February New Anthropology books

• Kinship in Ancient Athens: An Anthropological Analysis
  
  Kinship in Ancient Athens: An Anthropological Analysis: GN487 .H87 2018
  Author(s): Sarah C. Humphreys
  Oxford, United Kingdom ; Oxford University Press 2018.
  
  The concept of kinship is at the heart of understanding not only the structure and development of a society, but also the day-to-day interactions of its citizens. Kinship in Ancient Athens aims to illuminate both of these issues by providing a comprehensive account of the structures and perceptions of kinship in Athenian society, covering the archaic and classical periods from Drakon and Solon up to Menander. Drawing on decades of research into a wide range of epigraphic, literary, and archaeological sources, and on S.C. Humphreys' expertise in the intersections between ancient history and anthropology, it not only puts a wealth of data at readers' fingertips, but subjects it to rigorous analysis. By utilizing an anthropological approach to reconstruct patterns of behaviour it is able to offer us an ethnographic 'thick description' of ancient Athenians' interaction with their kin that offers insights into a range of social contexts, from family life, rituals, and economic interactions, to legal matters, politics, warfare, and more.--
  
  
• What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She
  
  What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She: P279 .B37 2020
  Author(s): Dennis Baron
  New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation a division of WW Norton & Company [2020]
  
  "The story of how we got from he and she to zie and hir and singular they. Like trigger warnings and gender-neutral bathrooms, pronouns are suddenly sparking debate, prompting new policies in schools, workplaces, even prisons, about what pronouns to use. Colleges ask students to declare their pronouns; corporate conferences print nametags with space for people to add their pronouns; email signatures sport pronouns along with names and titles. Far more than a byproduct of campus politics or culture wars, gender-neutral pronouns are in fact nothing new. Renowned linguist Dennis Baron puts them in historical context, demonstrating that Shakespeare used singular they; that women evoked the generic use of he to assert the right to vote (while those opposed to women's rights invoked the same word to assert that he did not include she), and that self-appointed language experts have been coining new gender pronouns, not just hir and zie but hundreds more, like thon, ip, and em, for centuries. Based on Baron's own empirical research, What's Your Pronoun? tells the untold story of gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns"--
  
  
• A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea
  
  A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea: GN671.N5 K845 2019
  Author(s): Don Kulick
  Chapel Hill, North Carolina : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2019.
  
  “Perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature.” —The Wall Street Journal “If you want to experience a profoundly different culture without the exhausting travel (to say nothing of the cost), this is an excellent choice.” —The Washington Post As a young anthropologist, Don Kulick went to the tiny village of Gapun in New Guinea to document the death of the native language, Tayap. He arrived knowing that you can’t study a language without understanding the daily lives of the people who speak it: how they talk to their children, how they argue, how they gossip, how they joke. Over the course of thirty years, he returned again and again to document Tayap before it disappeared entirely, and he found himself inexorably drawn into their world, and implicated in their destiny. Kulick wanted to tell the story of Gapuners—one that went beyond the particulars and uses of their language—that took full stock of their vanishing culture. This book takes us inside the village as he came to know it, revealing what it is like to live in a difficult-to-get-to village of two hundred people, carved out like a cleft in the middle of a tropical rainforest. But A Death in the Rainforest is also an illuminating look at the impact of white society on the farthest reaches of the globe—and the story of why this anthropologist realized finally that he had to give up his study of this language and this village. An engaging, deeply perceptive, and brilliant interrogation of what it means to study a culture, A Death in the Rainforest takes readers into a world that endures in the face of massive changes, one that is on the verge of disappearing forever.
  
  
• The Odd, the Unusual, and the Strange: Bioarchaeological Explorations of Atypical Burials
  
  The Odd, the Unusual, and the Strange: Bioarchaeological Explorations of Atypical Burials: GN486 .O33 2020
  Author(s): Tracy K. Betsinger, Amy B. Scott, Anastasia Tsaliki
  Gainesville : University of Florida Press 2020.
  
  This volume focuses specifically on non-normative or atypical mortuary practices situated within a contextually-driven understanding of social and cultural norms surrounding the process of interment. Drawing on examples from North and South America, Europe, and Asia, this comprehensive volume stresses the commonality between non-normative or atypical treatments spanning millennia. Additionally, this volume strives to employ a holistic understanding of non-normative burials both in terms of assessing the significance and interpretation of individual cases of atypical interments, as well as to better understand the overall phenomenon of these mortuary practices, which continue to be the source of fascination and debate within mortuary archaeology.
  
