SEAN KINGSTON PUBLISHING
We are delighted to publish the wonderfully coherent and thoughtful The Making of Asmat Art by Nick Stanley, which provides the first history of the development of this culture's spectacular art in relation to the evolving contexts of their engagement with the outside world. One of our two new full-colour monographs on World Art.
A vital corrective to the dominant and distorting notions of Aboriginal art and culture, We Don't Do Dots by Lorraine Gibson, is a detailed exploration of the marginalized Aboriginal community of a country town in New South Wales, and the manner in which its artists negotiate and redefine aboriginal cultural identity. Illustrated with numerous colour plates. Our postal address has changed! Sean Kingston Publishing has moved to the beautiful Herefordshire countryside. Specifically, to a garden office looking out from below a cherry tree to apple orchards and the Malverns. Our apologies to anyone who has had to wait for us to respond to emails etc. (though book orders have gone out as normal); we're catching up on normal business rapidly.
Paperbacks for Courses - Please don't be dissuaded from teaching any of our books because they are published in hardback. ALL our books are available in paperback for bulk orders when ordered from us direct. Just get your university bookshop to contact us (link) in good time with a course order and we can provide them with paperbacks affordable for students.
JOURNALS
FORTHCOMING 2013
COMING SOON! |
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| Hearing and the Hospital: Sound, Listening, Knowledge and Experience By Tom Rice |
Repositioning Pacific Arts: Artists, Objects, Histories
Edited by Anne E. Allen |
Les Lions en Pierre Sculptée chez les Bakhtiari: Description et significations de sculptures zoomorphes dans une société tribale du sud-ouest de l'Iran
By Pedram Khosronejad |
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| The Things We Value: Culture and History in Solomon Islands Edited by Ben Burt and Lissant Bolton |
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| We Don't Do Dots: Aboriginal Art and Culture in Wilcannia,
New South Wales By Lorraine Gibson |
How Democracy Works: An Ethnographic Theory of Politics
By Marcio Goldman |
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| The End of Anthropology? Edited by Holger Jebens and Karl-Heinz Kohl |
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| Every Day's a Festival! Diversity on Show Edited by Susanne Küchler, László Kürti and Hisham Elkadi |
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| Sin, Sex and Stigma: A Pacific Response to HIV and AIDS by Lawrence James Hammar |
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| Disasters, Relief and the Media by Jonathan Benthall |
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| Body Arts & Modernity by Elizabeth Ewart & Michael O'Hanlon (eds) |
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| Rationales of Ownership by Lawrence Kalinoe & James Leach (eds) |
Commons & Borderlands by Marilyn Strathern |
Mining & Indigenous Lifeworlds in Australia and Papua New Guinea by Alan Rumsey & James Weiner (eds) |
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SERIES
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Other Voices, Other Eyes (details to come)
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Sean Kingston Publishing is a small and independent press specializing in high-quality academic texts within the social sciences, particularly anthropology. We use the latest print-on-demand (POD) technology to print and distribute from the UK, the US and Australia.
The publisher takes a personal interest in all books accepted for publication, and believes in close liaison with authors. In providing a straightforward but rigorous avenue to publication (via peer-review), Sean Kingston Publishing hopes to address the needs of anthropology and its allied disciplines, which are increasingly overlooked by many of the larger publishers.
Why has Asmat art, from a remote and small south-coast West Papuan society, had such a significant and prolonged impact on the world stage? This book explores the way major collections were made and examines the motivations of the collectors, their relationships with those from whom they purchased and the circumstances of the exchange. It also considers the involvement of artists and film-makers, anthropologists, representatives of the civil authorities and missionaries. Asmat artists have maintained their unique appeal through constant stylistic innovation and by engagement with new publics, both locally and internationally, as exemplified by the recent displays of women's weaving alongside the men's carved wooden shields, drums and figures. Despite accelerating social changes, Asmat art continues to thrive as a compelling and transformative Melanesian presence in the global art world.
'Awe-inspiring works of Asmat art loom large in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and in
dozens of other great museums around the world. Nick Stanley's engagingly written study provides the
best history to date of the making of Asmat art traditions and of their avid acquisition by successive
European and north American collectors. Most importantly, the book foregrounds the creativity and
imagination of Asmat artists themselves. This is a book that will be welcomed by everyone interested in
the arts of the Pacific.'
Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge
Nick Stanley is an Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Africa, Oceania
and the Americas, The British Museum and Emeritus Professor and former
Director of Research, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham City
University.
Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-20-1, £65.00 (GBP), $130.00 (USD)
Please click here to order book.
What does it mean when whites say that certain Australian Aboriginal people have 'no culture' but accept that they have art? Why are notions and images of Aboriginal art and culture still dominated by those from the centre and north of the Australian continent, even though most Aborigines reside in the south-east? This book explores these questions, why they matter, and to whom they matter.
It draws on extensive fieldwork with Barkindji Aboriginal people in the small country town of Wilcannia, New South Wales. The richly textured ethnographic analysis examines how notions of Aboriginal art and Aboriginal culture are wielded as weapons of power in everyday racism in Australia. In so doing, it demonstrates how Aboriginal people deploy ideas of art, artists and culture to assert individual and group identity, and to subvert dominant culture ideas and ideals which operate as tools of oppression, distancing and harm.
