文化・社会人類学 — 全 下位分類

A Simpler Life approaches the developing field of synthetic biology by focusing on the experimental and institutional lives of practitioners in two labs at Princeton University. It highlights the distance between hyped technoscience and the more plodding and entrenched aspects of academic research.

Talia Dan-Cohen follows practitioners as they wrestle with experiments, attempt to publish research findings, and navigate the ins and outs of academic careers. Dan-Cohen foregrounds the practices and rationalities of these pursuits that give both researchers' lives and synthetic life their distinctive contemporary forms. Rather than draw attention to avowed methodology, A Simpler Life investigates some of the more subtle and tectonic practices that bring knowledge, doubt, and technological intervention into new configurations. In so doing, the book sheds light on the more general conditions of contemporary academic technoscience.

This concise, contemporary option for instructors of cultural anthropology breaks away from the traditional structure of introductory textbooks. Emphasizing the interaction between humans and their environment, the tension between human universals and cultural variation, and the impacts of colonialism on traditional cultures, Inside Cultures shows students how cultural anthropology can help us understand the complex, globalized world around us. This third edition:

• contains brand new material on many subjects, including anthropological approaches to anti-racism social movements in the Global North during 2020;
• includes findings in anthropological research regarding the Covid-19 pandemic, and its relation to other recent global events and conditions;
• updates the organization and presentation of cultural universals and cultural variations;
• presents updated and enhanced discussions of anthropological studies of humankind and the environment, with expanded analysis of industrial agriculture in the age of globalization;
• includes more illustrations and updates to existing illustrations, sidebars, and guideposts throughout the volume;
• is written in clear, supple prose that delights readers while informing on content of one of the important courses in a liberal arts education, one that effectively bridges humanities and the sciences.

Humanity has precipitated a planetary crisis of resource consumption-a crisis of stuff. So ingrained is our stuff-centric view that we can barely imagine a way out beyond substituting a new portmanteau of material things for the one we have today.

In The Human Scaffold, anthropologist Josh Berson offers a new theory of adaptation to environmental change. Drawing on niche construction, evolutionary game theory, and the enactive view of cognition, Berson considers cases in the archaeology of adaptation in which technology in the conventional sense was virtually absent. Far from representing anomalies, these cases exemplify an enduring feature of human behavior that has implications for our own fate.

The time has come to ask what the environmental crisis demands of us not as consumers but as biological beings. The Human Scaffold offers a starting point.

This book examines experiences of home improvement in the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand, providing valuable insight into the ways in which people make and maintain home in social, material and economic context. Drawing on in-depth interviews, examining both DIY projects and projects carried out by professional handymen, Rosie Cox explores how home improvement fits into wider social relationships and structures of inequality. Consideration is given to the importance of such work for gender and national identities, and how these identities are related to material contexts and the forms and fabric of homes. The book also highlights how home improvement can be a rewarding and valuable form of work, as well as an unrewarding and alienating endeavour. It will be of interest to scholars from a range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology and human geography.

Southeast Asia is renowned for birds' nests and the bird's nest trade. A bird's nest is often referred to as "White Gold" or "the Caviar of the East." In Birds' Nests: Business and Ethnicity in Southeast Asia, Kasem Jandam explores the history of using birds' nests and outlines key aspects of the business: consumption and its impact on ecology and the environment, market innovations, and the legal system related to public, private, community, and nonexclusive economic nesting resources. This book also discusses the trade and relationships among ethnic groups and the influence of Hong Kong's bird's nest market on the bird's nest business in Thailand and Southeast Asia.

An intimate look at twenty-first century households in rural China

China has undergone a remarkable process of urbanization, but a significant portion of its citizens still live in rural villages. To gain better access to jobs, health care, and consumer goods, villagers often travel or migrate to cities, and that cyclical transit and engagement with new technoscientific and medical practices is transforming village life. In this thoughtful ethnography, Goncalo Santos paints a richly detailed portrait of one rural township in Guangdong Province, north of the industrialized Pearl River Delta region.

Unlike previous studies of rural-urban relations and migration in China, Chinese Village Life Today-based on Santos's more than twenty years of field research-starts from a rural community's point of view rather than the perspective of major urban centers. Santos considers the intimate choices of village families in the face of larger forces of modernization, showing how these negotiations shape the configuration of daily village life, from marriage, childbirth, and childcare to personal hygiene and public sanitation. Santos also outlines the advantages of a rural existence, including a degree of autonomy over family planning and community life that is rare in urban China. Filled with vivid anecdotes and keen observations, this book presents a fresh perspective on China's urban-rural divide and a grounded theoretical approach to rural transformation.

In The Future Conditional, Eric S. Henry brings twelve-years of expertise and research to offer a nuanced discussion of the globalization of the English language and the widespread effects it has had on Shenyang, the capital and largest city of China's northeast Liaoning Province. Adopting an ethnographic and linguistic perspective, Henry considers the personal connotations that English, has for Chinese people, beyond its role in the education system. Through research on how English is spoken, taught, and studied in China, Henry considers what the language itself means to Chinese speakers. How and why, he asks, has English become so deeply fascinating in contemporary China, simultaneously existing as a source of desire and anxiety? The answer, he suggests, is that English-speaking Chinese consider themselves distinctly separate from those who do not speak the language, the result of a cultural assumption that speaking English makes a person modern.

Seeing language as a study that goes beyond the classroom, The Future Conditional assesses the emerging viewpoint that, for many citizens, speaking English in China has become a cultural need-and, more immediately, a realization of one's future.

Based on twelve months of in-depth ethnographic research in Japan with retailers, customers, wholesalers, writers and craftspeople, Selling the Kimono is a journey behind the scenes of a struggle to adapt to difficult economic conditions and declining demand for the kimono.

