This collection of essays begins with the premise that violence, in its relationship to order, is a central element of history. Taking a broad definition of violence, including structural and symbolic violence, the contributions move beyond the problematic of civilization’s mitigating or foundational role, instead seeing violence as inherently social, and, perhaps, socially inherent (if variable). The question then becomes what forms of harm are authorized or banned in which social orders and how they change over time. Beginning with a theoretical introduction, this interdisciplinary volume includes seven papers representing cultural anthropology, history, archaeology and international relations. The papers range from China to the Americas and from the 2nd millennium BCE to the 21st century CE. Some deal with long-term developments while others focus on a single time and place. Many treat the issue of the visibility/invisibility of violence, while all in one way or another deal with the role of violence in the re-production of community. Together, the volume aims to paint, with a few strokes, the outlines of a deep historical anthropology of social violence. The volume is based on the proceedings of a symposium hosted at Brown University.

How can stories and legends, written and oral, help people suffering from severe traumas or harsh conditions, now or in the past? Can storytelling help us sort out our innermost feelings and troubles? This deeply human subject is relevant not only to practitioners of psychotherapy, but to all of us, as we sometimes go through difficult times in life. In this book a cross-disciplinary group of researchers examine the ways in which narrative might aid in coping with difficult situations in life, and with the emotions that these situations engender. Starting with an introduction to basic narrative theories and the therapeutic effects of storytelling, the book then moves on to a series of lucid case studies. The authors present a diversity of material such as blogs, poetry, magazines, memoirs, and oral accounts from Antiquity to the present. Authors from several different disciplines make for a diversity of perspectives. The authors specialise in folkloristics, psychology, writing studies, poetry therapy, and classical studies. Psychologists, social workers, researchers, therapists -- all can benefit from this book, including everyone interested in the possibility of inner exploration through stories.

‘Authenticity’ and authentication is at the heart of museums’ concerns in displays, objects, and interaction with visitors. These notions have formed a central element in early thought on culture and collecting. Nineteenth century-explorers, commissioned museum collectors and pioneering ethnographers attempted to lay bare the essences of cultures through collecting and studying objects from distant communities. Comparably, historical archaeology departed from the idea that cultures were discrete bounded entities, subject to divergence but precisely therefore also to be traced back and linked to, a more complete original form in the (even) deeper past.Much of what we work with today in ethnographic museum collections testifies to that conviction. Post-structural thinking brought about a far-reaching deconstruction of the authentic. It came to be recognized that both far-away communities and the deep past can only be discussed when seen as desires, constructions and inventions.Notwithstanding this undressing of the ways in which people portray their cultural surroundings and past, claims of authenticity and quests for authentication remain omnipresent. This book explores the authentic in contemporary ethnographic museums, as it persists in dialogues with stakeholders, and how museums portray themselves. How do we interact with questions of authenticity and authentication when we curate, study artefacts, collect, repatriate, and make (re)presentations? The contributing authors illustrate the divergent nature in which the authentic is brought into play, deconstructed and operationalized. Authenticity, the book argues, is an expression of a desire that is equally troubled as it is resilient.Published in co-operation with the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden.

The U.S. South is a distinctive political and cultural force -- not only in the eyes of Americans, but also in the estimation of many Europeans. The region played a distinctive role as a major agricultural center and the source of much of the wealth in early America, but it has also served as a catalyst for the nation's only civil war, and later, as a battleground in violent civil rights conflicts. Once considered isolated and benighted by the international community, the South has recently evoked considerable interest among popular audiences and academic observers on both sides of the Atlantic.In

The cathedral-like Niah Caves of Sarawak (Borneo) have iconic status in the archaeology of Southeast Asia, due to the excavations by Tom and Barbara Harrisson in the 1950s and 1960s which revealed the longest sequence of human occupation in the region, from (we now know) 50,000 years ago to the recent past. This book is the first of two volumes describing the results of new work in the caves by a multi-disciplinary team of archaeologists and geographers aimed at clarifying the many questions raised by the earlier work. This volume is a closely integrated account of how the old and new work combines to provide profound new insights into the prehistory of the region: the strategies developed by our species to live in rainforests from the time of first arrival; how rainforest foragers engaged in forms of ‘vegeculture’ thousands of years before rice farming; and how rice farming represented profound transformations in the social (and spiritual? ) lives of rainforest dwellers, far more than being the dietary staple that it is today.

