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The Mind Possessed examines spirit concepts and mediumistic practices from a cognitive scientific perspective. Drawing primarily, but not exclusively, from ethnographic data collected during eighteen months of fieldwork in Belém, northern Brazil, this book combines fine‐grained description and analysis of mediumistic activities in an Afro‐Brazilian cult house with a scientific account of the emergence and the spread of the tradition's core concepts. The book develops a novel theoretical approach to questions that are of central importance to the scientific study of transmission of culture, particularly concepts of spirits, spirit healing, and spirit possession. Making a radical departure from established anthropological, medicalist, and sociological analyses of spirit phenomena, the book looks instead to instructive insights from the cognitive sciences and offers a set of testable hypotheses concerning the spread and appeal of spirit concepts and possession activities. Predictions and claims are grounded in the data collected and sourced in specific ethnographic contexts. The data presented open new lines of enquiry for the cognitive science of religion (a rapidly growing field of interdisciplinary scholarship) and challenge the existing but outdated theoretical frameworks within which spirit possession practices have traditionally been understood.

This book is about Rampura, a multi-caste village in princely Mysore (now part of Karnataka) as it was in 1948, the year when M. N. Srinivas did fieldwork there. As so often in human affairs, and in scholarly and scientific history, an accident opens the path to a solution; in this case, a fire that destroyed the author's notes led him to write this book. Professor Srinivas's monograph, based on the human mind's extraordinary capacity to bring forth significant details of the past, is a major ethnographic portrait woven from a sea of original data and purposeful seeking after a description of a village in its own terms. The book’s success suggests people should not let accidents and failures destroy one's art. The importance of the its study could not be overstated as caste represented a unique form of social stratification, and millions of human beings had ordered their lives according to it for over two millennia. The book describes Rampura's village life, agriculture, the sexes, relation between castes, classes and factions, and the quality of social relations.

Nationalism has informed all our ideas about language, culture, identity, nation, and state. Those ideas are being profoundly challenged by globalization, neoliberal responses to it, and the emergent new economy. Language, culture, and identity are commodified; communication takes on a central role as work process and work product in the new economy; multilingualism becomes a salient element of managing the mobility of people, ideas, and goods, and, indeed, of their very value. Through a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of key sites of production of discourse constructing the idea of “francophone Canada” from the 1970s to the present, the author shows how hegemonic discourses of language, identity, and the nation-state are destabilized under new political economic conditions, in processes which, she argues, put us on the path to post-nationalism. Examining sociolinguistic practices in workplaces, schools, community associations, NGOs, state agencies, and sites of tourism and performance across francophone North America and Europe, she shows how the tensions of late modernity produce competing visions of social organization and competing sources of legitimacy in attempts to reimagine—or resist reimagining—who we are.

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.

Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth celebrates the merits of carefully contextualized comparison as an illuminating approach to the study of religion. Drawing from ethnographical work in several sites over a period of sixteen years, Dempsey juxtaposes Hindu and Christian, Indian and Euroamerican religious expressions that take shape as folklore figures, democratizing theologies, sanctified terrain, and extraordinary human abilities. She uncovers how these expressions, all of which lend sacred meaning and power to the material realities of religious participants, push against systems promoting otherworldly abstractions. The book’s comparison of these religious modes deepens insights into the qualities and interpretations of the earthbound sacred, sheds light on contours otherwise obscured, and suggests possibilities for bridging human contingencies across religious and cultural divides. The method and structure of this book represent a two-tiered rebuttal to two similarly constructed critiques. A complaint commonly lodged against comparison is that it imposes abstractions that erase culturally embedded realities. Critics of religion view religious systems as likewise imposing spiritualized conceptions that neglect earthly realities. As both sets of critics see it, scholarly comparison and religion, dictated from above, easily lend themselves to imperialistic structures of oppression. Unsurprisingly, as frameworks that name and claim varieties of power, both are often guilty as charged. Yet by comparing contextually across religious and cultural divides, this book demonstrates how practitioners variously engage with religious forms and experiences that meet earthly concerns and dismantle oppressive abstractions in the process.

