Bücher der Reihe Routledge Studies in Anthropology

This book offers a new anthropological understanding of the socio-cosmological and ontological characteristics of the Isthmo-Colombian Area, beyond established theories for Amazonia, the Andes and Mesoamerica. It focuses on a core region that has been largely neglected by comparative anthropology in recent decades.

From the study of crime in sociology or of human security in development studies, to concerns with environmental catastrophe in climate studies and trans-national terrorism in international relations, the growth of security as a matter of academic concern is deemed a sign of our times. But what is security from a cross-cultural perspective? What does it look like from the point of view, not only of those people deemed to be under threat, but also from that of those who are deemed to pose it? Focusing on the multiple and mutually imbricated notions of, and concerns with, time involved in security practices across the globe, this volume brings together a selected group of established and upcoming scholars who conduct ethnographic research in a broad ambit of securitized contexts ¿ from the experience of Palestinian detainees in Israel or forms of popular violence in Bolivia, to efforts to normalise social relations in post-conflict Yugoslavia and ways of imagining threat in contemporary protest movements in Europe ¿ to chart the temporalities of securitization in a multi-polar world.

This volume is an exploration of the ways in which political economy as a mode of analysis moves anthropology toward a vital, politically engaged form of scholarship. It advances the understanding of the struggles of ordinary people in the face of capitalist change. In the current economic moment when such changes are tumultuous and the instabilities of capitalism are starkly revealed, this book responds to the urgent need for theoretical and methodological approaches for understanding the forces that shape our contemporary world. Through ethnographic investigations of the quotidian, and through the thematic of politics, history and livelihoods, which distinguish Marxist political economy in the field of anthropology, the authors here reveal the increasing complexity of everyday lives. Using examples derived from fieldwork carried out across diverse geographical locations, the authors pay particular attention to historical conditions shaping the peoplesΓÇÖ life trajectories. In so doing the authors engage critically, and with differing emphases, with political economy and Marxism as a mode of inquiry. This book illustrates the productive tension between observations emerging from the field and theoretical debates that is generated by anthropological ethnography.

In attending to surfaces, as they wrap, layer and grow within sentient bodies, material formations and cosmological sates, this volume presents a series of ten anthropological studies stretching across five continents and in observation of earthly practices of making, knowing, living and dying.

This volume examines the relationship between hope, mobility, and immobility in contemporary African migration. Through case studies within and beyond the continent, it demonstrates that hope offers a unique prism for analyzing migrants' horizons of expectation and possibility in situations of uncertainty, deepening inequality and increasingly restrictive regimes of mobility.

"Simultaneously published in the UK"--Title page verso.

This volume focuses on the future of environmental anthropology, gathering both established academics and newcomers to discuss the methodological and theoretical themes of future research and outline new theoretical approaches. It explores topics ranging from migration to climate change, food insecurity, indigenous knowledge, the relation between information technology and ecology, and research methods that will soon characterize the field.

This book explores the making of robots in labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It examines the cultural ideas that go into the making of robots, and the role of fiction in co-constructing the technological practices of the robotic scientists. The book engages with debates in anthropological theorizing regarding the way that robots are reimagined as intelligent, autonomous and social and weaved into lived social realities. Richardson charts the move away from the ¿worker¿ robot of the 1920s to the ¿social¿ one of the 2000s, as robots are reimagined as companions, friends and therapeutic agents.

Taking a bio-social approach, this volume bridges critical gaps in the understanding of the daily lives and experiences of adolescents in diverse cultures around the world and provides insights into how interactions between biology, ecology, culture, and social structures influence the patterns of adolescent identity development.

This collection offers the fruits of a stimulating workshop that sought to bridge the fraught relationship which sometimes continues between anthropologists and indigenous/native/aboriginal scholars, despite areas of overlapping interest. Participants from around the world share their views and opinions on subjects ranging from ideas for reconciliation, the question of what might constitute a universal "science," indigenous heritage, postcolonial museology, the boundaries of the term "indigeneity," different senses as ways of knowing, and the very issue of writing as a method of dissemination that divides and excludes readers from different backgrounds. This book represents a landmark step in the process of replacing bridges with more equal patterns of intercultural cooperation and communication.

Drawing on a combination of perspectives from diverse fields, this volume offers an anthropological study of climate change and the ways in which people attempt to predict its local implications, showing how the processes of knowledge making among lay people and experts are not only comparable but also deeply entangled. Through analysis of predictive practices in a diversity of regions affected by climate change - including coastal India, the Cook Islands, Tibet, and the High Arctic, and various domains of scientific expertise and policy making such as ice core drilling, flood risk modelling, and coastal adaptation - the book shows how all attempts at modelling nature¿s course are deeply social, and how current research in "climate" contributes to a rethinking of nature as a multiplicity of modalities that impact social life.

