Feeding Desire analyses this beauty ideal in the context of Islam, conceptions of health, and notions of desire Full description

    Laura M. Ahearn shows that young Nepalese people are applying their newly acquired literacy skills to love-letter writing, fostering a transition that involves not only a shift in marriage rituals, but also a change in how villagers conceive of their own ability to act and attribute responsibility for events. These developments have potential ramifications that extend far beyond the realm of marriage and well past the Himalayas.The love-letter correspondences examined by Ahearn also provide a deeper understanding of the social effects of literacy. While the acquisition of literary skills may open up new opportunities for some individuals, such skills can also impose new constraints, expectations, and disappointments. The increase in female literacy rates in Junigau in the 1990s made possible the emergence of new courtship practices and facilitated self-initiated marriages, but it also reinforced certain gender ideologies and undercut some avenues to social power, especially for women. Scholars, and students in such fields as anthropology, women's studies, linguistics, development studies, and South Asian studies will find this book ethnographically rich and theoretically insightful. Laura M. Ahearn is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University.

    This book includes one of the sanest and most convincing arguments that I have read for experimentation in the writing of ethnography, which is supported by the text itself as an exemplar of a modest, theoretically unpretentious experiment that works very well indeed." George E. Marcus, Rice University"While a few Californians may be aware of the Tongan immigrant population in their midst, most Americans are unaware that the United States is a major terminus for the people of Tonga, an island nation in the South Pacific. Small examines Tongan migration to the United States in a 'transnational' perspective, stressing that many of the new migrant populations seem successfully to manage dual lives, in both the old country and the new. To that end, she describes life in contemporary Tongan communities and in U.S. settings." Library JournalThis book documents the momentous social phenomena of mass migration from agricultural ex-colonies and ex-protectorates to the industrial world. Cathy A. Small provides the poignant perspective of one extended family and one village in the Kingdom of Tonga, an independent island nation in the South Pacific which has lost one third of its population to migration since the mid-1960s. Moving between Tonga and California, Small chronicles the experiences of a family from the village of 'Olunga. Some members stayed and some migrated to California, in successive waves in the 1960s-1990s. Through their lives, she presents a striking picture of Tongan culture in the United States. Returning to 'Olunga with family members and their American-born children, Small shows what happened to village life and to kin relationships thirty years after migration began.

    Via fascinating case studies and discoveries, they unravel our understanding of human behaviours and beliefs, including how witchcraft has been used to justify misfortune, and debunk old-fashioned ideas about “race” based upon the latest genetic research. They even share what our bathroom tells us about our concept of the body – and ourselves.   From our evolutionary ancestors, through our rites of passage, to our responses to globalization, Hendry and Underdown provide the essential first step to understanding the world as an anthropologist would – in all its diversity and commonality.

    An occasionally humorous and insightful look into what makes socities both similar and unique.

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    Comprising traditions that have their roots in the antiquity of the Indus Valley Civilization, it finds expression in shrines of phallic offerings, sacred animals and sacred trees. In the backdrop of economic development and rising extremism, these shrines exist as an anomaly and are increasingly at risk of being eroded. Growing connectivity between rural and urban areas further threatens the distinctiveness of these shrines and religious traditions.In Search of Shiva documents these religious traditions and studies how they have survived over the years and are now adapting to the increasingly rigid religious climate in Pakistan.

    Unraveling the deep-seated notions prescribed in most parenting books, Kids combines the latest scientific research on human evolution and biology with Small's own keen observations of various cultures for a lively, eye-opening view of early childhood in America. Small not only reveals how children in this age group socialize and absorb the rules that underlie the societies they live in; she also explains the extent to which parents enhance or hold back the emotional and psychological growth of their kids.In her engaging style, Small blends memorable accounts from her own experiences raising a preschooler with fascinating findings from her pioneering cross-cultural research, which spanned the country as well as the globe. Covering myriad aspects of the miraculous process of human growth, Small breaks new ground on topics such as why childhood is the optimum time for acquiring language skills; how children absorb knowledge and learn to solve problems; how empathy, and morality in general, make their way into a child's psyche; and the ways in which gender impacts identity. Underlying each chapter is an illuminating discussion of how the roles parents assign children in America shape the self-esteem and self-image of a future generation. Rich with vivid anecdotes and profound insight, Kids will cause readers to rethink their own parenting styles, along with every age-old assumption about how to raise a happy, healthy kid.

