Download Books and Ebooks (PDF / EPUB)

Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar offer an in-depth exploration of how Amerindian epistemology and ontology concerning indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon have spread to Western societies, and of how indigenous, mestizo, and cosmopolitan cultures have engaged with and transformed these forest traditions. The volume focuses on the use of ayahuasca, a psychoactive drink essential in many indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon. Ayahuasca use has spread to countries far beyond its Amazonian origin, spurring a wide variety of legal and cultural responses. The essays in this volume look at how these responses have influenced ritual design and performance in traditional and non-traditional contexts, how displaced indigenous people and rubber tappers are engaged in the creative reinvention of rituals, and how these rituals help build ethnic alliances and cultural and political strategies. These essays explore important classic and contemporary issues in anthropology, including the relationship between the expansion of ecotourism and ethnic tourism and recent indigenous cultural revival and the emergence of new ethnic identities. The volume also examines trends in the...

A World of Many Worlds is a search into the possibilities that may emerge from conversations between indigenous collectives and the study of science's philosophical production. The contributors explore how divergent knowledges and practices make worlds. They work with difference and sameness, recursion, divergence, political ontology, cosmopolitics, and relations, using them as concepts, methods, and analytics to open up possibilities for a pluriverse: a cosmos composed through divergent political practices that do not need to become the same. Contributors. Mario Blaser, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Déborah Danowski, Marisol de la Cadena, John Law, Marianne Lien, Isabelle Stengers, Marilyn Strathern, Helen Verran, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Human rights violations are perpetrated in all parts of the world, and the universal reaction to such atrocities is overwhelmingly one of horror and sadness. Yet, as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im and his contributors attest, our viewpoint is clouded and biased by the expectations native to our own culture. How do other cultures view human rights issues? Can an analysis of these issues through multiple viewpoints, both cross-cultural and indigenous, help us reinterpret and reconstruct prevailing theories of human rights?

The bodies and minds of children--and the very space of children--are under assault. This is the message we receive from daily news headlines about violence, sexual abuse, exploitation, and neglect of children, and from a proliferation of books in recent years representing the domain of contemporary childhood as threatened, invaded, polluted, and "stolen" by adults. Through a series of essays that explore the global dimensions of children at risk, an international group of researchers and policymakers discuss the notion of children's rights, and in particular the claim that every child has a right to a cultural identity. Explorations of children's situations in Japan, Korea, Singapore, South Africa, England, Norway, the United States, Brazil, and Germany reveal how children's everyday lives and futures are often the stakes in contemporary battles that adults wage over definitions of cultural identity and state cultural policies. Throughout this volume, the authors address the complex and often ambiguous implications of the concept of rights. For example, it may be used to defend indigenous children from radically assimilationist or even genocidal state policies; but it may also be ...

From about 2000 BCE onward, Egypt served as an important nexus for cultural exchange in the eastern Mediterranean, importing and exporting not just wares but also new artistic techniques and styles. Egyptian, Greek, and Roman craftsmen imitated one another’s work, creating cultural and artistic hybrids that transcended a single tradition. Yet in spite of the remarkable artistic production that resulted from these interchanges, the complex vicissitudes of exchange between Egypt and the Classical world over the course of nearly 2500 years have not been comprehensively explored in a major exhibition or publication in the United States. It is precisely this aspect of Egypt’s history, however, that Beyond the Nile uncovers. Renowned scholars have come together to provide compelling analyses of the constantly evolving dynamics of cultural exchange, first between Egyptians and Greeks—during the Bronze Age, then the Archaic and Classical periods of Greece, and finally Ptolemaic Egypt—and later, when Egypt passed to Roman rule with the defeat of Cleopatra. Beyond the Nile, a milestone publication issued on the occasion of a major international exhibition, will become an...

This ethnographic study of a local school system in Turkey illuminates the dynamic interplay between politics, society, and education.

This report analyses all aspects of cultural diversity, which has emerged as a key concern of the international community in recent decades, and maps out new approaches to monitoring and shaping the changes that are taking place. It highlights, in particular, the interrelated challenges of cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue and the way in which strong homogenizing forces are matched by persistent diversifying trends. The report proposes a series of ten policy-oriented recommendations, to the attention of States, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, international and regional bodies, national institutions and the private sector on how to invest in cultural diversity. Emphasizing the importance of cultural diversity in different areas (languages, education, communication and new media development, and creativity and the marketplace) based on data and examples collected from around the world, the report is also intended for the general public. It proposes a coherent vision of cultural diversity and clarifies how, far from being a threat, it can become beneficial to the action of the international community.

