Since its inception, anthropology's authority has been based on the assumption that it is a unified discipline emanating from the West. In an age of heightened globalization, anthropologists have failed to discuss consistently the current status of their practice and its mutations across the globe. World Anthropologies is the first book to provoke this conversation from various regions of the world in order to assess the diversity of relations between regional or national anthropologies and a contested, power-laden Western discourse. Can a planetary anthropology cope with both the 'provincial cosmopolitanism' of alternative anthropologies and the 'metropolitan provincialism' of hegemonic schools? How might the resulting 'world anthropologies' challenge the current panorama in which certain allegedly national anthropological traditions have more paradigmatic weight - and hence more power - than others? Critically examining the international dissemination of anthropology within and across national power fields, contributors address these questions and provide the outline for a veritable world anthropologies project.

Since its inception, anthropology's authority has been based on the assumption that it is a unified discipline emanating from the West. In an age of heightened globalization, anthropologists have failed to discuss consistently the current status of their practice and its mutations across the globe. World Anthropologies is the first book to provoke this conversation from various regions of the world in order to assess the diversity of relations between regional or national anthropologies and a contested, power-laden Western discourse. Can a planetary anthropology cope with both the 'provincial cosmopolitanism' of alternative anthropologies and the 'metropolitan provincialism' of hegemonic schools? How might the resulting 'world anthropologies' challenge the current panorama in which certain allegedly national anthropological traditions have more paradigmatic weight - and hence more power - than others? Critically examining the international dissemination of anthropology within and across national power fields, contributors address these questions and provide the outline for a veritable world anthropologies project.

In a post-colonial world, the contributions of anthropologists living outside North America and Western Europe can no longer be treated as marginal. World Anthropologies in Practice demonstrates how global dialogues enable us to draw on local knowledge as well as differences of perspective to help overcome anthropology’s eternal struggle against ethnocentrism and to strengthen the subject’s relevance to the contemporary world.Based on contributions to the ASA-sponsored IUAES World Anthropology Congress in Manchester, UK, this truly global book brings together a wide range of international scholars who might otherwise not talk to each other. Featuring articles from leading figures in the field such as Yolanda Moses, Winnie Lem, Carmen Rial, Miriam Grossi, and Cristina Amescua, the volume covers topics as diverse as the mobility of Brazilian football players, toilets in South Africa, trade unions in Nepal and South Africa, peace-building in southern Thailand, museological approaches in China, the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami, immigration and race in the United States, and many more. Edited by John Gledhill, the text offers a much-needed insight into the way in which anthropology is developing worldwide and makes a tremendous contribution to the discussion of ‘world anthropologies’. An important, timely work for students and researchers.

Anthropologists have acted as experts and educators on the nature and ways of life of people worldwide, working to understand the human condition in broad comparative perspective. As a discipline, anthropology has often advocated — and even defended — the cultural integrity, authenticity, and autonomy of societies across the globe. Public anthropology today carries out the discipline’s original purpose, grounding theories in lived experience and placing empirical knowledge in deeper historical and comparative frameworks. This is a vitally important kind of anthropology that has the goal of improving the modern human condition by actively engaging with people to make changes through research, education, and political action.

There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, constraining or confined to static texts; rather, they are productive, continually contested and able to create new social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations. Anthropologists do not stand outside or above systems of governance but are themselves subject to the rhetoric and rationalities of policy. The analyses of policy worlds presented by the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for understanding systems of knowledge and power and the positioning of academics within them.

This first English translation of lectures Claude Lévi-Strauss delivered in Tokyo in 1986 synthesizes his ideas about structural anthropology, critiques his earlier writings on civilization, and assesses the dilemmas of cultural and moral relativism, including economic inequality, religious fundamentalism, and genetic and reproductive engineering.

Cancer is a transnational condition involving the unprecedented flow of health information, technologies, and people across national borders. Such movement raises questions about the nature of therapeutic citizenship, how and where structurally vulnerable populations obtain care, and the political geography of blame associated with this disease. This volume brings together cutting-edge anthropological research carried out across North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia, representing low-, middle- and high-resource countries with a diversity of national health care systems. Contributors ethnographically map the varied nature of cancer experiences and articulate the multiplicity of meanings that survivorship, risk, charity and care entail. They explore institutional frameworks shaping local responses to cancer and underlying political forces and structural variables. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138776937_oachapter3.pdf

Confucius Institutes, the language and culture programs funded by the Chinese government, have been established in more than 1,500 schools worldwide since their debut in 2004. A centerpiece of China’s soft power policy, they represent an effort to smooth China’s path to superpower status by enhancing its global appeal. Yet Confucius Institutes have given rise to voluble and contentious public debate in host countries, where they have been both welcomed as a source of educational funding and feared as spy outposts, neocolonial incursions, and obstructions to academic freedom. China in the World turns an anthropological lens on this most visible, ubiquitous, and controversial globalization project in an effort to provide fresh insight into China’s shifting place in the world. Author Jennifer Hubbert takes the study of soft power policy into the classroom, offering an anthropological intervention into a subject that has been dominated by the methods and analyses of international relations and political science. She argues that concerns about Confucius Institutes reflect broader debates over globalization and modernity and ultimately about a changing global order. Examining the production of soft power policy in situ allows us to move beyond program intentions to see how Confucius Institutes are actually understood and experienced in day-to-day classroom interactions. By assessing the perspectives of participants and exploring the complex ways in which students, teachers, parents, and program administrators interpret the Confucius Institute curriculum, she highlights significant gaps between China’s soft power policy intentions and the effects of those policies in practice. China in the World brings original, long-term ethnographic research to bear on how representations of and knowledge about China are constructed, consumed, and articulated in encounters between China, the United States, and the Confucius Institute programs themselves. It moves a controversial topic beyond the realm of policy making to examine the mechanisms through which policy is implemented, engaged, and contested by a multitude of stakeholders and actors. It provides new insight into how policy actually works, showing that it takes more than financial wherewithal and official resolve to turn cultural presence into power.

Why does the world need anthropology and anthropologists? This collection of essays written by prominent academic, practising and applied anthropologists aims to answer this provocative question. In an accessible and appealing style, each author in this volume inquires about the social value and practical application of the discipline of anthropology. Contributors note that the problems the world faces at a global scale are both new and old, unique and universal, and that solving them requires the use of long-proven tools as well as innovative approaches. They highlight that using anthropology in relevant ways outside academia contributes to the development of a new paradigm in anthropology, one where the ability to collaborate across disciplinary and professional boundaries becomes both central and legitimate. Contributors provide specific suggestions to anthropologists and the public at large on practical ways to use anthropology to change the world for the better. This one-of-a-kind volume will be of interest to fledgling and established anthropologists, social scientists and the general public.

Despite international congresses and international journals, anthropologies of education differ significantly around the world. Linguistic barriers constrain the flow of ideas, which results in a vast amount of research on educational anthropology that is not published in English or is difficult for international readers to find. This volume responds to the call to attend to educational research outside the United States and to break out of “metropolitan provincialism.” A guide to the anthropologies and ethnographies of learning and schooling published in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Slavic languages, Japanese, and English as a second language, show how scholars in Latin America, Japan, and elsewhere adapt European, American, and other approaches to create new traditions. As the contributors show, educators draw on different foundational research and different theoretical discussions. Thus, this global survey raises new questions and casts a new light on what has become a too-familiar discipline in the United States.