Download or read book The Anthropological Perspective of the World written by Dominique Desjeux and published by P.I.E-Peter Lang S.A., Editions Scientifiques Internationales. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new global middle class of consumers is in the process of emerging and transforming the whole interplay of social forces.This book presents an inductive method in action, as it has been put in practice all over the world in almost 50 years of qualitative investigations in fields, offices, trains, kitchens, bathrooms or living rooms.
Download or read book Pursuits of Happiness written by Gordon Mathews and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropology has long shied away from examining how human beings may lead happy and fulfilling lives. This book, however, shows that the ethnographic examination of well-being--defined as "the optimal state for an individual, a community, and a society"--and the comparison of well-being within and across societies is a new and important area for anthropological inquiry. Distinctly different in different places, but also reflecting our common humanity, well-being is intimately linked to the idea of happiness and its pursuits. Noted anthropological researchers have come together in this volume to examine well-being in a range of diverse ways and to investigate it in a range of settings: from the Peruvian Amazon, the Australian outback, and the Canadian north, to India, China, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States. Gordon Mathews is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has written What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds (1996) and Global Culture /Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket (2000), and co-written Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation (2007); he has co-edited Consuming Hong Kong (2001) and Japan's Changing Generations (2004). Carolina Izquierdo is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for the Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research has centered on health and well-being among the Matsigenka in the Peruvian Amazon, the Mapuche in Chile, and middle-class families in the United States.
Download or read book Global Health written by Merrill Singer and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Affordable and conceptually accessible, this succinct volume captures the distinctive anthropological perspective on global health issues for undergraduates in the social and health sciences. Ideal for professors who want to add an experiential human face, a cultural dimension, and an emic understanding of health in cross-cultural contexts to interdisciplinary course content, Global Health exposes the day-to-day health challenges people around the world face. Key to its message is that, despite strides in improving worldwide health, human impacts on the environment, violent social conflict, and increasing social inequality diminish the success of global health initiatives to protect against illness, disability, and death. Readers, gripped by the impact of undeniable, far-reaching realities such as global warming, infectious disease, food insecurity, water crises, war and genocide, and refugee crises, will learn to apply a holistic, anthropological framework in search of solutions to such complex biosocial conditions.
Download or read book Anthropologists in a Wider World written by Paul Dresch and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dozen papers reflect the newer perspective of studying historical patterns, wider regions, and global networks beyond traditional anthropological fieldwork. New wave scholars reflect on their field and desk experiences and may let the field come to them; e.g., an ethnomusicologist studies the fieldwork of others and observes non- Western performances in a British museum. Includes bandw photos of authors' studies and a substantial bibliography. The editors and contributors are from the U. of Oxford, where the social and cultural anthropology department held a 1997 seminar on the teaching of methods on which this volume is based. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book An Anthropological Trompe L Oeil for a Common World written by Alberto Corsín Jiménez and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our political age is characterized by forms of description as ‘big’ as the world itself: talk of ‘public knowledge’ and ‘public goods,’ ‘the commons’ or ‘global justice’ create an exigency for modes of governance that leave little room for smallness itself. Rather than question the politics of adjudication between the big and the small, this book inquires instead into the cultural epistemology fueling the aggrandizement and miniaturization of description itself. Incorporating analytical frameworks from science studies, ethnography, and political and economic theory, this book charts an itinerary for an internal anthropology of theorizing. It suggests that many of the effects that social theory uses today to produce insights are the legacy of baroque epistemological tricks. In particular, the book undertakes its own trompe l’oeil as it places description at perpendicular angles to emerging forms of global public knowledge. The aesthetic ‘trap’ of the trompe l’oeil aims to capture knowledge, for only when knowledge is captured can it be properly released.
Download or read book The Anthropology of News and Journalism written by S. Elizabeth Bird and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title explores the role of news and journalism in contemporary culture from an anthropological perspective. Essays by leading scholars look at communities of professional and nonprofessional journalists.
Download or read book Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency written by John D. Kelly and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global events of the early twenty-first century have placed new stress on the relationship among anthropology, governance, and war. Facing prolonged insurgency, segments of the U.S. military have taken a new interest in anthropology, prompting intense ethical and scholarly debate. Inspired by these issues, the essays in Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency consider how anthropologists can, should, and do respond to military overtures, and they articulate anthropological perspectives on global war and power relations. This book investigates the shifting boundaries between military and civil state violence; perceptions and effects of American power around the globe; the history of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice; and debate over culture, knowledge, and conscience in counterinsurgency. These wide-ranging essays shed new light on the fraught world of Pax Americana and on the ethical and political dilemmas faced by anthropologists and military personnel alike when attempting to understand and intervene in our world.
