Through an ethnographic study of the ‘Barefoot College’, an internationally renowned non- governmental development organisation (NGO) situated in Rajasthan, India, this book investigates the methods and practices by which a development organisation materialises and manages a construction of success.

This book examines the creation of lesbian communities in India from the 1980s through the early 2000s and explores the everyday practices that comprise queer activism in India.

Perceptions of Climate Change from North India: An Ethnographic Account explores local perceptions of climate change through ethnographic encounters with the men and women who live at the front line of climate change in the lower Himalayas. From data collected over the course of a year in a small village in an eco-sensitive zone in North India, this book presents an ethnographic account of local responses to climate change, resource management and indigenous environmental knowledge. Aase Kvanneid’s observations cast light on the precarious reality of climate change in this region and bring to the fore issues such as access to water, NGO intervention and climate information for farmers. In doing so, she also explores classic topics in the study of rural India including ritual, gender, social hierarchy and political economy. Overall, this book shows how the cause and effect of climate change is perceived by those who have the most to lose and explores how the impact of climate change is being dealt with on a local and global scale. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the anthropology of climate change, environmental sociology and rural development.

Why should you study anthropology? How will it enable you to understand human behaviour? And what will you learn that will equip you to enter working life? This book describes what studying anthropology actually means in practice, and explores the many career options available to those trained in anthropology. Anthropology gets under the surface of social and cultural diversity to understand people’s beliefs and values, and how these guide the different lifeways that these create. This accessible book presents a lively introduction to the ways in which anthropology's unique research methods and conceptual frameworks can be employed in a very wide range of fields, from environmental concerns to human rights, through business, social policy, museums and marketing. This updated edition includes an additional chapter on anthropology and interdisciplinarity. This is an essential primer for undergraduates studying introductory courses to anthropology, and any reader who wants to know what anthropology is about.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Discourse about water and power in the modern era have largely focused on human power over water: who gets to own and control a limited resource that has incredible economic potential. As a result, discussion of water, even in the humanities, has traditionally focused on fresh water for human use. Today, climate extremes from drought to flooding are forcing humanities scholars to reimagine water discourse. This volume exemplifies how interdisciplinary cultural approaches can transform water conversations. The manuscript is organized into three emergent themes in water studies: agency of water, fluid identities, and cultural currencies. The first section deals with the properties of water and the ways in which water challenges human plans for control. The second section explores how water (or lack of it) shapes human collective and individual identities. The third engages notions of value and circulation to think about how water has been managed and employed for local, national, and international gains. Contributions come from preeminent as well as emerging voices across humanities fields including history, art history, philosophy, and science and technology studies. Part of a bigger goal for shaping the environmental humanities, the book broadens the concept of water to include not just water in oceans and rivers but also in pipes, ice floes, marshes, bottles, dams, and more. Each piece shows how humanities scholarship has world-changing potential to achieve more just water futures.

This book is a detailed exploration of the working practices of a community of scientists exposed in public, and of the making of scientific knowledge about climate change in Scotland. For four years, the author joined these scientists in their sampling expeditions into the Caledonian forests, observed their efforts in the laboratory to produce data from wood samples and followed their discussions of a graph showing the evolution of the Scottish temperature over the past millennium in conferences, workshops and peer-review journals. This epistemography of climate change is of broad social and academic relevance – both for its contextualised treatment of a key contemporary science, and for its original formulation of a methodology for investigating expertise.

Divorcing Traditions is an ethnography of Islamic legal expertise and practices in India, a secular state in which Muslims are a significant minority and where Islamic judgments are not legally binding. Katherine Lemons argues that an analysis of divorce in accordance with Islamic strictures is critical to the understanding of Indian secularism. Lemons analyzes four marital dispute adjudication forums run by Muslim jurists or lay Muslims to show that religious law does not muddle the categories of religion and law but generates them. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in these four institutions—NGO-run women's arbitration centers (mahila panchayats); sharia courts (dar ul-qazas); a Muslim jurist's authoritative legal opinions (fatwas); and the practice of what a Muslim legal expert (mufti) calls "spiritual healing"—Divorcing Traditions shows how secularism is an ongoing project that seeks to establish and maintain an appropriate relationship between religion and politics. A secular state is always secularizing. And yet, as Lemons demonstrates, the state is not the only arbiter of the relationship between religion and law: religious legal forums help to constitute the categories of private and public, religious and secular upon which secularism relies. In the end, because Muslim legal expertise and practice are central to the Indian legal system and because Muslim divorce's contested legal status marks a crisis of the secular distinction between religion and law, Muslim divorce, argues Lemons, is a key site for understanding Indian secularism.

The Credibility of Microcredit offers an objective assessment of microfinance worldwide by way of interdisciplinary research. It features works from leading researchers in the field of microfinance, as well as new names, employing a variety of methods and theoretical approaches.

The image of “Third World Woman” victimhood is one that runs through discourses in Western feminism, the fields of gender and development and also the activities of NGOs. Tamsin Bradley deconstructs this through her exploration of the relationships between NGOs and the people they target, using a unique multi-disciplinary perspective that examines the interfaces between anthropology, development and religion. She argues that dominant approaches in development practice see women as a singular and weak “other”, a focus for pity and compassion, which obscures the complexities of diverse communities and the ability to respond to real needs. Bradley's extensive fieldwork, on grassroots NGOs in rural Indian Rajasthan, and their Western donor organisations, and combines it with her compelling critique of development theory and practice, which she finds often caught in a macro system unable to connect with social realities. This leads her to a new and unique methodology, one rooted in a more honest, responsive and inclusive approach to encourage development workers to listen to the needs of those they seek to help.

In this thoroughly revised second edition editors Bård A. Andreassen, Claire Methven O’Brien and Hans-Otto Sano advance contemporary discussions on human rights methodology, bringing together an array of leading scholars to offer instruction and guidance on the methodological approaches to human rights research.