Since the days of the Spanish Conquest, the indigenous populations of Andean Bolivia have struggled to preserve their textile-based writings. This struggle continues today, both in schools and within the larger culture. The Metamorphosis of Heads explores the history and cultural significance of Andean textile writings--weavings and kipus (knotted cords), and their extreme contrasts in form and production from European alphabet-based texts. Denise Arnold examines the subjugation of native texts in favor of European ones through the imposition of homogenized curricula by the Educational Reform Law. As Arnold reveals, this struggle over language and education directly correlates to long-standing conflicts for land ownership and power in the region, since the majority of the more affluent urban population is Spanish speaking, while indigenous languages are spoken primarily among the rural poor. The Metamorphosis of Heads acknowledges the vital importance of contemporary efforts to maintain Andean history and cultural heritage in schools, and shows how indigenous Andean populations have incorporated elements of Western textual practices into their own textual activities.Based on extensive fieldwork over two decades, and historical, anthropological, and ethnographic research, Denise Arnold assembles an original and richly diverse interdisciplinary study. The textual theory she proposes has wider ramifications for studies of Latin America in general, while recognizing the specifically regional practices of indigenous struggles in the face of nation building and economic globalization.

Global Ancestors is a collection of papers which reflect on modern museological responses to the often complex and emotive relationship that people have with the ancestors and objects which they created. Set out in three broad themes, the first collection of papers explore how indigenous peoples are represented in museums in Panama and China and how more can be gained by working with indigenous communities to further our understanding of the ancestors. The second section examines changes in British and American museological thinking regarding the repatriation of human remains and objects to indigenous peoples, focusing in particular on the impact of legislation on western institutions and the expectations of indigenous communities and alternative religious groups. These issues are explored through case studies involving material from the British Museum and Glasgow Museum. The final section explores the ways in which archaeologists and indigenous communities interact. These chapters illustrate, through case studies from South Africa, Finland and Canada, how both groups have worked together for their mutual benefit or to change the majority viewpoint. Global Ancestors represents the beginnings of a more inclusive and shared understanding between different constituencies and points the way forward to a time when we can consider the ancestors truly ‘global’.

Cultural history tends to elude positive definition. It deals in some sense with culture, and with history, combined in a creative and often critical analysis. But its strength and analytical potential is to be found in its slipperiness, in its critical attitude to authoritative categorisation, and its relentless movement towards new angles, new spaces beyond the evident and the canonical. This volume has sprung out of the Research School for Studies in Cultural History at the Faculty of Humanities of Stockholm University, a five-year interdisciplinary research programme focusing on interplays between past and present. The Research School has provided a productive space for border-crossing academic enterprises. And as a result, the seventeen essays of this volume display just as many innovative approaches to traditional academic subjects such as celebrity, literary genre, prehistoric remains, television, and historic monuments. All stem from unexpected combinations and sliding perspectives, focusing on obscure corners and gaps between the illuminated centres of traditional academic knowledge. From such sliding perspectives follows the realisation that all narratives, representations, and claims of culture and history are in some sense political. The seventeen essays in this volume demonstrate how a shifting kaleidoscope of the academic subjects makes new knowledge possible, and enables the formulation of new critical questions. Challenging, disturbing, inspirational, these essays all make cultural history.

More than evoking chills down the spine and cautious glances over one's shoulder, spooky stories create lasting bonds and memories between friends and family. The tradition of storytelling ties generations together with exciting new tales and familiar folklore that has sparked superstitions and legends.In Kentucky Hauntings: Homespun Ghost Stories and Unexplained History, beloved storytellers Roberta Simpson Brown and Lonnie E. Brown present a thrilling collection of paranormal tales that will appeal to anyone looking for a friendly scare. Weaving together factual accounts of unexplained events, peculiar headlines, and local legends passed down from a time when most homes lacked electricity, Kentucky Hauntings combines stories with commentary on historic customs. From "telling the bees" about a death in the family, to a friendly "fool's errand" practical joke gone horribly wrong, and from terrifying haunted houses to the lifesaving "Bathtub Ghost," readers are transported to a world of age-old superstitions and paranormal experiences. Whether shared around the fire on a crisp autumn night or whispered in a huddle of close friends at a summer sleepover, these eerie stories will thrill and excite anyone who loves a good scare.

