The image we have of refugees is one of displacement – from their homes, families and countries – and yet, refugee settlement is increasingly becoming an experience of living simultaneously in places both proximate and distant, as people navigate and transcend international borders in numerous and novel ways. At the same time, border regimes remain central in defining the possibilities and …
Children and youth are front and center in the context of global mass migration and the social discord around questions of multicultural inclusion that it often ignites. It is young people at the forefront of navigating the complexities of cultural and ethnic diversity in their everyday lives. Imprecise portrayals of their inclination to either embrace diversity or to incite racism are used to …
YouTube hosts one billion visitors monthly and sees more than 400 hours of video uploaded every minute. In “Thanks for Watching,” Patricia Lange offers an anthropological perspective on this heavily mediated social environment, demonstrating how core concepts from anthropology—participant-observation, reciprocity, and community—apply to sociality on YouTube and how to reconceptualize an…
In Toward a Pragmatist Sociology, Robert Dunn explores the relationship between the ideas and principles of philosopher and educator John Dewey and sociologist C. Wright Mills to provide a philosophical and theoretical foundation for the development of a critical and public sociology. Dunn recovers an intellectual and conceptual framework for transforming sociology into a more substantive, comp…
Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality attends to the silence around asexuality in queer, feminist, and lesbian thinking from the late 1960s to the present. Drawing on the knowledge generated by asexual community, activism, and scholarship, Ela Przybylo gives us the first queer and feminist monograph on asexuality
Most importantly, the book shows how literature constitutes an alternative public sphere for Black people. In a society largely controlled by white supremacist actors and institutions, Black authors have conjured fiction into a space where hard questions can be asked and answered and where the work of combatting collective, racist suppression can occur without replicating oppressive hierarchies…
The question 'what is a human being?' remains one of the most vexing intellectual tasks. Debating Humanity reconstructs how contemporary sociologists and philosophers – among others, Arendt, Taylor, Archer and Boltanski – understand the key anthropological skills that define our shared membership to the human species.
In the early nineteenth century, critics like Zebulon Pike and Washington Irving viewed the West as a "dumping ground" for free blacks and Native Americans, a place where they could be segregated from the white communities east of the Mississippi River. But as immigrant populations and industrialization took hold in the East, white Americans began to view the West as a "refuge for real whites."…
The Owners of Kinship investigates how kinship in Indigenous Amazonia is derived from the asymmetrical relation between an “ownerâ€_x009d_ and his or her dependents. Through a comprehensive ethnography of the Kanamari, Luiz Costa shows how this relationship is centered around the bond created between the feeder and the fed. Building on anthropological studies of the acquisition, distri…
In anthropology, as much as in the current popular imagination, kings remain figures of fascination and intrigue. As the cliché goes, kings continue to die spectacular deaths only to remain subjects of vitality and long life. This collection of essays by a teacher and his student — two of the world's most distinguished anthropologists— explores what kingship actually is, histor…