In Southern Africa, marriage used to be widespread and common. However, over the past decades marriage rates have declined significantly. Julia Pauli explores the meaning of marriage when only few marry. Although marriage rates have dropped sharply, the value of weddings and marriages has not. To marry has become an indicator of upper-class status that less affluent people aspire to. Using the …
This volume is based on the recognition that heritage is popular and popular culture is now readily transformed into heritage whose meanings and myths reshape social life and political and economic realities as well as re-make “tradition.” The papers in this volume consider: What does popular heritage look like? To whom does it speak? Is it active in dissolving class and cultural boundaries…
This textbook is a collection of chapters on the essential topics in cultural anthropology. Different from other introductory textbooks, this book is an edited volume with each chapter written by a different author. Each author has written from their experiences working as an anthropologist and that personal touch makes for an accessible introduction to cultural anthropology. The authors' appro…
This book covers the ethnobiology and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of the Solega people of southern India. Solega TEK is shown to be a complex, inter-related network of detailed observations of natural phenomena, well-reasoned and often highly accurate theorizing, as well as a belief system, derived from cultural norms, regarding the relationships between humans and other species on t…
This volume offers a comprehensible account of the development and evolution of moral systems. It seeks to answer the following questions: If morals are eternal and unchanging, why have the world’s dominant religious moral systems been around for no more than a mere six thousand of the two hundred thousand years of modern human existence? What explains the many and varied moral systems acro…
Wandering the Wards provides a detailed and unflinching ethnographic examination of life within the contemporary hospital. It reveals the institutional and ward cultures that inform the organisation and delivery of everyday care for one of the largest populations within them: people living with dementia who require urgent unscheduled hospital care. Drawing on five years of research embedded in …
This textbook provides a collection of case studies in paleoanthropology demonstrating the method and limitations of science. These cases introduce the reader to various problems and illustrate how they have been addressed historically. The various topics selected represent important corrections in the field, some critical breakthroughs, models of good reasoning and experimental design, and im…
Mobility and Ancient Society in Asia and the Americas contains contributions by leading international scholars concerning the character, timing, and geography of regional migrations that led to the dispersal of human societies from Inner and northeast Asia to the New World in the Upper Pleistocene (ca. 20,000-15,000 years ago). This volume bridges scholarly traditions from Europe, Central Asia,…
This book seeks to communicate to both a global and local audience, the key attributes of pre-industrial African metallurgy such as technological variation across space and time, methods of mining and extractive metallurgy and the fabrication of metal objects. These processes were transformative in a physical and metaphoric sense, which made them total social facts. Because the production and …
Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces traces movements and connections in a region known for its formidable obstacles to mobility. Eight original essays and a conceptual introduction engage with questions of networks and interconnection between people across a bordered landscape. Mobility among the extremely varied ecologies of south-western China, Myanmar and north-eastern India, with …