""To read this collection is to be reminded how much we have learned from Clifford Geertz, this trailblazer in cultural anthropology and interpretive social science. Two of the great qualities that made him a mentor in this field shine forth in this book: his constant awareness of the near-impossibility of the task of understanding the other without distortion, and the wide and humane sympathies that made him so often succeed in this very task."---Charles...

En este libro, el brillante antropólogo Didier Fassin examina el mayor desafío al orden moral que hoy enfrentan las sociedades occidentales: extranjeros, refugiados, asilados e indocumentados en las grandes ciudades interpelan a los Estados y a su voluntad humanitaria. Las preguntas que plantean estas páginas son pertinentes para quienes piensan y diseñan políticas públicas, para los investigadores y para los ciudadanos todos: ¿quiénes tienen...

Has apocalyptic thinking contributed to some of our nation's biggest problems-inequality, permanent war, and the despoiling of our natural resources? From the Puritans to the present, historian and public policy advocate Betsy Hartmann sheds light on a pervasive but-until now-invisible theme shaping the American mindset: apocalyptic thinking, or the belief that the end of the world is nigh. Hartmann makes a compelling case that apocalyptic fears are...

For more than 30 years, renowned anthropologist Wade Davis has traveled the globe, studying the mysteries of sacred plants and celebrating the world's traditional cultures. His passion as an ethnobotanist has brought him to the very center of indigenous life in places as remote and diverse as the Canadian Arctic, the deserts of North Africa, the rain forests of Borneo, the mountains of Tibet, and the surreal cultural landscape of Haiti. In Light at...

Según el relato canónico, la historia del tango es la historia de un viaje ultramarino, siempre marcada por el prestigio de sus éxitos en Europa. Esto explicaría tanto su consagración inicial, hacia 1910, como su vigoroso resurgimiento de los últimos años. Sin embargo, esta historia oculta un universo amplio y heterogéneo de contextos en que se bailó tango en Buenos Aires. A partir de una etnografía de las clases de tango y las milongas...

Professor Julie Peteet believes that the concept of mobility is key to understanding how place and space act as forms of power, identity, and meaning among Palestinians in Israel today. In Space and Mobility in Palestine, she investigates how Israeli policies of closure and separation influence Palestinian concerns about constructing identity, the ability to give meaning to place, and how Palestinians comprehend, experience, narrate, and respond to...

Where numbers of different cultural groups come together, misunderstandings and tensions can arise, even where there is the greatest goodwill on both sides. Sometimes even those involved are unable to explain why. In this book the authors set out to explore the situations and contexts in which cross cultural misunderstandings can occur. Talking Past Each Other was first published in 1978 and has been read widely and reprinted regularly.

The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online. Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the...

Until we start to think of culture and cultures more as relations between individuals and groups and less as objects, we will have little chance of realizing the greater peace, flourishing, and ecological stewardship we are capable of and must achieve to avoid becoming abjectly inhumane or extinct. What I am suggesting is a moral approach to the study of culture and culture change. I am asking that cultural anthropology extend its scope to once again...

Recently anthropology has turned to accounts of persons-in-history/history-in-persons, focusing on how individuals and groups as agents both fashion and are fashioned by social, political, and cultural discourses and practices. In this approach, power, agency, and history are made explicit as individuals and groups work to constitute themselves in relation to others and within and against sociopolitical and historical contexts. Contributors to this...