Carved Flesh / Cast Selves

Carved Flesh / Cast Selves PDF Author: Tone Bleie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000323161
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
All the papers in this volume deal with the central theme of gender. The social contexts they examine range widely from Melanesia and Southeast Asia to Africa, Europe and America; yet in each case of these very diverse cases the concern is to analyse the ways in which gender is constructed.

Carved Flesh / Cast Selves

Carved Flesh / Cast Selves PDF Author: Tone Bleie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000323161
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
All the papers in this volume deal with the central theme of gender. The social contexts they examine range widely from Melanesia and Southeast Asia to Africa, Europe and America; yet in each case of these very diverse cases the concern is to analyse the ways in which gender is constructed.

Cultures of Relatedness

Cultures of Relatedness PDF Author: Janet Carsten
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521656276
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Our understanding of what makes a person a relative has been transformed by radical changes in marriage arrangements and gender relations, and by new reproductive technologies. We can no longer take it for granted that our most fundamental social relationships are grounded in 'biology' or 'nature'. These developments have prompted anthropologists to take a fresh look at idioms of relatedness in other societies, and to review the ways in which relationships are symbolised and interpreted in our own society. Defamiliarizing some classic cases, challenging the established analytic categories of anthropology, the contributors to this innovative book focus on the boundary between the 'biological' and the 'social', and bring into question the received wisdom at the heart of the study of kinship.

Transcultural Bodies

Transcultural Bodies PDF Author: Ylva Hernlund
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813541387
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Female "circumcision" or, more precisely, female genital cutting (FGC), remains an important cultural practice in many African countries, often serving as a coming-of-age ritual. It is also a practice that has generated international dispute and continues to be at the center of debates over women's rights, the limits of cultural pluralism, the balance of power between local cultures, international human rights, and feminist activism. In our increasingly globalized world, these practices have also begun immigrating to other nations, where transnational complexities vex debates about how to resolve the issue. Bringing together thirteen essays, Transcultural Bodies provides an ethnographically rich exploration of FGC among African diasporas in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Contributors analyze changes in ideologies of gender and sexuality in immigrant communities, the frequent marginalization of African women's voices in debates over FGC, and controversies over legislation restricting the practice in immigrant populations.

Bodies and Persons

Bodies and Persons PDF Author: Michael Lambek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521627375
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Large-scale comparisons are out of fashion in anthropology, but this book suggests a bold comparative approach to broad cultural differences between Africa and Melanesia. Its theme is personhood, which is understood in terms of what anthropologists call 'embodiment'. These concepts are applied to questions ranging from the meanings of spirit possession, to the logics of witchcraft and kinship relations, the use of rituals to heal the sick, 'electric vampires', and even the impact of capitalism. There are detailed ethnographic analyses, and suggestive comparisons of classic African and Melanesian ethnographic cases, such as the Nuer and the Melpa. The contributors debate alternative strategies for cross-cultural comparison, and demonstrate that there is a surprising range of continuities, putting in question common assumptions about the huge differences between these two parts of the world.

Violence and Belonging

Violence and Belonging PDF Author: Vigdis Broch-Due
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415290067
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Violence and Belonging explores the formative role of violence in shaping people's identities in modern postcolonial Africa.

The Ethnography of Moralities

The Ethnography of Moralities PDF Author: Signe Howell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134785011
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Focusing on the social construction of morality, The Ethnography of Moralities discusses a topic which is complex but central to the study and nature of anthropology. With the recent shift towards an interest in indigenous notions of self and personhood, questions pertaining to the moral and ethical origins of beliefs relating to human rights become increasingly relevant. Some of the questions that the contributors address are: * How is the ethical knowledge grounded? * Which social domains most profoundly articulate moral values and which are most affected? * Who defines and who enforces what is right and wrong? * What constitutes an ethical breach? Suggested answers are made with reference to empirical material so that the complexities and varieties of theoretical and methodological issues are highlighted. They are also discussed with reference to a wide array of ethnographic studies from Argentina, Mongolia, Melanesia, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Britain and The Old Testament.

The Twilight of Cutting

The Twilight of Cutting PDF Author: Saida Hodzic
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520965574
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
The last three decades have witnessed a proliferation of nongovernmental organizations engaging in new campaigns to end the practice of female genital cutting across Africa. These campaigns have in turn spurred new institutions, discourses, and political projects, bringing about unexpected social transformations, both intended and unintended. Consequently, cutting is waning across the continent. At the same time, these endings are misrecognized and disavowed by public and scholarly discourses across the political spectrum. What does it mean to say that while cutting is ending, the Western discourse surrounding it is on the rise? And what kind of a feminist anthropology is needed in such a moment? The Twilight of Cutting examines these and other questions from the vantage point of Ghanaian feminist and reproductive health NGOs that have organized campaigns against cutting for over thirty years. The book looks at these NGOs not as solutions but as sites of “problematization.” The purpose of understanding these Ghanaian campaigns, their transnational and regional encounters, and the forms of governmentality they produce is not to charge them with providing answers to the question, how do we end cutting? Instead, it is to account for their work, their historicity, the life worlds and subjectivities they engender, and the modes of reflection, imminent critique, and opposition they set in motion.

Labour of Love

Labour of Love PDF Author: Øystein Gulvåg Holter
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351923692
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Amazed at the stubborn nature of the sexual division of labour in modern society, five Norwegian researchers set out to explore the sources of this pervasive resistance to change. Moving from the neutral concepts of work and money, the lofty notions of love and family and the triviality of domestic organization, social science is made to yield some surprising insights into hidden, secret and perhaps even sacred structures of everyday life. A provocative claim in these pages is that the practical arrangement in the family is informed by the erotic properties of work and semi-religious notions of poverty and dirt - and is sustained by both sexes. This anthology reveals some perplexing aspects of contemporary self-understanding and rediscovers sexual meaning as a pillar of modern culture. The book is an invitation to reconsider the conditions for gender equality and to explore further the cultural tangle behind this persistent tolerance for injustice within European thinking.

Women in Islam

Women in Islam PDF Author: Anne Sofie Roald
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415248952
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
1. Research on Muslims

Trusting and its Tribulations

Trusting and its Tribulations PDF Author: Vigdis Broch-Due
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785331000
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Despite its immense significance and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the complex workings of trust are poorly understood and theorized. This volume explores trust and mistrust amidst locally situated scenes of sociality and intimacy. Because intimacy has often been taken for granted as the foundation of trust relations, the ethnographies presented here challenge us to think about dangerous intimacies, marked by mistrust, as well as forms of trust that cohere through non-intimate forms of sociality.