conceived. What constitutes kinship for different publics? How significant are biogenetic links? What does family resemblance tell us? Why is genetically modified food an issue? Are 'genes' and 'blood' interchangeable? It has been argued that the recent prominence of genetic science and genetic technologies has resulted in a 'geneticization' of social life; the ethnographic examples presented here do show shifts occurring in notions of 'nature' and of what is 'natural'. But, they also illustrate the complexity of contemporary kinship thinking in Europe and the continued interconnectedness of biological and sociological understandings of relatedness and the relationship between nature and nurture.

Download or read book Genetic Privacy An Evaluation Of The Ethical And Legal Landscape written by Terry Sheung-hung Kaan and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Privacy is an unwieldy concept that has eluded an essentialised definition despite its centrality and importance in the body of bioethics. The compilation presented in this volume represents continuing discussions on the theme of privacy in the context of genetic information. It is intended to present a wide range of expert opinion in which the notion of privacy is examined from many perspectives, in different contexts and imperatives, and in different societies, with the hope of advancing an understanding of privacy through the examination and critique of some of its evolving component concepts such as notions of what constitute the personal, the context of privacy, the significance and impact of the relational interests of others who may share the same genetic inheritance, and mechanisms for the protection of privacy (as well as of their limitations), among others. More specifically, the discussions in this volume encourages us to think broadly about privacy, as encompassing values that are entailed in the sociality of context and of relations, and also as freedom from illegitimate and excessive surveillance. A long-standing question that continues to challenge us is whether genetic information should be regarded as exceptional, as it is often perceived. A conclusion that could be derived from this volume is that while genetic information may be significant, it is not exceptionally so. The work presented in this volume underlines the continuing and growing relevance of notions of privacy to genomic science, and the need to take ownership of a genetic privacy for the future through broad, rigorous and open discussion.Contributors: Alastair V Campbell, Benjamin Capps, Jacqueline JL Chin, Oi Lian Kon, Kenji Matsui, Thomas H Murray, Nazirudin Mohd Nasir, Dianne Nicol, Anh Tuan Nuyen, Onora O'Neill, Margaret Otlowski, Yvette van der Eijk, Chunshui Wang, Ross S White.

Download or read book A Dam for Africa written by Stephan F. Miescher and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its construction in the early 1960s, the hydroelectric Akosombo Dam across the Volta River has exemplified the possibilities and challenges of development in Ghana. Drawing upon a wealth of sources, A Dam for Africa investigates contrasting stories about how this dam has transformed a West African nation, while providing a model for other African countries. The massive Akosombo Dam is the keystone of the Volta River Project that includes a large manmade lake 250 miles long, the VALCO aluminum smelter, new cities and towns, a deep-sea harbor, and an electrical grid. On the local level, Akosombo has meant access to electricity for people in urban and industrial areas across southern Ghana. For others, Akosombo inflicted tremendous social and environmental costs. The dam altered the ecology of the Lower Volta, displaced 80,000 people in the Volta Basin, and affected the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Ghanaians. In A Dam for Africa, Stephan Miescher explores four intersecting narratives: Ghanaian debates and aspirations about modernization in the context of decolonization and Cold War; international efforts of the US aluminum industry to benefit from Akosombo through cheap electricity for their VALCO smelter; local stories of upheaval and devastation in resettlement towns; and a nation-wide quest toward electrification and energy justice during times of economic crises, droughts, and climate change.

Download or read book Democracy and Diversity in Financial Market Regulation written by Nicholas Dorn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-13 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Financial markets have become acknowledged as a source of crisis, and discussion of them has shifted from economics, through legal and regulatory studies, to politics. Events from 2008 onwards raise important, cross-disciplinary questions: must financial markets drive states into political and existential crisis, must public finances take over private losses, must citizens endure austerity? This book argues that there is an alternative. If the financial system were less 'connected', contagion within the market would be reduced and crises would become more localised and intermittent, less global and pervasive. The question then becomes how to reduce connectedness within financial markets. This book argues that the democratic direction of financial market policies can deliver this. Politicising financial market policies – taking discussion of these issues out of the sphere of the 'technical' and putting it into the same democratically contested space as, for example, health and welfare policies – would encourage differing policies to emerge in different countries. Diversity of regulatory regimes would result in some business models being attracted to some jurisdictions, others to others. The resulting heterogeneity, when viewed from a global perspective, would be a reversal of recent and current tendencies towards one single/global 'level playing field', within which all financial firms and sectors have become closely connected and across which contagion inevitably reigns. No doubt the democratisation of financial market policy would be opposed by big firms – their interests being served by regulatory convergence – and considered macabre by some financial regulators and central bankers, who are coalescing into an elite community. However, everyone else, Nicholas Dorn argues here, would be better off in a financial world characterised by greater diversity.

