Valued for their sensual and social intensity, Greek dance-events are often also problematical for participants, giving rise to struggles over position, prestige, and reputation.
In this collection leading anthropologists provide a comprehensive yet highly nuanced view of what it means to be a Greek man or woman, married or unmarried, functioning within a complex society based on kinship ties.
In the past decade, South Africa's "e;miracle transition"e; has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity.
Since German reunification in 1990, there has been widespread concern about marginalized young people who, faced with bleak prospects for their future, have embraced increasingly violent forms of racist nationalism that glorify the country's Nazi past.
"e;If the Saint calls you, if you have an open road, then you don't feel the fire as if it were your enemy,"e; says one of the participants in the Anastenaria.
In present-day Greece many people still speak of exotikNB--mermaids, dog-form creatures, and other monstrous beings similar to those pictured on medieval maps.
The human propensity to take an ethical stance toward oneself and others is found in every known society, yet we also know that values taken for granted in one society can contradict those in another.
How secular governance in the Middle East is making life worse-not better-for religious minoritiesThe plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region.
The meaning of our concern for mortal remains-from antiquity through the twentieth centuryThe Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge.
Sherpas are portrayed by Westerners as heroic mountain guides, or "e;tigers of the snow,"e; as Buddhist adepts, and as a people in touch with intimate ways of life that seem no longer available in the Western world.
Turkey has leapt to international prominence as an economic and political powerhouse under its elected Muslim government, and is looked on by many as a model for other Muslim countries in the wake of the Arab Spring.
How our brains have evolved so that we control how we think and behaveThe Unpredictable Species argues that the human brain evolved in a way that enhances our cognitive flexibility and capacity for innovation and imitation.
Why our approaches to Alzheimer's and dementia are problematic and contradictoryDue to rapidly aging populations, the number of people worldwide experiencing dementia is increasing, and the projections are grim.
Wild Profusion tells the fascinating story of biodiversity conservation in Indonesia in the decade culminating in the great fires of 1997-98--a time when the country's environment became a point of concern for social and environmental activists, scientists, and the many fishermen and farmers nationwide who suffered from degraded environments and faced accusations that they were destroying nature.
A revolutionary approach to the study of cooperation that unites evolutionary biology and the social sciencesFrom the family to the workplace to the marketplace, every facet of our lives is shaped by cooperative interactions.
How our stone-age brains made modern society, and why it matters for relationships between men and womenAs countless love songs, movies, and self-help books attest, men and women have long sought different things.
The Gay Archipelago is the first book-length exploration of the lives of gay men in Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation and home to more Muslims than any other country.
Addressing problems of objectivity and authenticity, Sabine MacCormack reconstructs how Andean religion was understood by the Spanish in light of seventeenth-century European theological and philosophical movements, and by Andean writers trying to find in it antecedents to their new Christian faith.
In this highly original and much-anticipated ethnography, Anna Tsing challenges not only anthropologists and feminists but all those who study culture to reconsider some of their dearest assumptions.
Michael Herzfeld describes what happens when a bureaucracy charged with historic conservation clashes with a local populace hostile to the state and suspicious of tourism.
The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across a vast territory.
In the 1980s, a research team led by Parisian scientists identified several unique DNA sequences, or haplotypes, linked to sickle cell anemia in African populations.
How the love and labor of parents have changed our understanding of autismAutism has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years, thanks to dramatically increasing rates of diagnosis, extensive organizational mobilization, journalistic coverage, biomedical research, and clinical innovation.
A vivid portrait of India's outsourcing industryIn the Indian outsourcing industry, employees are expected to be "e;dead ringers"e; for the more expensive American workers they have replaced-complete with Westernized names, accents, habits, and lifestyles that are organized around a foreign culture in a distant time zone.
Gaming the language of addiction treatmentScripting Addiction takes readers into the highly ritualized world of mainstream American addiction treatment.
How can America's information technology (IT) industry predict serious labor shortages while at the same time laying off tens of thousands of employees annually?
Along the Archival Grain offers a unique methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content of archival forms.
Black Atlantic Religion illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomble religion.
