Social Science / General

Total 16 results found.

Azan on the Moon

Azan on the Moon

Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan's Pamir Highway

Azan on the Moon is an in-depth anthropological study of people’s lives along the Pamir Highway in eastern Tajikistan. Based on extensive fieldwork and through an analysis of construction, mobility, technology, media, development, Islam, and the state along the Pamir Highway, Mostowlansky shows how conceptualizations of modernity are both challenged and reinforced in contemporary Tajikistan.

The Force of Custom

The Force of Custom

Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan

Judith Beyer presents a finely textured ethnographic study that sheds new light on the legal and moral ordering of everyday life in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. Beyer shows how local Kyrgyz negotiate proper behavior and regulate disputes by invoking custom, known to the locals as salt. While salt is presented as age-old tradition, its invocation needs to be understood as a highly developed and flexible rhetorical strategy that people adapt to suit political, legal, economic, and religious environments.

Re-Collecting Black Hawk

Re-Collecting Black Hawk

Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest

The name Black Hawk permeates the built environment in the upper Midwestern United States. It has been appropriated for everything from fitness clubs to used car dealerships. Re-Collecting Black Hawk examines the phenomena of this appropriation in the physical landscape, and the deeply rooted sentiments it evokes among Native Americans and descendants of European settlers. Nearly 170 original photographs are presented and juxtaposed with texts that reveal and complicate the significance of the imagery. Contributors include tribal officials, scholars, activists, and others.

The Metamorphosis of Heads

The Metamorphosis of Heads

Textual Struggles, Education, and Land in the Andes

Provides a comprehensive ethnography of writing in the Andes, and details the relationship between Andean peoples’ struggle to preserve their indigenous textual forms in the face of Western cirricula, with their struggle for land and power.

Under Solomon’s Throne

Under Solomon’s Throne

Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh

Morgan Y. Liu provides a rare ground-level analysis of post-Soviet Central Asia’s social and political paradoxes by focusing on an urban ethnic community: the Uzbeks in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, who have maintained visions of societal renewal throughout economic upheaval, political discrimination, and massive violence.This study examines the culturally specific ways that Osh Uzbeks are making sense of their post-Soviet dilemmas. These practices reveal deep connections with Soviet and Islamic sensibilities and with everyday acts of dwelling in urban neighborhoods. Osh Uzbeks engage the spaces of their city to shape their orientations relative to the wider world, postsocialist transformations, Islamic piety, moral personhood, and effective leadership.

Winner of the 2014 Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award in the Social Sciences.

The Politics of Motherhood

The Politics of Motherhood

Maternity and Women's Rights in Twentieth-Century Chile

Examines the negotiations over women’s rights and the politics of gender in Chile throughout the twentieth century. Centering her study on motherhood, Pieper Mooney explores dramatic changes in health policy, population paradigms, and understandings of human rights, and reveals that motherhood is hardly a private matter defined only by individual women or couples. Instead, it is intimately tied to public policies and political competitions on nation-state and international levels.

The Curse of Nemur

The Curse of Nemur

In Search of the Art, Myth and Ritual of the Ishir

Part field diary, part art critique, and part cultural anthropology— the book offers a glimpse of an aesthetic “other” (the Ishir [Chamacoco] of Parguay), causing us to reexamine Western perspectives on the interpretation of art, religion, and Native American culture.

Transparency in Global Change

Transparency in Global Change

The Vanguard of the Open Society

An examination of the quest for information exchange in an increasingly international, open society, Transparency in Global Change discusses the reasons for the recent increase in public desire for transparency and the byproducts this transparency can produce.

We Fish

We Fish

The Journey to Fatherhood

A dialogue between father and son, combining prose and poetry, that uses fishing as a shared activity and a metaphor, to address the universal challenge of raising good children. The lessons they share have the power to save a generation of young black men.

Singing The City

Singing The City

The Bonds Of Home In An Industrial Landscape

A celebration of Pittsburgh’s industrial landscape and an eloquent tribute to a way of life largely disappearing in America. A unique addition to the literature on the importance of place.

How Does Social Science Work?

How Does Social Science Work?

Reflections on Practice

Paul Diesing takes an innovative, sometimes iconoclastic look at social scientists at work in many disciplines.

Anthropological Approaches to Political Behavior

Anthropological Approaches to Political Behavior

Contributions from Ethnology

The essays in this collection highlight theoretical issues surrounding concepts of power. These essayists argue that the only way to fully comprehend and analyze the complexities of power is to locate where the material, psychological, and social dimensions of political power are socially situated and reproduced.

The MOVE Crisis In Philadelphia

The MOVE Crisis In Philadelphia

Extremist Groups and Conflict Resolution

Examines the 1985 confrontation between police and members of the black counterculture group MOVE, which ended in the destruction of sixty-one homes and the death of eleven residents—five of them children. Sheds light on relevant issues such as negotiating with “irrational” adversaries and problems of perception and misperception when different cultures clash.

Atlas of World Cultures

Atlas of World Cultures

This reference offers a simple method for choosing a valid sample of the world’s known societies for cross-cultural research.

Essays in Comparative Social Stratification

Essays in Comparative Social Stratification

The essays in this volume represent trends in social stratification studies undertaken in major culture areas of the world. The empirical data of the chapters are set with special reference to the dynamics of processes within these diverse traditions and heritages as sources of comparison with one another and with the experiences of western societies.

Total 16 results found.