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903 results in Social and cultural anthropology

Page 1 of 46

Nuer Messianic Judaism
  • Truth and Mediation in the Ethiopia-South Sudan Borderlands
  • Yotam Gidron
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • The Messianic Jews of Ethiopia's Gambella region are Evangelical Christian Zionists who adhere to various Jewish practices and understand their faith as authentically emulating the faith of the first followers of Jesus Christ. Drawing on over a year of ethnographic research in this region, Yotam Gidron traces here the rise and evolution of Christian Zionist and Messianic Jewish faiths amongst Nuer communities in the Ethiopia-South Sudan borderlands. This study approaches processes of religious change from the perspective of believers, examining their pursuits of knowledge and transnational connectivity. In doing so, Gidron considers everyday dilemmas concerning spiritual mediation and truth, as they emerged in relation to church genealogies, Christian literacy, modes of prayer and praise, bloodlines, cattle, and the constitution of various human and divine relationships. As a result, he offers timely insights on spiritual and political life at the global margins, and on contemporary African attitudes towards Israel and the Middle East.

Peasants to Paupers
  • Land, Class and Kinship in Central Kenya
  • Peter Lockwood
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • On the northern periphery of Nairobi, in southern Kiambu County, the city's expansion into a landscape of poor smallholders is bringing new opportunities, dilemmas, and conflicts. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Peter Lockwood examines how Kiambu's 'workers with patches of land' struggle to sustain their households as the skyrocketing price of land ratchets up gendered and generational tensions within families. The sale of ancestral land by senior men turns would-be inheritors, their young adult sons, into landless and land-poor paupers, heightening their exposure to economic precarity. Peasants to Paupers illuminates how these dynamics are lived at the site of kinship, how moral principles of patrilineal obligation and land retention fail in the face of market opportunity. Caught between joblessness, land poverty and the breakdown of kinship, the book shows how Kiambu's young men struggle to sustain hopes for middle-class lifestyles as the economic ground shifts beneath their feet.This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Representing Relationships
  • Modes of Cognition and Connection
  • Alan Page Fiske
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • The four fundamental forms of sociality structure our relationships. By comparing hundreds of cultures across more than 5000 years, this book builds on Relational Models Theory to reveal how each of the four basic types of relationship are conceived in its own distinctive cognitive medium. The text demonstrates how people use their food and bodies to foster affiliation, spatial dimensions to form hierarchy, concrete operations of one-to-one matching to create equality, and employ arbitrary, conventional symbols for proportion-based relationships. Originating from the author's ethnographic fieldwork in a West African village, this innovative social theory integrates findings from social, cognitive, and developmental psychology, linguistics and semiotics, anthropology, archeology, art history, religious studies, and ancient texts. The chapters offer compelling insights into readers' everyday social relations by showing what humans think their social relationships actually are.

Alter-Native Constitutionalism
  • Common-ing ‘Common' Law, Transforming Property in South Africa
  • Sindiso Mnisi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • South Africa presents the perplexing paradox of arguably having the most progressive Constitution in the world, marked by full-throated socio-economic rights protection, while also being one of the most unequal countries in the world. This book takes seriously increasing sociopolitical challenges to the legitimacy of South Africa's post-apartheid legal order and scorching critiques of the constitutional settlement, against which many in the legal establishment bristle. Sindiso Mnisi develops 'Alter-Native Constitutionalism,' which is distinguished by equitable amalgamation of customary and common law with vernacular (or 'living') law, as a more compelling and just model for South Africa to adopt in its future than the legal pluralism that largely represents the afterlives of colonialism. This book draws on and contributes to international debates about the role of law in decolonising post-colonial orders and economic redistribution, addressing issues of poverty and inequality, gender, race, indigeneity, and customary vs vernacular law.