'At the heart of Gibson's fascinating study is a conundrum: Wilcannia
Aboriginal art is flourishing although Aboriginal culture is said to be nonexistent.
She has produced an engaging and challenging account of social life
as well as a serious analysis of deeply fraught relationships among the
townspeople. The numerous photographs and paintings make this a rich and
exciting publication.'
Gillian Cowlishaw, The University of Sydney
Lorraine Gibson's research has explored contemporary Aboriginal identity and the
way it is expressed, understood and valued by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Appointed to
a Research Fellowship at the Australian Museum, Sydney in 2006, she went on to curate the exhibition
'Life on the Darling' at the museum in 2008/9, bringing the art of the Barkindji before a national and
international audience. Recipient of the prestigious Vice Chancellor's Innovation Research Fellowship at the
Centre for Research on Social Inclusion (CRSI), Macquarie University, from 2008-10, the author is currently
working with Aboriginal women and children in Alice Springs' Town Camps who are affected by alcohol and
volatile substance misuse.
Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-09-6, £75.00 (GBP), $150.00 (USD)
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While the cinema of post-revolutionary Iran is internationally acknowledged, the world outside Iran has been ignorant of the Iranian war films that are the subject of this pioneering book. Over 200 Iranian feature films concentrating primarily on fighting and military operations have appeared since the 1980s and the beginning of the war between Iran and Iraq. This book presents a detailed exploration of the 'Sacred Defence cinema' established by Seyed Morteza Avini, a cinema that directly connects this war to the faith and religious belief of volunteer guardians of the revolution. These films remain the primary vehicles of the Islamic state in Iran for the preservation and memorization of the theme of martyrdom. As the distinguished film scholar, Hamid Dabashi writes in his Foreword to the book: 'If national cinemas are predicated on national traumas, in the volume that Pedram Khosronejad has put together we are at the heart of Iranian cinema.'
The eight-year Iran-Iraq war near the end of the 20th century renewed the horrors of the First World War near the start of the century - causing millions of casualties and untold devastation on both sides. It also resulted in a vigorous and dynamic cinematic output in Iran, producing some of the most ardent Islamist political movies, Shii-inflected spiritual films, and original theorization of what constitutes an ' Islamic cinema' . Khosronejad has managed to amass an astute and fascinating anthology - the first in English - that brings together an international roster of scholars to deal with the complexities and varieties of war fiction films, documentaries, television series and auteur directors.
Prof. Hamid Naficy, Northwestern University
Pedram Khosronejad is a Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and the editor of several publications: The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shi'ism (2011) and Unburied Memories: The Politics of Bodies, and the Material Culture of Sacred Defense Martyrs in Iran (2011).
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-17-1, £55.00 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
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The state is frequently conceived as a universal, although one apparently extraordinarily difficult to define. It often appears in academic discourse and, especially, in the popular imagination as an abstraction, usually nebulous, grasped as pervasive - a spectre to be feared. In this book, distinguished scholars from around the world take issue with this purported universality, exploring alternative imaginings of the state, of power and of global processes at the margins
Taking an anthropological perspective based in diverse ethnographic contexts outside Europe and North America, if not beyond their controlling influence in globalizing realities, this volume reveals different complexes of power, as well as processes that are external to power and often against it (contra Foucault, and as Pierre Clastres has famously argued).
The authors stress not only the different structures of institutional power, but also the persistence or transmutation of local kinds of power and their relevant cosmologies into contemporary globalized settings. They find innovative kinds of modernity, reconfigurations that have effects that cannot be reduced to over-generalized and often intensely Eurocentric concepts of power and the kinds of subjectivities realized by them. In this, the volume opens up the diversity of experiences of the state and offers new directions for its study.
Angela Hobart is Director of the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, Switzerland, and a Research Fellow, Medical Anthropology Department, University College London, UK.
Bruce Kapferer is Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Bergen University, Norway, Adjunct Professor at James Cook University, Australia and Honorary Professor at University College London, UK.
Published in association with the Centro Incontri Umani.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-13-3, £59.99 (GBP), $119.99 (USD)
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The importance and ramifications of saints, sainthood and pilgrimage in contemporary Iran and neighbouring countries are great, yet the academic conceptualizations of them and their entailments are sorely lacking. This book places the saints and their pilgrims in sharper focus, and offers important correctives to all-too-common Western misunderstandings, the foremost of which is the erroneous portrayal of Islam as primarily a body of legal doctrine and corresponding practice, and the associated principle that we can 'know' Islam if we 'know' Islamic law.
In an effort to challenge such a limited, and limiting, perspective, this volume suggests that both anthropology, insofar as it can focus on experience and practice, and history, insofar as it can encompass more than an institutional/political 'names and dates' discourse, can reveal something of the dynamism of the faith, as more than the sum of its laws. The approaches demonstrated in this book on Shiite Pilgrimage offer windows into the beliefs and lives of 'ordinary' people, past and present, and thereby bring forth agendas akin to those of 'subaltern studies'. Finally, the memorializing documented in these chapters provides evidence, past and present, of widespread desires for a more concrete, even immanent, relationship that is direct, unmediated and, at least partly, involves forms of intercession - even though such desires for immanence in the Islamic world have previously been considered as limited to devotees of the Sufi saints or the Shi'i Imams or their progeny.
