How can we restore fundamental values on a political and cultural level? Taking this question as a starting point, the book identifies the notion of sociological imagination as a suitable method to address the widespread disorientation within the human and social sciences. In particular, the three essays included in this volume focus on the role of sociology as a tool to achieve a constructive representation of reality. Through a sharp analysis of the current, growing dismissal of cultural structures and the lack of an ethical view in the interpretation of social phenomena, the author offers new perspectives in order to recover authentic human commitments that are able to re-establish meaningful relationships between people.

Roots in Reverse explores how Latin music contributed to the formation of the négritude movement in the 1930s. Taking Senegal and Cuba as its primary research areas, this work uses oral histories, participant observation, and archival research to examine the ways Afro-Cuban music has influenced Senegalese debates about cultural and political citizenship and modernity. Shain argues that the trajectory of Afro-Cuban music in twentieth century Senegal illuminates many dimensions of that nation’s cultural history such as gender relations, generational competition and conflict, debates over cosmopolitanism and hybridity, the role of nostalgia in Senegalese national culture and diasporic identities. More than just a new form of musical enjoyment, Afro-Cuban music provided listeners with a tool for creating a public sphere free from European and North American cultural hegemony.

Atmospheres are omnipresent and they are frequently used in everyday language. Yet, when do we perceive atmospheres and how can we explore them? The concept of atmosphere extends aesthetics to aisthesis and comprehends perception as a relation bound to the present and with regard to others. In this context, the astonishing atmosphere is identified as a watershed moment when the object of perception becomes the object of discourse. Surveying Benjamin’s definitions of aura, one becomes aware of two modes of perception, which are crucial for the understanding of atmospheres. The “atmospheric portfolio”, therefore, provides for the possibility to explore the particular features of the phenomenon. It is a collection of studies and research methods, which, on the one hand, reflects on the terms and concepts, and, which, on the other, allows for exemplary experiments of the empirical approaches to the phenomenon.

The Odyssey is rightly celebrated as a story that goes far beyond the scope of epic poetry. It is an open window to an entire era and its social systems as well as its theological, cultural, economic and political structures, while running simultaneously in the register of the earthly and of the divine. Within The Odyssey, the episode of the Sirens stands out as an exceptionally evocative example of this kind of achievement. This volume is dedicated to exploring the myriad levels of analysis that are allowed by this famous episode, following in the footsteps of celebrated readers of The Odyssey such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Lukàcs, Auerbach, Kerény, Bloch, Auden, Pound, Tolstoj, Elster and Steiner. By looking at the brief encounter between Ulysses and the Sirens, the reader of this volume will discover the roots of our modern concept of middle class rationality and its profound ramifications stretching between economy, politics, and the divine.

Surprisingly, jihadi groups like ISIS do not only attract female supporters coming from Muslim communities, but also Western women who grew up in non-Muslim environments. Trauma, depression and the need for a more exciting life outside the constraints of Western society brought some women to embrace the political cause of waging jihad and supporting terrorism. This book discovers the hidden psychological and sociological drivers that can lead young Western women to support jihadi ideology, violence and sometimes suicide. Through real and uncanny stories, supported by reliable official data, the book provides a scientific analysis of the mechanisms that can lead any “girl next door” to approve and passionately fall for a destructive movement, which she perceives as a heroic, romantic and empowering act.

A&P is a multidiscilinary journal which gathers international scholars and thinkers to analyse the latest debates in the field of philosophy and anthropology.

White southerners recognized that the perpetuation of segregation required whites of all ages to uphold a strict social order -- especially the young members of the next generation. White children rested at the core of the system of segregation between 1890 and 1939 because their participation was crucial to ensuring the future of white supremacy. Their socialization in the segregated South offers an examination of white supremacy from the inside, showcasing the culture's efforts to preserve itself by teaching its beliefs to the next generation. In Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South, author Kristina DuRocher reveals how white adults in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continually reinforced race and gender roles to maintain white supremacy. DuRocher examines the practices, mores, and traditions that trained white children to fear, dehumanize, and disdain their black neighbors. Raising Racists combines an analysis of the remembered experiences of a racist society, how that society influenced children, and, most important, how racial violence and brutality shaped growing up in the early-twentieth-century South.

In the sixties and seventies, the public sphere in Western countries was a place of critique. Through their activism in the public sphere, various kinds of social movements democratised institutions and political culture. Today, neoliberal politics and populist movements have transformed this place into a perilous arena, hosting many serious threats to democracy. The outcome of this challenge and confrontation will depend on how democratic political actors will make their presence felt in the public sphere.

