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Research in mental health is a complex phenomenon that requires the use of more than one technique. It is extremely crucial to study and understand people's perceptions, beliefs, healing practices and coping strategies related to mental health. Stipulating only one between the medical/biomedical and medical anthropology perspectives may not be adequate to understand the dynamics of mental health research. The number of variables and components associated with the respondents and their social environments give diverse results. Research on mental health is very crucial and different from other kinds of health-related researches. Thus, while conducting mental health research, it is important that the researchers be careful in choosing and applying appropriate methodology. It is a very critical field of research, requiring Interdisciplinary research methodological approaches. An eclectic strategy is required to give an innate understanding of the phenomenon of mental health. Studies should follow both anthropological and epidemiological notions to understand human behaviour, for better management and planning of the mental health services. The proposed paper discusses 'cultural epidemiology' as a methodology and explores its contribution to the contemporary mental health research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his book A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, originally published in1934, Jakob von Uexküll argued that all living beings – no matter how simple or complex – had to be understood as subjects, and that the worlds they lived in were constituted through their specific ways of perceiving their Umwelten. This article focuses on an exploration of Uexküll's argument set out in this classic text, considering its relevance for contemporary thought in anthropology that seeks to move beyond the human to embrace more-than-human world making and multispecies perspectives. Despite its largely positive reception in anthropology and other disciplines the paper also points to possible problems and limitations that Uexküll's argument might pose for more-than-human anthropology by considering the ethnographic example of falconry practice in which humans and birds of prey, learn to communicate and cooperate in hunting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change spells the end of tourism, and tourism is just one, and one of the least important, things to be so very near its end. This situation has emerged because of the global dominance of forms of material engagement that completely misunderstand the distribution of agency in the world. Framing the world as just an external human 'resource' diminishes the many forms of agency that elude, transcend, effect, facilitate and subvert human intentions. Even archetypically inanimate objects, such as stones, are actively constitutive of worlds, thoughts, and lives, including human lives, in myriad transformative ways. This lithic agency is illustrated in terms of the attraction that draws some to visit stone circles, and the atmospheres created by, and felt in, such places. This rather different understanding of a 'visitor attraction' and its ontological and ethical implications exposes some of the inadequate presumptions of our dominant form of life and its destructive atmospheric consequences at local and global scales. The paper employs Material Engagement Theory (MET), originating in archaeology and anthropology, as a way to understand the differences between the reductive assumptions of the Anthropocene and the redemptive possibilities of what it terms a neo-lithic ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While underwater archaeology has been practiced for decades, there is a resurgence in the field moving beyond shipwrecks to investigate sites of great antiquity. Over 50 years ago, archaeologists demonstrated that underwater research could be conducted to the same standards as on land and it produced unique data. Beyond data, however, submerged prehistory has contributed little to the theoretical side of archaeology or anthropology despite that fact that submerged landscapes relate to some of the most significant questions in human history. The field of underwater prehistory and its relation to anthropology parallels obstacles faced by terrestrial prehistoric archaeologists in the 1950s–1970s, when archaeology fought to contribute to anthropological theory. Now, submerged prehistory is in a similar boat, it can contribute unique and novel data to address some of not just archaeology's, but anthropology's biggest questions, but its potential has yet to be realized. This paper explores the trajectory of submerged prehistoric research at the start of its integration into anthropology and explores the areas where it is likely to contribute to anthropological theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of GeoHumanities is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Santa Catalina is a Caribbean island in the Colombian archipelago of Providencia y San Andrés, which has been at the centre of a recent territorial dispute between Colombia and Nicaragua that has made the islands central to the geostrategic agenda of the Colombian state in its attempt to reaffirm political alliances with the United States. Within this context, our investigation explores recent processes of archaeological research, heritagisation and tourism promotion on Santa Catalina Island that triggered a conflict between the local raizal population (Afro-descendant, Caribbean, Puritan and English-speaking) and the State (white, Andean, Catholic and Spanish-speaking) around the meaning of two key sites of memory—Fuerte Libertad (Fort Warwick) and the Cabeza de Morgan (Morgan's Head). Drawing on long-term ethnography, this paper reveals how the neoliberal, multicultural state of Colombia has functioned as an investment facilitator and a key actor in transforming ethnic-racial differences into class inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patterns in contemporary conflict highlight the failures of traditional views of the relationship between humanity and technology. This paper proposes that modern conflict is characterized by something called "dissimulation," referring to numerous phenomena together emphasizing the inadequacies of conceiving man as the overseeing creator of technological advancement. It shows rather that man, particularly man in conflict, is always already