How Transparency Works
  • Ethnographies of a Global Value
  • Edited by Filipe Calvão, Matthieu Bolay, Elizabeth Ferry
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    01 December 2026
  • Transparency has become a ubiquitous presence in seemingly every sphere of social, economic, and political life. Yet, for all the claims that transparency works, little attention has been paid to how it works – even when it fails to achieve its goals. Instead of assuming that transparency is itself transparent, this book questions the technological practices, material qualities, and institutional standards producing transparency in extractive, commodity trading, and agricultural sites. Furthermore, it asks: how is transparency certified and standardized? How is it regimented by 'ethical' and 'responsible' businesses, or valued by traders and investors, from auction rooms to sustainability reports? The contributions bring nuanced answers to these questions, approaching transparency through four key organizing concepts, namely disclosure, immediacy, trust, and truth. These are concepts that anchor the making of transparency across the lifespan of global commodities. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Religion, Dissonance, and Systems Theory
  • Comparing Spiritual Traditions
  • Ariel Glucklich
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • Religious belief systems are often marked by internal dissonance. Mitigating this dissonance can lead to surprising religious phenomena, including blood libels, scapegoating, religious violence, the worship of saints and martyrs, asceticism, austerities, as well as processions, fasting, and clowning. In this study, Ariel Glucklich provides a new approach to understanding how religious actions emerge in the context of belief systems. Providing an innovative psychological and social understanding of the causes that stimulate believers to action, he examines a range of religious phenomena in India, Israel, Austria, Italy, and the United States. Glucklich's new theory enables recognition of the patterns that account for the full complexity of actions inspired by religious beliefs and systems.  His systematic comparison of actions across traditional boundaries offers a novel approach to cause and effect in comparative religion and religious studies more broadly. Glucklich's book also generates new questions regarding a universal phenomenon that has escaped notice up to now.

Healing and the Invention of Metaphor
  • Toward a Poetics of Illness Experience
  • Laurence J. Kirmayer
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • It has long been understood that illness is influenced not only by our bodies' physiology, but also language, culture, and meaning. This book, written by renowned cultural psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer, explores of the influence of metaphor, narrative, and imagination in experiences of suffering and processes of healing across cultures. It emphasizes how metaphor can open a window to the hidden mechanisms of healing driven by meaning and symbolism, myth and imagination. At the same time, it offers a rigorous critical account of the metaphors embedded in the epistemology and practice of contemporary biomedicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy. In doing so, it exposes the sociomoral and political dimensions of these dominant approaches to understanding and treating illness.

Visceral Politics
  • Imaginaries of Power in South India
  • Indira Arumugam
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    10 July 2025
  • How can a brutal murder influence a person's duty to their god? What do the bold actions of crows entering homes say about family relationships? How does meat reflect political beliefs? And what does the disappearance of gods, once roaming the earth and meeting their followers, tell us about the political changes happening in the world? This book studies the body of politics, revealing the deep connections and unseen forces that hold it together. It illustrates how power, political dynamics, and beliefs come to life through the actions of families, the land they inhabit, and the animals they sacrifice. The book pulls apart the messy, vital, and often mysterious aspects of human existence, examining the politics that shapes people. Along the way, it reveals how ordinary people, in their daily lives, also come to understand and challenge the systems of power around them.

Beings and Beasts
  • Human-Animal Relations at the Margins
  • Edited by Ambika Aiyadurai, Prashant Ingole
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    17 July 2025
  • While, a lot has been written about the need to 'decolonize' animal studies and wildlife conservation, there is no discussion or attempt to 'de-brahminize' animal studies and conservation science in India. Similarly, some animals and birds are positioned as superior in the Brahmanical social order, others seem to be subordinated and are associated with certain 'inferior' caste groups. Beings and Beasts discusses the relations between humans and animals of marginalized societies, especially of Dalits and Tribals. It analyses the various ways of perceiving the 'conjoint' living and examines it from multiple perspectives and disciplinary lenses.