"Like Brazilian society, documentary filmmaking is undergoing transformation, becoming an increasingly inclusive and diverse field, intervening in the ongoing struggle for social justice and equal distribution of power. As the first English-language monograph to focus on this body of work, this book examines the ways in which contemporary documentaries explore the borders between centers and margins, visibilities and invisibilities, silences and speech, and forms of authority and their contestation. Centered on an eclectic cluster of documentaries -from ethnographic documentaries and indigenous videos to films concerned with social and criminal justice, including first-person, essayistic films - this book brings into view the transformations of both Brazilian society and filmmaking, ultimately examining the genre's preoccupation with archival content"--

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the legal issues around intangible cultural heritage (also known as traditional cultural expressions or folklore). It explores both institutional and substantive responses the law offers to the safeguarding of intangible heritage, relying heavily on critiques internal and external to the law. These external critiques primarily come from the disciplines of anthropology and heritage studies. Intangible cultural heritage is safeguarded on three different levels: international, regional, and national. At the international level, the foremost instrument is the specific UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003). At the regional level, initiatives are undertaken both in schemes of political and economic integration, a common thread being that intangible cultural heritage helps promote a common identity for the region, becoming thus a desirable aspect of the integration process. Domestically, responses range from strong constitutional forms of protection to rather weak policy initiatives aimed primarily at attracting foreign aid. Intangible heritage can also be safeguarded via substantive law, and, in...

An incisive study of situated learning, analyzed through a critical theory of social practice as transformational change in everyday life.

Despite its economic weight, Brazil has yet to emerge as a major player in global affairs. Since the 1960s, however, the country has been a major force on a happier front: popular culture, especially music. Dunn's attractively produced book takes the reader through the history of Brazil's cultural movement and focuses on a group of musicians from Bahia, including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Tom Ze. He examines how the tropicalists appropriated and parodied sectors of Brazil's culture to reveal the gap between the nation's idealized image of itself and the brutality of daily life. Perrone and Dunn, meanwhile, have collected essays from Brazilian as well as U.S. scholars to look more broadly at Brazilian popular culture. They ask how Brazil's culture was affected by outside influences, with subjects ranging from Carmen Miranda to the recent impact of hip-hop, rock, and heavy metal. Born out of Brazil's own domestic vicissitudes, popular music is perhaps its most successful and widely known international intervention.

This book compiles research from leading experts in the social, behavioral, and cultural dimensions of sustainability, as well as local and global understandings of the concept, and on lived practices around the world. It contains studies focusing on ways of living, acting, and thinking which claim to favor the local and global ecological systems of which we are a part, and on which we depend for survival. The concept of sustainability as a product of concern about global environmental degradation, rising social inequalities, and dispossession is presented as a key concept. The contributors explore the opportunities to engage with questions of sustainability and to redefine the concept of sustainability in anthropological terms.

Too often Indigenous peoples have been portrayed as being without a future, destined either to disappear or assimilate into settler society. This book asserts quite the opposite: Indigenous peoples are not in any sense “out of time” in our contemporary world. Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii shows how Indigenous peoples in Canada not only continue to have a future, but are at work building many different futures – for themselves and for their non-Indigenous neighbours. Through the experiences of the Haida First Nation, this book explores these possible futures in detail, demonstrating how Haida ways of thinking about time, mobility, and political leadership are at the heart of contemporary strategies for addressing the dilemmas that come with life under settler colonialism.

This volume reproduces key historical texts concerning `colonial knowledges’. The use of the adjective 'colonial' indicates that knowledge is shaped by power relationships, while the use of the plural form, ’knowledges’ indicates the emphasis in this collection is on an interplay between different, often competing, cognitive systems. George Balandier’s notion of the colonial situation is an organising principle that runs throughout the volume, and there are four sub-themes: language and texts, categorical knowledge, the circulation of knowledge and indigenous knowledge. The volume is designed to introduce students to a range of important interventions which speak to each other today, even if they were not intended to do so when first published. An introductory essay links the themes together and explains the significance of the individual articles.

