An ethnographic account of the logics and regimes of value propelling desires for transnational mobility—largely via human smuggling networks—throughout Fuzhou, China.

How might the anthropological study of cosmologies – the ways in which the horizons of human worlds are imagined and engaged – illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? This book addresses this question by bringing together anthropologists whose research is informed by a concern with cosmological dimensions of social life in different ethnographic settings. Its overall aim is to reaffirm the value of the cosmological frame as a continuing source of analytical insight. Attending to the novel cosmological formations that emerge in such fields as modern markets, political landscapes, digital media and popular cinema, the book’s key task is to explore how modern circumstances are constituted within the variable imagination of worlds and their horizons. It will be of interest to all students and researchers in anthropology, as well as scholars in fields as diverse as film studies, cultural studies, comparative religion, science and technology studies, and broader social theory.

All culture, particularly that of non-literate traditions, is constantly being recreated, and in the process also undergoes changes. In this book, Fredrik Barth examines the changes that have taken place in the secret cosmological lore transmitted in male initiation ceremonies among the Mountain Ok of Inner New Guinea, and offers a new way of explaining how cultural change occurs. Professor Barth focuses in particular on accounting for the local variations in cosmological traditions that exist among the Ok people, who otherwise share similar material and ecological conditions, and similar languages. Rejecting existing anthropological theory as inadequate for explaining this, Professor Barth constructs a new model of the mechanisms of change, based on his close empirical observation of the processes of cultural transmission. This model emphasises the role of individual creativity in cultural reproduction and change, and maintains that cosmologies can be adequately understood only if they are regarded as knowledge in the process of communication, embedded in social organization, rather than as fixed bodies of belief. From the model he derives various theoretically grounded hypotheses regarding the probable courses of change that would be generated by such mechanisms. He then goes on to show that these hypotheses fit the actual patterns of variation that are found among the Ok.

In Ancient Cosmologies (1975) nine eminent scholars seek to answer the question, what was the shape of the universe to the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Jews, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Greeks and Norsemen? How did they see the visible heavens as well as the other hidden worlds of the dead, gods and demons?

A collection of folk stories from around the world, each accompanied by background information, that explain the various perspectives of different peoples on how the universe and their world came to be.

This companion includes over 350 entries, extensively cross-referenced, describing the modern view of cosmology, including both theoretical ideas and the many strands of observational evidence.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Tens of thousands of Eritreans make perilous voyages across Africa and the Mediterranean Sea every year. Why do they risk their lives to reach European countries where so many more hardships await them? By visiting family homes in Eritrea and living with refugees in camps and urban peripheries across Ethiopia, Sudan, and Italy, Milena Belloni untangles the reasons behind one of the most under-researched refugee populations today. Balancing encounters with refugees and their families, smugglers, and visa officers, The Big Gamble contributes to ongoing debates about blurred boundaries between forced and voluntary migration, the complications of transnational marriages, the social matrix of smuggling, and the role of family expectations, emotions, and values in migrants’ choices of destinations.

"Life is fundamentally a process of perpetual and mutual communication; and to communicate is to emit and to receive waves and radiations (minika ye minienie). This process of, receiving and releasing or passing them on (tambula ye tambikisa) is the key to human beings game of survival. A person is perpetually bathed by radiations' weight, (zitu kia minienie). The weight (zitu/demo) of radiations may have a negative as well as positive impact on any tiny being, for example a person who represents the most vibrating: "kolo" (knot) of relationships." "The following expressions are very common among the Bantu, in general, and among the Kongo in particular, which prove to us the antiquity of these concepts in the African continent; Our businesses are waved/shaken; our health is waved/shaken; what we possess is waved/shaken; the communities are waved/shaken: Where are these (negative) waves coming from (Salu bieto bieti nikunwa; mavimpi nikunwa; biltuvwidi nikunwa; makanda nikunwa: Kwe kutukanga minika miami)?" "For the Bantu, a person lives and moves within an ocean of waves/radiations. One is sensitive or immune to them. To be sensitive to waves is to be able to react negatively or positively to those waves/forces. But to be immune to surrounding waves/forces, is to be less reactive to them or not at all. These differences account for varying degrees in the process of knowing/learning among individuals" --BOOK Cover.

Metaphysics—or the grand narratives about reality that shape a community—has historically been identified as one of the primary oppressive factors in violence against animals, the environment, and other subordinated populations. Yet, this rejection of metaphysics has allowed inadequate worldviews to be smuggled back into secular rights-based systems, and into politics, language, arts, economics, media, and science under the guise of value-free and narrowly human-centric facts that relegate many populations to the margins and exclude them from consideration as active members of the planetary community. Those concerned with systemic violence against creatures and other oppressed populations must overcome this allergy to metaphysics in order to illuminate latent assumptions at work in their own worldviews, and to seek out dynamic, many-sided, and relational narratives about reality that are more adequate to a universe of responsive and creative world-shaping creatures. This text examines two such worldviews—Whitehead’s process-relational thought in the west and the nonviolent Indian tradition of Jainism—alongside theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, that offer a new perspective on metaphysics as well as the creaturely kin and planetary fellows with whom we co-shape our future.

We stand at the threshold of a revolutionary and empowering new vision of the world. The discoveries of leading-edge science and the insights of spirituality are converging to reveal that the CosMos and all that we term reality is wholly integrated, and that at its most fundamental level, it is a field of information. This is the elemental cosmic mind from which everything emanates, is manifested, and to which all ultimately returns. Research is also demonstrating what the mystics of all traditions have discerned: that we have the innate ability to envision, understand, and experience the CosMos at levels far beyond the limitations of our human persona. CosMos is co-authored by two explorers who combine almost a century of seeking to understand not only how the world is as it is, but why. Philosopher Ervin Laszlo, Ph. D., and healer and scientist Jude Currivan, Ph. D., offer a revisioned view of the world that is no longer fragmented, but is at last, whole. Theirs is a perception of a meaningful and co-creative world that is exquisitely tuned to be ''as simple as it can be'' for consciousness to explore itself. In these momentous times, the vision shared in Cosmos invites us to open our hearts and minds to re-member who we really are and to take our places as conscious co-creators of our realities and of our evolving cosmic destiny.