Suchergebnisse

Anthropology of Religion: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introductory text organized around key issues that all anthropologists of religion face. This book uses a wide range of historical and ethnographic examples to address not only what is studied by anthropologists of religion, but how such studies are approached. It addresses questions such as:How do human agents interact with gods and spirits?What is the nature of doing religious ethnography? Can the immaterial be embodied in the body, language and material objects?What is the role of ritual, time, and place in religion?Why is c

1. Introduction : What is the anthropology of war? -- The basics -- Famous warring peoples -- 2. Weapons and tactics -- Weapons -- Tactics -- Basic patterns of combat -- Casualties -- 3. Military organizations -- Polities and their military organizations -- Why polities and their military organizations go to war -- Causes and consequences of war -- 4. War and its cousins -- Types of warfare -- Seven cousins of warfare -- Levels of armed combat -- 4. Foundations of war -- Biological characteristics that facilitate war -- Social characteristics that facilitate war -- Development of territoriality -- 6. Origins of war : two paths -- Hunter-gatherer warfare -- Primary state warfare -- 7. The evolution of war -- Warfare systems -- Secondary state warfare -- 8. The termination and prevention of war -- Causes and outcomes of war -- The dilemma of disarming, and arming -- Prevention of war -- Appendix: 40 warring peoples -- Glossary

AbstractWhile many GCC states have been embracing widespread modernization reforms across various sectors in the past few decades, sexual and reproductive health education, social awareness campaigns, and relevant penal codes criminalizing sexual crimes still remain dangerously outdated. This article reviews the state of sexual norms and practices amongst khalījī youth, and argues that Persian Gulf states and families' protectionist attitudes in restricting, regulating, and policing sexualities, has neither decreased the rate of sex crimes nor has it adequately defined the parameters of what is "acceptable" regarding sexual norms and behaviors. It argues that the domain of sexual norms needs to be renegotiated as a shared responsibility between the family unit and the state, considering that many youths' mental and physical well-being is often contingent on the provision of sufficient sexual information, counseling, and education in their respective societies.

This book describes how anthropologists in the twentieth century went about documenting the religions of those independent peoples who still lived beyond the frontiers of the global economy and the world religions. It begins by examining the enormous popularity of the newly invented field of anthropology in the nineteenth century as a site of multiple intellectual developments. Its climax was Frazer's Golden Bough, which is a pillar of modernity second only to Darwin's Origin of Species. But its notion of religion was entirely speculative. When anthropologists went to see for themselves, they encountered formidable obstacles. How to access a people's most profound understandings of the world and everything in it? Holding fast to the premise that ethnographers have no special powers of seeing inside other people's brains, this book teaches students to proceed slowly, a step at a time, watching how people perform rituals great and small, asking questions that seem stupid to their hosts, and struggling to translate abstract terms in unrecorded languages. Using a handful of examples from different continents, the book shows the potential of an anthropological approach to religion.

An Anthropology of Landscape tells the fascinating story of a heathland landscape in south-west England and the way different individuals and groups engage with it. Based on a long-term anthropological study, the book emphasises four individual themes: embodied identities, the landscape as a sensuous material form that is acted upon and in turn acts on people, the landscape as contested, and its relation to emotion. The landscape is discussed in relation to these themes as both 'taskscape' and 'leisurescape', and from the perspective of different user groups. First, those who manage the landscape and use it for work: conservationists, environmentalists, archaeologists, the Royal Marines, and quarrying interests. Second, those who use it in their leisure time: cyclists and horse riders, model aircraft flyers, walkers, people who fish there, and artists who are inspired by it. The book makes an innovative contribution to landscape studies and will appeal to all those interested in nature conservation, historic preservation, the politics of nature, the politics of identity, and an anthropology of Britain.

Explanatory accounts of the emergence, spread, storage, persistence, and transformation of knowledge face numerous theoretical and methodological challenges. This paper argues that although anthropologists are uniquely positioned to address some of these challenges, joint engagement with relevant research in neighbouring disciplines holds considerable promise for advancement in the area. Researchers across the human and social sciences are increasingly recognizing the importance of conjointly operative and mutually contingent bodily, cognitive, neural, and social mechanisms informing the generation and communication of knowledge. Selected cognitive scientific work, in particular, is reviewed here and used to illustrate how anthropology may potentially richly contribute not only to descriptive and interpretive endeavours, but to the development and substantiation of explanatory accounts also.RésuméLes comptes‐rendus portant sur l'émergence, la diffusion, la conservation, la persistance et la transformation des connaissances se heurtent à de nombreuses difficultés théoriques et méthodologiques. Bien que les anthropologues soient particulièrement bien placés pour affronter ces défis, des progrès considérables pourraient être réalisés en la matière dans le cadre d'une approche conjointe avec des disciplines voisines menant des recherches connexes. Les adeptes du décloisonnement des sciences humaines et sociales reconnaissent de plus en plus l'importance des interactions et interdépendances entre mécanismes physiques, cognitifs, neurologiques et sociaux dans la production et la communication des connaissances. Des travaux scientifiques choisis, en matière de cognition en particulier, sont examinés et utilisés pour illustrer la manière dont l'anthropologie pourrait apporter une riche contribution non seulement aux tâches descriptives et interprétatives, mais aussi à l'élaboration et la mise à l'épreuve de comptes‐rendus explicatifs.