Animals were vital to the British colonization of Myanmar. In this pathbreaking history of British imperialism in Myanmar from the early nineteenth century to 1942, Jonathan Saha argues that animals were impacted and transformed by colonial subjugation. By examining the writings of Burmese nationalists and the experiences of subaltern groups, he also shows how animals were mobilized by Burmese anticolonial activists in opposition to imperial rule. In demonstrating how animals - such as ele...

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remai...

If you want to know what anthropology is, look at what anthropologists do. This Very Short Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology combines an accessible account of some of the disciplines guiding principles and methodology with abundant examples and illustrations of anthropologists at work. Peter Just and John Monaghan begin by discussing anthropologys most important contributions to modern thought: its investigation of culture as a distinctively human character...

What is anthropology? What can it tell us about culture and the world around us? And why do we need it?For well over one hundred years, social and cultural anthropologists have traversed the world from Melanesia to suburban England, Taipei to Wall Street, uncovering surprising facts, patterns, predilections and, sometimes, the inexplicable, in terms of how humans organize their lives and articulate their values. By weaving together theories and examples from around the world, Matth...

A familiar cultural presence for people the world over, “the whiteman” has come to personify the legacy of colonialism, the face of Western modernity, and the force of globalization. Focusing on the cultural meanings of whitemen in the Orokaiva society of Papua New Guinea, this book provides a fresh approach to understanding how race is symbolically constructed and why racial stereotypes endure in the face of counterevidence.While Papua New Guinea’s resident white population has be...

This book tells the story of the Hakka Chinese in Sarawak, Malaysia, who were targeted as communists or communist sympathizers because of their Chinese ethnicity the 1960s and 1970s. Thousands of these rural Hakkas were relocated into “new villages” surrounded by barbed wire or detained at correction centres, where incarcerated people were understood to be “sacrificial gifts” to the war on communism and to the rule of Malaysia’s judicial-administrative regime.The Hakkas of Sara...

‘Remains among the most brilliant summaries of key ideas animating anthropology. In his famously accessible writing style, Eriksen introduces fundamental questions that shape human life, and provides an overview of the discipline’s contribution to the pressing issues of our times. A must-read’ Ursula Rao, Director, Anthropology of Politics and Governance, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology‘This is not just another book in the library of anthropolo...

Citizenship from Below boldly revises the history of the struggles for freedom by emancipated peoples in post-slavery Jamaica, post-independence Haiti, and the wider Caribbean by focusing on the interplay between the state, the body, race, and sexuality. Mimi Sheller offers a new theory of "citizenship from below" to describe the contest between "proper" spaces of legitimate high politics and the disavowed politics of lived embodiment. While acknowledging the internal contradictio...

For a time it was almost a cliche to say that anthropology was a handmaiden of colonialism - by which was usually meant 'Western' colonialism. And this insinuation was assumed to somehow weaken the theoretical claims of anthropology and its fieldwork achievements. What this collection demonstrates is that colonialism was not only a Western phenomenon, but 'Eastern' as well. And that Japanese or Chinese anthropologists were also engaged in studying subject peoples. But wherever they were an...

Education has long been a cornerstone of Chinese culture. Traditional Chinese norms have also held that the less education and exposure to influence from outside the home a girl had, the more likely she would be to remain true to conventional domestic values and to remain morally upright. In the mid-nineteenth century, overseas Chinese communities encountered a new perspective via Western European and American missionary schools. Formal education could be not just helpful but integral to p...

The first concerted critical examination of the uses and abuses of indigenous knowledge. The contributors focus on a series of interrelated issues in their interrogation of indigenous knowledge and its specific applications within the localised contexts of particular Asian societies and regional cultures. In particular they explore the problems of translation and mistranslation in the local-global transference of traditional practices and representations of resources.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2009!This book examines three big ideas: difference, legitimacy, and pluralism. Of chief concern is how people construe and deal with variation among fellow human beings. Why under certain circumstances do people embrace even sanctify differences, or at least begrudgingly tolerate them, and why in other contexts are people less receptive to difference, sometimes overtly hostile to it and bent on its eradication? What are the cultur...