The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology

Richard Fardon, Oliva Harris, Trevor H J Marchand, Cris Shore, Veronica Strang, Richard Wilson, Mark Nuttall, Richard Fardon, Oliva Harris, Trevor H J Marchand, Cris Shore, Veronica Strang, Richard Wilson, Mark Nuttall

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781473971592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In two volumes, the SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology provides the definitive overview of contemporary research in the discipline. It explains the what, where, and how of current and anticipated work in Social Anthropology. With 80 authors, contributing more than 60 chapters, this is the most comprehensive and up-to-date statement of research in Social Anthropology available and the essential point of departure for future projects.

The Handbook is divided into four sections:

-Part I: Interfaces examines Social Anthropology?s disciplinary connections, from Art and Literature to Politics and Economics, from Linguistics to Biomedicine, from History to Media Studies.

- Part II: Places examines place, region, culture, and history, from regional, area studies to a globalized world

-Part III: Methods examines issues of method; from archives to war zones, from development projects to art objects, and from ethics to comparison

-Part IV: Futures anticipates anthropologies to come: in the Brain Sciences; in post-Development; in the Body and Health; and in new Technologies and Materialities

Edited by the leading figures in social anthropology, the Handbook includes a substantive introduction by Richard Fardon, a think piece by Jean and John Comaroff, and a concluding last word on futures by Marilyn Strathern. The authors - each at the leading edge of the discipline - contribute in-depth chapters on both the foundational ideas and the latest research.

Comprehensive and detailed, this magisterial Handbook overviews the last 25 years of the social anthropological imagination. It will speak to scholars in Social Anthropology and its many related disciplines.

The SAGE Handbook of

Social Anthropology

 

 

 

SAGE has been part of the global academic community since 1965, supporting high quality research and learning that transforms society and our understanding of individuals, groups, and cultures. SAGE is the independent, innovative, natural home for authors, editors and societies who share our commitment and passion for the social sciences.

 

Find out more at: www.sagepublications.com

Notes on Contributors

Tim Allen is Professor in Development Anthropology at the Department of International Development, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He has carried out long-term field research in Sudan and Uganda and has also researched in Ghana, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Tanzania. His books include Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lord’s Resistance Army (2006); Culture and Global Change (1999, edited with Tracey Skelton) and Poverty and Development (2000, 2nd edition, edited with Alan Thomas).

Vered Amit is a Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University. She has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Canada and the Cayman Islands. Much of her research has featured an ongoing preoccupation with the workings of and intersections between different forms of transnational mobility. Recent publications include Going First Class? New Approaches to Privileged Travel and Migration (edited 2006) as well as Young Men in Uncertain Times (2011, edited with Noel Dyck).

Karin Barber is Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. She specializes in the anthropology of verbal arts and popular culture, focusing on the Yoruba-speaking area of western Nigeria. Among her more recent books are The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theatre (2000) and The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics (2007).

Joshua Barker is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His research interests include urban anthropology and the social anthropology of new media. His earlier research focused on policing and vigilantism in the city of Bandung, Indonesia. More recently he has published several articles focusing on new media and the making of Indonesian urban imaginaries.

Glenn Bowman has researched in Jerusalem, between 1983 and 1985, and since then in the mixed Christian–Muslim town of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. He taught at University College London, before moving to Kent in 1991 where he is Senior Lecturer, and convenes the MA in the Anthropology of Ethnicity, Nationalism and Identity. Bowman is past editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and serves on the editorial boards of Critique of Anthropology, Anthropological Theory and Focaal.

Dominic Boyer is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. He has written widely on intersections of media and knowledge, including Understanding Media (2007). His next book, The Life Informatic, concerns the transformation of news journalism in the era of digital information. He is currently researching the politics of energy transition in Latin America and Europe.

Janet Carsten is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community (1997), and After Kinship (2004), and editor of Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (2000) and Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness (2007).

Liana Chua is Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University. Her research interests include religious conversion, ethnic citizenship, materiality, and human–environment relations in Malaysian Borneo. She is the author of The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship and the Matter of Religion in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo (2012), and is currently co-editing, with Mark Elliott, a volume on Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency.

