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The death of a shaman in 1980 had an enormous spiritual and political consequences for one of the Arakmbut communities, resulting in a shift in its social organization from comparative hierarchy to a more egalitarian system. The author uses this case as an illustration to challenge the idea that indigenous peoples live in fossilized, static worlds.

This collection of autobiographical essays offers a vivid and harrowing picture of war and its impact on daily life, as seen by two distinct perspectives. Israeli and Palestinian.

The Bakweri people of Mount Cameroon, an active volcano on the coast of West Africa a few degrees north of the equator, have had a varied and at times exciting history which has brought them into contact, not only with other West African peoples, but with merchants, missionaries, soldiers and administrators from Portugal, Holland, England, Jamaica, Sweden, Germany and more recently France.

Violent ethno-nationalist conflicts continue to mar the history of the current century, yet no satisfactory answer to the question of why humans are susceptible to indoctrination by ideologies that lead to inter-group hostility has so far been found.

In 1991 the Huaorani people of eastern Ecuador followed the lead of other indigenous populations and formed a political organization to confront threats to their territory and autonomy posed by oil companies, missionaries, and state agencies.

There are many stories featuring the villainous hero Reynard the Fox in many languages told over many centuries, goingback as far as the early 12th century. All these stories are comic and much of the humour depends on parody and satire resulting in mockery, sometimes the subversion of certain kinds of serious literature...

Women in the Federal Republic, the former GDR, Switzerland and Austria have initiated a remarkable literary movement, especially after 1968, which is also attracting growing attention elsewhere. Informed by critical feminist and literary theory, this broad-ranging collection, the first of its kind, examines the history of these writings...

This book does not only offer an analysis of the political effects of the dramatic population changes that are taking place in countries all around the world; it also represents the testimony of one of the most distinguished scholars in the field of migration and population studies.

A work on the interrelationship between Liberal Judaism and Rabbinic Law (Halachah). It represents a plea for a positive yet critical approach to Rabbinic Law in general as well as to a variety of specific topics.

Merezhkovsky's bold claim that "all Russian literature is, to a certain degree, a struggle with the temptation of demonism" is undoubtedly justified. And yet, despite its evident centrality to Russian culture, the unique and fascinating phenomenon of Russian literary demonism has so far received little critical attention.

In anthropology, theoretical approaches attempting to come to terms with experiences of social interaction, often inspired by phenomenology, have come to the fore in opposition to the previously favored emphasis on symbolic and social structures. These essays attempt a new kind of ethnographic description of social life that treats structure and practice as aspects of the same reality. This is achieved through attention to indigenous conceptualizations of the way society itself is generated.With Jonathan Friedman and Fredrik Barth providing overviews, this series of innovative ethnographies highlights ways of forming social relations specific to Oceania as a cultural area, exemplifying a new kind of comparative approach and making a major contribution to general social theory.Ingjerd Hoëm is Head of the Institute for Pacific Archaeology and Cultural History at the Kon-Tiki Museum. Sidsel Roalkvam is a Post-doctoral fellow in the Department of General Practice and Community Medicine, University of Oslo.

For some time now, museums have been recognized as important institutions of western cultural and social life. The idea of the museum as a ritual site is fairly new and has been applied to the art museums in Europe and the United States so far. This volume expands it by exploring a range of contemporary museums in Europe and Africa. The case studies examine the different ways in which various actors involved in cultural production dramatize and ritualize such sites. It turns out that not only museum specialists, but visitors themselves are engaged in complex performances and experiences that make use of museums in often unexpected ways.

Fin-de-siecle Vienna remains a central event in the birth of the century's modern culture. Our understanding of what happened in those key decades in Central Europe at the turn of the century has been shaped in the last years by an historiography presided over by Carl Schorske's Fin de Siecle Vienna...