Pedram Khosronejad is a Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and the editor of several publications: The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shi'ism (2011) and Unburied Memories: The Politics of Bodies, and the Material Culture of Sacred Defense Martyrs in Iran (2011).
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-14-0, £49.99 (GBP), $99.99 (USD)
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This book marks the culmination of Giancarlo M.G. Scoditti's renowned series of publications on the cultural production of the northern Massim island of Kitawa, Papua New Guinea. It explores how the Nowau 'creators of images' conceive of the way their artistic compositions come about - sketching Kitawan cognitive philosophy and aesthetic practice. Describing how for them images grow like the loops of the Nautilus shell - one of nature's prominant demonstrations of the logarithmic spiral and the golden section - Scoditti's analysis of Kitawan cognitive and artistic principles resonates with Lévi-Strauss's work on myth and Kant's notion of the mental schema, and makes a ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of the 'oral mind'.
CONTENTS:
Foreword by Pierre Maranda; Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I: 1 - The thinkers and makers of oral aesthetics; 2 - The composer of visual texts; 3 - The interpreter of visual texts; Part II: 4 - The mental faculties and the definition of oral image; 5 - Image, graphic sign and figure; 6 - Forms of memorization and conservation; Part III: 7 - The oral mind; 8 - The thinking and making of oral images; 9 - Mind, reason, and the unwritten cognitive philosophy; 10 - The poetic formulas and the reason; 11 - Crowns and corollas as visual metaphors of the mental faculties; Conclusion; References; Index.
Giancarlo M. G. Scoditti is Professor of Ethnology at the Department of Classical Archaeology and History of Ancient Art, University of Urbino in Italy. Since 1973 he has carried out extensive field research on both Kitawa and Kiriwina Islands (Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea), focusing his attention on the verbal as well as non-verbal oral expressions of those cultures. He began by analysing the aesthetic and symbolic meaning of kula canoes' prowboards to their carvers. Then he worked on poetic formulas chanted on different occasions by inhabitants of Kitawa. Currently his researches concern the analysis of interpretations of the text of the myth of foundation narrated by the leaders of the four clans living on Kitawa and Kiriwina island.
Full Colour Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-08-9, £65.00 (GBP), $130.00 (USD)
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The first anthropological monograph published on the Vula'a people of south-eastern Papua New Guinea, The Shark Warrior of Alewai considers oral histories and Western historical documents that cover a period of more than 200 years in the light of an ethnography of contemporary Christianity.
Van Heekeren's phenomenology of Vula'a storytelling reveals how the life of one man, the Shark Warrior, comes to contain the identity of a people. Drawing on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, she goes on to establish the essential continuities that underpin the reproduction of Vula'a identity, and to demonstrate how these give a distinctive form to Vula'a responses to historical change. In an approach that brings together the fields of anthropology, history and philosophy, the book questions conventional anthropological categories of exchange, gender and kinship, as well as the problematic dichotomization of myth and history, to argue for an anthropology grounded in ontology.
CONTENTS:Deborah Van Heekeren is a lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University Sydney. Her research interests include the cosmology, myth, history and Christianity of the Vula'a of Papua New Guinea.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-03-4, £55.00 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
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Throughout the Pacific, cultural heritage is both a powerful idiom in post-colonial state-making, and a potent mobilizing force in diverse grassroots social movements, many of which have been misunderstood as 'cargo-cults' or 'inventions of tradition' in anthropological analyses. This collection recognizes cultural heritage as a ground for creativity and experimentation with social forms, and pin-points both the conflicting values at play and their potentially subversive power. Describing key social processes in Hawaii, Tahiti, Pohnpei, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and Australia, it explores alternative ways of configuring authority and organizing the state, as well as highlighting the potential in local social movements to influence culture and politics at the national level.
Taking the pulse of important contemporary social movements in the region, this volume is key for understanding the development of the modern nation-state in the Pacific.
CONTENTS:Edvard Hviding is Professor and Head of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway, and Director of the Bergen Pacific Studies research group. He is an Adjunct Professor of anthropology at James Cook University, Australia and an Honorary Fellow of the Cairns Institute.
Knut M. Rio is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway, and is responsible for the ethnographic collections at the Bergen University Museum.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-06-5, £59.99 (GBP), $119.99 (USD)
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Decolonisation, modernisation, globalisation, the crisis of representation, and the 'cultural turn' in neighbouring disciplines have unsettled anthropology to such an extent that the field's foundations, the subjects of its study as well as its methods and concepts, appear to be eroded.
It is now time to take stock and either abandon anthropology as a fundamentally untenable or superfluous project, or to set it on more solid foundations. In this volume some of the world's leading anthropologists - including Vincent Crapanzano, Maurice Godelier, Ulf Hannerz, and Adam Kuper - do just that. Reflecting on how to meet the manifold institutional, theoretical, methodological, and epistemological challenges to the field, as well as on the continued, if not heightened, importance of anthropology in a world where diversity and cultural difference are becoming ever more important economically, politically, and legally, they set upon the task of reconstructing anthropology's foundations and firming up its stance vis-à-vis these challenges.
