Download or read book Youth and Identity Politics in South Africa 1990 1994 written by S. Nombuso Dlamini and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Youth and Identity Politics in South Africa shows how the youth identify variously as fans of jazz or hip-hop who espouse a none-racial national character, as athletes who feel a strong connection to traditional Zulu patriarchy, or in many other social and political subcultures.

Download or read book South Africa s Youth and Political Participation 1994 2014 written by Robert B. Mattes and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "South Africans hold - often simultaneously - contradictory beliefs about young people and politics. On one hand, driven largely by a romanticized memory of Soweto and the street battles of the 1980s, many people see the youth as the primary catalyst of activism and political change. On the other hand, driven by continuing media depictions of youth unemployment, township protests and the antics of the ANC Youth League, a wide range of commentators routinely experience 'moral panics' about the apparent 'crisis' of the youth and their corrosive effect on the country's political culture. In this report, we review a wide range of longitudinal survey data spanning the first two decades of democracy and find that there are indeed a series of real problems with South Africa's political culture, particularly in the area of citizenship. At the same time, these data clearly show that these problems are largely not peculiar to young people. Across a range of different indicators, we find consistently that there are no, or relatively minor, age profiles to most dimensions of South African political culture." -- Abstract.

Download or read book Materializing Difference written by Péter Berta and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do objects mediate human relationships, and possess their own social and political agency? What role does material culture – such as prestige consumption as well as commodity aesthetics, biographies, and ownership histories – play in the production of social and political identities, differences, and hierarchies? How do (informal) consumer subcultures of collectors organize and manage themselves? Drawing on theories from anthropology and sociology, specifically material culture, consumption, museum, ethnicity, and post-socialist studies, Materializing Difference addresses these questions via analysis of the practices and ideologies connected to Gabor Roma beakers and roofed tankards made of antique silver. The consumer subculture organized around these objects – defined as ethnicized and gendered prestige goods by the Gabor Roma living in Romania – is a contemporary, second-hand culture based on patina-oriented consumption. Materializing Difference reveals the inner dynamics of the complex relationships and interactions between objects (silver beakers and roofed tankards) and subjects (Romanian Roma) and investigates how these relationships and interactions contribute to the construction, materialization, and reformulation of social, economic, and political identities, boundaries, and differences. It also discusses how, after 1989, the political transformation in Romania led to the emergence of a new, post-socialist consumer sensitivity among the Gabor Roma, and how this sensitivity reshaped the pre-regime-change patterns, meanings, and value preferences of prestige consumption.

Download or read book Tournaments of Value written by Anne Meneley and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant contribution to our understanding of the varied experience of women in the Islamic Middle East, Tournaments of Value gives a careful description of a world of female socializing, and the velocity, energy, and elaborateness of this remarkable female social world. Meneley's data challenges assumptions about the cross-cultural validity of a division between household and community, between domestic and public domains. She demonstrates the fluidity of social life, the shifting nature of community organization, and in doing so provides a welcome counterpoint to more rigid formulations of Middle Eastern social structure usually expressed in ethnographies. Tournaments of Value incorporates vignettes to illustrate more analytical points and to enliven the text, allowing the reader to enter fully into the rich world of Zabid in Yemen. This expanded 20th anniversary edition introduces this seminal work on Middle Eastern ethnography and women's studies to a new generation of readers.

Download or read book Milanese Encounters written by Cristina Moretti and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Milanese Encounters examines how the acts of looking, recognizing, and being seen reflect social relations and power structures in contemporary Milan.

Download or read book Wrapping Authority written by Joseph Hill and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since around 2000, a growing number of women in Dakar, Senegal have come to act openly as spiritual leaders for both men and women. As urban youth turn to the Fayḍa Tijāniyya Sufi Islamic movement in search of direction and community, these women provide guidance in practicing Islam and cultivating mystical knowledge of God. While women Islamic leaders may appear radical in a context where women have rarely exercised Islamic authority, they have provoked surprisingly little controversy. Wrapping Authority tells these women’s stories and explores how they have developed ways of leading that feel natural to themselves and those around them. Addressing the dominant perceptions of Islam as a conservative practise, with stringent regulations for women in particular, Joseph Hill reveals how women integrate values typically associated with pious Muslim women into their leadership. These female leaders present spiritual guidance as a form of nurturing motherhood; they turn acts of devotional cooking into a basis of religious authority and prestige; they connect shyness, concealing clothing, and other forms of feminine “self-wrapping” to exemplary piety, hidden knowledge, and charismatic mystique. Yet like Sufi mystical discourse, their self-presentations are profoundly ambiguous, insisting simultaneously on gender distinctions and on the transcendence of gender through mystical unity with God.