implicated and concealed within complex technological networks and mediums, wherein humanity is just another player amongst others. This paper diagnoses and defines the condition of "dissimulation" in drone warfare, modern partisanship and terrorism, raising further the question of the conceptualization of a technological object in doing so. It highlights the danger of an observed technological tendency too, particularly in terms of its shaping of contemporary conflict as well as our relationship to space and time. Having considered dissimulation's characteristic phenomena and effects, a strategy for dealing with it is then suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do anthropologists and cultural activists share during ethnographic investigations on heritage-making? What can the association of academics and cultural actors reveal about heritage as a process and heritage as a social fact? This paper draws on an ethnographic study on musical heritage-making in southern Portugal, especially focused on non-governmental associations involved in preserving and promoting traditional and popular music. After sketching out the context of the research, I present two modalities of association within anthropology and cultural activism in order to analyse the extent to which a sense of ease, discomfort or negotiation shape investigation practices in critical heritage studies. Using one local heritage association as an example, I show how social hierarchy, knowledge legitimacy and material techniques of heritage-making function as criteria of the mutual assessment put into practice by the activists and academics present in the field. I also argue that taking the easiness and uneasiness of such ethnographic associations into account helps draw out the ties between morality and materiality of heritage-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A person diagnosed with HIV today might never experience AIDS, nor transmit HIV. Advances in treatment effectiveness and coverage has made the UN 2030 vision for the 'end of AIDS' thinkable. Yet drug adherence and resistance are continuing challenges, contributing to avoidable deaths in high burden African countries, especially among men. The mood of global policy rhetoric is hopeful, though cautious. The mood of people living with HIV struggling to adhere to life-saving medication is harder to capture, but vital to understand. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with a high burden population in Kenya to explore specific socio-economic contexts that lead to a potent mixture of fatalism and ambition among men now in their thirties who came of age during the devastating 1990s AIDS crisis. It seeks to understand why some HIV-positive members of this bio-generation find it hard to take their life-saving medication consistently, gambling with their lives and the lives of others in pursuit of a life that counts. It argues that mood - here understood as a shared generational consciousness and collective affect created by experiencing specific historical moments - should be taken seriously as legitimate evidence in HIV programming decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance that medications can have in people's daily lives at home is self-evident, particularly in the case of chronic therapy. And yet, although medications are often part of daily routines, there is still a relative inertia from a design perspective of innovating medications as "objects" inhabiting the domestic landscape. Healthcare and medication innovations are driven by clinical requirements that deal with health issues, albeit often lacking extensive person-centered consideration. This paper aims to address some concerns about the use of medications at home, in order to convert them into design concerns. To this end, this study takes the form of a literature review that could be of interest to designers committed to forthcoming advancements in the field. Meant as a theoretical paper, it partly revisits and integrates consolidated studies conducted in the anthropology of pharmaceuticals, along with inputs derived from patient-related healthcare literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Anthropology Southern Africa (2332-3256) is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines conversion from "Hinduism" to Christianity in India and in the UK. To date work in this area has focused upon Hindu–Christian conversion among Hindus in India largely focusing upon Dalits. It explores the experience of Hindu Christian conversion through five case studies and focuses upon antecedents and consequences of conversion. It stresses the central role of profound religious experiences in those converting and the resultant disharmony among families and the wider Hindu community. While structural factors may be important for some of these individuals, all have undergone a form of metaphysical and intellectual conversion. The conversion narratives cited suggest that conversion experiences are beneficial psychologically in terms of providing a new sense of meaning, facilitating coping and increasing contentment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, foreign residents constitute more than 88% of the population. This demographic situation is the result of both massive flows of labor migration following the advent of the oil wealth in the late 1960s, and practical limitations in the attribution of nationality which prevent foreign residents from gaining citizenship. This paper offers a look at migration in the Gulf through a different angle, by focusing on second-generation foreigners who are born in Abu Dhabi. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among young men and women of diverse Arab nationalities who all grew up in the city, I show how these young adults craft modes of sociability and daily practices which make use of the interstices of urban space—informal spaces, vacant plots, and parking lots. These practices allow them to build a sense of belonging to the city at a very local scale, thus bypassing the national community to which they do not have access. This locality is also inherently cosmopolitan through being in touch with the cultural and linguistic diversity of Abu Dhabi's residents. Although it is rarely acknowledged as such, I argue that the ordinary cosmopolitanism at play in the shaping of Abu Dhabi's specific locality contributes to shaping young people's subjectivities and their expressions of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few centuries, human activity has wrought dramatic changes in the natural systems that support human life. Planetary health is a useful concept for health profession education (HPE) teaching and practice because it situates health within a broader understanding of the interdependent socio-ecological drivers of human and planetary health. It facilitates novel ways of protecting both population health and the natural environment on which human health and well-being depends. This paper focuses on the climate crisis as an example of the relationship between environmental change, healthcare, and education. We analyze how HPE can help decarbonize the healthcare sector to address both climate change and inequity in health outcomes. Based on the healthcare practitioner's mandate of beneficence, we propose simple learning objectives to equip HPE graduates with the knowledge, skills, and values to create a sustainable health system, using carbon emission reductions as an example. These learning objectives can be integrated into HPE without adding unduly to the curriculum load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a theoretical context for research into ‘the subject of ethics’ in terms of how students come to see themselves as self-reflective actors. I maintain that the ‘subject of ethics’, or ethical subjectivity, has been overlooked as a necessary aspect of creating politically transformative spaces in education. At the heart of egalitarian politics lies a fundamental tension between the equality of voices (or ways of being) and the notion that one way of being or one voice may be deemed more legitimate than another; which in turn puts the equality of beings into question. Building from Michel Foucault’s work regarding ethics and subjectivity, I suggest that a ‘subject of ethics’ can be viewed, in part, as a series of relations of self that form the horizon upon which a subject comes to work on themselves relative to moral codes and power relations. Ethical relations of self can be a useful concept for those interested in educational research that furthers social and ecological justice. In the conclusion of this paper I also discuss the limitations of locating ethics entirely within a constituted human subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines heritage, and particularly intangible heritage, by concentrating on the experience of smell to explore a heritage site in Istanbul, Turkey: the Spice Market. Due to a restoration project, the site became the focus of the 2012 international workshop ‘Urban Cultural Heritage and Creative Practice,’ which aimed at documenting the existing and threatened scents of the marketplace. In 2016 a gallery exhibition, ‘Scent and the City,’ was created as part of an effort to raise awareness about how scent constitutes an important component of the heritage of place. After providing a brief overview of the marketplace’s transformations since its construction in the seventeenth century, this paper covers various methods of scent research, including scent walks, mapping, oral history interviews, and artistic performances, and illustrates how the smellscapes of this historic, and now touristic, quarter of Istanbul are changing. By bringing a sensory approach to this important heritage site in Istanbul we demonstrate how an embodied approach, which forefronts scent as intangible heritage and a primary modality, can serve as a catalyst for individuals and communities to access their memories, emotions, and values and increase awareness of the role scent plays in defining locality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the productive tensions occurring in an interdisciplinary research project on weight loss after obesity surgery. The study was a bio-medical/anthropological collaboration investigating to what extent eating patterns, the subjective experience of hunger and physiological mechanisms are involved in appetite regulation that might determine good or poor response to the surgery. Linking biomedical and anthropological categories and definitions of central concepts about the body turned out to be a major challenge in the collaborative analysis. Notably, the conception of what constitutes ‘appetite’ was a key concern, as each discipline has its particular definition and operationalization of the term. In response, a material-semiotic approach was chosen which allowed for a reconceptualization of appetite as a ‘fractional object’, engaged in multiple relations and enacted differently in each instance. This perspective produced creative contrasts and offered alternative explorations of both scientific knowledge production and anthropological practices. The paper thereby explores the interfaces between anthropology and medical science by attending to the challenges and opportunities that result from destabilising an assumed fixed and well-defined concept associated with the body. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ‘ontological turn’ involves some anthropological points of long standing but the approaches recently coordinated into this turn have been presented as a ‘call to arms’, as shaking up ‘mono-realist singularities’ and as inherently political. This fighting talk has no doubt made important contributions to anthropology and insights from the ontological turn can help in anthropological understandings of medical practices. However, this paper contends that this helpfulness is also limited and that a call to arms may be inappropriate. This point is made through an ethnographic understanding of medical concern about the diagnosis of death. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Thirty years ago, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock outlined a strategy for ‘future work in medical anthropology’ that focused on three bodies. Their article – a zeitgeist for the field – sought to intervene into the Cartesian dualisms characterizing ethnomedical anthropology at the time. Taking a descriptive and diagnostic approach, they defined ‘the mindful body’ as a domain of future anthropological inquiry and mapped three analytic concepts that could be used to study it: the individual/phenomenological body, the social body, and the body politic. Three decades later, this paper returns to the ‘three bodies’. It analyses ethnographic fieldwork on chronic illness, using a rescriptive, practice-oriented approach to bodies developed by science studies scholars that was not part of the initial three bodies framework. It illustrates how embodiment was a technical achievement in some practices, while in others bodies did not figure as relevant. This leads to the suggestion that an anthropology of health need not be organized around numerable bodies. The paper concludes by suggesting that future work in medical anthropology might embrace translational competency, which does not have the goal of better definitions (better health, better bodies, etc.) but the goal of better engaging with exchanges between medical and non-medical practices. That health professionals are themselves moving away from bodies to embrace ‘planetary health’ makes a practice-focused orientation especially crucial for medical anthropology today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Polish historiography of sport bases its work on the nineteenth-century historiographic tradition: the resulting research and publications descriptively present the history of institutions, organizations and the achievements of sportspeople. Whereas this is work that comprehensively delves into the origins of sport and physical culture, describing in detail the oldest phenomena and events, the practice strays away from modern trends in the humanities with regards to interpretation or research methodology. In order to envision the scope of potential which the cultural perspective can offer Polish history of sports, the paper analyzes the recent historiography of Polish sport during the communist period. Discussing one of the Polish works that had been declared by its author as ‘anthropological research on history of sports’, the paper poses questions about notions of anthropological history in Polish scholarship, discusses what ethnographic sources can tell us when they are approached as ‘facts’ from the past, and in what other ways the same sources can be interpreted when perceived as traces in the palimpsest of our contemporary culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the terms of engagement between social science, posthumanist debates and One Health by questioning whether ‘the public’ may include non-human animals. The One Health concept refers to interdependence between human beings and non-human species in socio-ecological systems. One Health interventions and critiques have tended to emphasize the prevention of zoonotic infections, whereas this paper reflects on more than a decade of engaged research in One Health promotion. Repeatedly, this particular approach to One Health promotion has highlighted the imprint of multi-species entanglements in public life, especially the problematization and politicization of people’s pets. Serious consideration for multi-species entanglements cautions against conflating ‘the public’ with human beings and human interests, to the exclusion of all others. Human beings have never lived separate and apart from non-human species, and we all depend on shared environments. To do justice to multi-species entanglements, socio-ecological theory should undergo expansion in health promotion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Disease prevention and health care delivery, areas traditionally governed by the nation state and local communities, are increasingly being inhabited by ‘mobile sovereigns’ who carry a global currency of prevention strategies and treatments grounded in the universal standards of scientific evidence. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from research conducted on HIV in southwest China, this paper examines the impact of evidence-based science on the effectiveness of global health programming. It interrogates the intentions of global health partnerships and how the balance of power waged between those with money, science, and technical expertise, and those seeking assistance and resources, influences global health programming. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates the disconnect between the demand for a system of universal standards developed on the basis of scientific evidence and an appreciation for the local context, which shapes the way these standards should be modified for effective implementation of global health programs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper interprets the pressure to raise Palestinian-Israeli women’s labor force participation within the unfolding neoliberal project in Israel, arguing that women’s stalled workforce integration reflects embedded economic rationality. Poor infrastructure and discriminatory policies, combined with Israel’s rapid economic privatization, set contradictory expectations for Palestinian-Israeli women: their opportunity-cost calculations include entitlements to economic protection alongside obligations to provide expenditure-saving domestic labor. Yet growing pressure and desire to join the paid workforce suggest that the gender contract may be changing. This cultural schema, which links women’s economic strategizing to their sense of feminine propriety, is transforming as part of a broader transition to a market-led gender regime, with the paradoxical effect of encouraging women’s employment while simultaneously impoverishing them. By dwelling on the dialectics of culture and the structure of work opportunities, and women’s agency, this paper aims to resolves an impasse in the current debate on women’s low workforce participation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the phenomenological experiences of academic acculturation of selected non-British post-doctoral academics with a retrospective focus on their experiences as PhD students. The participants came from different disciplines and countries of origin to pursue several years of postgraduate research in different British higher education institutions. The typical, yet distinct, experiences of an exceptional group of early career academics offer invaluable insight into the joys, excitement, puzzlement and challenges that international students often encounter as they embark on studying and living in a foreign country such as the UK. Using Urie Bronfenbrenner's bio-ecological theory of human development, our paper presents a theoretical perspective that can help elucidate and offer a greater understanding of what appear to be complex incidences in international students' experiences. These incidences can, arguably, be crucial to the success or failure of students' sojourns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Festivals have provided an important arena for debates in anthropology and the social