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The attempt by the George W. Bush administration to reshape world order, especially but not exclusively after September 11, 2001, increasingly appears to have resulted in a catastrophic “misshaping” of geopolitics in the wake of bungled campaigns in the Middle East and their many reverberations worldwide. Journalists and scholars are now trying to understand what happened, and this book explores the role of culture and rhetoric in this process of geopolitical transformation. What difference do cultural concepts and values make to the cognitive and emotional weather of which, at various levels, international politics is both consequence and perceived corrective? The scholars in this multidisciplinary book bring the tools of cultural analysis to the profound ongoing debate about how geopolitics is mapped and what determines its governance.

This examination of children of immigrants in New York and London asks, “Is there a link between rap/hip-hop-influenced youth culture and motivation to succeed in school? The author challenges teachers, administrators, and parents to look beneath the outward manifestations of youth culture—the clothing, music, and tough talk—to better understand the internal struggle faced by many minority students as they try to fit in with peers while working to lay the groundwork for successful lives. Using ethnographic, survey, and interview data in two racially diverse, low-achieving high schools, she analyzes seemingly oppositional styles, tastes in music, and school behaviors, finding that most teens try to find a balance between success with peers and success in school.

This fresh and accessible ethnography offers a new vision of how society might cohere, in the face of ongoing global displacement, dislocation, and migration. Drawing from intensive fieldwork in a highly diverse North London neighborhood, the book focuses on an everyday item—blue jeans—to learn what one simple article of clothing can tell us about our individual and social lives and challenging, by extension, the foundational anthropological presumption of “the normative.” The authors argue that blue jeans do not always represent social and cultural difference, from gender and wealth, to style and circumstance. Instead they find that jeans allow individuals to inhabit what the authors term “the ordinary.” The book demonstrates that the emphasis on becoming ordinary is important for immigrants and the population of North London more generally, and they call into question foundational principles behind anthropology, sociology and philosophy.

“Chess gets a hold of some people, like a virus or a drug,” states this book. Drawing on a lifelong fascination with the game, the book guides readers into the world of twenty-first-century chess to help them understand its unique pleasures and challenges, and to advance a new “anthropology of passion.” Immersing us directly in chess's intricate culture, it interweaves small dramas, closely observed details, insights, anecdotes, and biographical sketches to elucidate the game and to reveal what goes on in the minds of experienced players when they face off over the board. The book offers a compelling take on the intrigues of chess and shows how the themes of play, beauty, competition, addiction, fanciful cognition, and intersubjective engagement shape the lives of those who take up this most captivating of games.

Writing, the subject of much innovative scholarship in recent years, is only half of what we call literacy. The other half, reading, receives its due in these essays by a group of anthropologists and literary scholars. The essays move beyond the simple rubric of “literacy” in its traditional sense of evolutionary advancement from oral to written communication. Some investigate reading in exotically cross-cultural contexts. Some analyze the long historical transformation of reading in the West from a collective, oral practice to the private, silent one it is today, while others demonstrate that, in certain Western contexts, reading is still very much a social activity. The reading situations described here range from Anglo-Saxon England to contemporary Indonesia, from ancient Israel to a Kashaya Pomo Indian reservation. The collection is filled with insights that erase the line between orality and textuality.

Friends—they are generous and cooperative with each other in ways that appear to defy standard evolutionary expectations, frequently sacrificing for one another without concern for past behaviors or future consequences. This multidisciplinary study synthesizes an array of cross-cultural, experimental, and ethnographic data to understand the broad meaning of friendship, how it develops, how it interfaces with kinship and romantic relationships, and how it differs from place to place. The book argues that friendship is a special form of reciprocal altruism based not on tit-for-tat accounting or forward-looking rationality, but rather on mutual goodwill that is built up along the way in human relationships.

One of the great riddles of cultural history is the remarkable parallel that exists between the peoples of Amazonia and those of Melanesia. Although the two regions are separated by half a world in distance and at least 40,000 years of history, their cultures nonetheless reveal striking similarities in the areas of sex and gender. In both Amazonia and Melanesia, male–female differences infuse social organization and self-conception. They are the core of religion, symbolism, and cosmology, and they permeate ideas about body imagery, procreation, growth, men's cults, and rituals of initiation. The contributors to this book illuminate the various ways in which sex and gender are elaborated, obsessed over, and internalized, shaping subjective experiences common to entire cultural regions, and beyond. Through comparison of the life ways of Melanesia and Amazonia, they expand the study of gender, as well as the comparative method in anthropology, in new directions.