With a backward glance at earlier predictions of the demise of anthropology, the essays present a confident account of the future of the discipline. Defining in clear terms what it is that anthropologists do, a well-chosen group of distinguished contributors confront the diversity and internal distinctions that characterize the field, weigh the seriousness of the trend toward interdisciplinary studies in the human sciences, and redefine the strengths of the anthropological mode of knowledge production.
Shirley Lindenbaum, Professor Emerita, City University of New York
CONTENTS:Holger Jebens is Senior Research Fellow at the Frobenius Institute and Managing Editor of Paideuma.
Karl-Heinz Kohl holds the chair of Cultural Anthropology at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main and is Director of the Frobenius Institute.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-05-8, £55.00 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
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In this volume we are provided with a unique insider's perspective on the rich culture of the northern Chin area of Burma/Myanmar by S. Khup Chin Pau, who, as grandson of Chief Hau Chin Khup, grew up amongst the feasts of merit and clan funerals of Kamhau chiefs at the height of their power and opulence. His account of the historical traditions of the area gains further depth and verisimilitude from exclusive access to rare documents and recordings of previous generations, including the personal notebooks of Pu Vung Za Kham, Secretary to Chief Pum Za Mang.
Beginning with the traditional architecture of the Kamhaus, Sukte and Siyins of the Northern Chin Hills, the book moves on to present the Sukte story in both poetry and song, and a local history of Sukte-Kamhau. The Sukte-Kamhau customs pertaining to the entirety of the life-cycle are described, including coming of age, courtship, marriage, the birth of a baby and the politically important communal feasts, funerals and memorials. A direct representation of peerless primary material, this highly illustrated work presents a wealth of data that will constitute a valuable resource for local people and scholars alike.
CONTENTS:Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-02-7, 340 pp., 108 plates - £50.00 (GBP), $100.00 (USD)
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Despite their ubiquity and cultural prominence, the academic study of arts festivals has long been neglected. The burgeoning festivals industry is, however, firmly embedded in both the arts funding and weekly calendar of European cities, and there is no doubt that festivals are fast becoming a defining feature of urban life in the twenty-first century. An assessment of their nature and impact is more pressing than ever before.
The contributors to this volume explore the modern urban festival and the difference it makes to the experience and management of diversity in the city. Their research reveals an unsettling coupling of the celebration of local diversity with institutional amnesia, in which the memory of a festival hardly ever outlasts its funding. This book documents a key phenomenon of our time, the supplanting of community-based remembering with the repetitive structures of events whose historic and interpretative depth is lost amid a spiraling velocity of 'festivalization'.
CONTENTS:Hardback, ISBN 978-1-9077740-1-0, £55.00 (GBP), $110.00 (USD)
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Focusing on issues of empathy and mutuality, and self and other, as experienced in the everyday challenges of doing participant-observation fieldwork, this volume makes a significant contribution to rethinking the experiential and conceptual construction of the field. The contributors adopt a critical and self reflexive approach that goes beyond issues of voice and representation raised by early postmodern anthropology, to grapple with issues concerning the nature of knowledge transmission that lie at the very heart of the ethnographic effort. They explore how multiple modes of attending, awareness and sense making can shape the ethnographic process. Of note are those unanticipated, less palpable forms of communication that are peripheral to or transcend more formalized and structured research methods and agendas. Among these are empathy, intuition, somatic modes of attention and/or embodied knowledge and identification, as well as, shared sensory experiences and aesthetics. By the elaboration of such concepts the volume as a whole offers a substantial elaboration of a phenomenological approach.
CONTENTS:Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-5-6, £49.99 (GBP), $99.99 (USD)
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What happens to national HIV programmes when Science and Religion collide and when both ignore the setting of most infections: in or on the way to marriage?
HIV and AIDS are serious social and public-health problems in Papua New Guinea. After long delays, community-, business- and faith-based organizations have launched an impressive multi-sectoral response. But health-service systems are overwhelmed by the need for HIV antibody testing and counselling, and for treatment with antiretrovirals. Foreign notions of epidemiology, such as 'sex worker', 'risk group' and 'rural/urban', have gained traction despite massive empirical evidence as to their inapplicability. Each of these has fuelled, rather than confronted, the gendered contradictions of marriage and sexuality in Papua New Guinea. Quantitative approaches have fetishized numbers at the expense of enabling changes in social-structure.
Part One of Sin, Sex and Stigma draws upon ethnography, public discourse and archival data to critique public-health policy and epidemiological modelling. Christian-inflected sex-negativity and anti-condom rhetoric are shown to have stymied prevention initiatives. Part Two enlists experts in antiretroviral therapy, sex work activism and ethnography in dialogues focused on strengthening the national response to HIV and AIDS.