Download or read book The Land of Weddings and Rain written by Gediminas Lankauskas and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research, The Land of Weddings and Rain examines the components of the contemporary urban wedding in post-socialist Lithuania.

Download or read book Why the Porcupine is Not a Bird written by Gregory Forth and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-04-06 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird is a comprehensive analysis of knowledge of animals among the Nage people of central Flores in Indonesia. Gregory Forth sheds light on the ongoing anthropological debate surrounding the categorization of animals in small-scale non-Western societies. Forth’s detailed discussion of how the Nage people conceptualize their relationship to the animal world covers the naming and classification of animals, their symbolic and practical use, and the ecology of central Flores and its change over the years. His study reveals the empirical basis of Nage classifications, which align surprisingly well with the taxonomies of modern biologists. It also shows how the Nage employ systems of symbolic and utilitarian classification distinct from their general taxonomy. A tremendous source of ethnographic detail, Why the Porcupine Is Not a Bird is an important contribution to the fields of ethnobiology and cognitive anthropology.

Download or read book Legacies of Violence written by Antonio Sorge and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Legacies of Violence, Antonio Sorge examines highland Sardinia's long history of resistance to outside authority and the effects that a history of violence exercises on collective representations.

Download or read book Island in the Stream written by Michael Lambek and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Island in the Stream introduces an original genre of ethnographic history as it follows a community on Mayotte, an East African island in the Mozambique Channel, through eleven periods of fieldwork between 1975 and 2015. Over this 40-year span Mayotte shifted from a declining and neglected colonial backwater to a full département of the French state. In a highly unusual postcolonial trajectory, citizens of Mayotte demanded this incorporation within France rather than joining the independent republic of the Comoros. The Malagasy-speaking Muslim villagers Michael Lambek encountered in 1975 practiced subsistence cultivation and lived without roads, schools, electricity, or running water; today they are educated citizens of the EU who travel regularly to metropolitan France and beyond. Offering a series of ethnographic slices of life across time, Island in the Stream highlights community members' ethical engagement in their own history as they looked to the future, acknowledged the past, and engaged and transformed local forms of sociality, exchange, and ritual performance. This is a unique account of the changing horizons and historical consciousness of an African community and an intimate portrait of the inhabitants and their concerns, as well as a glimpse into the changing perspective of the ethnographer.

Download or read book Being M ori in the City written by Natacha Gagné and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indigenous peoples around the world have been involved in struggles for decolonization, self-determination, and recognition of their rights, and the M?ori of Aotearoa-New Zealand are no exception. Now that nearly 85% of the M?ori population have their main place of residence in urban centres, cities have become important sites of affirmation and struggle. Grounded in an ethnography of everyday life in the city of Auckland, Being Maori in the City is an investigation of what being M?ori means today. One of the first ethnographic studies of M?ori urbanization since the 1970s, this book is based on almost two years of fieldwork, living with M?ori families, and more than 250 hours of interviews. In contrast with studies that have focused on indigenous elites and official groups and organizations, Being M?ori in the City shines a light on the lives of ordinary individuals and families. Using this approach, Natacha Gagné adroitly underlines how indigenous ways of being are maintained and even strengthened through change and openness to the larger society.

Download or read book We Are Still Didene written by Thomas McIlwraith and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detailing the history of the aboriginal village of Iskut, British Columbia over the past 100 years, ‘We Are Still Didene’ examines the community's transition from subsistence hunting to wage work in trapping, guiding, construction, and service jobs. Using naturally occurring, extended transcripts of stories told by the group's hunters, Thomas McIlwraith explores how Iskut hunting culture and the memories that the Iskut share have been maintained orally. McIlwraith demonstrates the ways in which these stories challenge the idealized images of Aboriginals that underlie state-sponsored traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) studies. McIlwraith instead illuminates how these narratives are connected to the Iskut Village's complex relationships with resource extraction companies and the province of British Columbia, as well as their interactions with animals and the environment.

Download or read book Maps of Experience written by Andie Diane Palmer and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many North American indigenous cultures, history and stories are passed down, not by the written word, but by oral tradition. In Maps of Experience, Andie Diane Palmer draws on stories recorded during travels through Secwepemc – or Shuswap – hunting and gathering territory with members of the Alkali Lake Reserve in Interior British Columbia. Palmer examines how the various kinds of talk allow knowledge to be carried forward, reconstituted, reflected upon, enriched, and ultimately relocated by and for new interlocutors in new experiences and places. Maps of Experience demonstrates how the Secwepemc engagement in the traditional practices of hunting and gathering create shared lived experiences between individuals, while recreating a known social context in which existing knowledge of the land may be effectively shared and acted upon. When the narratives of fellow travellers are pooled through discursive exchange, they serve as what can be considered a ‘map of experience,’ providing the basis of shared understanding and social relationship to territory. Palmer's analysis of ways of listening and conveying information within the Alkali Lake community brings new insights into indigenous language and culture, as well as to the study of oral history, ethnohistory, experimental ethnography, and discourse analysis.