Download or read book Boundless Worlds written by Peter Wynn Kirby and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where lived experience of surroundings is shifting, visceral, and immersive, interpretation of social spaces tends to be static and remote. "Space" and "place" are also often analyzed without grappling much (if at all) with the social, political, and historical roots of spatial practice. This volume embarks upon the novel strategy of focusing on movement as a way of understanding social spaces, which offers a means to get beyond biases inherent in the social science of space. Ethnographic studies of social life in settings as varied as nomadic Mongolia and island Melanesia, as distinct as contemporary Tokyo and war-torn Palestine, challenge Western assumptions about the universality of "space" and allow concrete understanding of how life plays out over different socio-cultural topographies. In a world that is becoming increasingly "bounded" in many ways - despite enormous changes wrought by technological, ideological, and other social developments - Boundless Worlds urges a scholarly turn, away from the purely global, toward the human dimension of social lives lived in conditions of conflict, upheaval, remapping, and improvisation through movement.
Download or read book Anthropological Perspectives on Technology written by Michael B. Schiffer and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These fourteen original essays accept a dual premise: technology pervades and is embedded in all human activities. By taking that approach, studies of technology address two questions central in anthropological and archaeological research today-accounting for variability and change. These diverse yet interrelated chapters show that to understand human lives, researchers must deal with the material world that all peoples create and inhabit. Therefore an anthropology of technology is not a separate, discrete inquiry; instead, it is a way to connect how people make and use things to any activity studied, ranging from religion, to enculturation, to communication, to art. Each contributor discusses theories and methods and also offers a substantial case study. These detailed inquiries span human societies from the Paleolithic to the computer age. By moving beyond the usual approach of examining ancient technologies, particularly chipped stone and low-fired ceramics, this volume probes for the construction of meaning in the material world across millennia. The authors of these essays find technology to be an inclusive and flexible topic that merges with studies of everything else in human activity. "A provocative and powerful discussion of the role of technology in human cultures. At a time when archaeology has become less focused on theory, and archaeology and social anthropology seem to fracture farther and farther apart, the book is a breath of fresh air."--Professor John Douglas, University of Montana
Download or read book Public Anthropology in a Borderless World written by Sam Beck and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropologists have acted as experts and educators on the nature and ways of life of people worldwide, working to understand the human condition in broad comparative perspective. As a discipline, anthropology has often advocated — and even defended — the cultural integrity, authenticity, and autonomy of societies across the globe. Public anthropology today carries out the discipline’s original purpose, grounding theories in lived experience and placing empirical knowledge in deeper historical and comparative frameworks. This is a vitally important kind of anthropology that has the goal of improving the modern human condition by actively engaging with people to make changes through research, education, and political action.
Download or read book Introducing Cultural Anthropology written by Brian M. Howell and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of culture in human experience? This concise yet solid introduction to cultural anthropology helps readers explore and understand this crucial issue from a Christian perspective. Now revised and updated throughout, this new edition of a successful textbook covers standard cultural anthropology topics with special attention given to cultural relativism, evolution, and missions. It also includes a new chapter on medical anthropology. Plentiful figures, photos, and sidebars are sprinkled throughout the text, and updated ancillary support materials and teaching aids are available through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources.
Download or read book Social and Cultural Anthropology in Perspective written by Ioan Lewis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social anthropology is, in the classic definition, dedicated to the study of distant civilizations in their traditional and contemporary forms. But there is a larger aspiration: the comparative study of all human societies in the light of those challengingly unfamiliar beliefs and customs that expose our own ethnocentric limitations and put us in our place within the wider gamut of the world's civilizations. Thematically guided by social setting and cultural expression of identity, Social and Cultural Anthropology in Perspective is a dynamic and highly acclaimed introduction to the field of social anthropology, which also examines its links with cultural anthropology. A challenging new introduction critically surveys the latest trends, pointing to weaknesses as well as strengths.Presented in a clear, lively, and entertaining fashion, this volume offers a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to social anthropology for use by teachers and students. Skillfully weaving together theory and ethnographic data, author Ioan M. Lewis advocates an eclectic approach to anthropology. He combines the strengths of British structural-functionalism with the leading ideas of Marx, Freud, and Levi-Strauss while utilizing the methods of historians, political scientists, and psychologists. One of Lewis' particular concerns is to reveal how insights from ""traditional"" cultures illuminate what we take for granted in contemporary industrial and post-industrial society. He also shows how, in the pluralist world in which we live, those who study ""other"" cultures ultimately learn about themselves. Social anthropology is thus shown to be as relevant today as it has been in the past.