sciences. A focus of these debates has been the characterisation of the links between festivals, social groups and collective identities. While revisiting these debates, this paper argues for a performative view of festivals as instances of group making, remaking and unmaking. Based on Holy Ghost festas in the Azores and among Azorean migrants in North America it shows how festivals can be viewed as contentious sites for the production of new transnational and ethnic socialities and identities. The paper highlights the importance of this view of festivals for a critical assessment of current efforts aimed at the ‘heritagisation’ of festive cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper deals with the parents' narratives of sickness and misfortune of their children among the Beja people in the Red Sea Hills, Northeastern Sudan. Drawing on fieldwork focusing parents' health‐seeking behavior related to child sicknesses through 1993–95, and combining participant observation and interviews, the aim is firstly to elucidate how markers of uncertainty is a pronounced trait of Beja sickness narratives, inviting listeners to actively engage in the stories, adding to a still scarce but growing literature on narration and uncertainty. Secondly, it aims at relating this narrative style to wider contexts of Beja culture and society, a type of analysis seldom undertaken within the field of medical anthropology. It is argued that although some facets of the lives of Beja people have changed since the time of the fieldwork, the changes are not pronounced and have not changed the cultural environment so as to make the analysis and conclusions of this paper less valid. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper brings to light the customary court of dareemat and explores its structure and practice among Pashtuns in the Zhob District of Balochistan. Existing literature on Pashtun society has mainly focused on the jirgah as the sole traditional institution of settling conflicts and disputes. The institution/court of dareemat primarily deals with resolution of disputes and conflicts pertaining to claims over property, land, accusations, and allegations. It consists of dareeman (arbitrators), disputants, eyewitnesses, and observers. Dareemat can be initiated through mutual consent of the disputants or arbitrators, depending on the intensity of the conflict or dispute. Individual males, having reputation for integrity, eloquence, expertise, and experience of arbitration (dareemat), are trusted with the task of being jury in the court of dareemat. It exists parallel to statutory courts of civil disputes in Zhob. The post-colonial state of Pakistan somehow has recognized the role of customary laws and courts in the sphere of civil disputes in predominantly Pashtun areas in tribal regions of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. By applying a legal pluralism lens to study the practice and settlement of civil disputes by using the customary dareemat court, Pashtuns in Zhob District prefer to settle their disputes outside formal courts, in the dareemat as a first recourse to justice. The findings of the article are based on 10 months anthropological fieldwork substantiated by dareemat archives in the form of affidavits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the discourses within the academic field of Disability studies and Disability theology concern inclusion, one of the dominant themes employed is the concept of friendship. The theological work of Hans Reinders and John Swinton have been among those most cited works among disability theologians. Their work on the revolving subject will be considered within the scope of this approach. In light of a comparative analysis, my attempt in this paper is to search whether their views on friendship involve ideas crucial for reconsidering friendship's anthropology which, in my view, is crucial torethink friendship with disabled people and which, for such a reason, I will specify as an anthropology of relational interdependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shifting worlds, shaping fieldwork: A memoir of anthropology and art: by Susan Ossman, London & New York, Routledge, 2021, xx + 172 pp., £19.99/$26.36 (softcover), ISBN 978-1-350-12809-5 We also see how art, in Ossman's hands, becomes a way of doing "fieldwork on scholarship" (6): Ossman's exhibits become collaborative sites that realise art's potential to generate cross-cultural conversations on issues ranging from gendered forms of labour to migration and displacement. The storyline of the book moves between Susan Ossman's art and her anthropology, treating the reader to moving accounts of scholarly and artistic co-creation. [Extracted from the article]

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in an Indian advertising agency, this paper demonstrates that brand mascots are more than advertising glitter designed to cajole consumers. When they become the basis for the collective rallying of organisational members who converge around a tangible manifestation of their firm's unique character, brand mascots operate as organisational totems, helping concretise and reproduce an organisation's identity in a foreign context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Chinese organizational culture is usually described as being influenced by Confucian social norms and unique to the country. The paper argues in contrast to this view that there are important cultural similarities between values and norms in organizations in China and other developing countries. It is suggested that China, like other developing countries, is in a process of industrialization but retains preindustrial social norms which shape social relations and organizational structures. The paper shows first that the morals of social distance and reciprocity which anthropologists have found to be constitutive of a large number of preindustrial communities also govern relationships within and between organizations in present-day China. The paper then turns to organizations in Africa and Latin America and it is shown that the same social morals structure behaviours in these two developing regions, suggesting that the cultural characteristics of Chinese organizations are not simply unique to this country but a set of preindustrial norms that industrializing countries have in common as a legacy of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using examples from long-term anthropological fieldwork