Our Books - Ideas That Shape Scholarship

Oceania has been the source of mysteries and dreams from the first contact with Europe onwards, both for Indigenous Oceanians and outsiders. 'Mysteries and Dreams: The French in Oceania' is a collection of cross-disciplinary essays that explore the mysteries, allures and questionings raised by Indigenous Oceanians and French people about their mutually different worldviews, as well as their dreams, aspirations or disillusions as they navigate their relationships. With a strong focus on reciprocity, this original project analyzes diverse forms of French association with Oceania and the responses engendered by Indigenous communities, authors and artists as they reshape French narratives. Organized along three lines – history, literature and arts – this innovative lens offers unprecedented examinations of hitherto unexplored Oceanian and French figures involved in Oceania, bringing to the fore Marist missionary Xavier Montrouzier, influential politicians Charles de Varigny and Auguste Marques, playwrights and artists Pierre Gope and Greg Semu, and filmmakers Sima Urale and Édouard Deluc. It also offers fresh postcolonial approaches to better-known figures such as Paris Communard convicts Louis Michel and Henri Rochefort, prominent authors like Titaua Peu, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Teresia Teaiwa, Vilsoni Hereniko and Édouard Glissant, and widely-discussed artists like Yuki Kihara. It also critically engages individuals representing the colonial gaze, such as Pierre Loti, Allan Hughan and Paul Gauguin. Spanning across Oceania, from the Solomon Islands to Rapa Nui, Hawai‘i to Aotearoa-New Zealand, Tahiti and Kanaky-New Caledonia, it shows the wide impacts of the French on this vast region. Bridging together Anglophone and Francophone Oceania, this volume is an authoritative and enlightening reference to scholars and students in postcolonial Pacific Island studies, to Indigenous and non-Indigenous Oceanians wishing to discover interactive processes of change in their region’s past and present, and, more generally, to all outsiders who might, some day, have felt inclined to fall under the spell of an imaginary Oceania.

'Entangled and Empowered: Agency in Multispecies Communities' is a collection that approaches the inevitable reality of entanglement between humans and other beings from a perspective of action and wonder. It argues that actors as diverse as bacteria, snakes, butterflies, ducks, and cacao trees can help us enact joy in fields as different as art, cinema, literature, and anthropology. While acknowledging the imminent reality of climate change, the sixth extinction, and other overwhelming threats to the Earth, this book argues that humans continue to live, and so do the beings whose lives are entwined with ours, for whom we can acknowledge and work to improve their existence. The nine essays in this volume trace that acknowledgment and work through three sections centered on visual media, queer and feminist readings of empowerment, and movements beyond the boundaries enacted by anthropocentric Western society. Drawing on theories such as new materialism, posthumanism, and ecofeminism, and with an international perspective from authors working at American, South Asian, and East Asian universities, 'Entangled and Empowered' finds hope in the shadow of despair. It engages with work by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing on entanglement, Donna Haraway on kin-making and multispecies communities, and Karen Barad on intra-actions, among others, while also showing how critiques of these ideas can make the world both more promising and more endangered. This collection will be useful for scholars working in all subfields of environmental humanities, especially those intersecting with the theories described above and as an archive of examples analyzing practical aspects of agency in diverse multispecies communities. Scholars studying texts as well-known as 'The Handmaid’s Tale' and as obscure as the codices of the Mopan Maya will find value in having both under one cover.