A 'hot glow of anger' compelled Lawrence Hammar to write this fiery account of the many factors preventing successful HIV and AIDS interventions in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on his extensive research experience on sexuality and sex work, on cultural and Christian ideologies, and on outrageous stories of denial, abuse, and stigma, Hammar paints a rich and devastating portrait of the history of AIDS in PNG. Read it and weep. Lawrence Hammar is an inspiring reminder for AIDS scholars and activists everywhere of the differences committed social scientists can make to the way things are done.
Leslie Butt, Dept. of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria
A bold, accessible, and rousingly angry book. Hammar's examination of the problematic reliance on conventional epidemiological categories - such as high risk groups - is powerful, as is his analysis of the ways in which questionable HIV prevalence and behavioral data become privileged over thorough ethnographic research. Hammar's investigation of gendered violence, sexual networking, and the dissemination of condom misinformation is unflinching.
Holly Wardlow, University of Toronto
CONTENTS:Lawrence Hammar conducted ethnographic fieldwork from 1990-2 on Daru island, capital of Papua New Guinea's Western Province, and worked alongside Papua New Guinean colleagues from 2003-6 during a nationwide study of HIV, AIDS, STDs, and sexual health and behaviour. His most recent project is 'Positive Research For Positive People: strengthening HIV social research capacity in Fiji', working in tandem with the Pacific Island AIDS Foundation and the Fijian Positive Network. He also teaches anthropology and sexuality courses throughout the state of Ohio.
Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-4-9, £64.99 (GBP), $129.99 (USD)
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Since Papua New Guinea's Independence in the 1970s, Port Moresby has been transformed from a colonial administrative centre to a distinctively Melanesian city. However visitors often shun the capital, their perceptions coloured by unsympathetic media accounts of violent crime and unchecked corruption. Instead they seek the 'real' Papua New Guinea - traditionally oriented and reassuringly parochial - beyond its boundaries.
In this book, experts from the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology and human ecology seek to represent 'Mosbi' as Papua New Guineans experience it. They augment the urban focus of the book with knowledge of the rural societies from which the contemporary inhabitants come. Considering groups of migrants, long-term residents and the traditional landholders of the territory on which it has grown, the contributors offer intimately informed perspectives on the vibrant, dynamic, exciting, hybrid environment that is 'Mosbi'. They argue that it needs to be recognised as the real Papua New Guinea, and that its inhabitants need to be understood not as caricatures of unemployed criminals on the one hand and as corrupt elites on the other, but as modern Melanesians creatively adapting to the exigencies of urban living.
CONTENTS:Michael Goddard is a Research Associate at Macquarie University, Australia. He is the author of The Unseen City: Anthropological Perspectives on Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and Substantial Justice: An Anthropology of Village Courts in Papua New Guinea.
Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-6-3, £49.99 (GBP), $99.99 (USD)
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‘Just leave the tree-trunk alone, the beetle is crawling out.’
In 1967, Toon van Buren went as a missionary-sponsored anthropologist to the Bawòng of the Congo, neighbours of the Lele made famous by Mary Douglas, initially to investigate her contentions about the ‘non-religious’ reasons for the missions’ success there. Like Douglas, he found his encounter there to be the most important of his life
Stalled by the prospect of presenting beliefs he could not believe to be true, van Buren’s outlook was changed by his own authentic 'Bawòng’ experience: a dream in which he was visited by the tribal chief and his wife.
Simultaneously attempting to do justice to both European and Bawòng points of view, and incorporating stories from over half the inhabitants of his host village, this is a magical-realistic travel story through the land of the Bawòng from a man experiencing overlapping beliefs.
CONTENTS:Toon van Buren studied philosophy and theology in Rome and Nijmegen, and was ordained a priest before leaving for mission work in the Congo (1966–8). On his return, he worked for the next 35 years as a (married) Roman Catholic pastor in psychiatric institutions, the last six years as a zen-meditation teacher. Currently, he meditates with zen adepts in a former monastery, ‘Gods Werkhof ’, in Werkhoven, the Netherlands.
Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-3-2, £34.99 (GBP), $69.99 (USD)
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The mass media have immense power, in their reporting of disasters, both natural and man-made, to stir the consciences of prosperous Westerners as well as to manipulate the perception of poverty and deprivation for political ends. For the relief agencies, the media present both unparalleled opportunities to raise money and acute ethical dilemmas when fund-raising priorities, developmental strategies and educational values conflict.
In 1993, this was the first book-length study of the representation of disasters in the media and of the marketing methods used by major relief agencies. In the preface to this new paperback edition which reviews the major developments in aid and in the media since the early 1990s, Jonathan Benthall contests the view of some commentators that the emergence of new technologies – the Internet and the cellphone – has radically changed the balance of power between the aid system and afflicted populations. He develops his original theme to argue that a ‘stable system’ is in place, whereby representations of misery in the South are exported to the North as consumables which are continuously reciprocated by flows of humanitarian aid. When the allotted role of Third World victimhood is repudiated – for instance, by migrant workers – the North sets up stern political barriers.
‘Essential reading for those involved in aid and development as well as for others interested in cultural studies’ (Oxfam Journal)
‘…a genuinely original work that creates a context for the nightly parade of keening refugees and pot-bellied infants through our living rooms.’ (Boyd Tonkin, New Statesman & Society).