Download or read book The Remembered Land written by Jim Leary and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did small-scale societies in the past experience and respond to sea-level rise? What happened when their dwellings, hunting grounds and ancestral lands were lost under an advancing tide? This book asks these questions in relation to the hunter-gatherer inhabitants of a lost prehistoric land; a land that became entirely inundated and now lies beneath the North Sea. It seeks to understand how these people viewed and responded to their changing environment, suggesting that people were not struggling against nature, but simply getting on with life – with all its trials and hardships, satisfactions and pleasures, and with a multitude of choices available. At the same time, this loss of land – the loss of places and familiar locales where myths were created and identities formed – would have profoundly affected people's sense of being. This book moves beyond the static approach normally applied to environmental change in the past to capture its nuances. Through this, a richer and more complex story of past sea-level rise develops; a story that may just have resonance for us today.

Download or read book Modernization as Spectacle in Africa written by Peter J. Bloom and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-09 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For postcolonial Africa, modernization was seen as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence and as crucial to the success of its newly established states. Since then, the rhetoric of modernization has pervaded policy, culture, and development, lending a kind of political theatricality to nationalist framings of modernization and Africans' perceptions of their place in the global economy. These 15 essays address governance, production, and social life; the role of media; and the discourse surrounding large-scale development projects, revealing modernization's deep effects on the expressive culture of Africa.

Download or read book Grassroots Law in Papua New Guinea written by Melissa Demian and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The introduction of village courts in Papua New Guinea in 1975 was an ambitious experiment in providing semi-formal legal access to the country’s overwhelmingly rural population. Nearly 50 years later, the enthusiastic adoption of these courts has had a number of ramifications, some of them unanticipated. Arguably, the village courts have developed and are working exactly as they were supposed to do, adapted by local communities to modes and styles consistent with their own dispute management sensibilities. But with little in the way of state oversight or support, most village courts have become, of necessity, nearly autonomous. Village courts have also become the blueprint for other modes of dispute management. They overlap with other sources of authority, so the line between what does and does not constitute a ‘court’ is now indistinct in many parts of the country. Rather than casting this issue as a problem for legal development, the contributors to Grassroots Law in Papua New Guinea ask how, under conditions of state withdrawal, people seek to retain an understanding of law that holds out some promise of either keeping the attention of the state or reproducing the state’s authority.

Download or read book Digital Arts written by Cat Hope and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital Arts presents an introduction to new media art through key debates and theories. The volume begins with the historical contexts of the digital arts, discusses contemporary forms, and concludes with current and future trends in distribution and archival processes. Considering the imperative of artists to adopt new technologies, the chapters of the book progressively present a study of the impact of the digital on art, as well as the exhibition, distribution and archiving of artworks. Alongside case studies that illustrate contemporary research in the fields of digital arts, reflections and questions provide opportunities for readers to explore relevant terms, theories and examples. Consistent with the other volumes in the New Media series, a bullet-point summary and a further reading section enhance the introductory focus of each chapter.

Download or read book Reproducing Fictional Ethnographies written by Anna Apostolidou and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the example of surrogate motherhood to explore the interplay between new reproductive technologies and new ethnographic writing technologies. It seeks to interrogate the potential of fictional multimodality in ethnography and to illuminate the generative possibilities of digital artefacts in anthropological research. It also makes a case for the tailor-made character of ethnographic writing in the digital era, arguing that research quests and representational modalities can be paired together to develop unique narrative forms, corresponding to each particular topic’s traits and analytical affordances. Focusing on the intersections of assisted reproduction technologies and digitally mediated writing, this study casts light upon the value of the affective, the fictional and the ‘real’ in the anthropological research and writing of relatedness. Analyzing the situated knowledge of ethnographers and research interlocutors, it experiments with multimodal storytelling and revisits the century-long debate on the affinity between an object of study and the possibilities for its representation. As the first attempt to bring together digital anthropology, fiction writing and the ethnography of surrogacy, this book fuses the genealogy of feminist critique on the orthodox, phallocentric, and heteronormative aspects of academic discourse with the input of digital humanities vis-à-vis troubling the conventional formal properties of scholarly writing.

Download or read book Queering Knowledge written by Paul Boyce and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume draws on the significance of the work of Marilyn Strathern in respect of its potential to queer anthropological analysis and to foster the reimagining of the object of anthropology. The authors examine the ways in which Strathern’s varied analytics facilitate the construction of alternative forms of anthropological thinking, and greater understanding of how knowledge practices of queer objects, subjects and relations operate and take effect. Queering Knowledge offers an innovative collection of writing, bringing about queer and anthropological syntheses through Strathern’s oeuvre. It will be relevant to scholars from anthropology as well as a number of other disciplines, including gender, sexuality and queer studies. *Winner of the 2020 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Edited Volume*