Socialantropologi og kulturantropologi

The Kemi River is the major watercourse in the Finnish province of Lapland and the 'stream of life' for the inhabitants of its banks. Franz Krause examines fishing, transport and hydropower on the Kemi River and analyses the profoundly rhythmic patterns in the river dwellers' activities and the river's dynamics. The course of the seasons and weekly and daily rhythms of discharge, temperature, work and other patterns make the river dwellers' world an ever-transforming phenomenon. The flows of life and the frictions of everyday encounters continually remake the river and its inhabitants, negotiating national strategies, economic power, people's ingenuity, and the currents of the Kemi River.

Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has reshaped history. In the decades after the collapse of Soviet communism, the West convinced itself that liberal democracy would henceforth be the dominant, ultimately unique, system of governance. An outburst of Western triumphalism proclaimed a US-led unipolar world entitled to 'impose democracy' on countries that failed to recognise the new order. Politicians foretold the universalisation of Western values as the final, enduring form of human society, a hubris that shaped how the West would treat Russia for the next two decades. But history wasn't over. Subsequent events proved it is unwise to make predictions, especially about the future. In February 2022, Vladimir Putin took great delight in proving it. Putin is a paradox. In the early years of his presidency, he appeared to commit himself to friendship with the West, suggesting that Russia could join the European Union or even NATO. He said he supported free-market democracy and civil rights. But the Putin of those years is unrecognisable today. The Putin of the 2020s is an autocratic nationalist, dedicated to repression at home and anti-Western militarism abroad. So, what happened? Was he lying when he proclaimed his support for freedom, democracy and friendship with the West? Or, was he sincere? Did he change his views at some stage between then and now? And if that is the case, what happened to change him?Putin and the Return of History examines these questions in the context of Russia's thousand-year past, tracing the forces and the myths that have shaped Putin's politics of aggression: the enduring terror of encirclement by outsiders, the subjugation of the individual to the cause of the state, the collectivist values that allow the sacrifice of human lives in battle, the willingness to lie and deceive, the co-opting of religion and the belief in Great Russia's mission to change the world.

In 1977-78, right after Papua New Guinea had achieved its political independence, Derk van Groningen was living among the Kilenge people on the north-west coast of the island of New Britain. Originally, his ethnographic field research centered on the circular migration pattern in the Kilenge area. Being permitted to take photographs of their daily activities, his focus became much broader.Groningen's work presents a photographic documentation of many aspects of Kilenge life during the transition period from colonial rule to self-determination and governance. His original observations and photographs are published here for the first time.

The texts collected in this volume take an anthropological approach to the variety of contemporary societal problems which confront the peoples of the contemporary South Pacific.

How does popular culture reflect and shape identity politics in the secessionist climate of contemporary Catalonia?

As we move further into the twenty-first century, we are witnessing both the global extensification and local intensification of inequality. Unequal Lives deals with the particular dilemmas of inequality in the Western Pacific. The authors focus on four dimensions of inequality: the familiar triad of gender, race and class, and the often-neglected dimension of generation. Grounded in meticulous long-term ethnographic enquiry and deep awareness of the historical contingency of these configurations of inequality, this volume illustrates the multidimensional, multiscale and epistemic nature of contemporary inequality. This collection is a major contribution to academic and political debates about the perverse effects of inequality, which now ranks among the greatest challenges of our time. The inspiration for this volume derives from the breadth and depth of Martha Macintyre's remarkable scholarship. The contributors celebrate Macintyre's groundbreaking work, which exemplifies the explanatory power, ethical force and pragmatism that ensures the relevance of anthropological research to the lives of others and to understanding the global condition.

The first biography of Zelia Nuttall (1857-1933), a pioneering Mexican-American anthropologist whose work on Aztec cosmology and mastery of ancient codices helped shape our understanding of pre-Columbian Mexico. Grindle captures the appeal and contradictions of this trailblazing woman, who brought a new rigor to the study of ancient civilizations.

A York Festival Anthology

How are Pacific lives imagined, written and read? From legends about culture heroes to biographies of national leaders, from tales of ancestors to stories of contemporary men and women, from lives told of both the famous and the nameless, this collection of essays probes questions of personhood, identity, memory, and time across the Pacific.

This is the eighth volume in the Comparative Austronesian series. The papers in this volume examine metaphors of path and journey among specific Austronesian societies located on islands from Taiwan to Timor and from Madagascar to Micronesia.