Download or read book Without the State written by Emily Channell-Justice and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-10-03 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Without the State explores the 2013–14 Euromaidan protests – a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine – through in-depth ethnographic research with leftist, feminist, and student activists in Kyiv. The book discusses the concept of "self-organization" and the notion that if something needs to be done and a person has the competence to do it, then they should simply do it. Emily Channell-Justice reveals how self-organization in Ukraine came out of leftist practices but actors from across the spectrum of political views also adopted self-organization over the course of Euromaidan, including far-right groups. The widespread adoption of self-organization encouraged Ukrainians to rethink their expectations of the relationship between citizens and their state. The book explains how self-organized practices have changed people’s views on what they think they can contribute to their own communities, and in the wake of Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it has also motivated new networks of mutual aid within Ukraine and beyond. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, including the author’s first-hand experience of the entirety of the Euromaidan protests, Without the State provides a unique analytical account of this crucial moment in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history.

Download or read book Rural Nostalgias and Transnational Dreams written by Nicola Mooney and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Renowned as the predominant farmers and landlords of Punjab, and long possessed of an autocthonous agricultural identity, Jat Sikhs today often live urban and diasporic lives. Rural Nostalgias and Transnational Dreams examines the formation of Jat Sikh identity amid diverse ideals and incursions of modernity, exploring the question of what it means to be Jat Sikh in the contemporary Indian city.Nicola Mooney describes a number of Jat Sikh social practices and narratives – education, professional development and employment, the making of appropriate marriage matches, and the discourse of progress – through which contemporary notions of identity are developed. She contextualizes these elements of Jat Sikh modernity against local, regional, and national histories of cultural and political differentiation, perceptions of marginality, and the expression of increasingly exclusive notions and practices of identity. Mooney argues that class practices incorporate urban Jat Sikhs into national and transnational communities, separating them from rural Jat Sikhs and confounding caste solidarities. Nevertheless, rural attachments remain important to urban identities.This is a unique ethnography that incorporates first-hand observations and local narratives to develop insights into the traditions and social memory of Jat Sikhs, as well as on the issues of urban and transnational social transformation."

Download or read book Europe Un Imagined written by Damien Stankiewicz and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europe Un-Imagined examines one of the world’s first and only trans nationally produced television channels, Association relative à la télévision européenne (ARTE). ARTE calls itself the "European culture channel" and was launched in 1991 with a French-German intergovernmental mandate to produce television and other media that promoted pan-European community and culture. Damien Stankiewicz’s ground-breaking ethnographic study of the various contexts of media production work at ARTE (the newsroom, the editing studio, the screening room), reveals how ideas about French, German, and European culture coalesce and circulate at the channel. He argues that the reproduction of nationalism often goes unacknowledged and unremarked upon, and questions whether something like a European "imagination" can be produced. Stankiewicz describes the challenges that ARTE staff face, including rapidly changing media technologies and audiences, unreflective national stereotyping, and unwieldy bureaucratic infrastructure, which ultimately limit the channel’s abilities to cultivate a transnational, "European" public. Europe Un-Imagined challenges its readers to find new ways of thinking about how people belong in the world beyond the problematic logics of national categorization.

Download or read book From Equality to Inequality written by Csilla Dallos and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The egalitarian society once enjoyed by the Lanoh hunter-gatherers of Peninsular Malaysia is quickly changing. Throughout a year of ethnographic fieldwork among the Lanoh, Csilla Dallos studied and interpreted social change in order to better understand the processes leading to inequality and the concurrent development of social complexity within a community. From Equality to Inequality provides rich empirical data on the factors within a community that significantly affect the development of inequality, including the effects of sedentism, integration, leadership competition, self-aggrandizement, marginalization, and feuding kinship groups. In this case study, Dallos argues that in order to understand emerging inequality, anthropologists and social scientists need to revisit current conceptions of politics in small-scale egalitarian societies. Offering a new model of developing social inequality that is congruent with the principles of complexity theory, From Equality to Inequality is a sterling example of how anthropological practice can further our general understanding of human behaviour.