Public policy and governance frontiers in new zealand

New Zealand is widely regarded as a leader in public policy and governance reforms and innovations, being an early adopted of New Public Management, a leader in e-government and transparency. Discussing reforms including those in policy areas such as well-being, sustainability, environmental mana...

Social sciences

Are the social sciences a dying fire? This book skilfully lays out how, apart from their misguided approach to knowledge production and specializations, social sciences continue to remain prisoners of a prescribed historical, cultural and anthropogenic narrative.

Malleable, digital, and posthuman

This book proposes a posthumanist research methodology for future research in the areas of the economy, the human self, politics, and research ethics, providing a novel explanatory and methodological framework for studying today's world.

Donors

Drawing on interviews with donors, their kin and fertility counsellors, the authors discuss what donation stories can tell us about contemporary understandings of connectedness, time and morality in the context of reproduction and family life, and consider how reproductive ‘openness’ might be don...

Technologies of reproduction across the lifecourse

This book presents a dialogue between scholars on different aspects of reproductive technologies. If we continue to work in disciplinary silos, reproductive studies is in danger of missing, and thereby reproducing, the kinds of power structures that shape reproductive life.

Exploring australian national identity

This book examines the influence of historical and popular figures on the way Australians see themselves in the 21st century. Investigating whether colonial figures such as convicts and bushrangers still influence contemporary Australian identity, and how the influence of sports figures, politici...

The language of illness and death on social media

This book investigates the language created in Facebook groups that relate shared experiences of illness, dying and mourning. It develops a theoretical and analytical framework for understanding the use and rhythms of emojis, interjections and other forms of “intensive” writing in social media of...

A history of the assessment of sex offenders

There are many varieties of procedures to assess criminal and sex offenders that have emerged throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. This book is an attempt to bridge that gap, to provide some historical background of sex offender assessment from 1830 to the present.

Australian metal music

This book explores heavy metal music in Australia, engaging with the nuanced ways in which metal music, scenes and cultures are experienced. Leading metal scholars and active scene members examine the diversity of practices, histories and identities within Australian metal music, and question wha...

Theorizing the sharing economy

This volume takes advantage of this opportunity by presenting a collection of empirical and conceptual work that explores the variety and the trajectories of new forms of organizing in the sharing economy, and in doing so builds on, rejuvenates, and refines existing organization theories.

Borders across healthcare

Borders across Healthcare explores contemporary moral economies of the healthcare-migration nexus through a scalar and relational perspective. The volume documents the many ways in which borders come to disrupt healthcare settings and illuminates how judgements of a health-related deservingness...

Big capital in an unequal world

Following the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of the elite in Pakistan. In doing so, it reveals the daily, even mundane, ways in which elites contribute to and shape the inequality that characterises the modern world.

Social im/mobilities in africa

Grounded in both theory and ethnography, this volume insists on taking social positionality seriously when accounting for Africa’s current age of polarizing wealth. To this end, the notion of social im/mobilities emphasizes the complexities of current changes, taking us beyond the prism of a un...

Making it count

A history of how Chinese officials used statistics to define a new society in the early years of the People’s Republic of China In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People’s Republic of China was how much they did not know. The gove...

Sovereignty suspended

A journey into de facto state-building based on ethnographic and archival research in the Turkish Republic of Northern CyprusWhat is de facto about the de facto state? In Sovereignty Suspended, this question guides Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay through a journey into de facto state-building, or t...

The doctor and mrs. a.

In the 1940’s, the young Punjabi “Mrs. A.” reflected on sexuality, gender, and struggle in a dream analysis with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand, drawing on Hindu myth to conceive a better, socialist future. An unconventional history of gender and sexuality in late colonialism, this book reminds us t...

Critique of identity thinking

Michael Jackson’s response to our beleaguered age is to ask what forms of speech and action are called for in ‘dark times’. He argues that experiences that fall outside the concepts and categories we habitually deploy in rendering life manageable and intelligible have both critical and redempti...

Birds of passage

Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Malta, this book traces the complex interactions between hunters, birds and the landscapes they inhabit, as well as the dynamics and politics of bird conservation. Birds of Passage looks at the practice and meaning of hunting in a specific context, ...

Islands of order

Two pioneering anthropologists reveal how complexity science can help us better understand how societies change over timeOver the past two decades, anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing and geneticist Murray Cox have explored dozens of villages on the islands of the Malay Archipelago, combining ethno...

Hidden heretics

A revealing look at Jewish men and women who secretly explore the outside world, in person and online, while remaining in their ultra-Orthodox religious communities What would you do if you questioned your religious faith, but revealing that would cause you to lose your family and the only way of...

Morality at the margins

What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim? Documenting everyday life in Lamu (Kenya), this book explores the mundane practices of behavior and speech that create moral personhood. In elaborating everyday practices of Islamic pluralism, the book shows how Muslim societies critically engage...

Financialization

The preacher's wife

From the New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved, a fascinating look at the world of Christian women celebritiesSince the 1970s, an important new figure has appeared on the center stage of American evangelicalism—the celebrity preacher's wif...

Beyond filial piety

This volume explores emerging cultural meanings and social responses to population aging in contemporary East Asian societies. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, policy, archival, and media data, the authors trace both common patterns and diverging trends across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sin...

Textures of the ordinary

Textures of the Ordinary shows how life is marked not only by catastrophic events but also by the soft knife of economic deprivation and the repetitive corrosions and routine violence within everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attenti...

