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By Area: Asia-Pacific
This volume is dedicated to the New Zealander ethnographer Elsdon Best (1856-1931) who is a key figure in the history of anthropology due to his involuntary triggering of a fundamental and long-lasting anthropological debate on the Māori concept of hau.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
After the end of the Second World War, major federally funded industries in Australia depended on the employment of large numbers of refugees displaced by the war. This book aims to bring to the foreground post-war industry and immigration to comprehensively document a uniquely Australian shaping of the built environment.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Malinowski’s pioneering work remains critical for anthropology in a postcolonial age. This volume uses ethnographic studies from around the world to contextualize the work politically and intellectually, examining its gestation and influence from multiple perspectives.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)
Focusing on contemporary ideas about how aged care is provided, this book poses the question: How can people who are aged and frail live out the final phase of their lives with dignity? In seeking answers, the author examines what it means to be ‘at home’ in residential care in a novel and compassionate way.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
The different ways of understanding borders, through culture, politics, or even religion, is transforming and requires multi-disciplinary approaches the complexity of interactions and tensions that may arise. Borders in East and West focuses on the relationships between Europe and East Asia through comparative case studies to challenge discourses and build new perspectives.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present History: 18th/19th Century Colonial History
Increasingly, scholarly works are approaching the challenges of peoples’ spatial movements across state frontiers as tied to various forms of mobilities that people experience. Using a plural and comparative lens with case studies, Tangled Mobilities brings fresh insight to the wider social phenomenon of mobility and the way places, affects, and personhood are shaped by and connected to it.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision’. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on Ahamb between 2010 and 2017, this book investigates how upheavals like the Ahamb revival can emerge to address and sometimes resolve social problems.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
On March 11, 2011, a tsunami warning was issued for Tonga in Polynesia. On the low and small island of Kotu, people were unperturbed in the face of pending catastrophe. The book is an ethnography of the relationship between people and their environment based on fieldwork over three decades.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies
This book analyzes, within the realms of national literature and film, recent Australian and Canadian attempts to reconcile with Indigenous populations in the wake of forced child removal. As Hanna Teichler demonstrates, their systematic emphasis on the subjectivity of the victim is carnivalesque, temporarily overturning discursive hierarchies.
Subjects: Memory Studies Literary Studies Film and Television Studies
Traumatic Pasts in Asia extends Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, explores how these new terrains of investigation inform and enrich earlier understandings.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies Medical Anthropology
The Wa people have a rich civilization of their own and a deep history in the mountains of Southeast Asia. This book introduces aspects of Wa culture, including their approach to the world’s troubles, and the lessons others might learn from it.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
Drawing on twenty years of research, this book examines the historical perspective of a Pacific people who saw “globalization” come and go. It asks the question: What does it mean to claim that global connections are in the past rather than the present or the future?
Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General) Cultural Studies (General)
Ethnography in the Raw describes the author’s encounters with a Philippine family into which he has married, his wife’s friends and acquaintances, and their lives in a remote rural village in the rice basin of Luzon, about 130 miles north east of Manila. It is both anthropological fieldwork ‘in the raw,’ and an incisive analysis of contemporary Philippine society and culture.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork undertaken since 2006, the book addresses some of the most topical aspects of remote Aboriginal life in Australia. This includes the role of kinship and family, relationships to land and sea, and cross-cultural relations with non-Aboriginal residents.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
Comparing first-person ethnographic accounts of young people living, working, and creating relationships in cities across Asia, this volume explores their contemporary lives, pressures, ideals, and aspirations.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies
This volume explores emerging cultural meanings and social responses to population aging in contemporary East Asian societies. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, policy, archival, and media data, the authors trace both common patterns and diverging trends across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Korea.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
Responding to recent scholarship, this book examines animal domestication and offers a Soiot approach to animals and landscapes, which transcends the wild-tame dichotomy. It is an ethnography intended to help us reinvent our relations with the earth in unpredictable times.
Subject: Environmental Studies (General)
Set against a discussion of the contemporary vitality of Aboriginal musical traditions in Australia and embedded in the historical background of this region, Curran lays out the features of Warlpiri songs and ceremonies, and centers on a focal case study of the Warlpiri Kurdiji ceremony to illustrate the modes in which core cultural themes are being passed on through song to future generations.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Cultural Studies (General)
This volume is unique in that it is dedicated to approaching the analysis of heritage through the concepts of social movements. Adapting the latest developments in the field of social movements, the chapters examine the formation, use and contestation of heritage by various official, non-official and activist players and the spaces where such ongoing negotiations and contestation take place.