in Tanzania, this paper critically analyzes how well generally accepted community-based tourism discourses resonate with the reality on the ground. It focuses on how local guides handle their role as ambassadors of communal cultural heritage and how community members react to their narratives and practices. It pays special attention to the time-limited, project-based development method, the need for an effective exit strategy, for quality control, tour guide training and long-term tour guide retention. The study is based on a program funded by the Netherlands-based development agency, Stichting Nederlandse Vrijwilligers (SNV), from 1995 to 2001, and on post-program experiences. Findings reveal multiple complex issues of power and resistance that illustrate many community-based tourism conflicts. The encounter with the “Other” is shown to be central and that the role of professional intermediaries in facilitating this experience of cultural contact is crucial. Tour guides are often the only “locals” with whom tourists spend considerable time: they have considerable agency in the image-building process of the peoples and places visited, (re)shaping tourist destination images and indirectly influencing the self-image of those visited too. The paper provides ideas for overcoming the issues and problems described. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Housing systems across advanced societies are typically compared in terms of quantitative measures of aggregate variables, with little regard for local complexity, diversity and cultural contingency. This paper seeks, through the exploration of ethnographic techniques, to reflect on both the meaningfulness of quantitative comparative studies that neglect local differences as well as qualitative research designs that fail to embed informant discourses with material, cultural and historic contexts. Ethnographic investigations have been rare among housing studies, despite their capacity to connect structural and subjective dimensions of social reality. The first part of the paper explores how ethnography has been applied in urban and housing research. The second considers a particular ethnographic study of Japanese housing consumption as a means to illustrate its comparative application. A specific concern is the disposition of the ethnographer as an outsider and both the cultural and analytical reflexivity realised through the process of acquiring insider perspectives. The paper concludes by considering the ways ethnography may contribute further to the development of comparative understanding in housing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical herbalism is the most widespread and the most ancient form of medicine. This paper offers an account of medical herbalism in Malawi, and discusses the role of medicines - both plant and animal substances - in the social life of the matrilineal peoples of Malawi. It aims to counter the widespread tendency to interpret medical practices in Africa solely in terms of a spiritual or religious metaphysic. After critiquing some early approaches to African medicine, the paper discusses the nature and role of medicines in Malawi, the main forms of therapy, and the relation of medicine to the ancestral shrines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is more than half a century since Frederick G. G. Rose (1915-1991) published his classic text, The classification of kin, age structure and marriage amongst the Groote Eylandt Aborigines: A study in method and a theory of kinship (1960) in the former German Democratic Republic. Although the fieldwork for his thesis had been carried out in Australia on Groote Eylandt in 1938 and 1941, a conservative academic establishment and the political climate of the Cold War postponed its publication until 1960. Why were Rose's fieldwork findings suppressed by the powerful gate-keeper of Australian anthropology, Professor Adolphus Peter Elkin (1891-1979)? Moreover, why was Rose later denied a government permit to revisit Groote Eylandt and Central Australia to further his research? This paper examines the early work of the communist anthropologist, Frederick Rose, within the broad context of Western post-war anthropological developments, an expanding capitalist economy and the political tensions of the Cold War era. As a communist and public servant from 1938 to 1954, Rose was forced, after the Petrov Royal Commission cast him under a cloud of suspicion, to seek institutional support for his academic career in the German Democratic Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aesthetic value is one of the fundamental criteria used to determine the cultural heritage significance of important places. In Australia, however, cultural heritage has had only a limited engagement with theories on aesthetics, and as a result, no practical methodology has been developed to identify, describe and assess the acoustic dimension of aesthetic value. This paper critiques the literature on aesthetics that cultural heritage has focused on to date, highlighting its emphasis on the visual qualities of place over other multi-sensory understandings. Recent research into acoustics, particularly based on the concept of the soundscape, is explored in order to develop a qualitative methodology to assist heritage practitioners and others in understanding, describing and evaluating the acoustics of place. The applicability of this approach is demonstrated through the analysis of two cultural landscapes in the south-west of Western Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the ethical position of the ethnographer when encountering unethical activities. Ethnography affords a rich insight into cultures, often behind previously secure doors but it is also a demanding science. Our gatekeepers control our access and our relationships with them can determine our destiny. This paper offers an exchange with ethics and the conditions experienced during an ethnography that challenged and disturbed this researcher's understanding of its rules and expectations. By drawing on data and experiences from a classroom ethnography it aims to consider the limits of ethics and the generic ritual that regardless of cost we must do no harm to others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author analyses the international socio-economic human rights system to establish whether its underlying discourses, scope, structure, and functioning adequately account for the values encountered by a