A recognized classic in the literature on African Brazilian religions, Nag Grandma and White Papa is an important case study of social identity formation as a relational process involving the 'political' mobilization of cultural markers to define group differences. Dantas's book remains surprisingly relevant to current theoretical debates on these questions as well as to the area of African diaspora studies.'' - Robert Slenes, Universidad Estadual de Campinas, Brazil ''Dantas brings together the practices of everyday believers, religious authorities, intellectuals, and elites to explore what Africa means in Brazil and how that meaning has changed over time. The depth, care, and sophistication of her research and analysis have made this book a model for a generation of scholarship in Brazil. Translation into English brings this imaginative work the broad audience it fully deserves.''

The imperialist ambitions of China – which invaded Tibet in the late 1940s – have sparked the spectacular spread of Tibetan Buddhism worldwide, and especially in western countries. This work is a study on the malleability of a particular Buddhist tradition; on its adaptability in new contexts. The book analyses the nature of the Tibetan Buddhism in the Diaspora. It examines how the re-signification of Tibetan Buddhist practices and organizational structures in the present refers back to the dismantlement of the Tibetan state headed by the Dalai Lama and the fragmentation of Tibetan Buddhist religious organizations in general. It includes extensive multi-sited fieldwork conducted in the United States, Brazil, Europe, and Asia and a detailed analysis of contemporary documents relating to the global spread of Tibetan Buddhism. The author demonstrates that there is a "de-institutionalized" and "de-territorialized" project of political power and religious organization, which, among several other consequences, engenders the gradual "autonomization" of lamas and lineages inside the religious field of Tibetan Buddhism. Thus, a spectre of these previous institutions continues to exist...

The story of the notorious Jewish gangster who ascended from impoverished beginnings to the glittering Las Vegas strip"A highly readable, fast-moving contribution to the annals of 20th-century organized crime."—Kirkus ReviewsIn a brief life that led to a violent end, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel (1906–1947) rose from desperate poverty to ill-gotten riches, from an early-twentieth-century family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side to a kingdom of his own making in Las Vegas. In this captivating portrait, author Michael Shnayerson sets out not to absolve Bugsy Siegel but rather to understand him in all his complexity.Through the 1920s, 1930s, and most of the 1940s, Bugsy Siegel and his longtime partner in crime Meyer Lansky engaged in innumerable acts of violence. As World War II came to an end, Siegel saw the potential for a huge, elegant casino resort in the sands of Las Vegas. Jewish gangsters built nearly all of the Vegas casinos that followed. Then, one by one, they disappeared. Siegel’s story laces through a larger, generational story of eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early- to mid-twentieth century.

1999 was a decisive year in the long history of the people of Timor-Leste, whose future was open when they voted for independence in a UN-sponsored referendum. Its results left no doubt that the Timorese considered themselves to be a nation wishing to have their own state, which they would rule. This book examines a vast array of transformations that have taken place over the past decades. It puts forward the idea of "cohabitations", which aims at inscribing the mutual influences arising from the existence of distinct social processes not only side by side but in their mutual influences and entanglements, sometimes resulting from effective clashes, some others from peaceful manipulation of social and cultural differences. From this analytical viewpoint of evolving power dynamics of cohabitations, experts in the field investigate issues that have been contentious in the recent past and analyse the challenges that present-day Timor-Leste is facing. Structured in three parts, the contributions address issues of governance, land, as well as the transformation in the traditional culture including conceptions about identity and exchange, and transformations in the ritual and religious...

Using both primary archival and printed sources, Mieko Nishida examines the perspectives of slaves, ex-slaves, and free-born people of color and the critical factors that affected their lives and self-perceptions. The book offers a new window on slave life in nineteenth-century Salvador, Brazil, and illustrates the difficulty of generalizing about New World slave societies.".

Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture—as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth—is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the “four ontologies”— animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation ...

This bibliography lists the most important works published in anthropology in 1993. Renowned for its international coverage and rigorous selection procedures, IBSS provides reserchers and librarians with the most comprehensive and scholarly bibliographic service available in the social sciences. IBSS is compiled by the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics, one of the world's leading social science institutions. Published annually, IBSS is available in four subject areas: anthropology, economics, political science and sociology.