Subjects: Heritage Studies Museum Studies Anthropology (General)
Set in a remote district of villagers and nomadic pastoralists in the northernmost part of Mongolia, this ethnography reveals an everyday universe where uncertain relations are as much internally cultivated in indigenous Mongolian perceptions of social relatedness, as it is externally confronted in postsocialist surroundings of unemployment and diminished social security.
Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General)
Brings together different generations of Timor-Leste scholars into dialogue to reconsider a diversity of such critical topics as the incorporation of strangers, the meanings of colonial documents, the value of sacred heirlooms, or the remembering (and forgetting) of colonial violence.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Sociology
Contrary to persistent depictions of an ethnically and economically homogeneous Japan, “ghetto” or “gangsta” J-hop music gives voice to the suffering, deprivation, and social exclusion experienced by many modern Japanese. 24 Bars to Kill gives a fascinating ethnographic account of this music as well as the subculture around it.
Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
Persistently Postwar approaches the topics of social memory and political discourse through an exploration of Japan’s post-war mass media. Diverse disciplinary backgrounds and contrasting perspectives offer a nuanced dialogue in which the functions of mass media are explored as more than a simple ideological tool.
Subjects: Media Studies Film and Television Studies Cultural Studies (General) Memory Studies
Explores how design and innovation shape people’s lives in the Pacific. Focusing on plant materials from the region, it reveals ways in which a variety of people – from craftswomen and scientists to architects and politicians – work with materials to transform worlds.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, and in recognition of the increasingly non-territorial nature of religion in the contemporary world, Going to Pentecost offers an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements, and Pentecostalism in particular.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Combining theoretical discussions with shorter case studies, this book offers an anthropological exploration of the emergence in Malaysia of lifestyle bloggers. It tracks the transformation of personal blogs, which attracted readers with spontaneous, authentic accounts of everyday life, into lifestyle blogs that generate income through advertising and foreground consumerist lifestyles.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Media Studies
Artifak investigates the meaning and value of (art) objects as commodities in Vanuatu, in differing states of transit and transition: in the local place, on the market, and in the museum. It provides an ethnographic account of commoditization in the context of revitalization of culture and the arts in Vanuatu.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Museum Studies
Explorations and Entanglements reconstructs the German elements in the overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits of the “Pacific Worlds.” It concentrates on the pre-1914 period and encompasses scientific, cultural, religious and commercial exchanges. It opens a gate to a fascinating and hitherto much neglected arena of transnational encounters.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Colonial History
In the context of dramatic changes and processes of “glocalization” across the Pacific region, and avoiding conventional “local-global” dichotomies, this volume explores the new and multifaceted forms of resistance and resilience through which communities attempt to regain their original social, political, and economic status and structure after disruption or displacement.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Gulag Memories explores the impact of the Gulag on collective memory as it applies to the language of commemoration in Russia, focusing on four regions particularly affected by the Gulag: Solovetsky Islands, the Komi Republic, the Perm region, and Kolyma.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies
An ethnography of elite polygamy in urban Malaysia, this volume explores the impact this growing practice has on Malay gender relations, examining the varied and often-conflicted polygamy narratives of elite Malay women, who manage their lives and loves under the “threat” of husbands able to marry another woman without their knowledge or consent.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology
This book is a multi-sited ethnography of the migration of a minority of the aboriginal Warlpiri away from their traditional homeland to distant towns and cities. It follows a number of Warlpiri matriarchs into their new locations, exploring how they sustain their independent lives and examining their changing relationship with the traditional culture they represent.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
Capturing Quicksilver considers the use, promotion, and legislation of Chinese medicine in Singapore in relation to government policies favoring international investment, urban redevelopment, healthcare regulation, “multiracial” nationalism, and the management of history and heritage. Theoretically and methodologically developed within medical anthropology, it explores embodied experience and individual and group creativity vis-à-vis state agendas.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology (General)
Dreams Made Small offers an in-depth, ethnographic look at journeys of education among young Papuans under Indonesian rule, ultimately revealing how dreams of transformation, equality, and belonging are shaped and reshaped in the face of multiple constraints.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Educational Studies Cultural Studies (General)
This book offers an ethnographic account of young people growing up in the slums of Bangkok, exploring their struggles to get by in conditions of severe structural constraint and the outcomes and side effects of their endeavours; in doing so, it offers an antidote to neoliberal assumptions about personal responsibility.