Engendering objects explores social and cultural dynamics among Maisin people in Collingwood Bay (Papua New Guinea) through the lens of material culture. Focusing upon the visually stimulating decorated barkcloths that are used as male and female garments, gifts, and commodities, it explores the relationships between these cloths and Maisin people. The main question is how barkcloth, as an object made by women, engenders people’s identities, such as gender, personhood, clan and tribe, through its manufacturing and use. This book describes in detail how barkcloth (tapa) not only visualizes and expresses, but also materializes and defines, people’s multiple identities. By ‘following the object’ and how it is made and used in the performance of life-cycle rituals, in exchanges and in church festivities, this interaction between people and things, and how they are mutually constituted, becomes visible. How are women’s bodies and minds linked with the production of barkcloth? How do cloths produced by women both establish and contest clan identity? In what ways is the commodification of barkcloth related to gender dynamics? Barkcloth and its associated designs show how gender ideologies and the socio-material constructions of identity are performed and, as such, developed, established and contested.The narratives of both men and women reveal the ways in which barkcloth provides a link with the past and dreams for the future. The author argues that the cloths and their designs embody dynamics of Maisin culture and in particular of Maisin gender relations. In contributing to the current debates on the anthropology of ‘art’, this study offers an alternative way of understanding the significance of an object, like decorated barkcloth, in shaping and defining people’s identities within a local colonial and postcolonial setting of Papua New Guinea.“Engendering Objects is among the most comprehensive and innovative new works emerging from Melanesia examining the intimate connections between material culture, cultural identity and gendered personhood. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and examination of museum collections, Anna-Karina Hermkens traces the enduring yet innovative place of tapa (barkcloth) among the Maisin people. Written with warm compassion and immediacy, the book is a theoretically provocative, accessible and compelling portrait of changing life in a Papua New Guinean village society.” – John Barker, University of British Columbia“This book makes a most welcome contribution to the study of the materiality by showing how gender is performed in the sensuous terms of clothing, food, and the exchange of objects. Anna-Karina Hermkens accomplishes this with enviable care and intellectual resources, and a prose and ethnography that make the book a pleasure to read.” – David Morgan, Duke University“Anna-Karina Hermkens takes us to look at designs on bark cloth from Papua New Guinea through a magnifying glass. A fascinating perspective on material culture evolves. Beyond the art work we discover individuals – mainly women – painting their stories about who they and their beloved are as women and men, as traditional members of a clan, and also what they head for as strugglers in a new economy driven world.” – Christian Kaufmann, Honorary Research Associate, Sainsbury Reseach Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich UK, former curator for Oceania at the Museum der Kulturen BaselAbout the author:Anna-Karina Hermkens obtained her PhD in Cultural Anthropology in 2005 from Radboud University Nijmegen. She is currently working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the ‘College of Asia and the Pacific’ of the Australian National University in Canberra Australia.

This is one of the first ventures to explore the relationship between social science and society in historical, sociological and global perspective. What impact has the research in these areas had on society? How are research fields established and to what ends? This book is a compilation of articles by an international and multidisciplinary group of scholars. The authors analyse the practical making and discursive aspects of social scientific knowledge and examples are drawn from a broad range of disciplines such as sociology, psychology, economics, and gender studies. The overall aim of the book is to encourage a contextual and reflexive understanding of the complex relationship between the social sciences and society. The bonds of the past and today are made up by reciprocity and involve key elements such as gender and power, science and politics, academic boundaries and global power relations. The book should be of interest to researchers, graduate students or anyone else interested in understanding and reflecting upon the uses, roles and functions of social science in today's globalised world.

Can a society, a culture, a country, be trapped by its own memories? The question is not easy to answer, but it would not be a bad idea to cautiously say: ‘It depends’. This book is about one society – Rwanda – and its culture, traditions, identities, and memories. More specifically, it discusses some of the ways in which ethnic identities and related memories constitute a deadly trap that needs to be torn apart if mass violence is to be eradicated in that country. It looks into everyday cultural practices such as child naming and oral traditions (myths and tales, proverbs, war poetry etc.) and into political practices that govern the ways in which citizens conceptualise the past.Rwanda was engulfed in a bloody war from 1990 until 1994, the last episode of which was a genocide that claimed about a million lives amongst the Tutsi minority. This book – the first in the Memory Traps series – provides a new understanding of how a seemingly quiet society can suddenly turn into a scene of the most horrible inter-ethnic crimes. It offers an analysis of the complexities and dangers resulting from the ways in which memories are managed both at a personal level and at a collective level.The main point is that Rwandans have become hostages of their memories of the long-gone and the recent past. The book shows how these memories follow ethnic lines and lead to a state of cultural hypocrisy on the one hand, and to permanent conflict – either open and brutal, or latent and beneath the surface – on the other hand. Written from a memory studies perspective and informed by critical theory, philosophy, literature, [oral] history, and psychology, amongst others, this book deals with some controversial subjects and deconstructs some of the received ideas about the recent and the long-gone past of Rwanda.About the author:Olivier Nyirubugara is a lecturer of New Media and Online Journalism at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (Erasmus University Rotterdam). In 2011, he completed a PhD in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam with a dissertation entitled Surfing the Past: Digital Learners in the History Class, in which he empirically explored ways in which pupils use the Web to find historical information. Nyirubugara has also been practicing journalism since 2002 and has been training and coaching journalists in mobile reporting in Africa since 2007.