Hacking diversity

A firsthand look at efforts to improve diversity in software and hackerspace communitiesHacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by...

Fierce medicines, fragile socialities

Comprehensive ethnographic case studies of people living with HIV and ARVs. In-depth observations of the infrastructural conditions and social dynamics shaping day-to-day work routines at Tanzanian HIV treatment centers. Focus on the financial and infrastructural fragilities of treat...

Crossing histories and ethnographies

Presents novel combinations of archival and ethnographic methods in the study of colonial historicities; Offers new perspectives on how to critically connect oral accounts, ethnography, and colonial archives; Brings together an international community of scholars who have conducted e...

The philosophers' gift

For philosophers, the gift fascinates because it demands disinterested generosity. Yet anthropology offers another view. Reciprocity, rather than disinterestedness, Hénaff shows, is central to ceremonial giving, alliance, and the social bond. From actual gift practices, Hénaff develops an origina...

The tongue-tied imagination

Winner, 2021 African Literature Association First Book AwardShould a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputatio...

The disabled church

How do communities consent to difference? How do they recognize and create the space and time necessary for the differences and disabilities of those who constitute them? Christian congregations often make assumptions about the shared abilities, practices, and experiences that are necessary for c...

The five hundred year rebellion

How history—spoken, written, visual, broadcast, and shared—has supported five centuries of indigenous Bolivian resistance.

People's car

People's Car studies divergent populist responses to land acquisition for industries in rural India. It contends that landownership enables small landowners to aspire and look forward to social mobility in the non-farm sector, which are contingent upon industrialization. The protests against land...

The revolution we expected

The Revolution We Expected presents a call for individual and societal transformation in order to rebuild and humanize our institutions and our communities to realize a post-patriarchal world and elevated consciousness as a global community.In his last work as an author, celebrated doctor and psy...

Going to pentecost

This is an experimental approach to Pentecostalism, departing from previous studies;  It is explicitly comparative, with very close collaboration amongst the three authors;  It offers new possibilities for the study of religion in global context

Indianthusiasm

Indianthusiasm brings together interviews with twelve Indigenous authors, artists and scholars who comment on the German fascination with North American Indigenous Peoples.

Being bedouin around petra

Takes an ethnographic approach to understanding everyday life of the Bedouin as heritage in contemporary Jordan. Exemplifies the materiality of heritage proclamations and religious transformations. Demonstrates the complex entanglements of Islamic revival, tourism, heritage managemen...

Murujuga

A fascinating case study of the archaeological site at Murujuga, AustraliaLocated in the Dampier Archipelago of Western Australia, Murujuga is the single largest archaeological site in the world. It contains an estimated one million petroglyphs, or rock art motifs, produced by the Indigenous Aust...

What is culture for?

What is culture really for? How to find compassion, hope and perspective in the arts. Many people search for the meaning of life through music, film, literature and the visual arts. But how can we synthesize the emotions we feel through art? This book looks at how works of culture were made - tha...

Making bodies kosher

Integrates archival and ethnographic material to explore healthcare concerns over time  Original study of Haredi Jews in the UK, whereas most focus on Israel or the USA  Explores the continuum of maternity care & child health in a ‘hard to reach’ minority

Where the gods reign

Where the Gods Reign is a magnificent book by one of the greatest ethnobotanical explorers known to this century. It is an essential for those interested in cultural anthropology, ethnobotany, and the Amazon in general.

Watch me play

A look at the revolution in game live streaming and esports broadcastingEvery day thousands of people broadcast their gaming live to audiences over the internet using popular sites such as Twitch, which reaches more than one hundred million viewers a month. In these new platforms for interactive ...

Changing our minds

Changing Our Minds tells you everything that you ought to know about the multi-faceted paradigm of psychedelic research and spiritual practices.

Vine of the soul

Vine of the Soul is an exceptional photographic essay accompanied by detailed descriptions of the Amazonians’ use of medicinal and other sacred plant substances. Over 160 documentary photos, some of the most signifi cant ever taken on the subject, bring the reader along a journey to a world in wh...

Cultural techniques

This volume designates a shift within posthumanistic media studies, that dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations, that reproduce, process and reflect the distinctions that are fundamental for a given culture, e.g. the anthropological difference, the distinctions between natura...

Dancing jacobins

Since independence from Spain, a trope has remained pervasive in Latin America’s republican imaginary: that of an endless antagonism pitting civilization against barbarism as irreconcilable poles within which a nation’s life unfolds. This book apprehends that trope not just as the phantasmatic pr...

Upside-down gods

Human survival requires a reorientation of science away from its exclusive technical and materialist premises focused on control, towards feedback and relational processes of organism-plus-environment. Gregory Bateson’s holistic approach unites culture, communication, psychology, biology and ecol...

The blind man

The Blind Man: A Phantasmography examines the complicated forces of perception, imagination, and phantasms of encounter in the contemporary world. In considering photographs he took while he was traveling in France, anthropologist and writer Robert Desjarlais reflects on a few pictures that show ...

Bad stories

If you’re one of the millions of Americans lying awake at night, asking yourself, How did we get here? you need to read Bad Stories. In a short, sharp lamentation, New York Times bestselling author Steve Almond explains why the election of a cruel con artist was not only possible, but inevitable.

The ethnography of rhythm

A history of the concept of orality (that is, the creation and transmission of literary works without the use of writing), this book shows awareness of this medium emerging from the encounter of many literary and scientific developments (romanticism, post-symbolism, structuralism; physiology, psy...