The Ethnographic Optic traces the surprising role of ethnography in French cinema in the 1960s and examines its place in several New Wave fictions and cinéma vérité documentaries during the final years of the French colonial empire. Focusing on prominent French filmmakers Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais, author Laure Astourian elucidates their striking pivot from centering their work on distant lands to scrutinizing their own French urban culture. As awareness of the ramifications of the shrinking empire grew within metropolitan France, these filmmakers turned inward what their similarly white, urban, bourgeois predecessors had long turned outward toward the colonies: the ethnographic gaze. Featuring some of the most canonical and best-loved films of the French tradition, such as Moi, un Noir, La jetée, and Muriel, this is an essential book for readers interested in national identity and cinema.

Sensing the Everyday is a multi-sited ethnographic inquiry based on fieldwork experiences and sharp everyday observations in the era of crisis. Blending sophisticated theoretical analyses with original ethnographic data, C. Nadia Seremetakis journeys from Greece to Vienna, Edinburgh, Albania, Ireland, and beyond. Social crisis is seen through its transnational multiplication of borders, thresholds and margins, divisions, and localities as linguistic, bodily, sensory, and performative sites of the quotidian in process. The book proposes everyday life not as a sanctuary or as a recessed zone distanced from the structural violence of the state and the market, but as a condition of im/possibility, unable to be lived as such, yet still an encapsulating habitus. There the impossibility of the quotidian is concretized as fragmentary and fragmenting material forces. Seremetakis weaves together topics as diverse as borders and bodies, history and death, the earth and the senses, language and affect, violence and public culture, the sociality of dreaming, and the spatialization of the traumatic, in a journey through antiphonic witnessing and memory. Her montage explores various ways of juxtaposing reality with the irreal and the imaginal to expose the fictioning of social reality. The book locates her approach to ethnography and the ‘native ethnographer’ in wider anthropological and philosophical debates, and proposes a dialogical interfacing of theory and practice, the translation of academic knowledge to public knowledge

Scholars from various disciplines have used key concepts to grasp mobilities, but as of yet, a working vocabulary of these has not been fully developed. Given this context and inspired in part by Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976), this edited volume presents contributions that critically analyze mobility-related keywords: capital, cosmopolitanism, freedom, gender, immobility, infrastructure, motility, and regime. Each chapter provides an historical context, a critical analysis of how the keyword has been used in relation to mobility, and a conclusion that proposes future usage or research.

′In the globalization ′game′ there are no absolute winners and losers. Neither homogenisation nor diversity can capture its contradictory movement and character. The essays and papers collected here offer, from a variety of perspectives, a rich exploration of creativity and innovation, cultural expressions and globalization. This volume of essays, in all their diversity of contents and theoretical perspectives, demonstrates the rich value of this paradoxical, oxymoronic approach′ - Stuart Hall, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University Volume 3 of the Cultures & Globalization series, Creativity and Innovations, explores the interactions between globalization and the forms of cultural expression that are their basic resource. Bringing together over 25 high-profile authors from around the world, this volume addresses such questions as: What impacts does globalization have on cultural creativity and innovation? How is the evolving world ′map′ of creativity related to the drivers and patterns of globalization? What are the relationships between creative acts, clusters, genres or institutions and cultural diversity? The volume is an indispensable reference tool for all scholars and students of contemporary arts and culture.

Already well-established in the Lusophone world, Mia Couto is increasingly acknowledged as a major voice in World literature. Winner of the Camões Prize for Literature in 2013, the most prestigious literary prize honouring Lusophone writers, he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Yet, despite this high profile there are very few full-length critical studiesin English about his writing. Mia Couto is known for his imaginative re-working of Portuguese, making it distinctively Mozambican in character. This book brings together some of the key scholars of his work such as Phillip Rothwell, Luís Madureira, and his long-time English translator David Brookshaw. Contributors examine not only his early works, which were written in the context of the 16-year post-independence civil war in Mozambique, but alsothe wide span of Couto's contemporary writing as a novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. There are contributions on his work in ecology, theatre and journalism, as well as on translation and Mozambican nationalist politics. Most importantly the contributors engage with the significance of Couto's writing to contemporary discussions of African literature, Lusophone studies and World literature. Grant Hamilton is Associate Professor of English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the editor of Reading Marechera (James Currey, 2013). David Huddart is Associate Professor of English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kongand is author of Involuntary Associations: World Englishes and Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2014]

West African history is inseparable from the history of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. According to historical archaeologist François Richard, however, the dominance of this narrative not only colors the range of political discourse about Africa but also occludes many lesser-known—but equally important—experiences of those living in the region. Reluctant Landscapes is an exploration of the making and remaking of political experience and physical landscapes among rural communities in the Siin province of Senegal between the late 1500s and the onset of World War II. By recovering the histories of farmers and commoners who made up African states’ demographic core in this period, Richard shows their crucial—but often overlooked—role in the making of Siin history. The book also delves into the fraught relation between the Seereer, a minority ethnic and religious group, and the Senegalese nation-state, with Siin’s perceived “primitive” conservatism standing at odds with the country’s Islamic modernity. Through a deep engagement with oral, documentary, archaeological, and ethnographic archives, Richard’s groundbreaking study revisits the four-hundred-year history of a rural community shunted to the margins of Senegal’s national imagination.

Presents current knowledge of and experience with disability across a wide variety of places, conditions, and cultures to both the general reader and the specialist.

How immersive simulations--from a fictional border-crossing site to a mock terrorist training camp--attempt to foster understanding across cultures

A stimulating overview of the intellectual arguments and critical debates involved in the study of British and Irish cinemas British and Irish film studies have expanded in scope and depth in recent years, prompting a growing number of critical debates on how these cinemas are analysed, contextualized, and understood. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema addresses arguments surrounding film historiography, methods of textual analysis, critical judgments, and the social and economic contexts that are central to the study of these cinemas. Twenty-nine essays from many of the most prominent writers in the field examine how British and Irish cinema have been discussed, the concepts and methods used to interpret and understand British and Irish films, and the defining issues and debates at the heart of British and Irish cinema studies. Offering a broad scope of commentary, the Companion explores historical, cultural and aesthetic questions that encompass over a century of British and Irish film studies—from the early years of the silent era to the present-day. Divided into five sections, the Companion discusses the social and cultural forces shaping British and Irish cinema during different periods, the contexts in which films are produced, distributed and exhibited, the genres and styles that have been adopted by British and Irish films, issues of representation and identity, and debates on concepts of national cinema at a time when ideas of what constitutes both ‘British’ and ‘Irish’ cinema are under question. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema is a valuable and timely resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of film, media, and cultural studies, and for those seeking contemporary commentary on the cinemas of Britain and Ireland.

Alterity has yet to see sustained treatment in archaeology due in great part to the fact that the archaeological record is not always equipped to inform on the subject. Like its kindred concepts, such as identity and ethnicity, alterity is difficult to observe also because it can be expressed at different times and scales, from the individual, family and village settings, to contexts such as nations and empires. It can also be said to 'reside' just as well in objects and individuals, as it may in a technique, action or performance. One requires a relevant, holistic data set and multiple line of evidence. Ancient Alterity in the Andes provides just that by focusing on the great achievements of the ancient Andes during the first millennium AD, centred on a Precolumbian culture, known as Recuay (AD 1-1700).