Exploring human nature takes the reader deep into the human experience of being in nature. Our current ecological predicament highlights the need to change people’s nature awareness and behaviour. This pioneering mixed methods study investigates a method to do this through facilitated Solo time in the wilderness. Solo time is an ancient, ritualised and pan-cultural practice of spending time alone in nature, that has been reintroduced into our current time and culture. The study focuses on the phenomenology of young adults’ immersive experiences in nature and the evaluation of long term impact on their personal development, their relationship with nature, community participation and ecological behaviour. However, this work is not only about the content of research, it is also about how research is done. On a methodological level the study takes a systemic approach: it explores and integrates an expanded, interconnected worldview and methodology. In practice, this encompasses working with participants’ dreams as data and including different ways of knowing in an expanded view on validity. It also includes collecting data on the researcher’s own experience and integrating it as a parallel narrative in the thesis. In this manner the book not only tackles the pressing issue of an increasing psychological and physical separation between humans and nature. It also calls into question how conventional research and its prevailing tendency to investigate the world in isolated pieces may contribute to the problem. Overall, this book provides a practical example of how a systemic approach may be integrated in the research process and in academic writing. It also serves as a valuable reference point for future work on promising triggers for change and highlights powerful elements for prospective programmes focussing on individual empowerment, sustainability and nature awareness. It addresses all researchers interested in ecopsychology and experiential education but also those who are curious to explore subjectivity as part of an expanded worldview and methodology in research.

The book is focused on parenthood and generativity, considered by the authors not only as biological functions, but above all as human and socio-cultural capabilities able to overcome gender differences.Therefore, the authors reconsider motherhood, emphasizing the historical and social function of women; the accent on socio-cultural gender role of women as mothers and wives also inspires an undeniable reflection on male identities and fatherhood. The book insists that parenthood and care are human characteristics, and not only a specific female frame, and suggests to the reader a new focus on gender relationships, by adopting a gylanic perspective.

Sergio Bologna has long been one of the sharpest analysts and critics of the changing structures in the contemporary labour market. In this new volume, the Italian thinker focuses on the phenomenon of ‘freelance workers’, and particularly of knowledge workers, not just as another segment within the global workforce, but as an emerging category striving to construct its own identity. Far from limiting his analysis to the realm of the economy, Bologna investigates the difference between employees and freelancers also in terms of their existential experiences and of their social relationships, both in the public and private sphere. On this basis, Bologna argues that the development of a shared identity among freelancers can function as the first step to establishing a network of cooperation and solidarity, all the way to the creation of a union of freelance workers. Himself a freelance worker, Sergio Bologna offers the reader a powerful and passionate argument for political and existential change in the 21st century.

Every year, in the last month of the Islamic calendar, millions of Muslims from around the world come together in Mecca to perform the Hajj, the pilgrimage that all capable Muslims should perform at least once in their lives. In 2013, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden organised the exhibition Longing for Mecca. The Pilgrim’s Journey. The chapters in this volume are the outcome of the two-day symposium on the Hajj, which was held at the museum in connection to the exhibition. The central theme that runs through the book is how Hajj practices, representations of Mecca and the exchange of Hajj-related objects have changed over time. The chapters in the first part of the book discuss religious, social, and political meanings of the Hajj. Here the relationship is addressed between the significance of pilgrimage to Mecca for the religious lives of individuals and groups and the wider contexts that they are embedded in. Together, these anthropological contributions provide insights into the effects on Hajj practices and meanings for present-day Muslims caused by current dimensions of globalisation processes. The second part of the book takes material expressions of the Hajj as its starting point. It explores what Hajj-related artefacts can tell us about the import of pilgrimage in the daily lives of Muslims in the past and present. The contributions in this part of the volume point out that Mecca has always been a cosmopolitan city and the nodal point of global interactions far exceeding religious activities. Together, the chapters in this book depict the Hajj ritual as a living tradition. Each with its own focus, the various contributions testify to the fact that, while the rites that make up the Hajj were formulated and recorded in normative texts in early Islam, details in the actual performance and interpretations of these rites are by no means static, but rather have evolved over time in tandem with changing socio-political circumstances.

