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This book examines the simultaneously material, social and emotional exchanges involved when African migrants venture to Europe in search of a better life. As we argue, these exchange are part of a broader quest for social regeneration that involve negotiations of family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad as well as complicated encounters with state officials and laws hindering or facilitating their journeys. In this migratory process exchange of everything from money, goods and advice to sentiments, phone calls and assurances of belonging are part of transnational circuits that enable, block or control mobility through social networks. We call the circuits that emerge from the sending, withholding and receiving of goods, ideas, bodies and emotions affective circuits. We focus especially on how affective circuits operate in the context of contemporary African migration to Europe, following in the footsteps of migrants and their families, husbands, wives, friends, peers and lovers across African countries like Ghana, Gambia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Cameroon, Congo, Mauritania, Kenya, Madagascar and Mozambique and European countries like France, Italy, Portugal, UK, Germany and Denmark. Through fieldwork in both Africa and Europe the authors analyze how exchanges work, how they are socially, culturally, morally and historically embedded, and how they regenerate and reshape kin and other intimate formations in our times of worldwide migrations.

In the last three decades the anthropology of Western Europe has become almost exclusively an anthropology of urban life. The anthropology of rural life in Western Europe has been progressively neglected. Yet, just because cities concentrate people who continue to produce new and unexpected forms of social organization does not mean rurality becomes the emptying home of a tired traditionalism. Far from it. Since the city is only defined by opposition to the countryside, and since rural movements have urban effects, we cannot ignore the changes taking place in hamlets, villages, and rural towns throughout Western Europe. They are a integral part and parcel of life in Europe today. The key aim of this book is to redress this academic imbalance, by examining some of the central changes in the rural zones of contemporary Western Europe. In particular, most contributors look at the newcomers to these areas and the rainbow variety of effects they are having. The ‘alternative’ in our title is to be understood broadly. The contributors are not just looking at the self-proclaimed alternatives (hippies, New Agers, back-to-nature types, etc.) but at labour migrants from outside Western Europe and affluent resettlers as well. Members of all these groups are, in their own way, contributing towards the construction of a non-traditional countryside. All of them help to maintain life in rural areas which would otherwise be emptying of residents.

The attempt by the George W. Bush administration to reshape world order, especially but not exclusively after September 11, 2001, increasingly appears to have resulted in a catastrophic “misshaping” of geopolitics in the wake of bungled campaigns in the Middle East and their many reverberations worldwide. Journalists and scholars are now trying to understand what happened, and this book explores the role of culture and rhetoric in this process of geopolitical transformation. What difference do cultural concepts and values make to the cognitive and emotional weather of which, at various levels, international politics is both consequence and perceived corrective? The scholars in this multidisciplinary book bring the tools of cultural analysis to the profound ongoing debate about how geopolitics is mapped and what determines its governance.

What is the nature of knowledge? Anthropology imagines it possible to divide or separate social and analytical relations, whereby knowledge travels between persons as a thing. And yet, Bolivip imagines knowledge as the bodily resources or parts of a person that can be extended or combined with others. This methodological exchange is modelled on a moment from Bolivip – an exchange of skin whereby knowledge is returned in respect of prior nurture and care given, and two people become encompassed by one skin. The Min area of Papua New Guinea has proven to be one of the most enigmatic cultures in anthropological experience. But rather than accept this resistance to analysis as a problem of Melanesian secrecy, this book suggests that archaic notions of anthropological knowledge have been the problem all along. Taking up the ‘Min problem’ head on, it suggests a solution to the impasse. The argument works through alternating chapters: an imagistic ethnography of Bolivip describes how arboreal and horticultural metaphors motivate the growth of persons and plants by circulating bodily resources through others. Knowledge here comes from those who contribute to conception, and is withheld until a person is capable of bearing it. These images are used to provide new readings of classic Melanesianist texts – Mead, Bateson, and Fortune – substituting theoretical ideas for intimate relations; Weiner and Strathern's own experiments with anthropology modelled on Melanesia; and Barth's reading of secrecy amongst the Min.

Starting with the discovery of a curious plot in which science became the handmaiden of white-collar crime, this book tracks a group of Victorian gentlemen-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned societies. It explores what the author calls “the stock exchange modality:” how the production of scientific truth became every bit as integral as financial engineering to investment and speculation in foreign government debt. This book underscores the crucial role of finance in shaping the contours of human knowledge and vice versa in an age of mercantile expansion. It argues that finance and science were at the heart of that new brand of imperialism, born under Benjamin Disraeli’s first term as Britain’s prime minister. This new imperialism built on the multiple covert links between the birth of social sciences and novel mechanisms of financial revenue creation and extraction. As anthropologists advocated the study of Miskito Indians or stated their views on a Jamaican Rebellion or Abyssinian Expedition, they responded and catered to the impulses of the Stock Exchange. The marriage between anthropological science and finance produced essential technologies of globalization, and formed the foundational structures of late nineteenth century British imperialism

This examination of children of immigrants in New York and London asks, “Is there a link between rap/hip-hop-influenced youth culture and motivation to succeed in school? The author challenges teachers, administrators, and parents to look beneath the outward manifestations of youth culture—the clothing, music, and tough talk—to better understand the internal struggle faced by many minority students as they try to fit in with peers while working to lay the groundwork for successful lives. Using ethnographic, survey, and interview data in two racially diverse, low-achieving high schools, she analyzes seemingly oppositional styles, tastes in music, and school behaviors, finding that most teens try to find a balance between success with peers and success in school.

