1,720,989 research outputs found
The Hau of Finance: Impact Investing and the Globalization of Social and Environmental Sustainability
No full textIMPACT HAU is a comparative anthropological study of impact investing and sustainable finance. Inspired by Marcel Mauss’s classic use of the Maori concept of hau, the ‘spirit of the gift’, it focuses on the designers, traders and beneficiaries of impact bonds to produce an empirically driven analysis of the multiple moralities of global finance
The Anthropology of Sustainability: Beyond Development and Progress
No full textThis book compiles research from leading experts in the social, behavioral, and cultural dimensions of sustainability, as well as local and global understandings of the concept, and on lived practices around the world. It contains studies focusing on ways of living, acting, and thinking which claim to favor the local and global ecological systems of which we are a part, and on which we depend for survival. The concept of sustainability as a product of concern about global environmental degradation, rising social inequalities, and dispossession is presented as a key concept. The contributors explore the opportunities to engage with questions of sustainability and to redefine the concept of sustainability in anthropological terms
Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability
No full textOur series aims to bring together research on the social, behavioral, and cultural dimensions of sustainability: on local and global understandings of the concept and on lived practices around the world. It publishes studies which use ethnography to help us understand emerging ways of living, acting, and thinking sustainably. The books in this series also investigate and shed light on the political dynamics of resource governance and various scientific cultures of sustainability
Migrant Hospitalities in the Mediterranean. Encounters with Alterity in Birth and Death
Full text linkThis book takes some of the insights of the anthropology of hospitality to illuminate ethnographic accounts of migrant reception in various parts of the Mediterranean. Anthropology has revisited the concept of hospitality in recent years, drawing on the insights of ethnographers of the Mediterranean, who ground the idea and practice of hospitality in concrete ethnographic settings and challenge the ways in which the casual usage of Derridean or Kantian notions of hospitality can blur the boundaries between social scales and between metaphor and practice. Host-guest relations are multiplied through pregnancy and childbirth, and new forms emerge with the need to offer mortuary practices for dead strangers. The volume does not attempt to define a distinctive Mediterranean hospitality, but explores the potential of the concept of hospitality to illuminate the spatial and scalar dimensions of morality and politics in Mediterranean migrant reception
Introduction: Mediterranean Migrant Hospitalities
Full text linkThis book takes some of the insights of the anthropology of hospitality to illuminate ethnographic accounts of migrant reception in various parts of the Mediterranean. Anthropology has revisited the concept of hospitality in recent years, drawing on the insights of ethnographers of the Mediterranean, who ground the idea and practice of hospitality in concrete ethnographic settings and challenge the ways in which the casual usage of Derridean or Kantian notions of hospitality can blur the boundaries between social scales and between metaphor and practice. Host-guest relations are multiplied through pregnancy and childbirth, and new forms emerge with the need to offer mortuary practices for dead strangers. The volume does not attempt to define a distinctive Mediterranean hospitality, but explores the potential of the concept of hospitality to illuminate the spatial and scalar dimensions of morality and politics in Mediterranean migrant reception
Hosting the Dead: Forensics, Ritual and the Memorialization of Migrant Human Remains in Italy
Full text linkIn this chapter we consider the afterlife of the remains of unidentified migrants who have died while attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Albania and North Africa to Italy. Drawing on insights from long-term, multi-sited field research, we outline paths taken by human remains and consider their multiple agencies and distributed personhood through the relational modalities with which they are symbolically and materially engaged at different scales of significance. The rising number of migrant deaths related to international crossings worldwide, especially in the Mediterranean, has stimulated a large body of scholarship, which generally relies upon a hermeneutics of secular transitional justice and fraternal transnationalism. We explore an alternative approach by focusing on the material and ritual afterlife of unidentified human remains at sea, examining the effects they have on their hosting environment. The treatment of dead strangers (across the double threshold constituted by the passage from life to death on the one hand and the rupture of exile on the other) raises new questions for the anthropology of death. We offer an interpretation of both ad hoc and organized recovery operations and mortuary practices, including forensic identification procedures, and collective and single burials of dead migrants, as acts of hospitality. Hosting the dead operates at different scales: it takes the politically charged form of memorialization at the levels of the state and the local community; however, while remembrance practices for dead strangers emphasize the latter’s status as a collective category, forensic technologies of remembrance are directed toward the reconstruction of (in)dividual personhood. These ritual and technological processes of memorialization and re-attachment together awaken ghosts of Italian fascism and colonialism
Ownership and Nurture: Studies in native Amazonian property relations
No full textThe first book to address the classic anthropological theme of property through the ethnography of Amazonia, Ownership and Nurture sets new and challenging terms for anthropological debates about the region and about property in general. Property and ownership have special significance and carry specific meanings in Amazonia, which has been portrayed as the antithesis of Western, property-based, civilization. Through carefully constructed studies of land ownership, slavery, shamanism, spirit mastery, aesthetics, and intellectual property, this volume demonstrates that property relations are of central importance in Amazonia, and that the ownership of persons plays an especially significant role in native cosmology
Introduction: The Anthropology of Sustainability: Beyond Development and Progress
No full textAnthropologists are quick to point out the contradictions, abuses and politically motivated uses of the term ‘sustainability’. But what happens if anthropologists apply their knowledge to understanding what sustainability means (or what it should mean) and what it entails? Contemporary anthropology is holistic, and involves shifting temporal and spatial scales of analysis. It explores how values and practices, ontologies and epistemologies interact and change, paying attention to the details of the everyday as much as to the exotic, and to the powerful as well the subalterns. By documenting the diversity of relationships between humans and non-humans it provides unique insights on the present possibilities available for humanity, and offers ways to rethink humanity’s current trajectory in order to help pass on a livable earth to future generations
First contacts, slavery and kinship in Northeastern Amazonia
No full textThe Trio, Wayana and Akuriyo are Carib-speaking Amerindians of the border regions of Brazil, southern Suriname and southern French Guiana. We have carried out field research since 2003 in southern Suriname, in a predominantly Trio village shared with a number of Wayana and most of the surviving Akuriyo. A relationship of asymmetry has evolved between the Trio and Akuriyo since the late 1960s, although arguably from a native point of view these two populations have engaged in a relationship of mutual avoidance as far back as people can remember. Despite, or perhaps because of, the memory of prior encounters between them, the Trio and Akuriyo would probably have maintained their mutual avoidance longer, had it not been for the intervention of evangelical missionaries
Personhood and ‘frontier’ in contemporary Amazonia and Siberia
No full textThe adage that anthropology is comparative if it can be defi ned as anything at all has been tested in recent years to great effect—particularly on the theme of the body (Gregor and Tuzin 2001; Lambek and Strathern 1998)—and with greater confidence than it had been a decade previously (Holy 1987). The body has provided a useful starting point for cross-cultural comparison because, at some level, the physically existing, universal human body can be considered a common factor among all cultures. While the apparent universality and constancy of the body may be questioned in light of ethnographic evidence, and while the body can be politicized in differing ways, when politics and history themselves are taken as points of comparison, a new and somewhat different challenge is set. Taking up both challenges and placing them alongside each other, this paper explores comparatively the themes of “frontier” and “personhood” in two regions, Amazonia and Siberia
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