Subject: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies
There is a World Heritage Craze in China. China claims to have the longest continuous civilization in the world and is seeking the recognition from UNESCO. With a sociological lens, this book offers comprehensive insights into World Heritage, as well as China’s deep social, cultural, and political structures.
Subjects: Heritage Studies Archaeology Sociology Travel and Tourism
Over world history, Southeast Asia’s contribution to the world economy (during the late prehistoric and early historic periods) has not been given much attention. This book attempts to recalibrate these interactions of Southeast Asia with other parts of the world economy, and gives the region its due instead of treating it as little more than a region of peripheral entrepôts.
Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Using interviews with scholars from Tunisia and Japan, this book examines the manner in which Foucault experienced and explained his encounters with non-Western cultures, unraveling the anthropological implications of his unwavering commitment to cultural difference. It also traces the philosophical-theoretical sources of his conception of difference, and uncovers the contradictions of his dismissal of empirical anthropology to know human beings.
Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
Tanu offers the first ethnographic study of young people who experience high levels of international mobility while growing up, either moving across national borders or by attending international schools with trans-national student bodies.
Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Educational Studies
First published in 2007, The Nanking Atrocity remains an essential resource for understanding the massacre. This second edition includes an extensive new introduction reflecting on the historiographical developments of the last decade, making this even more relevant as we approach the 80th anniversary of the Nanking massacre.
Subjects: Genocide History History: 20th Century to Present
In Okinawa, ecotourism promises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride. Footprints in Paradise explores how sense of place in Okinawa is transformed as language, landscapes, and wildlife are reconstituted as treasured and vulnerable resources.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Continuous government reforms to make universities ‘world class’, entrepreneurial and drivers of the knowledge economy, are transforming the traditional mission and meaning of the public university and its ability to act as ‘critic and conscience’ of society. This collection explores the new landscapes of higher education emerging across Europe and Australasia.
Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)
Urban areas in Arctic Russia are experiencing unprecedented social and ecological change. This collection outlines the key challenges that city managers will face in navigating this shifting political, economic, social, and environmental terrain.
Subjects: Urban Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Sustainable Development Goals
Biomedical Entanglements is an ethnographic study of the Giri people of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the indigenous population’s interaction with modern medicine. The study bridges medical anthropology and global health, exploring how the ‘biomedical’ is imbued with social meaning and how biomedicine affects Giri ways of life.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology
Trees, Knots and Outriggers (Kaynen Muyuw) is the culmination of twenty-five years of work by Frederick H. Damon and his attention to cultural adaptations to the environment in Melanesia.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
Donatas Brandišauskas probes the strategies that Orochen reindeer herders of southeastern Siberia have developed to navigate dramatic environmental and social changes that have unfolded in post-Soviet Siberia.
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Based on seventeen months of ethnographic research among Indonesian eldercare workers in Japan, this book is the first ethnography to research Indonesian care workers’ relationships with the cared-for elderly, their Japanese colleagues and their employers.
Subject: Medical Anthropology
Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through its set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral persons and community amid modernity, and its enormous transformations.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Cutting and Connecting rethinks anthropology’s comparative endeavor by calling in a conceptual debt that theoretical innovations from Melanesian anthropology owe to network analysis originally developed in African contexts. The contributors adopt and employ concepts from recent anthropological studies of Melanesia to analyze contemporary life on the African continent.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
Writing of Ranongga Island, the author tracks engagements with foreigners across many realms of life, describing startling reversals in which strangers become attached to local places, even as kinspeople are estranged. Against stereotypes of rural insularity, she argues that a distinctive cosmopolitan openness to others is evident in the rural Solomons in times of war and peace.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies
This ethnography details changing Ewenki ways of life brought China’s recent ecological migration policies, which aim to preserve and restore the badly damaged ecologies of western China. This ethnography examines these policies and their effects on Aoluguya Ewenki hunters, who have been relocated.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
The trajectory of Hong Kong films had been drastically affected long before the city’s official sovereignty transfer from the British to the Chinese in 1997. The author introduces the “Cinema of Transitions,” using examples from the 1980s to the present, to study New Hong Kong Cinema and on- and off-screen life against this background.