Jonathan Benthall is co-author of The Charitable Crescent: Politics of Aid in the Muslim World, and was formerly Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Editor of Anthropology Today.
Paperback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-7-0, £19.50 (GBP), $37.50 (USD)
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This rich account of potters in a southern Catalan village traces the history of pottery production and marketing and the responses of the potters to changing contexts of consumption. By juxtaposing the local, micro-history of a small group of producers (numbering no more than fifty people) with that of Spain’s changing economic and social climate, the author presents a local perspective of producers as affected by and acting upon global developments, ultimately localizing the European transition to one single integrated market economy.
Maintaining a dual focus on subject and object, and thereby combining social and material history, this book demonstrates how physical transformations in the pottery resulted from and affected its role in the social relations people formed as they produced, marketed and consumed it.
Rob van Veggel obtained his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and has since been applying his insights into material culture in product development research, marketing, brand strategy and governmental policies.
Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-2-5, £54.99 (GBP), $109.50 (USD)
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A beleaguered indigenous population came to the attention of the world in 1997 by threatening mass suicide in a last-ditch attempt to protect their ancestral lands (overlying possible oil deposits) from invasion by outsiders.
The U’wa (formerly known as the Tunebo) – a Chibchan-speaking group living on the eastern slopes of the Andes in NE Colombia – are documented in Ann Osborn’s pioneering study, here published in English for the first time. She introduces us to the U’wa on their own terms, enabling us to understand them from their own perspective, to place them squarely within the unique ecological setting that is a fundamental part of their being and to appreciate what might motivate them to contemplate such drastic action in the face of an external threat.
The life-sustaining annual round of ceremonies described here were undertaken not only for themselves but also on behalf of outsiders: ‘If we did not chant, the world would wear out … it would come down … we chant for the Whites as well, so that they can continue living in their world…’.
The contrast between this philosophy and that of our oil-hungry world provides timely cause for reflection.
Introduction by Stephen Hugh-Jones, emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
Hardback, ISBN 978-0-9556400-0-1, £49.99 (GBP), $99.50 (USD)
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What happens to body arts when these aesthetic practices assume fresh significance in the context of modernity?
In many parts of the indigenous world, the realm of body arts has become an arena for innovation, debate, revival and repression under the conditions of modernity. Among some groups, formerly suppressed ‘traditions’ of body arts have recently been revived. Elsewhere, body arts have been the means for creating or renovating identities in response to a developing international tourist market and in the light of novel technologies of representation, such as photography and film.
The contributions to this volume draw together ideas emerging from the anthropology of the body, the western interest in body ornamentation of the ‘Other’, and the recent revival of specific body arts such as tattooing and piercing.
Drawing on ethnographic case studies from
Elizabeth Ewart is University Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford.
Michael O'Hanlon is Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University’s museum of anthropology and world archaeology.
Paperback, ISBN 978-1907774041, £19.50 (GBP), $37.50 (USD)
Hardback, ISBN 0-9545572-9-8 (978-0-9545572-9-4), £49.50 (GBP), $99.50 (USD)
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Of Alien Kings and Perpetual Kin presents a detailed understanding and analysis of the ideology of kingship among the Aruwund (Lunda) of southern Democratic Republic of the Congo. In doing so the text is drawn into addressing a range of important regional themes: the debate on the concept of the 'culture hero' in central African traditions of state formation; the system of 'perpetual kinship'; issues of hierarchy; and the symbolic use of space in royal ritual. All these lead to an analysis that stresses the fluidity and ambiguity of symbolic thought. In this, this innovative work questions the heuristic and theoretical validity of the concept of 'opposition' as used in theoretical models applied to the study of symbolism in which terms are self-contained and mutually exclusive.
'a major ethnographic contribution ... Palmeirim is remarkably successful in her ambition to present the Ruwund epic as a story of exceptional complexity'
Johan Pottier (School of Oriental and African Studies), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14
CONTENTS
Prologue; Introduction; Chapter 1 - Negotiating the myth: the origin of kingship I; Chapter 2 - Rethinking culture heroes: the origin of kingship II; Chapter 3 - Metaphors of kinship: claiming perpetual ties among Ruwund aristocracy; Chapter 4 - Where distinctions remain unspoken: an essay on hierarchy; Chapter 5 - On courts, space and metaphors: the symbolic use of space; Epilogue - Of alien kings and angry chiefs; Appendix - The making of a king: a description of the royal installation ritual; Glossary; References.
Manuela Palmeirim is a Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Minho, Portugal.
Hardback, ISBN 0-9545572-7-1, £45.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
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Living with Things provides an account of consumption in terms of its centrality to our dwelling practices. Its focus is on the home, particularly on the movement of people and things within and through it in everyday habitation.
Here dwelling is seen as an activity, as doing things with and to the things to hand around us. Being ‘at home’ is achieved through living amongst things, as well as amongst people and other non-human presences, such as pets and gardens. Being at home is achieved through what we do with objects, the things that are acquired and stored, that linger around in our homes, sometimes for decades, and which we may eventually get rid of. These ordinary things make dwelling structures accommodating accommodations; they make them homes.
