Negotiating Autonomy

The 1980s and ‘90s saw Latin American governments recognizing the property rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities as part of a broader territorial policy shift. But the resulting reforms were not applied consistently, more often extending neoliberal governance than recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ rights. In Negotiating Autonomy, Kelly Bauer explores the inconsistencies by which the Chilean government transfers land in response to Mapuche territorial demands. Interviews with community and government leaders, statistical analysis of an original dataset of Mapuche mobilization and land transfers, and analysis of policy documents reveals that many assumptions about post-dictatorship Chilean politics as technocratic and depoliticized do not apply to Indigenous policy. Rather, state officials often work to preserve the hegemony of political and economic elites in the region, effectively protecting existing market interests over efforts to extend the neoliberal project to the governance of Mapuche territorial demands. In addition to complicating understandings of Chilean governance, these hidden patterns of policy implementation reveal the numerous ways these governance strategies threaten the recognition of Indigenous rights and create limited space for communities to negotiate autonomy.

Negotiating Personal Autonomy offers a detailed ethnographic examination of personal autonomy and social life in East Greenland. Examining verbal and non-verbal communication in interpersonal encounters, Elixhauser argues that social life in the region is characterized by relationships based upon a particular care to respect other people’s personal autonomy. Exploring this high valuation of personal autonomy, she asserts that a person in East Greenland is a highly permeable entity that is neither bounded by the body nor even necessarily human. In so doing, she also puts forward a new approach to the anthropological study of communication. An important addition to the corpus of ethnographic literature about the people of East Greenland, Elixhauser‘s work will be of interest to scholars of the Arctic and the North, Greenland, social and cultural anthropology, and human geography. Her conclusion that, in East Greenland, the ‘inner’ self cannot be separated from the ‘public’ persona will also be of interest to scholars working on the self across the humanities and social sciences.

Living in the age of American 'hyperpower' the relevance of both international law and conflict resolution have been called into question. Hannum and Babbitt, highly respected practitioners in these respective fields, have collected a series of experts to examine the relationship between these two disciplines. Focusing on self-determination, a particularly thorny issue of international law, Negotiating Self-Determination takes an in-depth look at what an understanding of conflict analysis can bring to this field and the impact that international legal norms could potentially have on the work of conflict resolvers in self-determination conflicts. Allen Buchanan's philosophical writings consider the goals of secessionists, Erin Jenne uses quantitative analysis to explain the conditions under which secessionist movements come into existence, and Anke Hoeffler and Paul Collier study the economic basis for secessionist movements. This well-researched volume looks beyond the international law and policy fields of the editors to philosophy, anthropology, political science, and economy to assist in gaining a more complete understanding of self-determination and conflict prevention.

Comprises four cases of indigenous groups' experiences to protect their land and resources from external threats using, among others, the ancestral titlling procedures of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act.

Conceptualising Child-Adult Relations focuses on how children conceptualise and experience child-adult relations. The authors explore the idea of generation as a key to understanding children's agency in intersection with social worlds which are largely organised and ordered by adults. The authors explore two interconnected themes: how children define the division of labour between children and adults, and how far children regard themselves as constituting a seperate group. This book is ground-breaking in its focus on the variety and commonality in children's lives and views across a broad range of contexts. It provides innovative theoretical approaches to the growing study of childhood by homing in on intergenerational relations as a main concept, and draws attention to links across the main sites of children's lives such as the home, neighbourhood and school. Moreover, for policy related issues, this book provides food for thought about the social conditions and status of childhood, and the factors structuring it.

This study looks at womens stuggle in Southern Africa where the last ten years have seen the most pervasive success stories on the African continent.Tracing the history of womens involvement in anti-colonial struggles and against apartheid, the book analyses post-colonial outcomes and examines the strategies employed by womens movements to gain a foothold in politics.

The present volume contains the proceedings of a workshop that took place as part of a larger project carried out by the Groningen Research School for the Study of the Humanities (GRSSH). The framework of the overall research perspective was a study of 'the autonomy of culture and its components'. In November 2006, colleagues from various departments at the University of Groningen who work in the field of Islamic studies jointly organised a workshop on the subject of 'autonomy and Islam'. For and from each of our disciplines, i.e. anthropology, psychology, pedagogy, philology and religious studies, internationally renowned scholars were invited to participate.

This book, first published in 2000, explores how different states negotiate the competing claims of ethnic groups.