This book explores nature as an integral part of the social worlds conventionally studied by anthropologists. The book demonstrates not only the entanglement of natural and social things, but also the entwinement of analytical perspective and ethnographic material.

This collection offers the fruits of a stimulating workshop that sought to bridge the fraught relationship which sometimes continues between anthropologists and indigenous/native/aboriginal scholars, despite areas of overlapping interest. Participants from around the world share their views and opinions on subjects ranging from ideas for reconciliation, the question of what might constitute a universal "science," indigenous heritage, postcolonial museology, the boundaries of the term "indigeneity," different senses as ways of knowing, and the very issue of writing as a method of dissemination that divides and excludes readers from different backgrounds. This book represents a landmark step in the process of replacing bridges with more equal patterns of intercultural cooperation and communication.

The Question of the Gift is the first collection of new interdisciplinary essays on the gift. Bringing together scholars from a variety of fields, including anthropology, literary criticism, economics, philosophy and classics, it provides new paradigms and poses new questions concerning the theory and practice of gift exchange. In addressing these questions, contributors not only challenge the conventions of their fields, but also combine ideas and methods from both the social sciences and humanities to forge innovative ways of confronting this universal phenomenon.

Drawing on the case of HIV/AIDS in Thailand, this book examines how anthropological and other interpretative social science research has been utilized in modeling the AIDS epidemic, and in the design and implementation of interventions. It argues that much social science research has been complicit with the forces that generated the epidemic and with the social control agendas of the state, and that as such it has increased the weight of structural violence bearing upon the afflicted. The book also questions claims of Thai AIDS control success, arguing that these can only be made at the cost of excluding categories such as intravenous drug users, the incarcerated, and homosexuals, who continue to experience extraordinarily high levels of levels of HIV infection. Considered deviant and undeserving, these persons have deliberately been excluded from harm reduction programs. Overall, this work argues for the untapped potential of anthropological research in the health field, a confident anthropology rooted in ethnography and a critical reflexivity. Crucially, it argues that in context of interdisciplinary collaborations, anthropological research must refuse relegation to the status of an adjunct discipline, and must be free epistemologically and methodologically from the universalizing assumptions and practices of biomedicine.

Who exactly is in debt - and what is inside it? Authors from many disciplines come together in this volume to ask about the ways in which debt is shared out, and the constraints implied in it. The dimensions explored are not merely economic, but also political and symbolic - with special attention being paid to the gendered debt that burdens women.

This book explores the global connections between Chilean landscapes and Northern consumers embodied by the Forest Stewardship Council logo, the green seal of approval for certified sustainably-produced "good wood." How do we decide what makes good forestry? What knowledges and values are expressed or silenced when "good" is defined with a market mechanism like certification? Henne''s ethnographic study documents the new forms of labor and the new expectations about sustainability and responsibility that certification generates, in the context of the competing ideas about how to manage a forest - or even what a forest is - that constitute forest certification in Chile. A critical analysis of certification''s practices helps understand the role of ethical trade initiatives in creating sustainable, survivable global futures.

Original empirical essays from across the globe demonstrate how the study of cancer promotes theoretical understandings of the politics and pragmatics of suffering, and offers insights into the meanings of survivorship, risk, charity and care in transnational contexts.

This interdisciplinary volume explores - through a focus on the Pan Pacific region and the global south - the politics of ethnography and ethnographic practices, including indigenous ethnography and ethnographic writing as cultural production in its own right.

Bringing about a creative dialogue between the anthropologist¿s own experience of magical consciousness and theoretical analysis, this book is a poly-vocal study in which the voices of the neurobiologist, anthropologist as anthropologist, anthropologist as native, and various spirit beings weave an alternative narrative displaying the process of magical thinking.

This is the first collection of ethnographic studies that critiques diagnosis across multiple categories of disease and illness. Smith-Morris¿s Introduction repositions diagnosis within critical studies of global health. The authors question specific diagnoses (e.g., HIV, tuberculosis, and andropause) as well as the structural and epistemological factors behind a disease¿s naming and experience.

This volume explores cultural, social and economic connections between the Americas and the South Pacific. By approaching the Transpacific Americas as an assemblage or relational space, the book complicates the Euro-American distinction between "centre" and "rim," and provides a comprehensive understanding of recent dynamics and shifting relations across the Pacific.

This volume explores how mechanisms of postindustrial capitalism affect places and people in peripheral regions and de-industrializing cities. While studies of globalization tend to emphasize localities newly connected to global systems, this collection, in contrast, analyzes the disconnection of communities away from the market, presenting a range of ethnographic case studies that scrutinize the framework of this transformative process, analyzing new social formations that are emerging in the voids left behind by the de-industrialization, and introducing a discussion on the potential impacts of the current economic and ecological crises on the hyper-mobile model that has characterized this recent phase of global capitalism and spatially uneven development.