Why are we what we are, where we are? Part 1. When and how did humankind spread across the world from our evolutionary origins in Africa? How do we know the answers? Did climate affect our evolution and distribution? Do geographic and cultural barriers affect our distribution even now? Part 2. How did or does the environment influence our biology and the distribution of cultures? In respect of both anatomical and physiological adaptations to the environment, and also the distribution of cultures, what we see in humans is extraordinarily similar to what we see in other animals. Animals and people with different diets have different physiologies; biodiversity and cultural diversity is higher in the tropics than at higher latitudes; we find fewer species and fewer cultures on islands than in the same area of nearby mainlands. And the reasons for these patterns are of the same in humans as in other animals. Part 3. Our distribution affects and is affected by other cultures and other species. We drive some to extinction, and are ourselves driven to extinction by some. But we also help expand the distribution of some, and our distribution is increased by some.

In this book, a multidisciplinary group of scholars examines how the actions of the United States as a global leader are worsening pressures on people worldwide to migrate, while simultaneously degrading migrant rights. Uniting such diverse issues as market reform, drug policy, and terrorism under a common framework of human rights, the book constitutes a call for a new vision on immigration.

This book takes us on a tour of the Western holiday world and shows how two centuries of “learning to be a tourist” have shaped our own ways of vacationing. We see how fashions in destinations have changed through the years, with popular images (written, drawn, painted, and later photographed) teaching the tourist what to look for and how to experience it. Travelers present and future will never see their cruises, treks, ecotours, round-the-world journeys, or trips to the vacation cottage or condo in quite the same way again. All our land-, sea-, and mindscapes will be the richer for the book's insights.

“International indigenism” may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is indeed a global phenomenon and a growing form of activism. This book examines the ways the relatively recent emergence of an internationally recognized identity—”indigenous peoples”—intersects with another relatively recent international movement—the development of universal human rights laws and principles. This movement makes use of human rights instruments and the international organizations of states to resist the political, cultural, and economic incursions of individual states. The concept “indigenous peoples” gained currency in the social reform efforts of the International Labor Organization in the 1950s, was taken up by indigenous nongovernmental organizations, and is now fully integrated into human rights initiatives and international organizations. Those who today call themselves indigenous peoples share significant similarities in their colonial and postcolonial experiences, such as loss of land and subsistence, abrogation of treaties, and the imposition of psychologically and socially destructive assimilation policies. The book shows how, from a new position of legitimacy and influence, they are striving for greater recognition of collective rights, in particular their rights to self-determination in international law. These efforts are influencing local politics in turn and encouraging more ambitious goals of autonomy in indigenous communities worldwide.

This book completes a triptych of volumes on social suffering, violence, and recovery. Social Suffering, the first volume, deals with sources and major forms of social adversity, with an emphasis on political violence. The second, Violence and Subjectivity, contains graphic accounts of how collective experience of violence can alter individual subjectivity. This third volume explores the ways communities “cope” with—endure, work through, break apart under, transcend—traumatic and other more insidious forms of violence, addressing the effects of violence at the level of local worlds, interpersonal relations, and individual lives. The chapters highlight the complex relationship between recognition of suffering in the public sphere and experienced suffering in people's everyday lives. Rich in local detail, the book's comparative ethnographies bring out both the recalcitrance of tragedy and the meaning of healing in attempts to remake the world.

Where do we get our notions of social hierarchy and personal worth? What underlies our beliefs about the goals worth aiming for, the persons we hope to become? This book addresses these questions in this ethnography of a small New Zealand farming community, articulating the cultural system beneath the social hierarchy. It describes a cultural theory of social hierarchy that defines not only the local system of social rank, but personhood as well. Because people define respectability differently, a crucial part of the book's approach is to examine how these differences are worked out over time. The concept of occupation is central to the book's analysis, since the work that people do provides the skeletal framework of the hierarchical order. The book focuses in particular on sheep farming and compares a New Zealand community with one in California. Wealth and respectability are defined differently in the two places, with the result that California landholders perceive a social hierarchy different from the New Zealanders'. Thus the distinctive “shape” that characterizes the hierarchy among these New Zealand landholders and their conceptions of self reflect the distinctive cultural theory by which they live.

Departing from an essentialist concept of the self, this book advances the cross-cultural study of selfhood with three contributions to the literature: First, it approaches the self as an ideological process, arguing that selfhood is culturally situated and emergent in social practices of persuasion. Second, it demonstrates how postmodernity problematizes the experience and concept of the self. Finally, the book challenges the pervasive practice of equating an individuated self with the Western world and a relational self with the non-Western world. Contributions cover a broad range of topics—from the development of the eccentric self to the ritual circumcision of Jewish males.