This book investigates ritualizing and learning at introductory meditation classes at two Buddhist centers in Toronto, Canada. The centers, Friends of the Heart and Chandrakirti, are led and attended by western Buddhists: that is, people from non-Buddhist familial and cultural backgrounds. Inspired by theories that suggest that rituals impart new knowledge or understanding, the book examines how introductory meditation students learn through formal Buddhist practice. Along the way, it explores practitioners' reasons for enrolling in meditation classes, their interests in Buddhism, and their responses to formal Buddhist rituals. Participants' learning experiences are illuminated by an influential learning theory called Bloom's Taxonomy, while the rites and practices taught and performed at the centers are explored using performance theory, a method which focuses on the performative elements of ritual's postures and gestures. But the study expands the performance framework as well, by demonstrating that performative ritualizing includes the concentration techniques that take place in a meditator's mind. Such techniques are received, traditional mental acts or behaviours that are standardized, repetitively performed, and variously regarded as special, elevated, spiritual, or religious. Having established a link between mental and physical forms of ritualizing, the study demonstrates that body and mind together gain new skills and understanding by way of embodied, gestural rites. The mind is thus experienced as both embodied and gestural, and the whole of the body as socially and ritually informed.

Where do we get our notions of social hierarchy and personal worth? What underlies our beliefs about the goals worth aiming for, the persons we hope to become? This book addresses these questions in this ethnography of a small New Zealand farming community, articulating the cultural system beneath the social hierarchy. It describes a cultural theory of social hierarchy that defines not only the local system of social rank, but personhood as well. Because people define respectability differently, a crucial part of the book's approach is to examine how these differences are worked out over time. The concept of occupation is central to the book's analysis, since the work that people do provides the skeletal framework of the hierarchical order. The book focuses in particular on sheep farming and compares a New Zealand community with one in California. Wealth and respectability are defined differently in the two places, with the result that California landholders perceive a social hierarchy different from the New Zealanders'. Thus the distinctive “shape” that characterizes the hierarchy among these New Zealand landholders and their conceptions of self reflect the distinctive cultural theory by which they live.

Qualitative methods have become increasingly popular among researchers in the professions: social work, nursing, education, business, computer science, and occupational therapy. And while many comprehensive textbooks (in sociology, anthropology and psychology) describe the standard techniques and philosophical assumptions, when the audience is broadened to include practitioners, it is often assumed that practitioners are the consumers of research, not the producers. This book uses qualitative methods to engage practitioners as knowledge producers. In particular, theory-to-practice gaps are described as indispensable conditions for conducting research that matters in worlds of practice. Practitioners are encouraged to lead research by conducting engaged scholarship, which promotes collaboration between practitioners and researchers to address practice-related problems in real world settings. Whereas reductionist methods assume that practice unfolds in closed systems, where variables can be manipulated and controlled or used to predict, the argument developed in this work, using critical realist philosophy, supports the idea that practice takes place in complex open systems. This, in turn, requires a specific practice-to-research vocabulary: brute and institutional facts, contingency and necessity, essentialism, and the phenomenological practice gap. Engaged scholarship and critical realist assumptions are applied to three case studies that combine research questions with data collection techniques and analytic strategies. Thematic, grounded theory, and narrative research techniques are illustrated, including original quick-start instructions for using ATLAS.ti computer software. Institutional ethnography is described, and a case study is used to illustrate the influence of policy implementation on clinical practice.