Based primarily on a former coal-mining village in North-east England, this book explores practices of inhabitation, from moving in or being modernised, to the daily accommodation of sleep and children. It provides a demonstration of what happens to consumption research when it ‘comes home’ and is positioned not in sites of exchange but within the home and in households.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 - From researching ridding to living with things; Chapter 2 - Moving in; Chapter 3 - Being modernised; Chapter 4 - Accommodating sleep; Chapter 5 - Collections, clothing and toys: the accommodations of everyday life; Chapter 6 - Accommodating appliances; Chapter 7 - Accommodating nature; Chapter 8 - Ridding, accommodation and dwelling; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.
Nicky Gregson is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield and the lead author of Servicing the Middle Classes; Second-hand Cultures.
Paperback, ISBN 978-1907774072, £19.50 (GBP), $37.50 (USD)
Hardback, ISBN 0-9545572-8-X, £45.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
Please click here to order book.Medical Anthropology is the fastest growing field in anthropology. Over the last three decades it has developed a strong academic and applied importance, both in North America and Europe. This has led to the establishment of a specific degree in medical anthropology at some universities, and to a specialization within general anthropological teaching or within the medical curriculum at others.
This publication provides a handbook to existing programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate level, with the aim of making this information available to a wide public. As a guide to medical anthropology programmes in Europe, it is primarily designed for students who are looking for suitable training, but it will also interest professionals who are looking for expertise in the field. It provides information on ongoing doctoral research all over Europe, and indicates new directions in medical anthropology. It is the first handbook of its kind.
CONTENTS
AUSTRIA - Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, University of Vienna; Ethnomedicine Unit, Institute for the History of Medicine, Centre for Public Health, Medical University of Vienna; CROATIA - Institute for Anthropological Research and Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar , Zagreb; DENMARK - Department of Anthropology and Ethnography, Institute of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, University of Aarhus; Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen; Institute of Public Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Southern Denmark; FINLAND - Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Helsinki; FRANCE - Department of Human Ecology and Anthropology, University of Aix-Marseilles; Doctoral Training in Social Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Research Programme, School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris; GERMANY - Institute for Ethnology/Social Anthropology, Free University Berlin; Department of Anthropology, South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg; GREAT BRITAIN - Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol; International Medical Anthropology Program, School of Social Sciences and Law, Brunel University; Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge; Department of Anthropology, University of Durham; Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh; London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM); Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford; School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London; Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex; Department of Anthropology, University College London (UCL); Behavioural and Social Sciences, Division of Medicine, University College London (UCL); HUNGARY - Department of Medical Anthropology, Institute of Behavioral Sciences, Semmelweis University, Budapest; ITALY - Department of Linguistic and Oriental Studies, University of Bologna; Department of Epistemology and Hermeneutics of Education, University of Milan; Department Man and Environment , Anthropology Section, University of Perugia; Department of Anthropological, Archeological and Historical Sciences, University of Turin; NETHERLANDS - Medical Anthropology Unit, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam; NORWAY - Department of General Practice and Community Medicine, University of Oslo; POLAND - Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan; SPAIN - Department of Anthropology, Philosophy and Social Work, University Rovira i Virgili,Tarragona; SWEDEN - Department of Social Anthropology, Gothenburg University; Department of Social Anthropology, University of Stockholm; SWITZERLAND - Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basle; Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Berne; The Anthropology of Health, Institute of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Lausanne; Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Zurich.
Elisabeth Hsu is University Lecturer in Medical Anthropology, and Doreen Montag is completing a D.Phil. in Social Anthropology, both at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford.
Paperback, ISBN 0-9545572-5-5, £12.99 (GBP), $26.50 (USD)
Please click here to order book.This volume gives a vital and unique insight into the effects of mining and other forms of resource extraction upon the indigenous peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea. Based on extensive fieldwork with the people concerned, it offers a comparative focus on indigenous cosmologies and their articulation or disjunction with the forces of 'development'.
A central dimension of contrast is that Australia as a 'settled' continent has had wholesale dispossession of Aboriginal land, while in Papua New Guinea more than 95% of the land surface remains unalienated from customary ownership. Less obviously, there are also important similarities owing to:
- a shared form of land title (largely unheard of outside Australia and Papua New Guinea) in which the state retains ownership of underground resources;
- the manner in which Western law has been used in both countries to define and codify customary land tenure;
- an emphasis on the reproductive imagery of minerals, petroleum and extraction processes employed by Aborigines and Papua New Guineans;
- and some surprising parallels in the ways that social identities on either side of the Arafura Sea have traditionally been grounded in landscape.
These studies are essential reading for all scholars involved in assessing the effects of resource extraction in Third World and Fourth World settings. Their distinctive contribution lies in their penetrating study of the forms of indigenous socio-cultural response to multinational companies and Western forms of governance and law.
'The writing is new and interesting. The essays mark out new ideas in seemingly effortless abundance. . . In sum - buy it, read it, I think you'll agree that its one of the really interesting books of the year.'
