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This chapter teases out the multiple, sometimes contradictory, messages in Japanese ethnographic accounts and images of colonial Korea to assess their practical and ideological value to the imperial project. It argues that colonial anthropology in Korea was characterized by two conflicting tendencies, both of which served official colonial objectives only obliquely: ethnographic accounts and images maximized Korean difference to enhance the grandeur of the Japanese empire, dramatize the urgent necessity of Japan's civilizing influence, and justify the purportedly altruistic intrusion on Korean sovereignty. But often these descriptions and images simultaneously minimized Korean difference in accordance with the dictates of the ideology of common ancestry (nissen dō soron), so as to make the annexation appear as a smooth integration of backward cousins into the Japanese family-state, and to enable a rediscovery of Japanese origins that enhanced the ongoing efforts to promote national cultural identity within the metropole.

This chapter focuses on the descriptions of a single festival—Yom Kippur. Out of all the possible holidays, Yom Kippur has been chosen for several reasons. To begin with, it comes up more often than any other festival in the ethnographic accounts, so that there is more material on the Day of Atonement than any other topic. Moreover, Yom Kippur constitutes one of the most important festivals on the Jewish calendar, which helps explain why it attracted so much attention from Christian authors. As a result, it also stands to reason that writing about Yom Kippur is more comprehensive than any of the other holidays.

Following a survey of the depiction of Jewish eating customs in ancient and medieval texts, this chapter scrutinizes the corresponding early modern accounts. It addresses the Jews' abstinence from pork; ritual slaughter; the separation between meat and milk and the tvila (immersion) of utensils; yeyn nesekh; and the perceived gluttony of the Jews. The chapter attempts to determine how the authors of the ethnographic accounts contended with these norms and guidelines, particularly their view of the fact that the attendant guidelines and practices set the Jews firmly apart from the rest of European society. As opposed to Yom Kippur and the birth rituals, which are primarily connected to the religious sphere of life and are observed on specific dates or occasions, the laws that govern food are applicable all year round. In consequence, they also had a substantial impact on the individual Jew's daily social interactions. In this respect, the descriptions of Jewish eating habits not only serves as a case study for the manner in which the various authors grasped the Jews' religious distinctiveness, but their cultural otherness as well.

This chapter introduces the Kamars, an aboriginal tribe located in the south-eastern districts of the Central Province of India. The chapter first describes the location of the Kamars; the habitat, the geographical formations (waterfalls, hills, etc.), the climate, and the population. It then reviews some of the previous ethnographic accounts and research that were conducted on the Kamars, and reveals that the name ‘Kamar’ corresponds to three or four different aboriginal and semi-aboriginal tribes that are distributed over different locations. It also notes that no anthropometric work has been conducted among the Kamars of Chhattisgarh, who are the focus of this study. Finally, the chapter describes the physical appearance, dress, and decoration of the Kamars.

This chapter discusses the history of Syrian Christians. It covers the Persian period, during which a dispersion of the early Christians seems to have taken place following the departure of St Thomas; and the Portuguese period which began with the ‘discovery’ of a sea route to India by Vasco da Gama in 1498. Syrian Christianity during the nineteenth century is then described using narrative accounts of three different but related kinds in the syntagmatic reconstruction of the past. These are: (a) Church Missionary Society Records (1816–56), (b) Judgement Reports including Witness Depositions in the Royal Court of Final Appeal (1879–89), and (c) Ethnographic Accounts of 1981–2.

This chapter offers an ethnographic account of an emerging feminist performance movement called Yoni Ki Baat (Our Vaginas Speak). Across the Unites States, a growing number of South Asian American women have found more progressive and politically resistive ways to engage with South Asian cultural traditions. By playing critically with folk dress, narratives, songs, poetic forms, dance, and material culture, these women engage in debates about sexuality and gender in their communities. Put simply, Yoni Ki Baat can be characterized as a South Asian American version of The Vagina Monologues, wherein the performances serve as an opportunity for young women to embed personal testimonies within traditional cultural forms as a way to address controversial issues connected to ethnic essentialism, sex positivity, and sexual violence, to name a few.

This chapter focuses on family stories. These stories include rehashings of recent events that the speaker may have personally observed; oral history and legends about ancestors that are passed along through generations; and also myths that index a family's relationship to supernatural or divine beings. Family stories offer family members a personalized connection to places and to history. For instance, in India, the presence of caste bards, the Bhats or Charans, also extend family stories into a more formalized arena. For cultural anthropologists, family stories are largely an unmarked analytic category: certainly, other people's family stories appear in life histories, oral histories, and even ethnographic accounts, but they are usually shuffled in amid other sorts of narrative data.

This chapter introduces and explores the central argument of the book. It concentrates on a group of people called the Nalik in northern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, where the author conducted fieldwork (2000–2001) and develops the idea that for people on this island, pattern is a form through which they think. It explores this assertion by focusing on a well-known patterned-shell valuable called a kapkap, which is carved throughout the region and presented to clan leaders at mortuary feasts in order to transfer power from one clan generation to the next. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Europeans collected the kapkap in vast quantities largely because of its decorative appeal, but the chapter shows that rather than being merely decorative, the patterns on the kapkap are forms for expressing relations to the land and to the dead, and for recalling social history, and are thus a material form of knowledge. In doing so, it provides the first ethnographic account of the kapkap.

This introductory chapter provides an ethnographic vignette regarding a young woman’s embrace of Islam with the help of the Los Angeles Latino Muslim Association. This account introduces several issues and questions around race, religion, and the mediation of lived experiences. Additionally, the chapter provides a demographic sketch of Latino Muslims in comparison to broader U.S. population groups. Highlights from this sketch include estimates that put the total national Latino Muslim population at less than 200,000; 62 percent were born in the United States; 31 percent trace their ancestry to Mexico and 22 percent to Puerto Rico; and 19 percent reside in California, 15 percent in Texas, 12 percent in New York, and 11 percent in New Jersey. The chapter also provides an overview of the methods used in the study and an outline of the book’s chapters.

The concluding chapter revisits the arguments of earlier social science research on capitalist agrarian development. Rural transformation has typically been characterized as following some variant of capitalist forms. This book has sought to take a step outside the language of capitalism to explore other possible characterizations of the rural. Yes, there are elements of what might be called capitalist and there are elements that are considered non-capitalist. But even these two forms of description are inadequate. What about the role of other elements in shaping outcomes for farmers? The nature of the soyabean plant, the geology and ecological profile of Malwa, the structure of online technology markets—can we ignore them? This book has sought to bring together theoretical insights from science and technology studies with empirical evidence through ethnography that helps to take into account all these various factors—social and technical—for richer and more detailed accounts of rural transformation.