Many developing countries—Viet Nam included—continue to struggle to raise incomes per capita. A common feature of the growth and development process is a fundamental change in the pattern of economic activity, as households reallocate labour from traditional agriculture to more productive forms of agriculture and modern industrial and service sectors. Broad structural transformation and wid…
This is a book about hope, the hope that we have ways to live together in a rapidly changing world which will enable us to ‘live a good life in the modern world’. It goes beyond hope and suggests how we may do this.The how is a critical question at a time when rapid change is impacting on all societies. What will be the human outcomes of political turmoil in the Middle East…
Samuel Cohn’s critical study of two Victorian British firms represents a radically new examination of women’s work. By contrasting the Post Office, which was the first employer to use female clerks instead of males, and the Great Western Railway, one of the last employers to make this change, Cohn identifies the organizational and economic limits to female employment. The Process of Occupat…
In December of 1984, the members of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local P-9 initiated a campaign against wage and benefit concessions at Geo. A. Hormel Company in Austin, Minnesota. By summer, they were involved in what many observers would come to regard as the strike of the decade, both because of the energy and imagination of the union members and because of the nationwide respon…
South Africans are struggling to characterise the times we are living through. Is this a time of deepening grievance, of political patronage and plunder – or a season of hope and previously unimaginable opportunity for most? The 2006 Transformation Audit – Money and Morality focuses on accountability, corruption and its costs.
Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Vanuatu, Angola, and Papua New Guinea/the Trobriand Islands respectively, Going to Pentecost offers a comparative study of Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, focusing on key issues as economy, urban sociality, and healing. More than an ordinary comparative book, it recognizes the changing nature of r…
Video games have entered the cultural mainstream and in terms of economic profits they now rival established entertainment industries such as film or television. As careers in video game development become more common, so do the stories about precarious working conditions and structural inequalities within the industry. Yet, scholars have largely overlooked video game production cultures in fav…
Gambling Debt is a game-changing contribution to the discussion of economic crises and neoliberal financial systems and strategies. Iceland's 2008 financial collapse was the first case in a series of meltdowns, a warning of danger in the global order. This full-scale anthropology of financialization and the economic crisis broadly discusses this momentous bubble and burst and places it in theor…
Europa kann neu gedacht werden: nicht von den Grenzen und Leitdifferenzen her, sondern von den Übergängen. Die aus vier Kontinenten stammenden Beiträgerinnen und Beiträger befassen sich mit der Frage, inwiefern die Fähigkeit, ästhetische, sprachliche und kulturelle Übergänge angesichts hoher Heterogenität hervorzubringen, Europa am ehesten ausmacht. Von Fatou Diome bis Yoko Tawada, von…
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. In rural China funerals are conducted locally, on village land by village elders. But in urban areas, people have neither land for burials nor elder relatives to conduct funerals. Chinese urbanization, which has increased drastically in recent decades, involves the creation of cemeteries, state-run funeral …