Deborah Rose (Senior Fellow, Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, ANU)
CONTENTS
1 Introduction: Depositings, James F. Weiner; 2 The iron furnace of Birrinydji, Ian McIntosh; 3 The Mount Kare python: Huli myths and gendered fantasies of agency, Holly Wardlow; 4 Who and what is a landowner? Mythology and marking the ground in a Papua New Guinea mining project, Dan Jorgensen; 5 Continuity and identity: Mineral development, land tenure and 'ownership' among the northern Mountain Ok, Don Gardner; 6 Land, stories and resources: Some impacts of large-scale resource exploitation on Onabasulu lifeworlds, T.M. Ernst; 7 The politics of petroleum extraction and royalty distribution at Lake Kutubu, Bill F. Sagir; 8 The Old Airforce Road: Myth and mining in north-east Arnhem Land, Ian Keen; 9 Changing views of place and time along the Ok Tedi, Stuart Kirsch; 10 Poisoning the rainbow: Mining, pollution and indigenous cosmology in Far North Queensland, Veronica Strang; 11 Mining, land claims and the negotiation of indigenous interests: Research from the Queensland Gulf country and the Pilbara region of Western Australia, David Trigger and Michael Robinson; 12 Development, rationalisation, and sacred sites: Comparative perspectives on Papua New Guinea and Australia, Francesca Merlan; References; Index.
Alan Rumsey is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and James Weiner a Visiting Fellow in the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Project, both in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.
Hardback, ISBN 0-9545572-4-7, £50.00 (GBP), $90.00 (USD)
Paperback, ISBN 0-9545572-3-9, £19.50 (GBP), $35.00 (USD)
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In Commons and Borderlands a leading social anthropologist examines early twenty-first-century interests in interdisciplinarity, with particular attention to the conjunction of science and society. Interdisciplinary practice has become well entrenched in any number of scientific disciplines, or disciplines from the humanities or from social science for that matter. This does not deter current rhetoric which sees new opportunities in new combinations of interests. One arresting strand is the promise that in a strong form - transdisciplinarity - 'society' might thereby be brought into 'science'. Marilyn Strathern’s questioning of these processes addresses the challenge that notions of ownership pose to the expected flow of knowledge. As is fitting for a consideration of the flow and transformational properties of knowledge, the contents of this collection are knowingly designated 'working papers', left as open, unfinished statements to highlight their future and the work they may still do. They are designed to inspire debate, and publication will coincide with a Cambridge seminar series on Social Property at which many of these challenges will be rehearsed and articulated.
CONTENTS
PREFACE; INTRODUCTION - In crisis mode : a comment on interculturality; CHAPTER ONE - Knowledge on its travels: Dispersal and divergence in the make-up of communities; CHAPTER TWO - Commons and borderland;.CHAPTER THREE - Who owns academic knowledge? CHAPTER FOUR - Accountabilty across disciplines.ENDNOTE Re-describing society.
Marilyn Strathern is William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
Paperback, ISBN 0-9545572-2-0, £15.99 (GBP), $32.50 (USD)
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What constitutes a resource, and how do people make claims on them? In the context of a burgeoning discourse of property, these are vital questions. Rationales of Ownership offers conceptual clarification in the context of material, intellectual and cultural resources in Papua New Guinea. The volume is a result of a major research project headed by Marilyn Strathern and Eric Hirsch, and brings together contributions from social anthropology and law. The approaches demonstrated, and conclusions reached, build upon recent understandings developed within Melanesian anthropology, but have far wider significance. The first publication sold out in Papua New Guinea due to the relevance of its approach and contents to lawyers and policy makers in that country. It is here made available to a wider readership, particularly those teaching courses on resource development, cultural and intellectual property, contemporary Pacific societies, environmental degradation, and property itself.
'. . .a unique contribution to the discipline's voice in contemporary global debates. . .this volume represents the best of the comparative, ethnographic tradition providing critical insight into difference and similarity on issues that entangle us all in various degrees of responsibility and care. It will be read by anthropologists, policy makers and all academic and non-academic students of what has come to be seen as the test area of the survival of cultural difference.'
Marta Rohatynskyj (University of Guelph)
CONTENTS
Preface, James Leach; 1. Introduction: Rationales of Ownership, Marilyn Strathern; 2. Mining Boundaries and Local Land Narratives (tidibe) in the Udabe Valley, Central Province, Eric Hirsch; 3. Disputing Damage Versus Disputing Ownership in Suau, Melissa Demian; 4. Land, Trees and History: Disputes Involving Boundaries and Identities in the Context of Development, James Leach; 5. The Bases of Ownership Claims Over Natural Resources by Indigenous Peoples in Papua New Guinea, Lawrence Kalinoe; 6. Keeping the Network in View: Compensation Claims, Property and Social Relations in Melanesia, Stuart Kirsch; 7. Combining Rationales from Bolivip: The Person and Property Rights Legislation in Papua New Guinea, Tony Crook; 8. Global and Local Contexts, Marilyn Strathern.
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Lawrence Kalinoe is Professor and Executive Dean in the School of Law, University of Papua New Guinea.
James Leach is Research Fellow, King's College and Associate Lecturer, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
Hardback, ISBN 0-9545572-0-4, £39.99 (GBP), $81.50 (USD)
Paperback, ISBN 0-9545572-1-2, £16.99 (GBP), $35.00 (USD)
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