The growing debate over British national identity, and the place of «Englishness» within it, raises crucial questions about multiculturalism, postimperial culture and identity, and the past and future histories of globalization. However, discussions of Englishness have too often been limited by insular conceptions of national literature, culture, and history, which serve to erase or marginalize the colonial and postcolonial locations in which Br ...
The tremendous increase in migrations and diasporas of human groups in the last decades are not only bringing along challenging issues for society, especially related to the economic and political management of multiculturalism and culturally effective health care, but they are also creating dramatic changes in traditional knowledge, believes and practices (KBP) related to (medicinal) plant use. The contributors to this volume – all internationa ...
Everyday, millions of people eat earth, clay, nasal mucus, and similar substances. Yet food practices like these are strikingly understudied in a sustained, interdisciplinary manner. This book aims to correct this neglect. Contributors, utilizing anthropological, nutritional, biochemical, psychological and health-related perspectives, examine in a rigorously comparative manner the consumption of foods conventionally regarded as inedible by most ...
Adulthood is taken for granted. It connotes the end of childhood, the resolution to the “storm and stress” period of adolescence. This conception is strongly entrenched in the sociology of youth and the sociology of the life course as well as in the policy arena. At the same time, adulthood itself remains unarticulated; journey’s end remains conceptually fixed and theoretically uncontested. Adulthood, then, is both central to the social imaginat ...
Most studies on transnational migration either stress assimilation, circulatory migration, or the negative impact of migration. This remarkable study, which covers migrants from one Jordanian village to 17 different countries in Europe, Asia, and North America, emphasizes the resiliency of transnational migrants after long periods of absence, social encapsulation, and stress, and their ability to construct social networks and reinterpret traditi ...
Too often, anthropological accounts of ritual leave readers with the impression that everything goes smoothly, that rituals are «meaningful events.» But what happens when rituals fail, or when they seem «meaningless»? Drawing on research in the anthropology of Christianity from around the globe, the authors in this volume suggest that in order to analyze meaning productively, we need to consider its limits. This collection is a welcome new addit ...
Romania has a larger Gypsy population than most other countries but little is known about the relationship between this group and the non-Gypsy Romanians around them. This book focuses on a group of Rom Gypsies living in a village in Transylvania and explores their social life and cosmology. Because Rom Gypsies are dependent on and define themselves in relation to the surrounding non-Gypsy populations, it is important to understand their day-to- ...