"This deeply disturbing but brilliant collection will be a challenge to a burgeoning literature on children in war situations ... [especially] to those who wish to make a black and white distinction between children and adults." -Children, Youth and EnvironmentsWar leads not just to widespread death but also to extensive displacement, overwhelming fear, and economic devastation. It weakens social ties, threatens household survival and undermines the family''s capacity to care for its most vulnerable members. Every year it kills and maims countless numbers of young people, undermines thousands of others psychologically and deprives many of the economic, educational, health and social opportunities which most of us consider essential for children''s effective growth and well-being.Based on detailed ethnographic description and on young people''s own accounts, this volume provides insights into children''s experiences as both survivors and perpetrators of violence. It focuses on girls who have been exposed to sexual exploitation and abuse, children who head households or are separated from their families, displaced children and young former combatants who are attempting to adjust to their changed circumstances following the cessation of conflict. In this sense, the volume bears witness to the grim effects of warfare and displacement on the young.Nevertheless, despite the abundant evidence of suffering, it maintains that children are not the passive victims of conflict but engage actively with the conditions of war, an outlook that challenges orthodox research perspectives that rely heavily on medicalized notions of ''victim'' and ''trauma.''Jo Boyden is a senior research officer at the Refugee Studies Centre, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford.Joanna de Berry trained in anthropology at Cambridge University and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Historians mostly from Germany and the US, but also other eastern European countries, explore the role of their colleagues during the Nazi period and their participation in the genocide.

Focusing on areas such as the heritage of 1989 revolutions, ambivalence, disillusionment, individualism, and collective identities, this text explores the expectations and goals that Eastern Europeans had during the 1989 revolutions and the decade thereafter, and the problems and disappointments they encountered in the course of the transformation.

Western societies draw crucially on concepts of the "individual" in constructing their images of the ethnic group and nation and define these in terms of difference. This study explores the implications of these constructs for Western understanding of social order and ethnic conflicts.

The term 'Anthropology of Food' has become an accepted abbreviation for the study of anthropological perspectives on food, diet and nutrition, an increasingly important subdivision of anthropology that encompasses a rich variety of perspectives, academic approaches, theories, and methods. Its multi-disciplinary nature adds to its complexity.

Beginning with the arrival of the British in 1788 and extending to the 1960s, this volume reconstructs instances of Australian genocide, and places them in a global context. It identifies the moments of radicalization, and the escalation of British violence and ethnic engineering aimed at the indigenous populations.

It is often argued that Germany and Scandinavia stand at two opposite ends of a spectrum with regard to their response to social-economic disruptions and cultural challenges. Though, in many respects, they have a shared cultural inheritance, it is nevertheless the case that they mobilize different mythologies and different modes of coping when faced with breakdown and disorder. The authors argue that it is at these "critical junctures," points of crisis and innovation in the life of communities, that the tradition and identity of national and local communities are formed, polarized, and revalued; it is here that social change takes a particular direction.

A key theme in the anthropology of beliefs is the relationship between socio-economic change and changes in the belief system. It has been widely argued that rapid economic change, particularly the introduction of capitalism, leads to an increase in beliefs in, and representations of, evil and the devil.

This collection demonstrates both varied and skillful ways in which individuals and communities react to and cope with the impact of decades of mass tourism on their lives and values, thus throwing new light onto questions of identity, boundary maintenance and cultural adjustment.

A collection of ten essays written by German scholars investigating the formulation of taboos in literature, and the literary strategies and artistic devices used by German writers to subvert the unspeakable.

Jews and Judaism played a significant role in the history of the expansion of Europe to the west as well as in the history of the economic, social, and religious development of the New World. They played an important role in the discovery, colonization, and eventually exploitation of the resources of the New World.

In this second volume of Liberal Jewish sermons spanning the greater part of the second half ofthe twentieth century, the author again combines a radically progressive stance with Jewish commitment and seeks to understand contemporary history from a "prophetic" point of view.

Despite the widespread trends of secularization in the 20th century, religion has played an important role in several outbreaks of genocide since the First World War. And yet, not many scholars have looked either at the religious aspects of modern genocide, or at the manner in which religion has taken a position on mass killing.

This collection of essays by internationally renowned scholars of political theory from Europe and the United States explores both the concept and the reality of civil society and its institutions.