The human body is the locus of meaning, personhood, and our sense of the possibility of sanctity. The desecration of the human corpse is a matter of universal revulsion, taboo in virtually all human cultures. Not least for this reason, the unburied corpse quickly becomes a focal point of political salience, on the one hand seeming to express the contempt of state power toward the basic claims …
The international strategy of criminalising the cultivation, manufacture, distribution and use of certain psychoactive substances has failed to achieve a ‘drug free world’. Examining the impact of drug criminalisation and enforcement on a previously overlooked demographic, this edited collection argues that women are negatively and disproportionately affected by this flawed policy approach.
This book combines economic studies of innovation systems with studies of mediatisation, media convergence, trans- and cross-media and with other approaches within media and culture studies. It elaborates on a new concept, cross-innovation, referring to co-innovation and convergence processes taking place between different sectors of digital service economies. The proposition is that digitisati…
This book combines economic studies of innovation systems with studies of mediatisation, media convergence, trans- and cross-media and with other approaches within media and culture studies. It elaborates on a new concept, cross-innovation, referring to co-innovation and convergence processes taking place between different sectors of digital service economies. The proposition is that digitisati…
Across the Americas and Europe, the family has changed and marriage is in retreat. To answer the question of what's driving these changes and how they impact social and economic inequality, progressives have typically focused on the economic causes of changing family structures, whereas conservatives tend to stress cultural and policy roots. In this illuminating book, an international group of …
Social science researchers in the global South, and in South Africa particularly, utilise research methods in innovative ways in order to respond to contexts characterised by diversity, racial and political tensions, socioeconomic disparities and gender inequalities. These methods often remain undocumented – a gap that this book starts to address. Written by experts from various methodologica…
Confronting national, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, contributors to African Archaeology Without Frontiers argue against artificial limits and divisions created through the study of ‘ages’ that in reality overlap and cannot and should not be understood in isolation. Papers are drawn from the proceedings of the landmark 14th PanAfrican Archaeological Association Congress, held in Jo…
The Truth about the Desert explores the living conditions under which Tuareg refugees from northern Mali rebuild their lives in the Nigerien diaspora and how these conditions affect their self-understandings and cultural practices, established status hierarchies, and religious identity formation. The book counterbalances an earlier scholarly preoccupation with Tuareg nobility by zoning in on tw…
An Archaeology of Art and Writing offers an in-depth treatment of the image as material culture. Centring on early Egyptian bone, ivory, and wooden labels—one of the earliest inscribed and decorated object groups from burials in the lower Nile Valley—the research is anchored in the image as the site of material action. A key aim of this book is to outline a contextual and reflexive approach…