This volume examines some crucial issues in the conduct of fieldwork and ethnography and provides new insights into the problems of constructing anthropological knowledge. How is anthropological knowledge created from fieldwork, whose knowledge is this, who determines what is of significance in any ethnographic context, and how is the fieldsite extended in both time and place? Nine anthropologists examine these problems, drawing on diverse case studies. These range from the dilemmas of the religious refashioning of the ethnographer in contemporary Indonesia to the embodied knowledge of ballet performers, and from ignorance about post-colonial ritual innovations by the anthropologist in highland Papua to the skilled visions of slow food producers in Italy. It is a key text for new fieldworkers as much as for established researchers. The anthropological insights developed here are of interdisciplinary relevance: cultural studies scholars, sociologists and historians will be as interested as anthropologists in this re-evaluation of fieldwork and the project of ethnography.

The History of modern politics in The Bahamas involves a myriad of actors and activists and has created a foundation on which the Commonwealth of The Bahamas exist today. Leaders such as Sir Roland Symonette , Rt. Hon. Sir Lynden Pindling, Hon. Hubert Alexander Ingram, Hon. Perry Gladstone Christie, and Most Hon. Dr. Hubert Alexander Minnis and many other supporters all contributed to the evolution of The Bahamas as we know today.

This book explores the dynamics of the socio-cultural baggage that Indian indentured migrants took with them to the Caribbean island of Trinidad and how they have since become a vibrant diaspora community, namely the Indo-Trinidadians. It combines social history with first-hand fieldwork data to portray human ingenuity in terms of social reconstitution and community building in a hostile socio-cultural environment. Furthermore, it addresses key social institutions—religion, caste, and family—and cultural elements—language, foodways, and ethnicity. Its analytical framework is guided by the concept of metamorphosis; it steers clear of the persistence versus change hypotheses. Given its focus, it will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, social anthropology, history, and migration and diaspora studies.

Patrick Baker's post-modern approach uses ideas from chaos theory and world systems theory to interpret the prehistory and history of Dominica. During its prehistory Dominica served as an occasional stepping-stone for small-scale, independent foraging and horticultural peoples migrating up the Antillean arc to the larger islands in the north. Its discovery by Europeans brought it into a social and economic constellation that was constructed and orchestrated largely from the metropolitan centre. Centring the Periphery is the unfolding story of the struggle of the Dominican people to create and order a world that is controlled from outside.

The essays in this collection focus attention on the enormous contribution made by women in maintaining family relations in situations of both racial and gender domination.

There is a strong connection between culture and parenting. What is acceptable in one culture is frowned upon in another. This applies to behavior after birth, encouragement in early childhood, and regulation and freedom during adolescence. There are differences in affection and distance, harshness and repression, and acceptance and criticism. Some parents insist on obedience; others are concerned with individual development. This clearly differs from parent to parent, but there is just as clearly a connection to culture. This book includes chapters on China, Colombia, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, Brazil, Native Americans and Australians, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, Cuba, Pakistan, Nigeria, Morocco, and several other countries. Beside this, the authors address depression, academic achievement, behavior, adolescent identity, abusive parenting, grandparents as parents, fatherhood, parental agreement and disagreement, emotional availability and stepparents.​

Abigail L. Swingen’s insightful study provides a new framework for understanding the origins of the British Empire while exploring how England’s original imperial designs influenced contemporary English politics and debates about labor, economy, and overseas trade. Focusing on the ideological connections between the growth of unfree labor in the English colonies, particularly the use of enslaved Africans, and the development of British imperialism during the early modern period, the author examines the overlapping, often competing agendas of planters, merchants, privateers, colonial officials, and imperial authorities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The sixth edition of this bestselling text offers a concise history of anthropological theory from antiquity to the twenty-first century, with new and significantly revised sections that reflect the current state of the field.

“[A] tour de force of global history...Bosma has turned the humble sugar crystal into a mighty prism for understanding aspects of global history and the world in which we live.”—Los Angeles Review of Books The definitive 2,500-year history of sugar and its human costs, from its little-known origins as a luxury good in Asia to worldwide environmental devastation and the obesity pandemic. For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it serves no necessary purpose in our diets, and extracting it from plants takes hard work and ingenuity. Granulated sugar was first produced in India around the sixth century BC, yet for almost 2,500 years afterward sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis along the way? The World of Sugar begins with the earliest evidence of sugar production. Through the Middle Ages, traders brought small quantities of the precious white crystals to rajahs, emperors, and caliphs. But after sugar crossed the Mediterranean to Europe, where cane could not be cultivated, demand spawned a brutal quest for supply. European cravings were satisfied by enslaved labor; two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans taken across the Atlantic were destined for sugar plantations. By the twentieth century, sugar was a major source of calories in diets across Europe and North America. Sugar transformed life on every continent, creating and destroying whole cultures through industrialization, labor migration, and changes in diet. Sugar made fortunes, corrupted governments, and shaped the policies of technocrats. And it provoked freedom cries that rang with world-changing consequences. In Ulbe Bosma’s definitive telling, to understand sugar’s past is to glimpse the origins of our own world of corn syrup and ethanol and begin to see the threat that a not-so-simple commodity poses to our bodies, our environment, and our communities.