The kimono is an iconic piece of clothing, instantly recognised as a symbol of traditional Japanese culture. Yet, little is known about the industry that makes and sells the kimono, in particular the crisis this industry is currently facing. Since the 1970s, kimono sales have dropped dramatically, craftspeople are struggling to find apprentices, and retailers have closed up shop.

Illuminating recent academic investigations into the lived experience of economic crisis, this volume presents a story of an industry in crisis, and the narratives of hope, creativity and resilience that have emerged in response. The ethnographic depth and theoretical contribution to understanding the effects of economic crisis and the transformation of traditional culture will be of broad interest to students, academics and the general public.

A pioneering examination of history, current affairs, and daily life along the Russia-China border, one of the world's least understood and most politically charged frontiers.

The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. It's a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the world's political giants. Franck Bille and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldwork, they introduce readers to the lifeways, politics, and history of one of the world's most consequential and enigmatic borderlands.

It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over the economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as Bille and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, persecuted on both sides, seek to "revive" their own alternative social groupings that span the border. And Chinese towns make much of their proximity to "Europe," building giant Russian dolls and replicas of St. Basil's Cathedral to woo tourists.

Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life.

Statues, paintings, and masks-like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums-give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities, and sometimes these objects are understood to be enlivened, agentive on their own terms. This book explores how magical images are expected to work with the shamans and spirit mediums who tend and use them in contemporary South Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bali, and elsewhere in Asia. It considers how such things are fabricated, marketed, cared for, disposed of, and sometimes transformed into art-market commodities and museum artifacts.

The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars from around the world.

Crewe's insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions. She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are constructed as sites of work, debate and the nation in miniature; and how politicians and officials engage with hierarchies, continuity and change. This book also proposes how to study parliaments through an anthropological lens while in conversation with other disciplines. The dive into ethnographies from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Region demolishes hackneyed geo-political categories and culminates in a new comparative theory about the contradictions in everyday political work.

This important book will be of interest to anyone studying parliaments but especially those in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology; politics, legal and development studies; and international relations.

Traditional medicine enjoys widespread appeal in today's Russia, an appeal that has often been framed either as a holdover from pre-Soviet times or as the symptom of capitalist growing pains and vanishing Soviet modes of life. Mixing Medicines seeks to reconsider these logics of emptiness and replenishment. Set in Buryatia, a semi-autonomous indigenous republic in Southeastern Siberia, the book offers an ethnography of the institutionalization of Tibetan medicine, a botanically-based therapeutic practice framed as at once foreign, international, and local to Russia's Buddhist regions.
By highlighting the cosmopolitan nature of Tibetan medicine and the culturally specific origins of biomedicine, the book shows how people in Buryatia trouble entrenched center-periphery models, complicating narratives about isolation and political marginality. Chudakova argues that a therapeutic life mediated through the practices of traditional medicines is not a last-resort response to sociopolitical abandonment but depends on a densely collective mingling of human and non-human worlds that produces new senses of rootedness, while reshaping regional and national conversations about care, history, and belonging.

Each chapter in this book focuses on a distinct type of culturally driven theological dialogue. One type is between readers and texts, in which biblical scholars suggest new ways of reading, and even rewriting, the Bible so it becomes more meaningful in local terms. A second kind concerns the state of the church and society. For example, feminist theologians and those calling for "prophetic" action on social problems propose new conversations about how people in Oceania should navigate difficult times. A third kind of discussion revolves around identity, emphasizing what makes Oceania unique and culturally coherent. A fourth addresses the problems of climate change and environmental degradation to sacred lands by encouraging "eco-theological" awareness and interconnection. Finally, many contextual theologians engage with the work of other disciplines- prominently, anthropology-as they develop new discourse on God, people, and the future of Oceania.

Contextual theology allows people in Oceania to speak with God and fellow humans through the idiom of culture in a distinctly Pacific way. However, Tomlinson concludes, the most fruitful topic of dialogue might not be culture, but rather the nature of dialogue itself. Written in an accessible, engaging style and presenting innovative findings, this book will interest students and scholars of anthropology, world religion, theology, globalization, and Pacific studies.

The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology is the first instalment of The SAGE Handbook of the Social Sciences series and encompasses major specialities as well as key interdisciplinary themes relevant to the field. Globally, societies are facing major upheaval and change, and the social sciences are fundamental to the analysis of these issues, as well as the development of strategies for addressing them. This handbook provides a rich overview of the discipline and has a future focus whilst using international theories and examples throughout. The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology is an essential resource for social scientists globally and contains a rich body of chapters on all major topics relevant to the field, whilst also presenting a possible road map for the future of the field.

Part 1: Foundations

Part 2: Focal Areas

Part 3: Urgent Issues

Part 4: Short Essays: Contemporary Critical Dynamics

This book is the definitive guide to understanding and doing visual ethnography.

Sarah Pink's landmark text provides you with both the critical theoretical foundations and the creative tools and techniques you need to conduct your own visual ethnography.

Covering the material and the digital, and tying key concepts and ideas to real world contexts throughout, this fully updated fourth edition:

• Provides clear and critical guidance on research planning and ethics
• Discusses new and emerging technologies, including digitally connected devices and wearable cameras.
• Introduces contemporary methods such as futures ethnography, distance ethnography, team ethnography, and the use of documentary.
• Explores the latest theory and practice in photographic and video ethnography.
• Shows you how visual ethnography can be applied, participatory, and even interventional.

A milestone in visual and ethnographic research, this book is a must-have for students and researchers across the social sciences. It is an essential invitation, and companion, to doing impactful, creative, and critical visual research.