Download or read book How to Think Like an Anthropologist written by Matthew Engelke and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What is anthropology? What can it tell us about the world? Why, in short, does it matter? For well over a century, cultural anthropologists have circled the globe, from Papua New Guinea to suburban England and from China to California, uncovering surprising facts and insights about how humans organize their lives and articulate their values. In the process, anthropology has done more than any other discipline to reveal what culture means--and why it matters. By weaving together examples and theories from around the world, Matthew Engelke provides a lively, accessible, and at times irreverent introduction to anthropology, covering a wide range of classic and contemporary approaches, subjects, and practitioners. Presenting a set of memorable cases, he encourages readers to think deeply about some of the key concepts with which anthropology tries to make sense of the world--from culture and nature to authority and blood. Along the way, he shows why anthropology matters: not only because it helps us understand other cultures and points of view but also because, in the process, it reveals something about ourselves and our own cultures, too." --Cover.
Download or read book Policy Worlds written by Cris Shore and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, constraining or confined to static texts; rather, they are productive, continually contested and able to create new social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations. Anthropologists do not stand outside or above systems of governance but are themselves subject to the rhetoric and rationalities of policy. The analyses of policy worlds presented by the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for understanding systems of knowledge and power and the positioning of academics within them.
Download or read book A World of Insecurity written by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering contribution to the emergent anthropology of human security that brings classic concerns of the field into the 21st century.
Download or read book China in the World written by Jennifer Hubbert and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-03-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confucius Institutes, the language and culture programs funded by the Chinese government, have been established in more than 1,500 schools worldwide since their debut in 2004. A centerpiece of China’s soft power policy, they represent an effort to smooth China’s path to superpower status by enhancing its global appeal. Yet Confucius Institutes have given rise to voluble and contentious public debate in host countries, where they have been both welcomed as a source of educational funding and feared as spy outposts, neocolonial incursions, and obstructions to academic freedom. China in the World turns an anthropological lens on this most visible, ubiquitous, and controversial globalization project in an effort to provide fresh insight into China’s shifting place in the world. Author Jennifer Hubbert takes the study of soft power policy into the classroom, offering an anthropological intervention into a subject that has been dominated by the methods and analyses of international relations and political science. She argues that concerns about Confucius Institutes reflect broader debates over globalization and modernity and ultimately about a changing global order. Examining the production of soft power policy in situ allows us to move beyond program intentions to see how Confucius Institutes are actually understood and experienced in day-to-day classroom interactions. By assessing the perspectives of participants and exploring the complex ways in which students, teachers, parents, and program administrators interpret the Confucius Institute curriculum, she highlights significant gaps between China’s soft power policy intentions and the effects of those policies in practice. China in the World brings original, long-term ethnographic research to bear on how representations of and knowledge about China are constructed, consumed, and articulated in encounters between China, the United States, and the Confucius Institute programs themselves. It moves a controversial topic beyond the realm of policy making to examine the mechanisms through which policy is implemented, engaged, and contested by a multitude of stakeholders and actors. It provides new insight into how policy actually works, showing that it takes more than financial wherewithal and official resolve to turn cultural presence into power.
Download or read book The Angry Earth written by Anthony Oliver-Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Angry Earth explores how various cultures in different historical moments have responded to calamity, offering insight into the complex relationship between societies and their environments. From hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes to oil spills and nuclear accidents, disasters triggered by both natural and technological hazards have become increasingly frequent and destructive across the planet. Through case studies drawn from around the globe the contributors to this volume examine issues ranging from the social and political factors that set the stage for disaster, to the cultural processes experienced by survivors, to the long-term impact of disasters on culture and society. In the second edition, each chapter has been updated with a postscript to reflect on recent developments in the field. There is also new material on key present-day topics including epidemics, drought, non-governmental organizations, and displacement and resettlement. This book demonstrates the relevance of studying disaster from an anthropological perspective and is a valuable resource not only for anthropologists but for other fields concerned with education, policy and practice.