This fresh and accessible ethnography offers a new vision of how society might cohere, in the face of ongoing global displacement, dislocation, and migration. Drawing from intensive fieldwork in a highly diverse North London neighborhood, the book focuses on an everyday item—blue jeans—to learn what one simple article of clothing can tell us about our individual and social lives and challenging, by extension, the foundational anthropological presumption of “the normative.” The authors argue that blue jeans do not always represent social and cultural difference, from gender and wealth, to style and circumstance. Instead they find that jeans allow individuals to inhabit what the authors term “the ordinary.” The book demonstrates that the emphasis on becoming ordinary is important for immigrants and the population of North London more generally, and they call into question foundational principles behind anthropology, sociology and philosophy.

This volume presents CSR as a series of economic and political strategies that are currently shifting the focus of international human rights activism and signaling the rise of new forms of global governance. In as much as the work demonstrates the limitations of CSR and offers a critical perspective on corporate techniques of market domination, it also posits a future for CSR within the human rights movement. This volume's contributors engage directly with the conduct and objectives of corporations, moving beyond discussions of markets and economic policy to examine how particular corporate agents have shaped realities on the ground.

“Chess gets a hold of some people, like a virus or a drug,” states this book. Drawing on a lifelong fascination with the game, the book guides readers into the world of twenty-first-century chess to help them understand its unique pleasures and challenges, and to advance a new “anthropology of passion.” Immersing us directly in chess's intricate culture, it interweaves small dramas, closely observed details, insights, anecdotes, and biographical sketches to elucidate the game and to reveal what goes on in the minds of experienced players when they face off over the board. The book offers a compelling take on the intrigues of chess and shows how the themes of play, beauty, competition, addiction, fanciful cognition, and intersubjective engagement shape the lives of those who take up this most captivating of games.

What is the future of curatorial practice? How can the relationships between Indigenous people in the Pacific, collections in Euro-American institutions, and curatorial knowledge in museums globally be (re)conceptualised in reciprocal and symmetrical ways? Is there an ideal model, a ‘curatopia,’ whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia, which can enable the reinvention of ethnographic museums and address their difficult colonial legacies? This volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of the play in curatorial practice, reviewing the different models and approaches operating in different museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world, and debating the emerging concerns, challenges, and opportunities. The subject areas range over native and tribal cultures, anthropology, art, history, migration and settler culture, among others. Topics covered include: contemporary curatorial theory, new museum trends, models and paradigms, the state of research and scholarship, the impact of new media, and current issues such as curatorial leadership, collecting and collection access and use, exhibition development, and community engagement. The volume is international in scope and covers three broad regions—Europe, North America and the Pacific. The contributors are leading and emerging scholars and practitioners in their respective fields, all of whom have worked in and with universities and museums, and are therefore perfectly placed to reshape the dialogue between academia and the professional museum world.

How do fishers extend their bodies and senses to work beneath the surface of the sea in places they cannot see, have never been, and could not survive in? And at what risk? This book explores how fishers make the sea productive through their labour, using technologies ranging from wooden boats to digital GPS plotters to extend their senses and range of effective work, in the process creating familiar places in a seemingly hostile environment. It shows how the lives of fishers are deeply affected by capitalist commodity relations. Drawing on years of participant observation at sea in the west of Scotland, the author worked on a Nephrops prawn trawler, lived on a boat in harbours and voyaged along the coast. The book makes a unique contribution to understanding human-environment relations, examining the places fishers create and name at sea, as well as fishers’ technologies and navigation practices. Combining anthropology, phenomenology and political economy, the ethnography offers new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies in a Marxist framework. It also contributes to the social studies of fisheries through an analysis of how deeply fishing practices and social relations are shaped by political economy.

Writing, the subject of much innovative scholarship in recent years, is only half of what we call literacy. The other half, reading, receives its due in these essays by a group of anthropologists and literary scholars. The essays move beyond the simple rubric of “literacy” in its traditional sense of evolutionary advancement from oral to written communication. Some investigate reading in exotically cross-cultural contexts. Some analyze the long historical transformation of reading in the West from a collective, oral practice to the private, silent one it is today, while others demonstrate that, in certain Western contexts, reading is still very much a social activity. The reading situations described here range from Anglo-Saxon England to contemporary Indonesia, from ancient Israel to a Kashaya Pomo Indian reservation. The collection is filled with insights that erase the line between orality and textuality.

Friends—they are generous and cooperative with each other in ways that appear to defy standard evolutionary expectations, frequently sacrificing for one another without concern for past behaviors or future consequences. This multidisciplinary study synthesizes an array of cross-cultural, experimental, and ethnographic data to understand the broad meaning of friendship, how it develops, how it interfaces with kinship and romantic relationships, and how it differs from place to place. The book argues that friendship is a special form of reciprocal altruism based not on tit-for-tat accounting or forward-looking rationality, but rather on mutual goodwill that is built up along the way in human relationships.