In Britain today, if you are in the business of fighting crime, then you have to be in the business of dealing with alcohol. ‘Binge drinking’ culture is intrinsic to urban leisure and has come to pose a key threat to public order. Unsurprisingly, a struggle is occurring. Pub and club companies, local authorities, central government, the police, the judiciary, local residents, drug and alcohol campaign groups, and revellers all hold competing notions of social order in the night-time city and the appropriate uses and meanings of its public and private spaces. Bar Wars explores how official discourses of ‘partnership’ and ‘self-regulation’ belie the extent of fierce adversarial contestation between and within these groups. Located within a long tradition of urban ethnography, the book offers unique and hard-hitting analyses of social control in bars and clubs, courtroom battles between local communities and the drinks industry, and street-level policing. These issues go to the heart of contemporary debates concerning urban civility, alcohol and drugs policies, and the impacts of and justifications for new police powers introduced as part of the Licensing Act 2003 and Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006. The author's experiences as a disc jockey and as an expert witness to the licensing courts provide a unique perspective, setting his work apart from other academic commentators. Bar Wars takes the study of the ‘night-time economy’ to a new level of sophistication, making it essential reading for all those wishing to understand the policing and regulation of contemporary British cities.

This book critically assesses the expanding field of global health. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to address the medical, social, political, and economic dimensions of the global health enterprise through vivid case studies and bold conceptual work. The book demonstrates the crucial role of ethnography as an empirical lantern in global health, arguing for a more comprehensive, people-centered approach. Topics include the limits of technological quick fixes in disease control, the moral economy of global health science, the unexpected effects of massive treatment rollouts in resource-poor contexts, and how right-to-health activism coalesces with the increased influence of the pharmaceutical industry on health care. The chapters explore the altered landscapes left behind after programs scale up, break down, or move on. We learn that disease is really never just one thing, technology delivery does not equate with care, and biology and technology interact in ways we cannot always predict. The most effective solutions may well be found in people themselves, who consistently exceed the projections of experts and the medical-scientific, political, and humanitarian frameworks in which they are cast. This book sets a new research agenda in global health and social theory and challenges us to rethink the relationships between care, rights, health, and economic futures.

This book is about play, performance, and participatory culture in the digital age. It shows how music, video games, and social media are bridging virtual and visceral experience, creating dispersed communities who forge meaningful connections by “playing along” with popular culture. Miller reveals how digital media are brought to bear in the transmission of embodied knowledge: how a Grand Theft Auto player uses a virtual radio to hear with her avatar’s ears; how a Guitar Hero player channels the experience of a live rock performer; and how an amateur guitar student translates a two-dimensional, pre-recorded online music lesson into three-dimensional physical practice and an intimate relationship with a distant teacher. Through ethnographic case studies, Miller demonstrates that our everyday experiences with interactive digital media are gradually transforming our understanding of musicality, creativity, play, and participation.

Moving into a senior boys' dorm at a co-ed New England preparatory school, I soon noticed vast behavioral differences among the students that I found hard to understand. In an environment of ivy-covered buildings, institutional goals of excellence and aspirations to Ivy League colleges, I observed that many girls worked themselves into a state of sleep deprivation and despair during exam period while the boys remained seemingly unconcerned and relaxed. I noticed that the girls felt the pressure to be “cute” and “perfect”, while the boys felt pressure to be “bad ass” and the “best at everything.” I learned that the boys thought that “it would suck” to be a girl and that one third of the girls would be male if given the chance. I noticed class and ethnic differences in how the students seemed to display their masculinity and femininity. From my vantage point of sitting in the back of the football and field-hockey buses, touring dorm rooms, listening to the words they used to describe each others' looks and sexuality, and listening to them discussing their academic and social pressures, competition, rumors, backstabbing, sex, and partying, I discovered that these boys and girls shared similar values, needs, and desires. Caught in the crossfire between cultural and institutional values of individuality, hierarchy and success, class and racial/ethnic differences, and society's expectations for gender appropriate behavior, these students faced conflicting pressures that affected both their social and academic success. This work provides insight into the costs of privilege as well as class, ethnic, and individual differences in the performance of gender. It reveals how the adolescent culture of this powerful group reflects and perpetuates larger cultural, institutional, class and ethnic values, gender ideals, and power structures, and ultimately exposes the underpinnings of the American character.