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891 results in Social and cultural anthropology

Page 1 of 45

Ethnography of an Interface
  • Self-Tracking, Quantified Self, and the Work of Digital Connections
  • Yuliya Grinberg
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • Technologists frequently promote self-tracking devices as objective tools. This book argues that such glib and often worrying assertions must be placed in the context of precarious industry dynamics. The author draws on several years of ethnographic fieldwork with developers of self-tracking applications and wearable devices in New York City's Silicon Alley and with technologists who participate in the international forum called the Quantified Self to illuminate the professional compromises that shape digital technology and the gap between the tech sector's public claims and its interior processes. By reconciling the business conventions, compromises, shifting labor practices, and growing employment insecurity that power the self-tracking market with device makers' often simplistic promotional claims, the book offers an understanding of the impact that technologists exert on digital discourse, on the tools they make, and on the data that these gadgets put out into the world.

Visceral Politics
  • Intimate Imaginaries of Power in South India
  • Indira Arumugam
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2025
    Print publication:
    01 April 2026

Beings and Beasts

Love and Violence in Sierra Leone
  • Mediating Intimacy after Conflict
  • Luisa T. Schneider
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    31 December 2024
  • In the decades following the civil war that took place in Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2002, new laws were passed to rebuild the state, and to prevent rape, teenage pregnancy and domestic violence. In this ethnography, Luisa T. Schneider explores the intricate semantic, empirical and socio-legal dynamics of love and violence in post-conflict Sierra Leone, challenging the oversimplification of these phenomena. Schneider underscores the limitations of imposing singular interpretations on love and violence, advocating for a nuanced, phenomenological approach that reveals how state and institutional attempts to regulate violence and loving relationships without considering local lived experience and meaning-making can yield negative consequences. By analysing how love and violence are historically constituted, experienced, and (re)produced across personal, social, legal, and political levels, this book critiques the construction of violence within gendered sexual relationships by development agencies, law makers and politicians, urging them to engage with local knowledge and experience. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Bus Station Hustle
  • Transport Work in Urban Ghana
  • Michael Stasik
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    31 December 2024
  • Bus stations are among the most prominent sites of social and economic activity in Africa. Integral to transport, trade, and exchange over distance, they provide livelihoods for large numbers of people. Through a detailed ethnography of one of Ghana's busiest long-distance bus stations, Michael Stasik explores the dialectical relationship between the ways in which people make the station work and how the station shapes popular economic engagement and social life. Drawing on a dual understanding of 'hustle' as a distinct mode of economic activity and organisation, as well as a marker of complex and sometimes bewildering situations, Stasik challenges dominant views of transport work in urban Africa, especially those wedded to generic notions of 'informality'. Bus Station Hustle offers a nuanced anthropological perspective on the hands-on work in and the institutional workings of an infrastructural hub of mobility and exchange. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

A Woman's Job
  • Making Middle Lives in Urban India
  • Asiya Islam
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024
  • Against the backdrop of rapid socio-economic change in post-1990 India, scholars and policy makers have expressed surprise at the low rate of women's participation in the workforce, particularly in urban areas. A Woman's Job presents a unique urban ethnography of young lower middle class women's lives in Delhi as they weave in and out of service employment, education, and domestic contracts. Urban, educated, and skilled, these young women seek employment in cafes, malls, call centres, and offices in the globalising landscape of Delhi. Their participation in work enables access to 'things', such as, jeans, smartphones, English language, and the metro, that symbolise global modernity. However, caught in a web of gender, class, and caste inequalities, their identification as 'working' women also generates social anxieties. The book shows how women adopt 'middle-ness' as a strategy of life-making at the multiple sites of work, home, and leisure.

Youth, Pentecostalism, and Popular Music in Rwanda
  • Andrea Mariko Grant
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • Youth, Pentecostalism, and Popular Music in Rwanda offers fascinating insight into the lived experiences of young people in Rwanda through ethnographic analysis of the ambiguities and ambivalences that have accompanied the country's rapid post-genocide development. Andrea Mariko Grant considers how Pentecostalism and popular music offer urban young people ways to craft themselves and their futures; to imagine alternative ways to 'be' Rwandan and inhabit the city in the post-genocide era. Exploring the idiom of the heart – and efforts to transform it – this book offers a richly nuanced perspective of urban young people's everyday lives, their aspirations and disappointments, at a political moment of both great promise and great constraint. Rather than insist on a resistance-dominance binary, Grant foregrounds the possibilities of agency available to young people, their ability to make 'noise', even when it may lead to devastating consequences.