global distributive justice framework; the principal goal being to assess the human rights system to determine if it can be useful in the redistribution of the benefits arising from medical innovation, taking health needs into consideration. This assessment will draw the foundation for a deeper political analysis of how human rights are conceptualised in order to understand the role of market forces in realising the human right to health. The paper's main conclusion is that the system, as it currently operates, is incompatible with a global distributive justice framework in health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a response to Dan Hicks' commentary on the author's paper "The Temporality of the Landscape." Topics discussed include concerns on the questions of how people should best understand past and present human lives in relation to their surrounding conditions, the author's purpose of writing the article, and Hicks' conclusion that the paper 'fails archaeology today.'

Methodological shifts in human geography, generally under the banner of the 'cultural turn', have seen an increased focus on methods such as interviews, discourse and textual deconstruction, and the recognition of notions such as reflexivity and intersubjectivity. Together these approaches argue that there is no logical natural order of things or notions of universality. These approaches argue that there is no such thing as objectivity in social research, but that research is informed by the experiences, aims and agency of those performing the research and that researchers should be written into the research environment. Drawing on these insights, the purpose of this paper is to explore a methodological approach centred on actor-network theory (ANT) and suggest how this approach could add value to research being undertaken in human geography. Within such an approach all research findings are created by the researcher through, first, the objectives and framing of a research project and, second, the methods used to create and follow the research network. Drawing on research into residential development and planning on the fringe of Sydney, Australia, this paper has three objectives: first, to position all research as partial and as the product of associations that stretch beyond the research field; second, to argue that all research is a process of translation; and, third, to explore the manner in which we as researchers construct ourselves in efforts to enter networks of research interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This afterword places the three articles in the context of recent developments in the anthropology of knowledge as it relates to sociability. The articles illustrate again that sociability is more a matter of finding out what is happening, and then doing something about it, than a matter of applying earlier knowledge. The papers are part of a movement in anthropology with roots in the work of people like Garfinkel, Ranciere, de Certeau, Lave, etc. In various ways they focused our attention on the matters that appear in the three papers included here: the acknowledgment of ignorance is always productive, though what is done next can be quite dangerous for many of those involved. Furthermore, the learning that participation produces soon reveals itself insufficient and a new form of ignorance. In all events, ignorance leads to social interaction in all its modalities. Ignorance is not a barrier to sociability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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For many anthropologists, longterm ethnographic fieldwork does not end when they leave the field, as the journey towards ethnographic understanding evolves for years after physically returning from the field. In an auto-ethnographic mode, this paper traces the author's return journey from the field, through transformations in their understanding of soul abduction and spirit-revenge among upland members of the Nyishi tribe in the Eastern Himalayas. The paper traces the author's journey from initial ontological immersion in fieldwork materials, through a reductionist withdrawal from the data, to the "redemptive symmetry" of a multispecies approach: one which recognizes the human and more-than-human origins of such spirit phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alternative health care and holistic spiritual practices have become increasingly popular in many Western countries, especially among women, who often claim them to be deeply transformative. This paper presents an ethnographic study of women's tantric retreats in Northwest Europe that aimed to help women reconnect with their vital sexual energy, rediscover the sacredness of their female bodies, and possibly heal from damaging and even traumatic experiences regarding their femininity and sexuality. It draws on Turner's influential view on ritual as a liminal space in order to account for the transformative potential of these workshops. Specifically, it applies Hinton and Kirmayer's flexibility hypothesis, which suggests that healing rituals shift people's mode of being-in-the-world, including their cognitive, emotional, and physical state or stance, towards openness to new ways of being. First, it highlights different ontological domains where shifts took place, notably somatic state, self-image and relationality. Subsequently, it identifies the main modalities that were used for enabling transformation: the embodiment of the metaphor of the goddess/the divine as present in each woman and the use of intimate, loving touch and meditative awareness. The process of transformation and healing elucidated in this way engaged the physical, emotional and cognitive levels as interacting dimensions, relying foremost on the activation of a vital energy that both gave participants a deep sense of self and connected beyond the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the creation of the indigenous legal subject in Colombia from the perspective of legal-knowledge regimens. It analyses the turn from medical psychiatric assessments to indigenous identity to anthropological discourses on cultural differences. This article describes the legal construction of the indigenous subject in two historical moments. On the one hand, in the context of formation of the nation-state in Colombia and, on the other hand, in the transition towards contemporary multicultural constitutionalism within which legal discourse creates taxonomies for