Performing Place, Practising Memories

Performing Place, Practising Memories
Author: Rosita Henry
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2012-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857455095

During the 1970s a wave of ‘counter-culture’ people moved into rural communities in many parts of Australia. This study focuses in particular on the town of Kuranda in North Queensland and the relationship between the settlers and the local Aboriginal population, concentrating on a number of linked social dramas that portrayed the use of both public and private space. Through their public performances and in their everyday spatial encounters, these people resisted the bureaucratic state but, in the process, they also contributed to the cultivation and propagation of state effects.

Toward Engaged Anthropology

Toward Engaged Anthropology
Author: Sam Beck
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2013-07-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 178238037X

By working with underserved communities, anthropologists may play a larger role in democratizing society. The growth of disparities challenges anthropology to be used for social justice. This engaged stance moves the application of anthropological theory, methods, and practice toward action and activism. However, this engagement also moves anthropologists away from traditional roles of observation toward participatory roles that become increasingly involved with those communities or social groupings being studied. The chapters in this book suggest the roles anthropologists are able to play to bring us closer to a public anthropology characterized as engagement.

In the Event

In the Event
Author: Lotte Meinert
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1782388907

Events are “generative moments” in at least three senses: events are created by and condense larger-scale social structures; as moments, they spark and give rise to new social processes; in themselves, events may also serve to analyze social situations and relationships. Based on ethnographic studies from around the world—varying from rituals and meetings over protests and conflicts to natural disasters and management—this volume analyzes generative moments through events that hold the key to understanding larger social situations. These events—including the Ashura ritual in Bahrain, social cleavages in South Africa, a Buddhist cave in Nepal, drought in Burkina Faso, an earthquake in Pakistan, the cartoon crisis in Denmark, corporate management at Bang & Olufsen, protest meetings in Europe, and flooding and urban citizenship in Mozambique—are not simply destructive disasters, crises, and conflicts, but also generative and constitutive of the social.

Extremism, Society, and the State

Extremism, Society, and the State
Author: Giacomo Loperfido
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2021-12-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1800733461

Extremism does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, extremism is a relative concept that often emerges in crisis situations, taking shape within the tense and contradictory relations that tie marginal spaces, state orders, and mainstream culture. This collected volume brings together leading anthropologists and cultural analysts to offer a concise look at the narratives, symbolic, and metaphoric fields related to extremism, systematizing an approach to extremism, and placing these ideologies into historical, political, and geo-systemic contexts.

Biomedical Entanglements

Biomedical Entanglements
Author: Franziska A. Herbst
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2016-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 178533235X

Biomedical Entanglements is an ethnographic study of the Giri people of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the indigenous population’s interaction with modern medicine. In her fieldwork, Franziska A. Herbst follows the Giri people as they circulate within and around ethnographic sites that include a rural health center and an urban hospital. 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.

Transcultural Montage

Transcultural Montage
Author: Christian Suhr
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857459651

The disruptive power of montage has often been regarded as a threat to scholarly representations of the social world. This volume asserts the opposite: that the destabilization of commonsense perception is the very precondition for transcending social and cultural categories. The contributors—anthropologists, filmmakers, photographers, and curators—explore the use of montage as a heuristic tool for comparative analysis in anthropological writing, film, and exhibition making. Exploring phenomena such as human perception, memory, visuality, ritual, time, and globalization, they apply montage to restructure our basic understanding of social reality. Furthermore, as George E. Marcus suggests in the afterword, the power of montage that this volume exposes lies in its ability to open the very “combustion chamber” of social theory by juxtaposing one’s claims to knowledge with the path undertaken to arrive at those claims.

The Social Life of Achievement

The Social Life of Achievement
Author: Nicholas J. Long
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2013-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1782382216

What happens when people “achieve”? Why do reactions to “achievement” vary so profoundly? And how might an anthropological study of achievement and its consequences allow us to develop a more nuanced model of the motivated agency that operates in the social world? These questions lie at the heart of this volume. Drawing on research from Southeast Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America, this collection develops an innovative framework for explaining achievement’s multiple effects—one which brings together cutting-edge theoretical insights into politics, psychology, ethics, materiality, aurality, embodiment, affect and narrative. In doing so, the volume advances a new agenda for the study of achievement within anthropology, emphasizing the significance of achievement as a moment of cultural invention, and the complexity of “the achiever” as a subject position.

All Tomorrow's Cultures

All Tomorrow's Cultures
Author: Samuel Gerald Collins
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2021-06-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1800730772

The first edition of All Tomorrow’s Cultures explored the legacy of futures-thinking in anthropology and marked the beginning of a resurgence of interest in anthropological futures. The new edition has been updated to reflect some of the outpouring of work since then, particularly in science and technology studies and in anthropological analyses of indigenous futures. In addition, Collins has updated the final chapter to expand the field of anthropological possibility in an age of both despair and hope.

Public Anthropology in a Borderless World

Public Anthropology in a Borderless World
Author: Sam Beck
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2015-07-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1782387315

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.

Music and Manipulation

Music and Manipulation
Author: Steven Brown
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2006
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1845450981

Since the beginning of human civilization, music has been used as a device to control social behavior, where it has operated as much to promote solidarity within groups as hostility between competing groups. Music is an emotive manipulator that influences attitude, motivation and behavior at many levels and in many contexts. This volume is the first to address the social ramifications of music’s behaviorally manipulative effects, its morally questionable uses and control mechanisms, and its economic and artistic regulation through commercialization, thus highlighting not only music’s diverse uses at the social level but also the ever-fragile relationship between aesthetics and morality.