One of the great riddles of cultural history is the remarkable parallel that exists between the peoples of Amazonia and those of Melanesia. Although the two regions are separated by half a world in distance and at least 40,000 years of history, their cultures nonetheless reveal striking similarities in the areas of sex and gender. In both Amazonia and Melanesia, male–female differences infuse social organization and self-conception. They are the core of religion, symbolism, and cosmology, and they permeate ideas about body imagery, procreation, growth, men's cults, and rituals of initiation. The contributors to this book illuminate the various ways in which sex and gender are elaborated, obsessed over, and internalized, shaping subjective experiences common to entire cultural regions, and beyond. Through comparison of the life ways of Melanesia and Amazonia, they expand the study of gender, as well as the comparative method in anthropology, in new directions.

Why are we what we are, where we are? Part 1. When and how did humankind spread across the world from our evolutionary origins in Africa? How do we know the answers? Did climate affect our evolution and distribution? Do geographic and cultural barriers affect our distribution even now? Part 2. How did or does the environment influence our biology and the distribution of cultures? In respect of both anatomical and physiological adaptations to the environment, and also the distribution of cultures, what we see in humans is extraordinarily similar to what we see in other animals. Animals and people with different diets have different physiologies; biodiversity and cultural diversity is higher in the tropics than at higher latitudes; we find fewer species and fewer cultures on islands than in the same area of nearby mainlands. And the reasons for these patterns are of the same in humans as in other animals. Part 3. Our distribution affects and is affected by other cultures and other species. We drive some to extinction, and are ourselves driven to extinction by some. But we also help expand the distribution of some, and our distribution is increased by some.

In this book, a multidisciplinary group of scholars examines how the actions of the United States as a global leader are worsening pressures on people worldwide to migrate, while simultaneously degrading migrant rights. Uniting such diverse issues as market reform, drug policy, and terrorism under a common framework of human rights, the book constitutes a call for a new vision on immigration.

Iraqi women in Denmark is an ethnographic study of ritual performance and place-making among Shi‘a Muslim Iraqi women in Copenhagen. The book explores how Iraqi women construct a sense of belonging to Danish society through ritual performances, and it investigates how this process is interrelated with their experiences of inclusion and exclusion in Denmark. The findings of the book refute the all too simplistic assumptions of general debates on Islam and immigration in Europe that tend to frame religious practice as an obstacle to integration in the host society. In sharp contrast to the fact that Iraqi women’s religious activities in many ways contribute to categorizing them as outsiders to Danish society, their participation in religious events also localizes them in Copenhagen. Drawing on anthropological theories of ritual, relatedness and place-making, the analysis underscores the necessity of investigating migrants’ notions of belonging not just as a phenomenon of identity, but also with regard to the social relations and practices through which belonging is constructed and negotiated in everyday life.The Iraqi women’s religious engagement is related to their social positions in Danish society, and the study particularly highlights how social class relations intersect with issues of gender and ethnicity in the Danish welfare state, linking women’s religious practices to questions of social mobility. The book contextualizes this analysis by describing women’s previous lives in Iraq and their current experiences with return visits to a post-war society.

This book examines the intersections of life and work for expatriates in Kathmandu, Nepal, and the many changes to their experience of overseas labor in the last sixty years. Western elite transnational laborers are the nominal centerpoint of Mediating, yet the text uses this base as opportunity to explore other populations and practices. Bureaucracy and audit practices constrain the work and lives of expatriates, being also their medium of exchange with many local coworkers and friends. Changes in best practices have transformed the ideologies of overseas labor as well as the lives of workers themselves. New racialized and gendered labor, forms of expertise and ideas of security have altered the work of experts and their relationships to Nepalis. This book examines such diverse phenomena as global business, international politics, gendered labor practices and Nepal's own history through the lens of the world of transnational elite labor in Kathmandu.

Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases argues that today it is vital to distinguish danger, risk, and uncertainty analytically and anthropologically. In order to do so, it presents a series of concepts and cases that clarify emergent problem spaces as well as to the way these domains are currently addressed—or not addressed—by relevant scholarship. It argues that the scholarly fields previously understood as covering risk are inadequate in part because the world is increasingly being populated by forms, practices and events of uncertainty that cannot be reduced to risk. It makes the case that the study of uncertainty should not focus solely on the appearance of new risks and dangers in the world which no doubt abound, but also on how uncertainty itself should be defined as a problem; and the forms of governing and experience that are emerging in relation to it. The studies in this book, with contributions from various anthropological domains (economics and entrepreneurialism, security and humanitarianism, health and environment), enable consideration of the forms of knowledge and technologies applied to the problem of managing uncertainty, as well as differing modes of subjectivity appropriate to forms of action currently developing beyond risk assessment. The volume brings together recent thinkers whose work, while not ignoring previous scholarship on risk, nevertheless provides ground-breaking attention to the domain of uncertainty providing analytic tools and case studies necessary for understanding that domain.