the definition of identities and the recognition of special rights to people who claim to be indigenous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I reflect on the general nation-building project entailed in one of the most compelling and better-studied cases of political imagineering: Jakarta's 'Beautiful Indonesia' Miniature Park (Taman Mini 'Indonesia Indah'). Conceived and driven by Indonesia's second president, Suharto, and his wife Ibu Tien in the early 1970s, this park was meant to visualise and construct the then-emerging Indonesian cultural and moral ethos in an ambiguous opposition to Soviet monumental Jakarta. By contrasting these two political spaces and exploring the vernacular concepts of beauty (keindahan) and harmony (kerukunan), I focus on the park's aesthetic dimensions and on the ways in which these dimensions articulate with the projection of a particular kind of moral nation. The account of my first visit to the park—and the country—as a graduate student and a participant of an Indonesian governmental programme of 'cultural diplomacy' provides first-hand material to set the stage for my analysis of the park in the post-Suharto era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As originally conceived, syndemics refers to complex epidemics involving two types of adverse interaction – the clustering and interactions of two or more diseases or health conditions (the biological–biological interface) and social environmental factors (the biological–social interface). The theory has been widely applied in the fields of medicine, public health and anthropology, but how the concept is conceptualised and investigated in new syndemics literature remains unclear. This paper offers a scoping review of recent syndemics literature aiming to address the question: Where have scholars taken the syndemics concept? Five bibliographic databases were searched for titles containing 'syndemic[s]' revealing 334 records. A total of 143 journal articles, 23 book chapters, 21 commentaries, 2 books and 5 dissertations were assessed. Citations were classified into five categories: syndemics (n = 22), potential syndemics (n = 34), socially determined heightened burden of disease (n = 29), harmful disease cluster (n = 32) and additive adverse conditions (n = 71). The limited number of citations meeting the definition of a syndemic arrangement highlights the challenges related to describing and empirically supporting the biological–biological and biological–social relationships. Nevertheless, there is value in retaining the original, holistic, biosocial meaning of syndemics to identify and detail the casual pathways and mechanisms of interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the complex relationship between nation building and science of race by tracing the development of Czech physical anthropology before and after WWI. I am particularly interested in the shifting epistemologies of race as part of the political economy of knowledge and its transformations in the changing historical circumstances marked by nationalism. My argument pinpoints the ambivalence of racial theory, employed by Czech physical anthropologists, as both the precondition and product of the complex interplay between science, politics and popular culture in the early twentieth-century post-/Habsburg territories. Abbreviations: ANM (Archiv Národního muzea): Archive of the National Museum, Prague; AUK (Archiv University Karlovy): Archive of Charles University, Prague [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing involvement of anthropologists in medical humanitarian response efforts has laid bare the moral and ethical consequences that emerge from humanitarian action. Anthropologists are well placed to examine the social, political, cultural and economic dimensions that influence the spread of diseases, and the ways in which to respond to epidemics. Anthropologists are also, with care, able to turn a critical lens on medical humanitarian response. However, there remains some resistance to involving anthropologists in response activities in the field. Drawing on interviews with anthropologists and humanitarian workers involved in the 2014-2016 West African Ebola epidemic, this paper reveals the complex roles taken on by anthropologists in the field and reveals how anthropologists faced questions of legitimacy vis-à-vis communities and responders in their roles in response activities, which focused on acting as 'firefighters' and 'cultural brokers' as well as legitimacy as academic researchers. Whilst these anthropologists were able to conduct research alongside these activities, or draw on anthropological knowledge to inform response activities, questions also arose about the legitimacy of these roles for anthropological academia. We conclude that the process of gaining legitimacy from all these different constituencies is particular to anthropologists and reveals the role of 'giving voice' to communities alongside critiquing medical humanitarianism. Whilst these anthropologists have strengthened the argument for the involvement of anthropologists in epidemic response this anthropological engagement with medical humanitarianism has revealed theoretical considerations more broadly for the discipline, as highlighted through engagement in other fields, especially in human rights and global health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic congestion profoundly marks Istanbul's everyday, in part, by casting drivers as competitors for time and space. Navigating traffic entails many driver maneuvers that are seemingly 'unfair' or 'wrong' such as line cutting, driving in the emergency lane, parking in prohibited areas, running lights, etc. As such, drivers carefully detail contingencies and circumstances within which some of their ostensibly problematic actions can be deemed acceptable. Within these narratives are also buried processes of emerging as moral subjects albeit filled with ambiguities and contradictions. This paper brings together mobility studies, the anthropology of traffic and the anthropology of ethics/morality to provide ethnographic detail into the everyday of experiencing automobility in Istanbul as a morally complex and formative arena. It is based on a year's fieldwork with 45 drivers of diverse vehicles recounting their struggles as they try to maintain a sense of 'conscience' while they reach their destination, sometimes at the expense of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]