Camille Bulcke
  • The Jesuit Devotee of Tulsidas
  • Ravi Dutt Bajpai, Swati Parashar
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2024
    Print publication:
    01 April 2026
  • This is the first English biography of the Belgian Jesuit, Padma Bhushan recipient and renowned scholar of Hindi, Awadhi and Sanskrit: Father Camille Bulcke (1909–1982). Father Bulcke came to India when it was still a British colony, found spiritual inspiration in the life and compositions of the great Indian poet Goswami Tulsidas, and emerged as one of the renowned exponents of the Ramkatha (The Story of Rama) and the Hindi language. This book attempts to read and critically examine his life, while also analysing his writings on comparative religious studies. In doing so, it provides a brief overview of the world of Hindi literature and its development in postcolonial India through the contributions of Father Bulcke, and highlights the cultural and religious encounters between the West and the East, Europe and India, Christianity and Hinduism.

Questioning Migrants
  • Ethnic Nationalism at the Limits of Pakistan
  • Tahir H. Naqvi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2024
    Print publication:
    01 April 2026

Sacrifice and Violence
  • Reflections from an Ethnography in Nepal
  • Marie Lecomte-Tilouine
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024
  • Violence is at the heart of the sacrifice, despite its denial in the texts. For the participants and observers, it materialises in the exposure of everyone and everything to the 'fountains of blood'. The specificity of this public and holistic violence, orchestrated in Nepal by the highest dignitaries and aimed at the rejuvenation of the cosmic, political and social order, allows us to see sacrifice as the ultimate model of legitimate violence. At the same time, observation reveals its oxymoronic nature through the opposite effect its violence has on its participants. As such, sacrifice is not only the organiser of society, but also the revelator of its internal tensions and fault lines. The book explores the complex aspects of royal ceremonies, their contestation by different groups, and finally the contours of the new legitimacy that sacrifice found during the revolutionary period under its most extreme form of human sacrifice.

Between Muslim Pīr and Hindu Saint
  • Laldas and the Devotional Culture in North India
  • Mukesh Kumar
  • Published online:
    30 April 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024
  • This book focuses on the shared religious figure of Laldas/Khan, and uncovers fascinating historical and contemporary dimensions of Hindu-Muslim socio-cultural interactions around his shrines. It explores reformist and extremist politics that have influenced shared religious traditions, shedding light on the impact of the reformist ideologies of the Arya Samaj and Tablighi Jamaat on the followers of Laldas. It presents a compelling analysis of how some shared religious practices persist and adapt amidst the pressures of dominant reform movements. The inclusion of marginalised voices, particularly women, adds a poignant and powerful dimension to the narrative. Through its comprehensive and thought-provoking approach, the book provides valuable insights into the continuously evolving religious landscape of north Indian devotional Hinduism and popular Islam. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Narrative Research Now
  • Critical Perspectives on the Promise of Stories
  • Edited by Ashley Barnwell, Signe Ravn
  • Published by:
    Bristol University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    01 December 2023
  • Supported by the editors' popular podcast 'Narrative Now', this interdisciplinary volume explores the capacities and limitations of narrative research. It maps out new directions for the field while honouring its legacy.

Risk in the Roman World
  • Jerry Toner
  • Published online:
    16 November 2023
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023
  • Modern risk studies have viewed the inhabitants of the ancient world as being both dominated by fate and exposed to fewer risks, but this very readable and groundbreaking new book challenges these views. It shows that the Romans inhabited a world full of danger and also that they not only understood uncertainty but employed a variety of ways to help to affect future outcomes. The first section focuses on the range of cultural attitudes and traditional practices that served to help control risk, particularly among the non-elite population. The book also examines the increasingly sophisticated areas of expertise, such as the law, logistics and maritime loans, which served to limit uncertainty in a systematic manner. Religious expertise in the form of dream interpretation and oracles also developed new ways of dealing with the future and the implicit biases of these sources can reveal much about ancient attitudes to risk.

Caring for Cultural Heritage
  • An Integrated Approach to Legal and Ethical Initiatives in the United Kingdom
  • Charlotte Woodhead
  • Published online:
    09 November 2023
    Print publication:
    23 November 2023
  • This book explores how cultural heritage and its care are translated in UK law and non-law instruments. It analyses how communities of care look after cultural heritage because they care about it. These communities include the international and national community, national and local governments, courts, professional bodies, institutions such as museums as well as community groups. 'Care' refers to the varied ways in which communities engage with cultural heritage to maintain it, sustain relationships about it and with it, use it and provide access to it, with a view to passing it on to future generations. The book also assesses how far these nested practices of care assist communities of care in providing respectful, empathetic and dialogical care to navigate harm to cultural heritage. It will be of interest to scholars of cultural heritage studies across disciplines, including law, sociology and anthropology, as well as policymakers and practitioners in cultural heritage management.