Education for Action is an invaluable tool for making informed choices about working for social change while earning a degree. This expanded fourth edition of this easy-to-use guidebook provides detailed information on progressive programs in a wide variety of academic field. Each entry includes a concise description of the program, key faculty contacts and their interests, course titles, degree information, and crucial addresses, phone and fax numbers.

The IBSSis the essential tool for librarians, university departments, research institutions and any public or private institution whose work requires access to up-to-date and comprehensive knowledge of the social sciences.

Darrell A Posey died in March 2001 after a long and distinguished career in anthropology and ecology. Kayapó Ethnoecology and Culture presents a selection of his writings that result from 25 years of work with the Kayapó Indians of the Amazon Basin. These writings describe the dispersal of the Kayapó sub-groups and explain how with this diaspora useful biological species and natural resource management strategies also spread. However the Kayapó are threatened with extinction like many of the inhabitants of the Amazon basin. The author is adamant that it is no longer satisfactory for scientists to just do 'good science'. They are are increasingly asked and morally obliged to become involved in political action to protect the peoples they study.

How might we envision animism through the lens of the ‘anthropology of anthropology’? The contributors to this volume offer compelling case studies that demonstrate how indigenous animistic practices, concepts, traditions, and ontologies are co-authored in highly reflexive ways by anthropologists and their interlocutors. They explore how native epistemologies, which inform anthropological notions during fieldwork, underpin the dialogues between researchers and their participants. In doing so, the contributors reveal ways in which indigenous thinkers might be influenced by anthropological concepts of the soul and, equally, how they might subtly or dramatically then transform those same concepts within anthropological theory.

How do the lives of indigenous peoples relate to the romanticized role of "Indians" in Brazilian history, politics, and cultural production? Native and National in Brazil charts this enigmatic relationship from the sixteenth century to the present, focusing on the consolidation of the dominant national imaginary in the postindependence period and highlighting Native peoples' ongoing work to decolonize it. Engaging issues ranging from sovereignty, citizenship, and national security to the revolutionary potential of art, sustainable development, and the gendering of ethnic differences, Tracy Devine Guzman argues that the tensions between popular renderings of "Indianness" and lived indigenous experience are critical to the unfolding of Brazilian nationalism, on the one hand, and the growth of the Brazilian indigenous movement, on the other. Devine Guzman suggests that the "indigenous question" now posed by Brazilian indigenous peoples themselves--how to be Native and national at the same time--can help us to rethink national belonging in accordance with the protection of human rights, the promotion of social justice, and the consolidation of democratic governance for indigenous and...

Les croyances et les pratiques religieuses des autochtones des Amériques ont-elles été supplantées par le christianisme ? Jusqu'à récemment, les chercheurs avaient tendance à vouloir démontrer les effets dévastateurs de l'évangélisation sur les systèmes de croyances premiers ou, au contraire, à tenter de mettre au jour, sous la façade chrétienne, les restes d'un substrat religieux originel. En réalité, les dynamiques religieuses chez les autochtones américains apparaissent bien plus complexes et subtiles. De nos jours, des réseaux religieux sont en voie d'émergence ou de consolidation. Ils s'inscrivent dans un contexte de mondialisation, mettant en contact les autochtones avec des spiritualités et des croyances issues de tous les continents. Par une curieuse inversion historique, l'expérience religieuse n'est plus un facteur de déstructuration et d'assimilation, mais constitue un facteur de reconstruction sociale et politique. A une époque où les autochtones des Amériques et d'ailleurs multiplient leurs échanges spirituels, il est paradoxal de constater combien les chercheurs demeurent mal outillés pour comprendre ces phénomènes contemporains. Quel...

One hundred years ago in Brazil the rituals of Candomblé were feared as sorcery and persecuted as crime. Its cult objects were fearsome fetishes. Nowadays, they are Afro-Brazilian cultural works of art, objects of museum display and public monuments. Focusing on the particular histories of objects, images, spaces and persons who embodied it, this book portrays the historical journey from weapons of sorcery looted by the police, to hidden living stones, to public works of art attacked by religious fanatics that see them as images of the Devil, former sorcerers who have become artists, writers, and philosophers. Addressing this history as a journey of objectification and appropriation, the author offers a fresh, unconventional, and illuminating look at questions of syncretism, hybridity and cultural resistance in Brazil and in the Black Atlantic in general.

