"Cabana and Clark have chosen to base their research into migration on careful study of how real people actually behave over time and space. We are well served by this rugged empiricism and by the multidisciplinary breadth of their approach."—Dean R. Snow, Pennsylvania State University "A thorough survey of the ways in which anthropologists across the four subfields have defined and analyzed human migration."—John H. Relethford, author of Reflections of Our Past: How Human History Is Revealed in Our Genes All too often, anthropologists study specific facets of human migration without guidance from the other subdisciplines (archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistics) that can provide new insights on the topic. The equivocal results of these narrow studies often make the discussion of impact and consequences speculative. In the last decade, however, anthropologists working independently in the four subdisciplines have developed powerful methodologies to detect and assess the scale of past migrations. Yet these advances are known only to a few specialized researchers. Rethinking Anthropological Perspectives on Migration brings together these new methods in one volume and addresses innovative approaches to migration research that emerge from the collective effort of scholars from different intellectual backgrounds. Its contributors present a comprehensive anthropological exploration of the many topics related to human migration throughout the world, ranging from theoretical treatments to specific case studies derived primarily from the Americas prior to European contact. Contributors: | Christopher S. Beekman | Wesley R. Bernardini | Deborah A. Bolnick | Graciela S. Cabana | Alexander F. Christensen | Jeffery J. Clark | J. Andrew Darling | Christopher Ehret | Alan G. Fix | Catherine S. Fowler | Severin M. Fowles | Susan R. Frankenberg | Jane H. Hill | Keith L. Hunley | Kelly J. Knudson | Lyle W. Konigsberg | Scott G. Ortman | Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda

Friendship is an essential part of human experience, involving ideas of love and morality as well as material and pragmatic concerns. Making and having friends is a central aspect of everyday life in all human societies. Yet friendship is often considered of secondary significance in comparison to domains such as kinship, economics and politics. How important are friends in different cultural contexts? What would a study of society viewed through the lens of friendship look like? Does friendship affect the shape of society as much as society moulds friendship? Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe, this volume offers answers to these questions and examines the ideology and practice of friendship as it is embedded in wider social contexts and transformations.

While there is increasing political interest in research and policy-making for global mental health, there remain major gaps in the education of students in health fields for understanding the complexities of diverse mental health conditions. Drawing on the experience of many well-known experts in this area, this book uses engaging narratives to illustrate that mental illnesses are not only problems experienced by individuals but must also be understood and treated at the social and cultural levels. The book -includes discussion of traditional versus biomedical beliefs about mental illness, the role of culture in mental illness, intersections between religion and mental health, intersections of mind and body, and access to health care; -is ideal for courses on global mental health in psychology, public health, and anthropology departments and other health-related programs.

In the continuous search for sustainability, the exchange of diverse perspectives, assumptions, and values is indispensable to environmental protection. Through anthropological and ethnographic analyses, this collection addresses how interests, values, and ideologies affect dialogue and sustainability work. Drawing on studies from three continents - Europe, North America, and South America - the paradoxes and the plurality of meanings associated with the creation of sustainable futures are explored. The book focuses on how communication practices collide with organizational frameworks, customary practices, livelihoods, and landscape. In so doing, the authors explore the meanings of environmental communication, pushing beyond environmental advocacy rhetoric to emphasize stronger anthropological engagement within communities to achieve more impactful environmental communication practice. Empirically the book's chapters explore a diverse set of issues, ranging from coastal management in the European north to Native American place naming in Alaska. They further share findings from studies of contaminated land remediation in Sweden, conflicts over water resources in Chile, management of heritage and national parks in Northern Arizona, and cultural transmission in Slovakia. This is an open access book.

As anthropologists, we offer this book about aging in a wide variety of human societies in the hope of its making three contributions. First, this book will help to remedy a massive neglect of old age by the discipline of anthropology. The pioneering work of Leo Simmons (1945) has remained a lonely monument since the 1940's, for despite recent interest in the subject of aging in modern Western societies on the part of social gerontologists and sociologists, little has been done by anthropologists on aging in non-Western societies. Where it has been treated at all, it has been in the form either of a few final paragraphs in the discussion of the life cycle or of a simple ethnographic fact among other facts about a certain social system. What has been missing has been any attempt to put aging in a cross-cultural or comparative perspective, to give this vital subject the same treatment that has been accorded marriage, for example, or death or inheritance or sex roles. Second, this book will bring a needed cross-cultural perspective to the study of social gerontology. The recent explosion of interest in this field has been largely confined to the study of aging in North America and Europe. But we anthropologists feel that such a culturally limited study, though interesting and productive in its own right, is dangerously narrow if it does not consider what aging is like in other societies. What aspects of aging, for example, are human universals and have to be planned for as inevitable, and what aspects are cultural particulars and can be avoided, modified, or strengthened under certain social conditions? By presenting both a biological account of the universals of human aging (Weiss), and specific ethnographic accounts of aging in a wide variety of societies, we believe we can help to put North American aging into perspective Third, we hope this book will serve as an illustration of a particular anthropological approach to unity and diversity in human societies and cultures. Perhaps the main task of sociocultural anthropology is a twofold one: the explanation of cross-cultural universals, somehow rooted either in the biological nature of the human species or in universal imperatives of social organization, and the explanation of intercultural variations, rooted in a dialectical interaction between culture and the material conditions (partially created by culture) in which it exists. If unity and diversity can indeed be explained in this way, the cross-cultural study of aging can serve as a paradigm. By first setting out what seem to be the universals determined by the biology of the human species, and by then exploring the range of variation in cultural solutions, we ought to be able to formulate a set of principles that will allow us to explain why variations occur in a certain way. Nine ethnographic case studies are enough, we believe, to enable us to formulate some preliminary hypotheses about the nature and causes of variation in the social process of aging.

4e de couverture: Responding to the challenges from the worlds they study and reflecting critically on their own practice, anthropologists have recently devoted new attention to ethics and morality. This masterclass brings together four of the most eminent scholars working in this field--Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane--to discuss, in a lecture format, the way in which anthropology faces contemporary ethical issues and moral problems. Rather than treating ethics as an object or as an isolable domain in moral theory, the authors are interested in grasping how the ethical and the moral emerge from social actions and interactions, how they are related to historical contexts and cultural settings, how they are transformed through their confrontation with the political, and how they are, ultimately, an integral part of life. Contrasting in their perspectives and methods, but developing a lively conversation, this masterclass provides four distinct voices to compose what will be an essential guide for an anthropology of the ethical and the moral in the twenty-first century.

Drawing on a diverse, comparative ethnographic literature, this new volume examines the intimate spaces and cultural practices of those elites who occupy positions of power and authority across a variety of different settings. Using ethnographic case studies from a wide range of geographical areas, including Mexico, Peru, Amazonia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Europe, North America and Africa, the contributors explore the inner worlds of meaning and practice that define and sustain elite identities. They also provide insights into the cultural mechanisms that maintain elite status, and into the complex ways that elite groups relate to, and are embedded within, wider social and historical processes.