This book is the first comprehensive work on Russian Fractals in indigenous artifacts. While existing works focus on universal phenomena, such as liquid crystal or finance, none explore the intersection between Fractals and Russia. 'Russian Fractals in Indigenous Artifacts' therefore investigates how indigenous Russian cultures have a wonderful Fractal heritage that was originally tied to socially just and ecologically sustainable social practices, including those of indigenous northern groups such as the Yakut. Fractal designs originally allowed unalienated value, both human and nonhuman, to be visible, thereby enabling just and sustainable living. This book also examines how the tsarist elite encouraged the creation of unique creative masterpieces, developing and strengthening traditional crafts and art of indigenous people—hence, Fabergé, or imperial architecture. Today, the challenge for contemporary Russia is to reestablish the relationship between the social and ecological sustainability of indigenous cultures and practices, for which we can now provide modeling and analysis. Lay attempts at this have only limited success, as they have based the attempts on a purely religious basis, which recognizes the ecological aspects but often succumbs to authoritarian nationalism. However, the freely accession of indigenous peoples to Russia for the sake of national liberation has had a positive effect on enriching them with spirituality and creativity by Fractal artifacts through friendly exchanges with one another. In 'Russian Fractals in Indigenous Artifacts,' Bangura and Zhigun express why there is a need for a forward-thinking Fractal renaissance in Russia, bringing together contemporary computational and scientific analyses with these ecologically and socially sustainable traditions.

To do anthropology in a sporting world, one must reckon with the digital. As digital technologies become more widespread and increasingly sophisticated, people develop new ways to use them when playing, watching, and learning sport. This volume adds to the growing literature in the Anthropology of Sport by framing key debates in the light of this digital context. More importantly, the authors articulate how apparently trivial contexts such as sport are crucial for exploring the ways human beings incorporate digital technologies in their everyday lives. From taekwondo in Argentina to horse-riding in Morocco, the contributors to this volume explore a diverse range of sports across a variety of global locales. Through insightful ethnography, they show how fundamental elements of sport, including movement, competition, and values are increasingly mediated by digital technologies. Whether it is Sri Lankan cricketers analysing their practice frame-by-frame, English youth swimmers curating their Instagram feeds, or women footballers navigating urban spaces safely in Brazil, such examples indicate the diverse relationships that exist between sport and the digital. Throughout, the authors reflect on issues around knowledge, collaboration, and representation and consider their implications for undertaking anthropological work. This reveals how the fundamental relationship between anthropologist and interlocutor continues to change in the digital age. This book will be of interest to both students and scholars in anthropology and the social sciences, including sociology, sports sciences, cultural studies, geography, and history. The nuanced yet accessible discussion of method will be useful for students preparing to undertake ethnographic work, while the contribution to theoretical debates will aid researchers exploring sport and/or the digital. The international scope of this volume, combined with the broad scope of the arguments therein, ensure a wide appeal for many readers.

This book aims to illustrate how the 'popular' is not an arbitrary outcome as it is claimed to be, and how the project of constructing the popular functions as a web composed of different agents - governmental and state agencies, the media, corporate groups, development agencies, and the military with subtle nuances. Different agencies overlap in many aspects but work as a pact for making a national-popular. With specific references to Bangladesh, this book tends to illuminate how these agencies share similar missions and objectives, create spaces to collaborate with each other, and, regardless of specific disputes among them, maintain and manifest an oligarchic relationship. This is the flexible, yet definitive, location of the popularizing project - a 'cultural mission' of the ruling systems. It would deny a simplistic understanding of popular culture and posit the question of the popular within a complex web of social agencies in a particular space, at a specific historical juncture. Making popular here is integral to claiming populist credibility both as a cultural and political mission. It is cultural in the way the projects are launched and manifested and seek to reveal certain meanings. It is political in terms of configuring indoctrination over its subjects, mostly in the form of nationalist exhibitions. The project is becoming even more important for the corporate groups as it does not necessarily contest the state machinery but rather takes it as a 'de facto' ally.