Mobility Economies in Europe's Borderlands
  • Migrants' Journeys through Libya and the Mediterranean
  • Marthe Achtnich
  • Published online:
    12 October 2023
    Print publication:
    26 October 2023
  • The arrival of unauthorised migrants at the shores of southern Europe has been sensationalized into a migration 'crisis' in recent years. Yet, these depictions fail to grasp migrants' experiences and fall short of addressing a more complex phenomenon. In this original ethnography, Marthe Achtnich examines migrants' journeys and economic practices underpinning mobility to recast how we think of migration. Bringing the perspectives and voices of migrants to the fore, she traces sub-Saharan migrants' journeys along one of the world's most dangerous migration routes: through the Sahara Desert, Libya, and then by boat to Malta in Europe. Examining what she calls 'mobility economies', Achtnich demonstrates how these migrant journeys become sources of profit for various actors. By focusing on migrants' long and difficult journeys, the book prompts a necessary rethinking of mobile life, economic practices under contemporary capitalism, and the complex relationship between the two.

The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality
  • Edited by Cecilia McCallum, Silvia Posocco, Martin Fotta
  • Published online:
    29 September 2023
    Print publication:
    19 October 2023
  • The tense but enduring engagement between anthropology and gender and sexuality studies has had profound effects upon anthropological theory and practice. Bringing together contributions from an international team of authors, this Handbook shows that anthropological work has taken inspiration from feminist and LGBTQI movements to create a transformative body of research. It provides an accessible, state-of-the-art overview of the anthropology of gender and sexuality whilst also documenting its historical emergence, highlighting the varied impact gender and sexuality studies have had on anthropological theory. It is split into five parts, with each chapter introducing a contemporary anthropological theory through in-depth ethnographical discussion. It features intersectional, black, and indigenous authors, providing a forum for established and emerging voices to gesture towards futures of anthropology of gender and sexuality. Authoritative and cutting-edge, it is essential reading for researchers and students in anthropology, and will set the agenda for future research in the field.

Encounters with Islam
  • Studies in the Anthropology of Muslim Cultures
  • Lawrence Rosen
  • Published online:
    09 September 2023
    Print publication:
    14 September 2023
  • Too often, Western encounters with the Islamic world commence with stereotypes and end with a renewed distance. Drawing from decades of experience studying the Muslim world, Lawrence Rosen challenges these narrow understandings. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Rosen shows the wide-ranging significance of Muslim art, culture, and law around the world. Exploring political, economic, and social encounters within and with the Muslim world across the eras, he considers a wide range of contexts – from fifteenth-century mosaics in Central Asia that reveal a complex understanding of mathematics, to the political choices available to the youth of modern-day Morocco and Cairo. With in-depth analyses of art, law, and religion, and how they informed one another, Rosen develops a vibrant, nuanced portrait of the Islamic world. Drawing linkages across time, regions, and cultures, this is a significant anthropological study of the Islamic world from a seasoned scholar.

Peranakan Chinese Identities in the Globalizing Malay Archipelago
  • Leo Suryadinata
  • Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    01 September 2023
  • Peranakan Chinese communities and their 'hybrid' culture have fascinated many observers. This book, comprising fourteen chapters, was mainly based on papers written by the author in the last two decades. The chapters address Peranakan Chinese cultural, national and political identities in the Malay Archipelago, i.e., Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore (IMS). This book is divided into two parts. Part I which is on the regional dimension, contains nine chapters that discuss the three countries and beyond. Part II consists of five chapters which focus on one country, i.e., Indonesia. This book not only discusses the past and the present, but also the future of the Peranakan Chinese.

Performing Power in Nigeria
  • Identity, Politics, and Pentecostalism
  • Abimbola A. Adelakun
  • Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023
  • For decades, Pentecostalism has been one of the most powerful socio-cultural and socio-political movements in Africa. Performing Power in Nigeria explores how Nigerian Pentecostals mark their self-distinction as a people of power within a social milieu that affirmed and contested their desires for being. Their faith, and the various performances that inform it, imbue the social matrix with saliences that also facilitate their identity of power. Using extensive archival material, interviews and fieldwork, Abimbola A. Adelakun questions the histories, desires, knowledge, tools, and innate divergences of this form of identity, and its interactions with the other ideological elements that make up the society. Analysing the important developments in contemporary Nigerian Pentecostalism, she demonstrates how the social environment is being transformed by the Pentecostal performance of their identity as the people of power. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

State of the Arts
  • An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration
  • Jonas Tinius
  • Published online:
    03 August 2023
    Print publication:
    17 August 2023
  • This is a bold and wide-ranging account of the unique German public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. State of the Arts analyses how artistic traditions have responded to social change, racism, and cosmopolitan anxieties and recounts how critical contemporary cultural production positions itself in relation to the tumultuous history of German state patronage, difficult heritage, and self-cultivation through the arts. Jonas Tinius' fieldwork with professional actors, directors, cultural policy makers, and activists unravels how they constitute theatre as a site for extra-ordinary ethical conduct and how they grapple with the pervasive German cultural tradition of Bildung, or self-cultivation through the arts. Tinius shows how anthropological methods provide a way to understand the entanglement of cultural policy, institution-building, and subject-formation. An ambitious and interdisciplinary study, the work demonstrates the crucial role of artistic intellectuals in society.

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