An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Augé calls "non-space" results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Augé uses the concept of "supermodernity" to describe a situation of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity.

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Augé calls “non-space” results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Augé uses the concept of “supermodernity” to describe a situation of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity.

This books is the product of research conducted in the Brazilian Border with Bolívia in 2013, where a migrant temporary shelter hosted, under a humanitarian visa, hundreds of Haitians that had fled several stages of human insecurity back in their homeland. In order to survive and with the dream of leaving soon, migrants strategise their relationships and harnest social navigation skills. This fieldwork was part of the Master of Social and Cultural Anthropology programa at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, for which the author was granted a VU Scholarship.

This book presents a critical and aesthetic defence of “non-place” as an act of cultural reclamation. Through the restorative properties of photography, it re-conceptualises the cultural significance of non-place. The non-place is often referred to as “wasteland”, and is usually avoided. The sites investigated in this book are located where access and ownership are often ambiguous or in dispute; they are places of cultural forgetting. Drawing on the author’s own photographic research-led practice, as well as material from photographers such as Ed Ruscha, Joel Sternfeld and Richard Misrach, this study employs a deliberately allusive intertexuality to offer a unique insight into the contested notions surrounding landscape representation. Ultimately, it argues that the non-place has the potential to reveal a version of England that raises questions about identity, loss, memory, landscape valorisation, and, perhaps most importantly, how we are to arrive at a more meaningful place.

As we become familiar with the 21st century we can see that what we are designing is changing, new technologies support the creation of new forms of product and service, and new pressures on business and society demand the design of solutions to increasingly complex problems, sometimes local, often global in nature. Customers, users and stakeholders are no longer passive recipients of design, expectations are higher, and increased participation is often essential. This book explores these issues through the work of 21 research teams. Over a twelve-month period each of these groups held a series of workshops and events to examine different facets of future design activity as part of the UK's research council supported Designing for the 21st Century Research Initiative. Each of these 21 contributions describes the context of enquiry, the journey taken by the research team and key insights generated through discourse. Editor and Initiative Director, Tom Inns, provides an introductory chapter that suggests ways that the reader might navigate these different viewpoints.

Studying the work of important continental theorists, Joe Moran explores the concrete sites and routines of everyday life and how they are represented through political discourse, news media, material culture, photography, reality TV and more.

High state official and judge of the Supreme Court or the Segunda Audiencia, and later first bishop of the state of Michoacan, Vasco de Quiroga is still celebrated for the alternative community models he established for the Purepecha Indians in the Northwestern state of Michoacan in Mexico. This study offers the most complete approach to date to the writings directly attributed to this state official of the Spanish Empire and also to the scholarship about him. This work provides critical readings of Quiroga's texts including the Rules and Regulations for the Government of the Hospitals of Santa Fe de Mexico and Michoacan, Información en Derecho, De Debellandis Indis and the Juicio de Residencia, and relates them to more widely know figures such as Ginés de Sepúlveda, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Francisco de Vitoria among others. This book will be of interest to all those engaged in the history of literature, legal studies, utopianism, Hispanic/Spanish studies of the Early Modern Period, Colonial Latin American Studies and Golden Age Studies.

Malaysia features some of the most spectacular national parks in the world. The parks - most are hotspots of biodiversity - have become a major attraction for foreign and increasingly domestic tourists. Nature tourism is at the same time a source of revenues and a threat to the environmental integrity of conservation areas. This study - based on the theory of structuration and using a triangulation of methods - analyses (eco)tourism in Malaysian national parks from different angles by asking different groups of tourists and experts about their opinions, experiences and needs. In order to learn more about the often neglected group of domestic tourists a large survey was conducted in Kuala Lumpur. The needs of foreign individual and group travellers were analysed with a questionnaire in Gunung Mulu National Park. And experts of conservation and tourism (i.e. scientists, park managers, tour operators, exponents of NGOs) were asked to assess the state and potential of ecotourism in Malaysian national parks. Results show that the increasing heterogeneity and number of visitors and their different needs can put a strain on the environmental integrity of conservation areas. This study makes recommendations to mitigate such strains and to further sustainable tourism.

What role does 'place' have in a world marked by increased mobility on a global scale? What strategies are there for representing 'place' in the age of globalization? What is the relationship between 'place' and the varied mobilities of migrancy, tourism, travel and nomadism? These are some of the questions that run through the ten essays in this collection. The combined effect of these essays is to participate in the contemporary project of subjecting the links between place, mobility, identity, representation and practice to critical interdisciplinary scrutiny. Such notions are not the property of particular disciplines. In the era of globalization, transnationalism and readily acknowledged cultural hybridity these links are more important than ever. They are important because of the taken-for-grantedness of: the universal impact of globalization; the receding importance of place and the centrality of mobile identities. This taken-for-grantedness masks the ways place continues to be important and ways in which mobility is differentiated by race, gender, ethnicity, nationality and many other social markers. This book is a concerted attempt to stop taking for granted these themes of the age. Material discussed in the essays include the creation of cultural routes in Europe, the video's of Fiona Tan, artistic and literary representations of the North African desert, the production of indigenous videos in Mexico, mobile forms of ethnography, the film Existenz, Jamaica Kincaid's writing on gardens, the video representation of sex tourism and ways of imagining the global. Authors include: Tim Cresswell, Ginette Verstraete, Ernst van Alphen, Ursula Biemann, Laurel C. Smith, Nick Couldry, Isabel Hoving, Renée van de Vall, Inge E. Boer and Kevin Hetherington.