Unraveling all the mysteries of the khipu—the knotted string device used by the Inka to record both statistical data and narrative accounts of myths, histories, and genealogies—will require an understanding of how number values and relations may have been used to encode information on social, familial, and political relationships and structures. This is the problem Gary Urton tackles in his pathfinding study of the origin, meaning, and significance of numbers and the philosophical principles underlying the practice of arithmetic among Quechua-speaking peoples of the Andes. Based on fieldwork in communities around Sucre, in south-central Bolivia, Urton argues that the origin and meaning of numbers were and are conceived of by Quechua-speaking peoples in ways similar to their ideas about, and formulations of, gender, age, and social relations. He also demonstrates that their practice of arithmetic is based on a well-articulated body of philosophical principles and values that reflects a continuous attempt to maintain balance, harmony, and equilibrium in the material, social, and moral spheres of community life.

Well-known anthropologist Lamphere highlights the voices of three generations of Navajo women who are weaving their traditional beliefs with modern American culture to create a new blueprint for their lives and the next generations.

The modern world is forcing us to understand emotion in order to cope with new problems such as road rage and epidemic levels of depression, as well as age-old problems such as homicide, genocide and racial tension. At the same time, scholarly research is leading us to appreciate how emotion helps us to understand and transcend our selfish interests, to connect with others, to feel what is just and moral, and not just think it, and to construct societies and cultures that govern our joint efforts. This book draws upon scholarly research to address, explain and legitimize the role that emotion plays in everyday interaction and in many of the pressing social, moral, and cultural issues that we face today.

Streets are places that stimulate activities, interactions, behaviours and, by extension, controls. Yet, within the built environment discourse, the street is first and foremost conceptualised as a mute backdrop to movement-vehicular or pedestrian. The Covid-19 pandemic brought renewed focus on the street as the space of networks, flows and mobilities as the 'lockdown' was the preferred mode of controlling the spread of the disease. The Social Life of Streets in India: Histories, Contestations and Subjectivities endeavours to understand the complexities of social dynamics of streets in relation to spatiality and materiality in the Indian milieu. It draws from a diverse body of scholarship and varied disciplinary leanings and engages with three broad strands: historical aspects of streets, the physicality of street as a built environment and social science discourse mediated through anthropology, urban geography, social theory and urban studies. Further the volume deliberates on questions such as: How do we look at streets and, in particular, how do we document and conceptualise streets in the Indian context that highlights the particularities of South Asian milieus? Is the street public? Is it merely a physical space? How does the street in its physicality and in its built form enter or respond to the metaphorical, the literary, the methodological and the social?