Based on ethnographic research carried out in diverse Latin American contexts, "Gender, Sexuality and Life Course: Research and Dialogues over Contemporary Social Transformations" offers a complex picture of the intersection of life stages and the social markers of class, gender and sexuality; a topic that has garnered much attention in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico over recent years. This volume successfully interweaves investigations into these themes in various contexts. Concentrating on Brazil, topics include the premature aging of Brazilian women, how situations of sexual violence against adolescents are constructed and named in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and how Brazilian gerontology deals with sexuality in old age and how patients react to this treatment. In terms of the Argentine context, chapters examine how the process of the constitution of “LGBTIQ elders” creates an idea of shared meaning in terms of aging, and the suffering experienced by Argentine heterosexual men with the marks of aging. Finally, chapters also concerned with the conditions in which Mexican men begin their sexual life, as well as social support networks that are woven by travestis of different generations and their narratives on aging. The interdisciplinary nature of this volume results in a wide range of interest for graduate students of social and cultural studies, sexuality studies, LGBT and queer studies, gerontology, life course, and Latin American studies. It would also hold appeal for social activists of LGBTI issues, social workers, psychologists, social and cultural anthropologists, and public health professionals.

Monster Studies is a rising academic topic. Despite hesitancy at first, the subject is now examined by scholars of various academic interests and backgrounds. However, the dominant monster investigations are from the post-1900s. This volume focuses on Premodern monsters. The purpose of this volume is to examine various monsters from diverse cultures in order to indicate how each monstrous discourse derives from their mythology’s socio-cultural context. The volume examines several Monsters within their socio-cultural matrix. This includes a variety of monstrosities from diverse cultures and periods. Namely, the examined creatures, or perceived creatures, stem from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament (Pauline epistles), Reformation England, the Japanese Noh play Dōjōji, Yamauba Myths, and Yōkai Relics from early modern Japanese Buddhism.

Sensory environmental relationships – understood as dynamic, embodied, and emplaced affective sensory perceptions in (and of) the environment – invite us to remember the past, infuse our experiences of the present, and entice us to imagine the future. Ethnographically specific, socially and culturally nuanced approaches to environmental relationships require considerable conceptual and practical flexibility and inventiveness. Reflecting this commitment, 'Sensory Environmental Relationships' aims to offer a new anthropological understanding of how, in our individual and collective lives, senses, places, and temporalities intersect. While anthropologists have been studying the sensory environmental relationships in connection to people’s pasts and presents, futures remain conspicuously absent. By bringing different timeframes into the foreground of the analysis, this volume contributes to filling in the gap in our understanding of the human experience. The volume’s ethnographically based contributions address the questions of how embodied and emplaced practices of sensing, while moving or staying in place in diverse environments, engender, inform, and affect the processes of remembering (and forgetting) the past, experiencing the present, and imagining the future. Drawing on the fields of environmental anthropology, sensory studies, studies of movement and mobility, memory studies, and other related (sub)disciplines, as well as diverse, epistemologically and methodologically experimental approaches, the volume explores the ways in which sensory environmental relationships “touch” upon our pasts, presents, and futures.

As an epistemological perspective, ‘nomadism’ is an emerging field of scholarship, offering intersectionality with eco-criticism, feminism, post-colonialism, migration studies, and translation. Much of the scholarship that uses the precepts of nomadism to read cultural texts and phenomena is scattered as separate articles in academic journals or as single chapters in books wherein the primary focus is the intersectional fields. Few book-length publications solely focus on the ramifications of nomadism; Posthumanist Nomadisms across non-Oedipal Spatiality fills that void. The fifteen chapters in this volume explore the possibilities offered by the nomadic perspective to explore a wide range of literary and cultural texts; organized into three sections, “Nomadic Assemblages,” “Non-Oedipal Cartographies”, and “Space-Time Montages”, that work as one to negate absorption into the interiority of sovereign territory. These sections are not an attempt at corralling the nomadic spirit into separate enclosures; instead, they are bands of warriors that operate the violence of the hunted animal, dehumanized human others, and earth others. The chapters are in constant multi-vocal conversations with narratives that camp on the turbulent weathers of global transitory spaces. They charter real or intellectual turfs of interstitial/rhizomatic nomadic epistemologies as political resistance to the exclusionary practices of a violently wired world. This book will appeal to post-graduate students, researchers, and faculty in the departments of literature, comparative literary and cultural studies. Researchers in sociology, cultural anthropology, gender studies, and migration studies will also find the material applicable to the expanding approaches available in their fields.