Subjects: Film and Television Studies Cultural Studies (General)
Nearly half the people born on the remote Mbuke Islands become teachers, businessmen, or bureaucrats in urban centers, while those who stay at home ask migrant relatives “What about me?” This detailed ethnography sheds light on remittance motivations and documents how terms like “community” can be useful in places otherwise permeated by kinship.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Sociology
Since the arrival of the first Tibetans in exile in 1959, a vast and continuous wave of international support has permitted these refugees to survive and even to flourish in temporary residences. This book shows how Tibetan refugees continue to attract resources, while other refugee populations are largely forgotten.
Subject: Refugee and Migration Studies
The reindeer herders of Aoluguya, China, are a group of former hunters who today see themselves as “keepers of reindeer.” To some, their future seems troubled, but this volume’s literary and academic contributions instead focus on the present, as the Ewenki attempt to reclaim their forest lifestyle and develop new forest livelihoods.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
Focusing on transformation and continuity over time in Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, among others, contributors assert that kinship is a lived and living dimension of contemporary human lives. The ethnographic case studies add to the understanding of kinship as — according to Unaisi Nabobo-Baba — “knowledge that counts.”
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Foods are changed by those who produce and supply them, and also by those who consume them. The contributors of this volume have expanded the discussion of food to include its social and cultural meanings and functions, thereby using it as a way to explain a culture and its changes.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition
Trapped in the Gap explores what happens when a group of state-supported, intelligent and well-meaning people attempt to help without harming. This group of “white anti-racists” find themselves trapped by endless ambiguities, contradictions, and double binds, a microcosm of the broader dilemmas of postcolonial societies.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
In 1908 Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers brought about a turning point in modern anthropology. The two pioneers’ fieldwork in Island Melanesia brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. Contributors to this volume—who have all carried out fieldwork in Melanesian locations—situate the scholars’ efforts in the contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History
Subjects: Travel and Tourism Sociology
“This is a groundbreaking book…that represents a sophisticated assemblage of ideas to frame and drive the analysis of data gleaned through long-term engagement with each site…Using the well-delineated concepts of travel, assemblage, and translation, [Kingfisher] explains the contradictory ways in which policy discourse is produced and through which traveling ideas ‘touch down’ in varied places and times and are selectively taken up by people in varied systems of social relations and grounded experiences.” · Judith Goode, Temple University
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
“Schachter has produced a powerful and moving account of Native Hawaiian elders who have now passed physically but continue to live on in spirit in the prose that she has assembled from the writings gifted to her. This work represents the best that anthropology has to offer Indigenous peoples seeking to remain Native in a decidedly anti-Native world—a document that gives voice to the truths they know and which connects generations in a lineage of discourse.” · Ty Tengan, University of Hawaii
Subjects: Anthropology (General) History: 20th Century to Present
Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)
Subject: Development Studies
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
Subject: Theory and Methodology
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
This volume presents recent and original studies of life experiences outside the institutional settings of childcare and education, of those growing up in contemporary Central Australia or with strong links to the region.
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General)
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology
Subjects: Urban Studies Cultural Studies (General)
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General) Applied Anthropology
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Subject: Medical Anthropology
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology
Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Subjects: Museum Studies Refugee and Migration Studies
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
Subject: Colonial History
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology Sociology
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Gender Studies and Sexuality
Subjects: Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
Subjects: History: World War II Colonial History
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Development Studies
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Subject: Theory and Methodology
Subjects: Genocide History Colonial History
Subject: Applied Anthropology
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Subject: Anthropology (General)
Subject: Colonial History
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Development Studies
Subjects: Museum Studies Theory and Methodology Colonial History Heritage Studies
This book examines the settlement patterns and intersite variability in lithic assemblages of Early Jomon (ca. 5000 BP) hunter-gatherers in Japan. The results of this study suggest that the Early Jomon people were not sedentary, as previously assumed, but instead moved their residential basis seasonally. The implications of this result are discussed in the context of the development of hunter-gatherer cultural complexity in general and the course of Japanese prehistory in particular.
Subject: Archaeology
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
Subjects: Development Studies Sociology
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present
In this book, Veth develops a model of settlement and subsistence in the Western Desert of Australia, drawing on his own archaeological investigations, as well as ethnographic and environmental data. Building on this model, he concludes with a plausible reconstruction of the colonization of the harsh, arid interior of this continent.