This reflection on “doing nothing” takes us on a tour of what is happening when, to all appearances, absolutely nothing is happening. Sifting through a wide range of examples drawn from literature, published ethnographies, and firsthand research, the authors probe the unobserved moments in our daily lives—waiting for a bus, daydreaming by the window, performing a routine task—and illuminate these “empty” times as full of significance. The book leads us to rethink the ordinary and find meaning in today's hypermodern reality.

This book signals the emergence of a new paradigm of social analysis committed to understanding and analyzing social oppression in the context of sexuality and gender. The contributors, an interdisciplinary group of social scientists representing anthropology, sociology, public health, and psychology, illuminate the role of sexuality in producing and reproducing inequality, difference, and structural violence among a range of populations in various geographic, historical, and cultural arenas. In particular, the chapters consider racial minorities including Hispanics, Koreans, and African Americans; discuss disabled people; examine issues including substance abuse, sexual coercion, and HIV/AIDS; and delve into other topics including religion and politics. Rather than emphasizing sexuality as an individual trait, the chapters view it as a social phenomenon, focusing in particular on cultural meaning and real-world processes of inequality such as racism and homophobia. The chapters address the complex and challenging question of how the research under discussion here can make a real contribution to the struggle for social justice.

This book explores Palo, a Kongo-inspired “society of affliction” that is poorly understood at the margins of Cuban popular religion. Narrated as an encounter with two teachers of Palo, the book unfolds on the outskirts of Havana as it recounts his attempts to assimilate Palo praise of the dead. Coming to terms with a world in which everyday events and materials are composed of the dead, the author of this book discovers in Palo unexpected resources for understanding the relationship between matter and spirit, for rethinking anthropology's rendering of sorcery, and for representing the play of power in Cuban society. The book draws upon recent critiques of Western metaphysics as it reveals what this little-known practice can tell us about sensation, transformation, and redemption in the Black Atlantic.

Cold War paranoia can only partly describe or explain the twentieth-century dreams of telepathy. The nightmare shades of mind control and crowd frenzy have long alternated with the pastels of love and collective effervescence. Both extremes materialized over time, along tangled circuits of wars, events, and interactions staged across borders since at least the nineteenth century. The Cold War and its fences fed fascination with the workings and the failures of contact and communication. Opposed sides accused each other of jamming media and spinning propaganda even while they mirrored fantasies of connection. This book contrasts and connects Russian and American channels and means to check channels, with special attention to intersections of the telepathic with the theatrical. It theorizes links between historically layered struggles over technologies for intuition and dominant models of communication—commonsense or theoretical. It demonstrates that theories resting on models of individual sincerity and of dyadic communication warp understandings of the Soviet Union and Russia—and thus of the United States as well. It proposes that attention to the means of making and checking contact, that is, to the phatic functions in language, offers a way out of the impasses and paradoxes of paranoia.

From risqué cabaret performances to engrossing after-hours shop talk, this book offers an unprecedented look inside the secretive subculture of modern magicians. Entering the flourishing Paris magic scene as an apprentice, the author gives a first-hand account of how magicians learn to perform their astonishing deceptions. The book follows the day-to-day lives of some of France's most renowned performers, revealing not only how secrets are created and shared, but also how they are stolen and destroyed. In a book brimming with humor and surprise, the author shows how today's magicians marshal creativity and passion in striving to elevate their amazing skill into high art. The book's lively cast of characters includes female and queer magicians whose work is changing the face of a historically masculine genre.

Tropical forests are vanishing at an alarming rate. This book, based on extensive international field research, highlights one solution for preserving this precious resource: empowering local people who depend on the forest for survival. Synthesizing a vast amount of information, it provides a tour of global efforts to empower community-based forest stewards. Along the way, the book shows the fundamental importance of tropical forest ecosystems and deepens our sense of urgency to save them for the benefit of billions of rural people in tropical and subtropical regions, as well as for countless species of plants and animals. In their travels to research this book, the authors saw many remarkable examples of how proficient even the poorest local people can be in stabilizing and recovering formerly destitute forests. With case studies from Thailand's Golden Triangle to Mindanao in the Philippines, from Indonesia, India, and Africa to Brazil, Mexico, and Central America, they introduce us to the communities and the individuals, the governments, the loggers, the agencies, and the local groups who vie for forest resources. Contrasting community-based efforts and traditional forest management with government and donor efforts, the authors discuss the many reasons why international institutions and national governments have been unable and unwilling to stem the accelerating loss of tropical forestland. The book argues that we are paying a terrible price—politically, economically, and environmentally—for allowing tropical forests to be stripped.