    Humans: from the beginning will appeal to anybody who reads about these discoveries, is intrigued by them, and would like to know more about prehistory. Now brought fully up to date for 2015, Humans: from the beginning is a single-volume guide to the human past. Drawing upon expert literature and the latest multi-disciplinary research, this rigorous but accessible book traces the whole of the human story from the first apes to the first cities. The end product of five years of research, it has also been planned from the ground up to take advantage of the eBook format and ease access to visual matter, references and glossary items. Humans: from the beginning is written for the non-specialist, but it is sufficiently comprehensive in scope, rigorous in content, and well-referenced to serve as an ideal ‘one-stop’ text not only for undergraduate students of relevant disciplines, but also to postgraduates, researchers and other academics seeking to broaden their knowledge. This 32-chapter work presents an even-handed coverage of topics including: • How climate change has long played a pivotal role in our affairs and those of our ancestors. • How humans evolved from apes at a time when the apes were facing extinction. • Why the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees (our closest living relatives) might have been more like a human than a chimpanzee. • A possible Asian rather than African origin for the earliest humans. • Why the Neanderthals were not the dimwits of popular imagination. • How language and modern human behaviour evolved: an examination of theories including those of Robin Dunbar, Steven Mithen and Derek Bickerton. • How the small group of modern humans that eventually colonised the whole of the non-African world might have started from Arabia rather than Africa. • David Lewis-Williams’ theory that the cave art of Ice Age Europe was linked to a shamanistic belief system that might be rooted in the very architecture of the human brain. • Why the Neolithic transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture was a lengthy process, with many down sides. • Colin Renfrew’s still-controversial theory that the spread of farming communities in Neolithic times was responsible for the languages now spoken in many parts of the world. • How an ‘Urban Revolution’ replaced egalitarian farming communities with socially-stratified kingdoms and city-states in just a few millennia. • How the complex, technological societies of today have much in common with not only the earliest states but much earlier primate societies.

    His success and good fortune at such a young age was a remarkable accomplishment for someone from a small Central California farm town. Everything was coming together for Axel until a devastating tragedy beset his hometown. Axel’s perfect life was thrown into turmoil, exposing the moral compromises that he had made to achieve success. In his struggle to put the pieces of his life back together, he discovered his true purpose. From the depths of tragedy, Axel embarked on a quest to revitalize his people and restore the American Nation.

    By living among the people he studied here, speaking their language and participating in their activities, he invented what became known as participant-observation. This new type of ethnographic study was to have a huge impact on the emerging discipline of anthropology. In this work, Malinowski applied his experiences on the Trobriand Islands to the study of sexuality, and the attendant issues of eroticism, obscenity, incest, oppression, power and parenthood. In so doing, he both utilized and challenged the psychoanalytical methods being popularized at the time in Europe by Freud and others. The result is this book, which, though revolutionary when first published, has since become a standard work on the psychology of sex.

    She illuminates the social lives of the people who produce coffee, and those who process, distribute, market, and consume it. The Gimi peoples, who grow coffee in Papua New Guinea's highlands, are eager to expand their business and social relationships with the buyers who come to their highland villages, as well as with the people working in Goroka, where much of Papua New Guinea's coffee is processed; at the port of Lae, where it is exported; and in Hamburg, Sydney, and London, where it is distributed and consumed. This rich social world is disrupted by neoliberal development strategies, which impose prescriptive regimes of governmentality that are often at odds with Melanesian ways of being in, and relating to, the world. The Gimi are misrepresented in the specialty coffee market, which relies on images of primitivity and poverty to sell coffee. By implying that the "backwardness" of Papua New Guineans impedes economic development, these images obscure the structural relations and global political economy that actually cause poverty in Papua New Guinea.

    Ruth Gomberg-Mu�oz introduces readers to the Lions, ten friends from Mexico committed to improving their fortunes and the lives of theirfamilies. Set in and around Il Vino, a restaurant that could stand in for many places that employ undocumented workers, Labor and Legality reveals the faces behind the war being waged over illegal aliens in America. Gomberg-Mu�oz focuses on how undocumented workers develop a wide range of socialstrategies to cultivate financial security, nurture emotional well-being, and promote their dignity and self-esteem. She also reviews the political and historical circumstances of undocumented migration, with an emphasis on post-1970 socioeconomic and political conditions in the United States andMexico.Labor and Legality is one of several volumes in the Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology series, which examines the experiences of individual communities in our contemporary world. Each volume offers a brief and engaging exploration of a particular issue arising fromglobalization and its cultural, political, and economic effects on certain peoples or groups. Ideal for introductory anthropology courses-and as supplements for a variety of upper-level courses-these texts seamlessly combine portraits of an interconnected and globalized world with narratives thatemphasize the agency of their subjects.

    for Social Anthropology in Oceania, Special Pubs. No. 1Hawaiian culture as it met foreign traders and settlers is the context for Sahlins's structuralist methodology of historical interpretation.

    However, arguing that variation is as characteristic of globalization as standardization, the book stresses the necessity for a bottom-up, comparative analysis. Distinguishing between the cultural, political, economic and ecological aspects of globalization, the book highlights the implications of globalization for people's everyday lives. Throughout, the discussion is illustrated with wide-ranging case material. Chapter summaries and a guide to further reading underline the book's concern to clarify this most complex and influential of ideas.