Law and Empire in the Pacific
Fiji and Hawai`i
Focusing on the intimate relationship between law, culture, and the production of social knowledge, these essays re-center law in social theory. The authors analyze the transition from chiefdom to capitalism, colonizers' racial and governmental ideologies, land and labor policies, and contemporary efforts to recuperate indigenous culture and assert or maintain indigenous sovereignty. Speaking to Fijian and Hawaiian circumstances, this volume illuminates the role of legal and archival practice in constructing ethnic and political identities and producing colonial and anthropological knowledge.
American Arrivals
Anthropology Engages the New Immigration
Soaring immigration to the United States in the past few decades has reawakened both popular and scholarly interest in this important issue. American Arrivals highlights the important insights of anthropology for the field of migration studies.
Gray Areas
Ethnographic Encounters with Nursing Home Culture
This volume features ten scholars from anthropology, nursing, sociology, gerontology, human geography, and other disciplines who provide ethnographic case studies exploring critical care decision-making, models of care for people with Alzheimer's disease, the way residents cope with the limitations, indignities, and opportunities of nursing home life, the roles of family members and nursing home employees, and the formulation of assisted living.
Remaking Life and Death
Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences
The boundaries of life now occupy a place of central concern among biological anthropologists. Because of the centrality of the modern biological definition of life to Euro-American medicine and anthropology, the definition of life itself and its contestation exemplify competing uses of knowledge.
Tikal: Dynasties, Foreigners, and Affairs of State
Advancing Maya Archaeology
New insights from the Tikal excavations and epigraphic breakthroughs suggest that a thriving marketplace existed in the center of the city, that foreigners comprised a significant element of its populace, and that differences in tomb form and contents signal the changing fortunes of Tikal's rulers.
Catastrophe and Culture
The Anthropology of Disaster
At a time of increasing globalization and worldwide vulnerability, the study of disasters has become an important focus for anthropological research-one where the four fields of anthropology are synthesized to address the multidimensionality of the effects to a community's social structures and relationship to the environment.
The Empire of Things
Regimes of Value and Material Culture
Representing a new wave of thinking about material culture studies-a topic long overdue for reevaluation-the essays in this volume take a fresh look at the relationship between material culture and exchange theory and illuminate the changing patterns of cultural flow in an increasingly global economy and the cultural differences registered in "regimes of value."
Uruk Mesopotamia and Its Neighbors
Cross-cultural Interactions in the Era of State Formation
In Uruk Mesopotamia and Its Neighbors, ten field and theoretical archaeologists working in the area today offer an overview and analysis of new data and interpretations for Greater Mesopotamia during the late fifth and fourth millennia B.C.
Women and Men in the Prehispanic Southwest
Labor, Power, and Prestige
Women and Men in the Prehispanic Southwest takes a groundbreaking look at gendered activities in prehistory and the differential access that women and men had to sources and symbols of power and prestige.
History in Person
Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities
Extended conflict situations in Northern Ireland or South Africa, the local effects of the rise of multinational corporations, and conflicts in workplaces, households, and academic fields are all crucibles for the forging of identities. In this volume, the authors bring their research to bear on enduring struggles and the practices of identity within those struggles. This collection of essays explores the innermost, generative aspects of subjects as social, cultural, and historical beings and raises serious questions about long-term conflicts and sustained identities in the world today.