Unhappy Families
  • Childcare in a Hopeless World
  • Adam Ferner
  • Published by:
    Agenda Publishing
    Published online:
    05 June 2025
    Print publication:
    26 September 2024
  • Adam Ferner's engaging and personal book explores the ethical dimensions of childcare in a world riven by conflict and inequality. He argues that widespread attitudes towards biological parenthood contribute to these worsening crises and examines the liberatory potential of foster-care and adoption.

    Written in a clear and jargon-free style, the book is informed by both Ferner's training as a philosopher and his extensive experience as a child support worker. His analysis foregrounds the concerns of young people largely marginalized by society, and he argues against the prevailing orthodoxy that hope is a necessary element of childcare. The book challenges us to look afresh at our everyday notions of parenthood, childcare and having children, and to question the dominant ethos of the family.

Ethnography of an Interface
  • Self-Tracking, Quantified Self, and the Work of Digital Connections
  • Yuliya Grinberg
  • Published online:
    18 May 2025
    Print publication:
    05 June 2025
  • Technologists frequently promote self-tracking devices as objective tools. This book argues that such glib and often worrying assertions must be placed in the context of precarious industry dynamics. The author draws on several years of ethnographic fieldwork with developers of self-tracking applications and wearable devices in New York City's Silicon Alley and with technologists who participate in the international forum called the Quantified Self to illuminate the professional compromises that shape digital technology and the gap between the tech sector's public claims and its interior processes. By reconciling the business conventions, compromises, shifting labor practices, and growing employment insecurity that power the self-tracking market with device makers' often simplistic promotional claims, the book offers an understanding of the impact that technologists exert on digital discourse, on the tools they make, and on the data that these gadgets put out into the world.

Bus Station Hustle
  • Transport Work in Urban Ghana
  • Michael Stasik
  • Published online:
    09 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025
  • Bus stations are among the most prominent sites of social and economic activity in Africa. Integral to transport, trade, and exchange over distance, they provide livelihoods for large numbers of people. Through a detailed ethnography of one of Ghana's busiest long-distance bus stations, Michael Stasik explores the dialectical relationship between the ways in which people make the station work and how the station shapes popular economic engagement and social life. Drawing on a dual understanding of 'hustle' as a distinct mode of economic activity and organisation, as well as a marker of complex and sometimes bewildering situations, Stasik challenges dominant views of transport work in urban Africa, especially those wedded to generic notions of 'informality'. Bus Station Hustle offers a nuanced anthropological perspective on the hands-on work in and the institutional workings of an infrastructural hub of mobility and exchange. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Love and Violence in Sierra Leone
  • Mediating Intimacy after Conflict
  • Luisa T. Schneider
  • Published online:
    28 January 2025
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • In the decades following the civil war that took place in Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2002, new laws were passed to rebuild the state, and to prevent rape, teenage pregnancy and domestic violence. In this ethnography, Luisa T. Schneider explores the intricate semantic, empirical and socio-legal dynamics of love and violence in post-conflict Sierra Leone, challenging the oversimplification of these phenomena. Schneider underscores the limitations of imposing singular interpretations on love and violence, advocating for a nuanced, phenomenological approach that reveals how state and institutional attempts to regulate violence and loving relationships without considering local lived experience and meaning-making can yield negative consequences. By analysing how love and violence are historically constituted, experienced, and (re)produced across personal, social, legal, and political levels, this book critiques the construction of violence within gendered sexual relationships by development agencies, law makers and politicians, urging them to engage with local knowledge and experience. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Handbook of Creative Data Analysis
  • Edited by Helen Kara, Dawn Mannay, Alastair Roy
  • Published by:
    Bristol University Press
    Published online:
    07 January 2025
    Print publication:
    11 September 2024
  • Written by key names in the field, this book opens up the options for creativity and innovation in data analysis while retaining a systematic, rigorous and ethical approach in line with good research practice. Featuring transferable case examples across disciplines, this is the definitive practical guide to creative data analysis.

