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Barter and Social Regeneration in the Argentinean Andes
Despite the pervasiveness of barter across societies, this mode of transaction has largely escaped the anthropologist’s gaze. Drawing on data from fairs in the Argentinean Andes, this book addresses a local modality of barter known as cambio. Bringing out its embeddedness within religious celebrations, it argues that cambio is practiced as a sacrifice to catholic figures and local ancestors, thereby challenging a widespread view of barter as a non-monetary form of commodity exchange. This ethnography of Andean barter considers processes of value creation, both economic and subjective, to further our understanding of how social groups create themselves through economic exchanges.
Becoming Other
Most of us are conscious of having a single and stable self, but the self is more fragmented and plastic than we care to think. David Berliner explores the captivating world of identity through an array of astonishing experiences. From Napoleon doppelgangers to Philip Roth's alter-ego Nathan Zukerman and Wonder Woman cosplayers to anthropologists going native, he delves into the kaleidoscopic nature of the self and attempts to understand the heterogenous nature of identity. But Becoming Other also discusses a great cultural controversy of our time: who has the right to play at being whom?
Ecological Nostalgias
Introducing the study of econostalgias through a variety of rich ethnographic cases, this volume argues that a strictly human centered approach does not account for contemporary longings triggered by ecosystem upheavals. In this time of climate change, this book explores how nostalgia for fading ecologies unfolds into the interstitial spaces between the biological, the political and the social, regret and hope, the past, the present and the future.
Losing Culture
We’re losing our culture... our heritage... our traditions... everything is being swept away. Such sentiments get echoed around the world, from aging Trump supporters in West Virginia to young villagers in West Africa. But what is triggering this sense of cultural loss, and to what ends does this rhetoric get deployed? To answer these questions, anthropologist David Berliner travels around the world, from Guinea-Conakry, where globalization affects the traditional patriarchal structure of cultural transmission, to Laos, where foreign UNESCO experts have become self-appointed saviors of the nation’s cultural heritage. He also embarks on a voyage of critical self-exploration, reflecting on...
An Overheated World
Although economic, cultural and demographic changes are part and parcel of the modern world, changes in a number of areas have accelerated in the last quarter-century – a period sometimes spoken of as the global information society, a world of ‘liquid modernity’ – or of fully-fledged global neoliberalism associated with deregulation, flexible accumulation and financialisation. At a global level, some of the substantial areas where change has accelerated are, apart from the spectacular spread of new information technology, tourism, foreign direct investment, urbanisation, resource extraction through mining, energy use, species extinction, displacement, and international trade. These a...
Food, Agriculture and Social Change
Through grounded case studies in seven Latin American countries, each of which seeks to explain development as it uniquely unfolds, this book explores how social change in food and agriculture is fundamentally experiential, contingent and unpredictable.
Lotman's Cultural Semiotics and the Political
Yuri Lotman (1922-1993) was a prominent Russian intellectual and theorist. This book presents a new reading of his semiotic and philosophical legacy. The authors analyse Lotman's semiotics in a series of temporal contexts, starting with the rigidity of Soviet-era ideologies, through to the post-Soviet de-politicization that - paradoxically enough - ended with the reproduction of Soviet-style hegemonic discourse in the Kremlin and ultimately reignited politically divisive conflicts between Russia and Europe. The book demonstrates how Lotman's ideas cross disciplinary boundaries and their relevance to many European theorists of cultural studies, discourse analysis and political philosophy. Lotman lived and worked in Estonia, which, even under Soviet rule, maintained its own borderland identity located at the intersection of Russian and European cultural flows. The authors argue that in this context Lotman’s theories are particularly revealing in relation to Russian-European interactions and communications, both historically and in a more contemporary sense.
Tangier/Gibraltar - A Tale of One City
Contemporary life is caught in prisons of identity. Public, academic, and political discourses do not seem to be possible without circling around the topos of identity, thereby creating an illusion of uniqueness, separation, difference, and conflict. By studying the relationship between the Moroccan city of Tangiers and the British overseas territory of Gibraltar, Dieter Haller shows how cross-boundary experiences, practices, and identifications create a sense of neighborhood beyond official discourses. Across the Straits of Gibraltar, local and regional relationships in different fields such as kinship, economy, and culture provide resources for post-Brexit common action and a future beyond the prison of identity.
Putin’s Dark Ages
Two decades before the war against Ukraine, a “special operation” was launched against Russian historical memory, aggressively reshaping the nation’s understanding of its history and identity. The Kremlin’s militarization of Russia through World War II propaganda is well documented, but the glorification of Russian medieval society and its warlords as a source of support for Putinism has yet to be explored. This book offers the first comparison of Putin’s political neomedievalism and re-Stalinization and introduces the concept of mobmemory to the study of right-wing populism. It argues that the celebration of the oprichnina, Ivan the Terrible’s regime of state terror (1565–1572), has been fused with the rehabilitation of Stalinism to reconstruct the Russian Empire. The post-Soviet case suggests that the global obsession with the Middle Ages is not purely an aesthetic movement but a potential weapon against democracy. The book is intended for students, scholars, and non-specialists interested in understanding Russia’s anti-modern politics and the Russians’ support for the terror unleashed against Ukraine.
Black Women in America
This is a comprehensive guide to the lives of 641 individual black women, most of whom are significant on a national level. There are also entries to more than 150 general topics and organizations involving Black women. Listed alphabetically, the signed entries have bibliographies and many have photographs. The length of the articles vary from one or two columns to multiple pages, especially for the topical entries. Entries are balanced and easily comprehensible. The appendices include a chronology, a classified bibliography, including a directory of research centers, and the biographies classified by occupations. There is an extensive index. Recommended as a first purchase among the new biographical sources about Black women for high school libraries.