The case of Deir Alla is a social and economic case study of developing Third World agriculture. The study is based upon historical sources, contemporary public information with statistics, and field work in the Jordanian village of Deir Alla. This fieldwork took place in 1986 and a report was prepared in 1989. For this publication additional field work in 1997 accounted for the rapidly changing social and economic situation.The Ottoman feudal system, with the local harrath (ploughman) economy, changed gradually to private ownership since 1936, affecting the social relations of production. From 1950 onwards this development was strongly influenced by a sudden population increase (Palestinian refugees), the East Ghor irrigation system, the strong promotion of vegetable production and new technologies and institutions. Share cropping became the dominant feature of agrarian relations, but during the last decades international migrant labour expanded the wage labour system.Some types of production organization, such as the small-owner-family-labour system, proved to be more successful than others, but with the current difficult economic situation the debt trap is felt by many of these small owners.The book is important for the understanding of the social and economic history of the region, showing the dynamics of social change, but also because of its thorough analysis of the current situation, assessing theoretical models and predicting developments in a rapidly changing agricultural world.Mohamed Fayez Tarawneh is Associate Professor at Yarmouk University, specialized in the Anthropology of development and particularly interested in rural development and social change. Furthermore, he is the general manager of the Hashemite Fund for the Development of Jordan Badia. Some of his major publications concern a historical and social geographic study of the Jordanian town and countryside of Kerak, the participatory development in Wadi Araba and Poverty in Jordan.

Renowned as one of the most distinguished universities in the world, Peking University (PKU or, colloquially, "Beida") has been at the forefront of higher education in China since its inception. Its roots arguably date to the origin of Chinese higher education. Hao Ping traces the intricate evolution of the university, beginning with the preceding institutions that contributed to its establishment, and stretching from the first Opium War of 1839 through the first of several eye-opening defeats for the then-isolated Middle Kingdom to the Xinhai Revolution and the early days of the Republic of China. Hao Ping chronicles the contentious debates between reform-minded leaders who championed Western models of learning and conservatives who favored the traditional schooling and examination system, providing readers with details about the workings of the imperial court as well as the individual officials and scholars involved in Chinese educational reform. This authoritative history of the founding of Peking University defends the university's claim to be the first modern university in China and offers insight into the formation of higher education as it exists in China today.

The British Museums uniquely important Melanesian collection is pre-eminent among early collections, and the 20,000 items it comprises are core to understanding the cultures of the western Pacific. The extraordinary art styles represented, from groups such as New Guinea, New Ireland and the Solomon Islands and relating to ancestors, family and clan, houses, feasting and festivals, are of interest not only in themselves but also for how they have influenced European artists since the nineteenth century. With contributions from a wide range of international scholars, anthropologists, indigenous peoples and artists, and illustrated with over 300 colour images of Museum objects and contextual photographs, the book will survey and respond to the collection from the point of view of anthropologists and the people responsible for its creation. Melanesia is a visual and key reference work, providing illuminating encounters with the historical and contemporary cultures of the western Pacific, documenting the most culturally diverse and artistically fertile region in the world for the first time.

This book is an ambitious project uniting various fields in a multidisciplinary venture drawing on academics and clinicians from medicine, psychology and educational sciences. The interdisciplinary approach has assembled medical, educational and health specialists - many of whom are a rare assemble of outstanding academics and clinicians - with scholarly contributions from many different countries and institutes. It provides a plethora of essays and reviews by clinicians and academics, many contributions self-confessional, disclosing details of their own personal pain and suffering with critical life events including either physical or psychological illnesses, and a description of their own resources and strengths. There are also chapters provided by academics with creative and novel ideas drawing on insight derived from literature, arts and psychology as well as medicine, creating models for encouraging personal development coping despite adversity and eventually finding meaning towards recovery both physically and psychologically. This process of recovery frequently required the support of trusted families and friends, teachers, and fellow physicians and psychologists, enabling them to pursue interesting and outstanding careers "despite" these apparent disadvantages. The authors are all very reflective, providing good advice for young practitioners and "afflicted" alike. The distinguished contributors show the power of the role of psycho-history and biography in understanding who researchers have been influenced by, and what and why. This book will be useful for practitioners and researchers, but also for laymen and social policy makers. The intended readership thus includes those interested in health psychology, sociology, anthropology, public health and mental health sciences.