Culture Creation And Procreation

These 12 chapters discuss the constitution of kinship among different communities in South Asia and addressing the relationship between ideology and practice, cultural models, and individual strategies. Chapters center around three topics: community and person, gender and change, and shared knowledge and practice. The volume as a whole contributes to the on-going debate on models of well-being within kinship studies. Contributors include anthropologists from Europe, Asia, and the United States. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

These 12 chapters discuss the constitution of kinship among different communities in South Asia and addressing the relationship between ideology and practice, cultural models, and individual strategies. Chapters center around three topics: community and person, gender and change, and shared knowledge and practice. The volume as a whole contributes to the on-going debate on models of well-being within kinship studies. Contributors include anthropologists from Europe, Asia, and the United States. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Today human ecology has split into many different sub-disciplines such as historical ecology, political ecology or the New Ecological Anthropology. The latter in particular has criticised the predominance of the Western view on different ecosystems, arguing that culture-specific world views and human-environment interactions have been largely neglected. However, these different perspectives only tackle specific facets of a local and global hyper-complex reality. In bringing together a variety of views and theoretical approaches , these especially commissioned essays prove that an interdisciplinary collaboration and understanding of the extreme complexity of the human-environment interface(s) is possible.

The essays in Relative Values draw on new work in anthropology, science studies, gender theory, critical race studies, and postmodernism to offer a radical revisioning of kinship and kinship theory. Through a combination of vivid case studies and trenchant theoretical essays, the contributors—a group of internationally recognized scholars—examine both the history of kinship theory and its future, at once raising questions that have long occupied a central place within the discipline of anthropology and moving beyond them. Ideas about kinship are vital not only to understanding but also to forming many of the practices and innovations of contemporary society. How do the cultural logics of contemporary biopolitics, commodification, and globalization intersect with kinship practices and theories? In what ways do kinship analogies inform scientific and clinical practices; and what happens to kinship when it is created in such unfamiliar sites as biogenetic labs, new reproductive technology clinics, and the computers of artificial life scientists? How does kinship constitute—and get constituted by—the relations of power that draw lines of hierarchy and equality, exclusion and inclusion, ambivalence and violence? The contributors assess the implications for kinship of such phenomena as blood transfusions, adoption across national borders, genetic support groups, photography, and the new reproductive technologies while ranging from rural China to mid-century Africa to contemporary Norway and the United States. Addressing these and other timely issues, Relative Values injects new life into one of anthropology's most important disciplinary traditions. Posing these and other timely questions, Relative Values injects an important interdisciplinary curiosity into one of anthropology’s most important disciplinary traditions. Contributors. Mary Bouquet, Janet Carsten, Charis Thompson Cussins, Carol Delaney, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Sarah Franklin, Deborah Heath, Stefan Helmreich, Signe Howell, Jonathan Marks, Susan McKinnon, Michael G. Peletz, Rayna Rapp, Martine Segalen, Pauline Turner Strong, Melbourne Tapper, Karen-Sue Taussig, Kath Weston, Yunxiang Yan

The field of anthropology of migration and multiculturalism is booming. Throughout its hundred-odd year history, studies of migration and diverse or ‘plural’ societies have arguably been both marginal and central to the discipline of Anthropology. However, recent years have witnessed the rapid growth of anthropological studies concerning these topics. This has particularly been the case since the 1970s, when anthropologists developed a keen interest in the subject of ethnicity, especially in post-migration communities. Since the 1990s, migrant transnationalism has become one of the most fashionable topics. There is still much to do in research and theory surrounding this field, not least with regard to contemporary public debates around multiculturalism, immigration and ‘integration’ policy. This book presents essays pointing toward a number of possible new directions – both theoretical and methodological – for anthropological inquiry into migration and multiculturalism, including innovative ways of examining diversity discourses, urban conditions, social complexities, scales of analysis, transnational marriages, entangled politics and interwoven cultures. This book was published as a special issue of the Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Sometimes we convey what we mean not by what we say but by what we do. This type of indirect communication is sometimes called 'indirection'. From patent miscommunication, through potent ambiguity to pregnant silence this incisive collection examines from a rare anthropological perspective the many aspects of indirect communication. From a Mormon Theme Park to carnival time on Montserrat the contributors analyse indirection by illustrating how food, silence, sunglasses, martial arts and rudeness call constitute powerful ways of conveying meaning. An Anthropology of Indirect Communication is an engaging text which provides a challenging introduction to this subject.

Few thorough ethnographic studies on Central Indian tribal communities exist, and the elaborate discussion on the cultural meanings of Indian food systems ignores these societies altogether. Food epitomizes the social for the Gadaba of Odisha. Feeding, sharing, and devouring refer to locally distinguished ritual domains, to different types of social relationships and alimentary ritual processes. In investigating the complex paths of ritual practices, this study aims to understand the interrelated fields of cosmology, social order, and economy of an Indian highland community.