This article suggests that linguistic anthropology offers useful
analytical tools to documentary studies because both fields wrestle with questions
that emerge from the circulation of indexical representations that are putatively
constructing truths. Linguistic anthropology is deeply concerned with the ways
that texts circulate, and how this…[Read more]

In 1989 New Zealand legislators revised their child welfare legislation, partially
in response to M¯aori and Pacific Island critiques that the previous state-centered
regime had failed to take into account their culturally distinctive techniques for being
a family and had failed to support culturally specific practices of decision making
and…[Read more]

In this essay, I discuss how Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory might be useful for anthropologists. After providing a summary of Luhmann’s theory, I address the quandaries anthropologists might face when deploying a theory that presumes systems without selves. I also recount how other anthropologists have made use of Luhmann’s systems theory to an…[Read more]

It is not a stretch of imagination to link seclusion of girls at puberty with the Palaeolithic cave art. The widely accepted view about cave art suggests that the cave artists had been shamans. This shamanic origin can imply that the religion emerged in the times when the cave artists were active. It has already been posited in the relevant…[Read more]

Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail is an ethnographic study of migrants from India’s north-east border region living and working in Delhi, the nation’s capital. Northeast India borders China, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia. Despite burgeoning interest in the region, little attention is given to the thousands of migrants…[Read more]

Borderland Cities in New India explores contemporary urban life in two cities in India’s Northeast borderland at a time of dramatic change. Social and economic transformation from India’s embrace of neoliberalism and globalisation, often referred to as ‘new’ India, has become a popular subject for academic analysis in the last decade. This is epit…[Read more]

Edition of cuneiform tablet excavated at Büklükale on the western Kızılırmak in 2010.

An examination of Judean Pillar Figurines in relation to cultural discourse and identity construction in the late Iron-Age Levant

In this chapter I will develop an ethnographic approach to analyze the translocal connections within the global network of contemporary Arabian horse breeders. The focus thus lies on the purebred Arabian horse, its changing meaning, commodification, and the specific locally-situated work and practice, not only connecting the horse with their human…[Read more]

In his studies on the indigenous cultures of the territory of New Spain, the Enlightenment-influenced Jesuit Francisco Xavier Clavijero makes frequent use of the term “barbarian”. This notion, whose implications Clavijero expressly develops, has a specific function in his works as an interpretative instrument for social reality. The notion of bar…[Read more]

Adjudicado a un momento histórico concreto, tras la conquista cristiana de Toledo (1085) y su incorporación a los reinos cristianos, el mudéjar se ha utilizado al mismo tiempo como sustento de la idea de convivencia entre musulmanes y cristianos y como definición de un «estilo nacional» dentro del arte español. Durante el redescubrimiento de al-…[Read more]

Abstract: El impacto del colonialismo y del recién descubierto Oriente provocó que el continente europeo proyectase en aquellas tierras lejanas, llenas de exotismo, leyendas y sensualidad, sus propias pasiones prohibidas y sus más oscuros deseos. El erotismo que las culturas indígenas despertaban en la sociedad victoriana llevó a la creación de so…[Read more]

In displaying archaeological information as points on a map, we lose elements of the social and economic geography of the region we are studying. This paper suggests a methodology for exploring the space between our ‘dots-on-the-map’, based on the rapidly developing ‘science of networks’. It takes as a case study the distribution of sites using s…[Read more]