Jean Comaroff is the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. John L. Comaroff is the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Their current research in post-apartheid South Africa is on crime, policing, and the workings of the state, on democracy and difference, and on the nature of postcolonial politics. Their recent co-authored books include Ethnicity, Inc. (2009), Zombies et frontières à l’ère néolibérale. Le cas de l’Afrique du Sud post-apartheid (2010), and Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (2011).

Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Anthropology and Development in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex where she works mainly on the anthropology of democracy, sexualities, rights and gender. Recent publications include Development With a Body: Sexuality, Human Rights and Development (2009, edited with Sonia Corrêa and Susie Jolly) and Men and Development: Politicising Masculinity (2011, edited with Jerker Edström and Alan Greig).

Jane K. Cowan is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference (2000), and Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (2001, edited with Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and Richard A. Wilson). Her research interests include gender, embodiment and performance, culture and rights, and histories of transnational engagements around minority and human rights, from activism to international monitoring, with a current focus on petitions to the League of Nations.

Rupert Cox is a Lecturer in Visual Anthropology at Manchester University whose interests revolve around the relationships between technology, the senses, and media practices, both as subjects of study in themselves and as the means to link artwork with anthropological enquiry. In Japan, he researches into such areas as the representation and practice of the Zen arts, the cultural history of the idea of copying, and the political ecology of aircraft noise. His latest publication is Beyond Text: Critical Practice and Sensory Anthropology (forthcoming, edited with Christopher Wright and Andrew Irving).

Jennifer Curtis is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She has published articles based on her doctoral research in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which traced relationships among grassroots activism and transnational norms regarding human rights and conflict resolution. She is currently writing a monograph on Northern Ireland’s transformation into a model for peace-making, incorporating prior research and her current work on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) activism.

Sophie Day is Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has conducted research in both South Asia (Ladakh) and Europe (mostly London). She is author of On the Game: Women and Sex Work (2007), and co-editor of Lilies of the Field (1999, with Evthymios Papataxiarchis and Michael Stewart), and Sex Work, Mobility and Health in Europe (2004, with Helen Ward).

Greg Downey is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University, Australia. His research has focused on martial arts and rugby in Brazil, the United States, Australia and Oceania, focusing especially on biological, behavioural, perceptual and neurological adaptations to diverse training regimens. He is author of Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art (2005) and editor of the forthcoming volume, The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology (with Daniel D. Lende).

Robin (R.I.M) Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and co-Director of the British Academy’s Centenary Research Project whose focus is on what makes us human and how we came to be that way. His broader research interests lie in the evolution of sociality in mammals (with particular reference to ungulates, primates and humans).

Alessandro Duranti is Professor of Anthropology and Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has carried out fieldwork in (Western) Samoa and in the United States, where he studied political discourse, verbal performance, and human universals such as greetings. He has written on intentionality, agency, linguistic relativity, and, more recently, the role of improvisation in jazz and everyday interaction. He is a past President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology.

Brian Durrans was until 2007 senior curator of Asian ethnography in the British Museum. He has curated many exhibitions, most recently Posing Questions: Being & Image in Asia & Europe (Brunei Gallery, the School of Oriental and African Studies [SOAS], 2010), part of a major Asia-Europe museum initiative which he co-led with a Japanese colleague. His writings have ranged over museology, collecting, representations and Asian material culture. He is currently pursuing further research on portraiture, and leads a long-term collaborative project on the anthropology of time capsules.

Jerry (J. S.) Eades is Professor and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Japan, and Senior Honorary Research Fellow, School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent. His current research interests include migration, urbanization, tourism and the environment in the Asia Pacific region.

Ron Eglash received his BS in Cybernetics, his MS in Systems Engineering, and his PhD in History of Consciou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Volume 1
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface: The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth
• Foreword: Thinking Anthropologically, About British Social Anthropology
• Introduction – Flying Theory, Grounded Method
• PART 1 INTERFACES
• PART 2 PLACES
• Volume 2
• PART 3 METHODS
• PART 4 FUTURES
• Name Index
• Subject Index