An Anthropology Of Common Ground

"Paying attention to details and 'small stories' as that which make worlds (heritage projects as well as ethnography), the book proposes a kind of postcolonial scholarship. Rather than uncovering or building up one story about the Danish-Ghanaian past, the work insists on providing 'inconclusive' analyses, collaboratively generated in the course of the project work and in the process of writing ethnographically about it. The ambition is to nurture fieldwork as an opportunity for creating a common ground, on which to think about what heritage and ethnography could be. Common ground, then, is not only an ideal of the joint heritage project, but an expression of an anthropological ambition. In consequence, the book is an account of a particular ethnographic research project - the 'methods story' being about how post-colonial relations might be noticed and supported and about how empirical research is done as relations between what is going on in the field and the way that the ethnographer chooses to tell the story of the field in the text. The book is structured around four different approaches, following a 'crafting the field' chapter (in lieu of a 'context' chapter). Each provides a qualification of heritage and ethnography - as components of positively and collaboratively generating what these phenomena even are"--Publisher's description.

How might we explore commonness in cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration? This book answers this question by analyzing a cultural heritage project reconstructing a former Danish plantation in Ghana, entailing histories of slavery, questions of building materials, ideas of cultural exchange, and discussions of authenticity.

Legal and economic factors have thrust American archaeology into a period of intellectual and methodological unrest. Issues such as reburial and repatriation, land and resource 'ownership,' and the integration of tradition and science have long divided archaeologists and Native American communities. Both groups recognize the need for a dramatic transformation of the discipline into one that appeals to and serves the greater public. This book tackles these and other issues by elucidating successful strategies for collaboration. It includes detailed discussions of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), enacted in 1990 in effort to legislatively redefine ownership of cultural items. Perspectives range from Native American representatives from tribes throughout the U.S., professional archaeologists and anthropologists working for tribes, federal and state agency representatives, museum specialists, and private archaeology and anthropology consultants. Published in cooperation with the Society for American Archaeology.

This book is the fruit of a symposium in honor of Ted Eisenberg concerning the growing divide between the mathematics community and the mathematics education community, a divide that is clearly unhealthy for both. The work confronts this disturbing gap by considering the nature of the relationship between mathematics education and mathematics, and by examining areas of commonality as well as disagreement. It seeks to provide insight into the mutual benefit both stand to gain by building bridges based on the natural bonds between them.