Traditional society cosmology is an instrument of territorial, space and buildings order as a whole language.Megalithic Nias was found with its organizational and architectural concept arranged with its cosmology.The belief of three worlds/cosmos: upper world or ancestor’s world, human world, and underworld, is local cult approved as local…[Read more]

Local wisdom producing genius loci is a conceptual idea that lives, grows and develops in the society. It develops continually and in relation with society awareness, organizing sacral and profane parts of their lives. Genius loci in traditional settlements can be found in the different pattern and order corresponding to traditional values of the…[Read more]

Kampong Dago Pojok is a local neighborhood within the Dago area of Bandung, an area well-known for its cultural and artistic activities which have contributed significantly to the development of Bandung as a ‘creative city’ in the early 2000s. This paper draws on a participatory research method to explore the lived experiences and creative pra…[Read more]

Kampong Dago Pojok is a local neighborhood within the Dago area of Bandung, an area well-known for its cultural and artistic activities which have contributed significantly to the development of Bandung as a ‘creative city’ in the early 2000s. This paper draws on a participatory research method to explore the lived experiences and creative pra…[Read more]

How built environment plays role in social transformation?This question is one concern of social-constructivism approach in study of place. Place construction studies focus on space that socially constructed and social that spatially constructed. This article explores place construction on urban social transformation in creative-kampung phenomena…[Read more]

In the twenty-first century, the majority of people are living in cities—at least this is the credo communicated frequently. This statement has been strengthened by the “urban renaissance” that dawned at the beginning of the twenty-first century and by a globally evident increase in capital investment in urban-development projects. Such plann…[Read more]

Theorists of civil society often view civil society as a site for democratic education.
Civil society is supposed to assist democratic practice by offering people contexts in which
they practice promoting the common good. This article, following Nina Eliasoph ‘s intervention,
takes this to be a claim requiring ethnographic exploration. The…[Read more]

In this article, I explore how people use the culture concept in legislatures to understand the minorities they legislate for
and about. I focus on recent debates in the New Zealand parliament over whether the indigenous Ma¯ ori are a cultural group or a racial
group. A Westminster parliament system encourages these debates, in which political…[Read more]

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]

THE URBAN WORLD: A CASE STUDY IN SLUM RELOCATION (40 minute documentary) A film by Warren Bass Howard Spodek, executive producer and subject specialist Illustrated Essay by Howard Spodek “The Urban World” documents the relocation of a family at the crossroads of two of the most important urban developments in India today: the revitalization of cit…[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]

This PhD thesis has used building recording techniques, documentary research and oral history testimonies to explore how concepts of the modern and new between the 1870s and 1930s shaped the urban built environment, through the study of a particular kind of infrastructure that was developed to meet the needs of expanding cities at this time – s…[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.

The use of colour as a spatial metaphor is a familiar part of the language of urbanism: green, grey, brown and blue spaces abound in the literature, from Jane Jacobs’ attacks on the over-planning of American cities to Peter Borsay’s recent exploration of the place of nature in the history of English towns. This latter responds to a wider turn tow…[Read more]

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]