This book is about history of India. It is my sincere attempt to tell all the people of my country about us - who we all are and where we came from. Critical analyses of the three migrations - Hunters and Gatherers around 80000 years ago, Central Asian Pastoral population around 50000 years ago and Indo-Aryans around 6000 years ago, and, three invasions - King Alexander, Islamic and the British, that this country faced, is carried out, to clearly bring out the evolutionary process that this country was subjected to, since 80000 years ago. The partially interbred population from the three migrations, had given rise to great philosophies about God and life, that had influenced other religions of our world. Finally, this book analyzes and questions the implementation of the infamous Caste System, the enormous damage it had done to the Indian Society and the need to eradicate the same. Dr Soundar Divakar is a retired Scientist from a National Laboratory. After completing MSc degree in Chemistry from Pachaiyappa's College in Chennai, he obtained his PhD degree in Chemistry from the Australian National University, Canberra in 1982. Since then, he is actively involved in research in the areas of Bio-Organic Chemistry and Biotechnology, Astrology and Indian History. In his research career spanning 46 years he has to his credit 152 research publications, in National and International Journals besides guiding several PhD and MSc students. He has authored four books - Enzymatic Transformation (Springer), Naadi Astrology - Predictive rules (VL Media Solutions), Language of Rahu (Notion Press) and Astrology - A Science of the Quantum World (Notion Press). Since 2018, for the last four consecutive years, his name has appeared in the Top 2% of World Scientists List published by Stanford University Scientists.

An exploration of the unexpected role that llamas and other Andean camelids played in transoceanic relationships and knowledge exchange.

Exploring breakthroughs in language and cognition research, Caleb Everett finds that fundamentals of human perception are culturally encoded by the words and sentences we use. The experience of time, space, color, odor, and taste is substantially influenced by language, so that basic interactions with the world vary greatly across peoples.

This is a close examination of the ways in which plant life and human life are symbolically intertwined in two rural villages of Hassan District, Karnataka State, India. After presenting a general overview of South Asian cultural traditions related to symbolic uses of plants, the author shares results of an in-depth study of the ways that plants have been used in rites of passage by multiple castes. The author, her partner, and a local team conducted detailed interviews and observations on birth, maturation, marriage, pregnancy, death, and other rituals in 1966-67. A follow-up study of plants covered folk taxonomy, local understandings of plant types and plant parts in 1976-77. Includes photos and other illustrations, a bibliography and a glossary of botanical names.

The book integrates the latest scholarly literature on the entire Indian Ocean region, from East Africa to China. Issues such as India's history, India's changing status in the region, and India's cross-cultural networking over a long period are explored in this book. It is organized in specific themes in thirteen chapters. It incorporates a wealth of research on India's strategic significance in the Indian Ocean arena throughout history. It enriches the reader's understanding of the emergence of the Indian Ocean basin as a global arena for cross-cultural networking and nation-building. It discusses issues of trade and commerce, the circulation of ideas, peoples and objects, and social and religious themes, focusing on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. The book provides a refreshingly different survey of India's connected history in the Indian Ocean region starting from the archaeological record and ending with the coming of empire. The author's unique experience, combined with an engaging writing style, makes the book highly readable. The book contributes to the field of global history and is of great interest to researchers, policymakers, teachers, and students across the fields of political, cultural, and economic history and strategic studies.

Syrian refugees who gained asylum in Germany following the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 quickly entered into an 'integration regime' which produced a binary notion of 'well integrated' migrants versus refugees falling short of the narrow social and political definitions of a 'good' refugee. Etzel's rich ethnographic study shows how refugees navigated this conditional inclusion. While some asylum seekers gained international protection, others were left with limited agency to demand government accountability for the ever-moving target of integration. Putting a spotlight on the inconsistencies and failings of a universal approach to integration, this is an important contribution to the wider field of migration and anthropology of the state.

Auroville in Tamil Nadu, South India, is an internationally recognized endeavour in prefiguring an alternative society: the largest, most diverse, dynamic and enduring of intentional communities worldwide. This book is a critical and insightful analysis of the utopian practice of this unique spiritual township, by a native scholar. The author explores how Auroville's founding spiritual and societal ideals are engaged in its communal political and economic organization, as well as various cultural practices and what enables and sustains this prefiguratively utopian practice. This in-depth, autoethnographic case study is an important resource for understanding prefigurative and utopian experiments - their challenges, potentialities and significance for the advancement of human society.

The soundscape of prison life is that of constant clangs, bangs and jangles. What is the significance of this cacophonous din to those who live and work with it? This book is the story of a year spent with a UK prison community, bringing its social world vividly to life through aural ethnography --