From Belonging to Belief presents a nuanced ethnographic study of Islam and secularism in post-Soviet Central Asia, as seen from the small town of Bazaar-Korgon in southern Kyrgyzstan. Opening with the juxtaposition of a statue of Lenin and a mosque in the town square, Julie McBrien proceeds to peel away the multiple layers that have shaped the return of public Islam in the region. She explores belief and nonbelief, varying practices of Islam, discourses of extremism, and the role of the state, to elucidate the everyday experiences of Bazaar-Korgonians. McBrien shows how Islam is explored, lived, and debated in both conventional and novel sites: a Soviet-era cleric who continues to hold great influence; popular television programs; religious instruction at wedding parties; clothing; celebrations; and others. Through ethnographic research, McBrien reveals how moving toward Islam is not a simple step but rather a deliberate and personal journey of experimentation, testing, and knowledge acquisition. Moreover she argues that religion is not always a matter of belief - sometimes it is essentially about belonging. From Belonging to Belief offers an important corrective to studies that focus only on the pious turns among Muslims in Central Asia, and instead shows the complex process of evolving religion in a region that has experienced both Soviet atheism and post-Soviet secularism, each of which has profoundly formed the way Muslims interpret and live Islam.

This collection of papers from a project of the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan, unites anthropologists in an international collaborative effort to reexamine the dynamics of family, ethnicity, and the nation-state in China and in overseas Chinese society. Using ethnographic fieldwork, this book sheds light on the interactions between state, society, and identity through a variety of channels, such as family, lineage, kinship or quasi-kinship network, national frameworks such as religion association, Minority Autonomous Regions, and ethnic dress. This research demonstrates that even for the same cultural phenomenon, the discourses at the common, the elite, and the institutional levels will be adjusted based on the needs of the social context, market economy, and global networks.

This is a study of a unique collection of Inner Mongolian artifacts at the National Museum of Denmark. They are described, analyzed and presented in a catalogue of more than 800 items, documenting the daily life of pastoral society in and around the tent, in the herding of the animals, in caravan trade and in hunting, crafts, sports and games, and in ritual life. Information about the objects was obtained during two expeditions to Inner Mongolia in the 1930s led by the Danish author Henning Haslund-Christensen, who had many years’ experience of travel and expedition life in Mongolia. This is also a detailed account of the expeditions; of the routes, means and measures, as well as the worries and hopes of the participants; of their struggles with scientific aspirations; and of the conditions for collecting against the backdrop of the Chinese civil war and the Japanese occupation. The First and Second Danish Expeditions to Central Asia took place in 1936–1937 and 1938–1939 respectively. These expeditions were the sole foreign parties with access to the area at the time, and therefore their members were among the few observers of Inner Mongolian pastoral society at a time and place for which information was, and still is, scant and fragmented. Hence, the material objects and data obtained are of great scientific importance in the documentation of the life and material culture of Inner Mongolian herders in the 1930s – the main subject of the present book.

Anthropology's engagement with art has a complex and uneven history. While material culture, 'decorative art', and art styles were of major significance for founding figures such as Alfred Haddon and Franz Boas, art became marginal as the discipline turned towards social analysis in the 1920s. This book addresses a major moment of renewal in the anthropology of art in the 1960s and 1970s. British anthropologist Anthony Forge (1929-1991), trained in Cambridge, undertook fieldwork among the Abelam of Papua New Guinea in the late 1950s and 1960s, and wrote influentially, especially about issues of style and meaning in art. His powerful, questioning-raising arguments addressed basic issues, asking why so much art was produced in some regions, and why was it so socially important? Fifty years later, art has renewed global significance, and anthropologists are again considering both its local expressions among Indigenous peoples and its new global circulation. In this context, Forge's arguments have renewed relevance: they help scholars and students understand the genealogies of current debates, and remind us of fundamental questions that remain unanswered. This volume brings together Forge's most important writings on the anthropology of art, published over a thirty year period, together with six assessments of his legacy, including extended reappraisals of Sepik ethnography, by distinguished anthropologists from Australia, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Anthony Forge was born in London in 1929. A student at Downing College, Cambridge, he studied anthropology with Edmund Leach, and went on to undertake research with Raymond Firth at the London School of Economics. Over 1958-63 he undertook several periods of fieldwork among the Abelam of the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, made major collections for the Museum der Kulturen, Basel, and went on to write a series of essays which were enormously influential for the anthropology of art and for studies of Melanesia. He was appointed Foundation Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University in 1974 and taught there until his death in 1991.