  
• Creative Practice Ethnographies
  
  Creative Practice Ethnographies: GN453 .H56 2020
  Author(s): Larissa Hjorth, Anne M. Harris, Kat Jungnickel, Gretchen Coombs
  Lanham : Lexington Books [2020]
  
  Creative Practice Ethnographies focuses on the intersection of creative practice and ethnography and offers new ways to think about the methods, practice, and promise of research in contemporary interdisciplinary contexts. How does creative practice inform new ways of doing ethnography and vice versa? What new forms of expression and engagement are made possible as a result of these creative synergies? By addressing these questions, the authors highlight the important roles that ethnography and creative practice play in socially impactful research. This book is aimed at interdisciplinary researchers, scholars, and students of art, design, sociology, anthropology, games, media, education, and cultural studies.
  
  
• The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community
  
  The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community: BP195.A74 K373 2020
  Author(s): Ayfer Karakaya-Stump
  Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press [2020]
  
  The Kizilbash were at once key players in and the foremost victims of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict that defined the early modern Middle East. Today referred to as Alevis, they constitute the second largest faith community in modern Turkey, with smaller pockets of related groups in the Balkans. Yet several aspects of their history remain little understood or explored. This first comprehensive socio-political history of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities uses a recently surfaced corpus of sources generated within their milieu. It offers fresh answers to many questions concerning their origins and evolution from a revolutionary movement to an inward-looking religious order.
  
  
• Marriage After Migration: An Ethnography of Money, Romance, and Gender in Globalizing Mexico
  
  Marriage After Migration: An Ethnography of Money, Romance, and Gender in Globalizing Mexico: GN480.2 .H34 2020
  Author(s): Nora Haenn
  New York : Oxford University Press [2020]
  
  "Marriage After Migration is a compelling ethnography centered around the stories of five women in rural Mexico as they work to keep their communities and families together when their spouses migrate abroad. Through rich and highly readable narratives about the lives of these women, author Nora Haenn explores how international migration affects kinship ties and rewrites gender roles. Haenn's research illuminates aspects of migration and globalization that are often overlooked, around family members who remain in the home country; women; and indigenous communities. The unique and personal subject matter and engaging writing style will crystallize for students how people on the periphery can be drivers of globalization, and how globalization can affect not only economies but also fundamental social structures and relationships"--
  
  
• Art, Anthropology, and Contested Heritage: Ethnographies of TRACES
  
  Art, Anthropology, and Contested Heritage: Ethnographies of TRACES: NX164.R43 A78 2020
  Author(s): Arnd Schneider
  London ; Bloomsbury Academic 2020.
  
  This book presents innovative ethnographic perspectives on the intersections between art, anthropology, and contested cultural heritage, drawing on research from the interdisciplinary TRACES project (funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 program). The case studies in this volume critically assess how and in which arrangements artistic/aesthetic methods and creative everyday practices contribute to strengthening communities both culturally and economically. They also explore the extent to which these methods emphasize minority voices and ultimately set in motion a process of reflexive Europeanisation from below which unfolds within Europe and beyond its borders. At the heart of the book is the development of a new way of transmitting contentious cultural heritage, which responds to the present situation in Europe of unstable political conditions and a sense of Europe in crisis. With chapters looking at difficult art exhibitions on colonialism, death masks, Holocaust memorials, and skull collections, the contributors articulate a response to the crisis in current economic-political conditions in Europe and advances brand new theoretical groundwork on the configuration of a renewed European identity.
  
  
• Anthropology of Precious Minerals
  
  Anthropology of Precious Minerals: GN436 .A58 2020
  Author(s): Elizabeth Ferry, Annabel Vallard, Andrew Walsh
  Toronto : University of Toronto Press [2020]
  
  Based on a Wenner-Gren international workshop, held at the Royal Ontario Museum, this book addresses the complexity of human-mineral engagements through ethnographic case studies and anthropological reflections on different people and the minerals they deem 'precious.'
  
  
• Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography
  
  Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography: GN316 .B49 2020
  Author(s): Corey M. Abramson, Neil Gong
  New York : Oxford University Press [2020]
  
  The social sciences have seen a substantial increase in comparative and multi-sited ethnographic projects over the last three decades. Yet, at present, researchers seeking to design comparative field projects have few scholarly works detailing how comparison is conducted in divergent ethnographic approaches. In Beyond the Case, Corey M. Abramson and Neil Gong have gathered together several experts in field research to address these issues by showing how practitioners employing contemporary iterations of ethnographic traditions such as phenomenology, grounded theory, positivism, and interpretivism, use comparison in their works. The contributors connect the long history of comparative (and anti-comparative) ethnographic approaches to their contemporary uses. By honing in on how ethnographers render sites, groups, or cases analytically commensurable and comparable, Beyond the Case offers a new lens for examining the assumptions, payoffs, and potential drawbacks of different forms of comparative ethnography.