Youth, Pentecostalism, and Popular Music in Rwanda
  • Andrea Mariko Grant
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • Youth, Pentecostalism, and Popular Music in Rwanda offers fascinating insight into the lived experiences of young people in Rwanda through ethnographic analysis of the ambiguities and ambivalences that have accompanied the country's rapid post-genocide development. Andrea Mariko Grant considers how Pentecostalism and popular music offer urban young people ways to craft themselves and their futures; to imagine alternative ways to 'be' Rwandan and inhabit the city in the post-genocide era. Exploring the idiom of the heart – and efforts to transform it – this book offers a richly nuanced perspective of urban young people's everyday lives, their aspirations and disappointments, at a political moment of both great promise and great constraint. Rather than insist on a resistance-dominance binary, Grant foregrounds the possibilities of agency available to young people, their ability to make 'noise', even when it may lead to devastating consequences.

Job Insecurity and Life Courses
  • Sonia Bertolini, Valentina Goglio, Dirk Hofäcker
  • Published by:
    Bristol University Press
    Published online:
    17 December 2024
    Print publication:
    31 January 2024
  • Drawing from interviews and survey data across the EU and the UK, this in-depth study explores how worker instability is perceived and experienced, and how this 'perception' in turn affects individuals' economic and social situation. Using intersectional analysis, the authors identify groups who are more prone to labour market risks.

Sacrifice and Violence
  • Reflections from an Ethnography in Nepal
  • Marie Lecomte-Tilouine
  • Published online:
    28 November 2024
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
  • Violence is at the heart of the sacrifice, despite its denial in the texts. For the participants and observers, it materialises in the exposure of everyone and everything to the 'fountains of blood'. The specificity of this public and holistic violence, orchestrated in Nepal by the highest dignitaries and aimed at the rejuvenation of the cosmic, political and social order, allows us to see sacrifice as the ultimate model of legitimate violence. At the same time, observation reveals its oxymoronic nature through the opposite effect its violence has on its participants. As such, sacrifice is not only the organiser of society, but also the revelator of its internal tensions and fault lines. The book explores the complex aspects of royal ceremonies, their contestation by different groups, and finally the contours of the new legitimacy that sacrifice found during the revolutionary period under its most extreme form of human sacrifice.

Camille Bulcke
  • The Jesuit Devotee of Tulsidas
  • Ravi Dutt Bajpai, Swati Parashar
  • Published online:
    28 November 2024
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
  • This is the first English biography of the Belgian Jesuit, Padma Bhushan recipient and renowned scholar of Hindi, Awadhi and Sanskrit: Father Camille Bulcke (1909–1982). Father Bulcke came to India when it was still a British colony, found spiritual inspiration in the life and compositions of the great Indian poet Goswami Tulsidas, and emerged as one of the renowned exponents of the Ramkatha (The Story of Rama) and the Hindi language. This book attempts to read and critically examine his life, while also analysing his writings on comparative religious studies. In doing so, it provides a brief overview of the world of Hindi literature and its development in postcolonial India through the contributions of Father Bulcke, and highlights the cultural and religious encounters between the West and the East, Europe and India, Christianity and Hinduism.

A Woman's Job
  • Making Middle Lives in New India
  • Asiya Islam
  • Published online:
    28 November 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • Against the backdrop of rapid socio-economic change in post-1990 India, scholars and policy makers have expressed surprise at the low rate of women's participation in the workforce, particularly in urban areas. A Woman's Job presents a unique urban ethnography of young lower middle class women's lives in Delhi as they weave in and out of service employment, education, and domestic contracts. Urban, educated, and skilled, these young women seek employment in cafes, malls, call centres, and offices in the globalising landscape of Delhi. Their participation in work enables access to 'things', such as, jeans, smartphones, English language, and the metro, that symbolise global modernity. However, caught in a web of gender, class, and caste inequalities, their identification as 'working' women also generates social anxieties. The book shows how women adopt 'middle-ness' as a strategy of life-making at the multiple sites of work, home, and leisure.

An Advanced Guide to Multilingualism

Page 1 of 46