This book addresses the Lusophone Black Atlantic as a space of historical and cultural production between Portugal, Brazil, and Africa. The authors demonstrate how it has been shaped by diverse colonial cultures including the Portuguese imperial project. The Lusophone context offers a unique perspective on the history of the Atlantic.

This volume examines the implications and consequences of the idea of ‘intangible heritage’ to current international academic and policy debates about the meaning and nature of cultural heritage and the management processes developed to protect it. It provides an accessible account of the different ways in which intangible cultural heritage has been defined and managed in both national and international contexts, and aims to facilitate international debate about the meaning, nature and value of not only intangible cultural heritage, but heritage more generally. Intangible Heritage fills a significant gap in the heritage literature available and represents a significant cross section of ideas and practices associated with intangible cultural heritage. The authors brought together for this volume represent some of the key academics and practitioners working in the area, and discuss research and practices from a range of countries, including: Zimbabwe, Morocco, South Africa, Japan, Australia, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, USA, Brazil and Indonesia, and bring together a range of areas of expertise which include anthropology, law, heritage studies, archaeology, museum studies,...

This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.

This edited collection by scholars of both history and anthropology re-examines the concepts of resistance and the effect of neoliberalism from the 1980s to the present day comparing Brazil and Mexico, two of the largest countries in Latin America.

Before they were largely decimated and dispersed by the effects of European colonization, Arawak-speaking peoples were the most widespread language family in Latin America and the Caribbean, and they were the first people Columbus encountered in the Americas. Comparative Arawakan Histories, in paperback for the first time, examines social structures, political hierarchies, rituals, religious movements, gender relations, and linguistic variations through historical perspectives to document sociocultural diversity across the diffused Arawakan diaspora.

This third volume in a bestselling series on culture, society, and museums examines the effects of globalization on contemporary museum, heritage, and exhibition practices.

Frequently presented as a historic last chance to set the world on a course to prevent catastrophic climate change, the 21st Conference of the Parties to the Climate convention (COP21) was a global summit of exceptional proportions. Bringing together negotiators, scientists, journalists and representatives of global civil society, it also constituted a privileged vantage point for the study of global environmental governance "in the making". This volume offers readers an original account of the current state of play in the field of global climate governance. Building upon a collaborative research project on COP21 carried out by a multidisciplinary team of twenty academics with recognised experience in the field of environmental governance, the book takes COP21 as an entry point to analyse ongoing transformations of global climate politics, and to scrutinise the impact of climate change on global debates more generally. The book has three key objectives: To analyse global climate governance through a combination of long-term analysis and on-sight observation; To identify and analyse the key spaces of participation in the global climate debate; To examine the "climatisation" of a...

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and historical research, this book uses a Brazilian quilombola community (descendants of enslaved Africans) as a case study to explore how memories, knowledge, and experience are transformed into cultural heritage.

This book is the first to describe indigenous archaeology in Latin America for an English speaking audience. Eighteen chapters primarily by Latin American scholars describe relations between indigenous peoples and archaeology in the frame of national histories and examine the emergence of the native interest in their heritage. Relationships between archaeology and native communities are ambivalent: sometimes an escalating battleground, sometimes a promising site of intercultural encounters. The global trend of indigenous empowerment today has renewed interest in history, making it a tool of cultural meaning and political legitimacy. This book deals with the topic with a raw forthrightness not often demonstrated in writings about archaeology and indigenous peoples. Rather than being ‘politically correct,’ it attempts to transform rather than simply describe.

This book brings social and cultural issues to the fore that are especially important for, but not exclusive to, the Brazilian religious context. How to deal with cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity? What is the role of religious education in public schools? Is there a convergence between human rights, religion, and theology? In what way have churches and social movements contributed toward the res publica? The book's contributors discuss these issues in dialogue with the concept of public theology, evaluating its pertinence and shaping its meaning in a Latin American perspective. (Series: Theology in the Public Square / Theologie in der Offentlichkeit - Vol. 6)