Through a series of case studies from Southern and Eastern Africa, Oceania, and Europe, Movement and Connectivity: Configurations of Belonging explores the analytical usefulness of the concept of «mobility» for anthropological thought and theorization. The book scrutinizes mobility through long-term ethnographies that encompass life histories of individual persons, cyclical household developments, and the evolution of communities and networks. It shows how the social and spatial complexity of mobility increases with time and how socio-political and economic changes affect values, ideas, and practices in local life-worlds. The case studies examines mobility from below and as processes constitutive of society and identity - processes through which mobility is perceived and experienced as part of life. How do people see their own local life-world and its (un)connectedness to other societies? To what extent can a mobility approach advance our understanding of the complex relationship between migratory practices, experiences of belonging, and the kinds of movement and connectivity that make and re-make people as well as their societies? Movement and Connectivity: Configurations of Belonging re-questions and re-thinks relationships between space, time, and livelihoods and explores how differently motivated geographical movements may be perceived and lived as part of wider social complexities.

Jeffery J. Clark and Karl W. Laumbach --

This original collection brings islands to the fore in a growing body of scholarship on the Indian Ocean, examining them as hubs or points of convergence and divergence in a world of maritime movements and exchanges. Straddling history and anthropology and grounded in the framework of connectivity, the book tackles central themes such as smallness, translocality, and “the island factor.” It moves to the farthest reaches of the region, with a rich variety of case studies on the Swahili-Comorian world, the Maldives, Indonesia, and more. With remarkable breadth and cohesion, these essays capture the circulations of people, goods, rituals, sociocultural practices, and ideas that constitute the Indian Ocean world. Together, they take up “islandness” as an explicit empirical and methodological issue as few have done before.

Networks of Outrage and Hope is an exploration of the new forms of social movements and protests that are erupting in the world today, from the Arab uprisings to the indignadas movement in Spain, from the Occupy Wall Street movement to the social protests in Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere. While these and similar social movements differ in many important ways, there is one thing they share in common: they are all interwoven inextricably with the creation of autonomous communication networks supported by the Internet and wireless communication. In this new edition of his timely and important book, Manuel Castells examines the social, cultural and political roots of these new social movements, studies their innovative forms of self-organization, assesses the precise role of technology in the dynamics of the movements, suggests the reasons for the support they have found in large segments of society, and probes their capacity to induce political change by influencing people’s minds. Two new chapters bring the analysis up-to-date and draw out the implications of these social movements and protests for understanding the new forms of social change and political democracy in the global network society.

This practical guide shows how to facilitate collaboration among diverse individuals and organizations to navigate complexity and create change in our interconnected world. The social and environmental challenges we face today are not only complex, they are also systemic and structural and have no obvious solutions. They require diverse combinations of people, organizations, and sectors to coordinate actions and work together even when the way forward is unclear. Even so, collaborative efforts often fail because they attempt to navigate complexity with traditional strategic plans, created by hierarchies that ignore the way people naturally connect. By embracing a living-systems approach to organizing, impact networks bring people together to build relationships across boundaries; leverage the existing work, skills, and motivations of the group; and make progress amid unpredictable and ever-changing conditions. As a powerful and flexible organizing system that can span regions, organizations, and silos of all kinds, impact networks underlie some of the most impressive and large-scale efforts to create change across the globe. David Ehrlichman draws on his experience as a network builder; interviews with dozens of network leaders; and insights from the fields of network science, community building, and systems thinking to provide a clear process for creating and developing impact networks. Given the increasing complexity of our society and the issues we face, our ability to form, grow, and work through networks has never been more essential.

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discrete entities. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more precisely – is becoming, in the world. The question, thus, is how these two modes of becoming relate and fold into each other. Throughout the four-year research process that led to this book, the authors approached this question not just from a theoretical perspective; taking the suggestion of 'thinking through things' literally and methodologically seriously, the first two workshops were dedicated to practical, hands-on exercises working with things. From these workshops a series of installations emerged, straddling the boundaries of art and academia. These installations served as artistic-academic interventions during the final symposium and are featured alongside the other academic contributions to this volume. Throughout this process, two main themes emerged and structure Part II, Movement and Growth, and Part III, Dissolution and Traces, of the present volume, respectively. Part I, Conceptual Grounds, consists of two chapters offering conceptual takes on things and ties – one from anthropology and one from archaeology. As interrelated modes of becoming, materiality and connectivity make it necessary to coalesce things and ties into thing~ties – an insight toward which the chapters and interventions came from different sides, and one in which the initial proposition of the editors still shines through. Throughout the pages of this volume, we invite the reader to travel beyond imaginaries of a universe of separate planets united by connections, and to venture with us instead into the thicket of thing~ties in which we live.

This book explores how we go about creating the connections within us that allow us to become fully embodied human beings in the world. It provides some very personal memories of Irmgard Bartenieff and the development of her approach to Fundamentals.

The sensory and motor cortical homunculi proposed by Walter Penfield were a major landmark for the anatomical mapping of the brain. More than 60 years after, the development of new tools to investigate brain function non-invasively has increased our knowledge about the structure and functions of the primary motor Cortex (M1) beyond motor control in both humans and animals. This book highlights the role of the motor cortex that goes way beyond motor functioning. We were interested in both theoretical and empirical contributions related to electrophysiological, pharmacological, neuroimaging, and neuromodulatory studies exploring the role of M1 on non-motor functions, such as pain, abnormal neuroplasticity that may lead to chronic pain conditions; or the relationship between M1 and mental imagery or emotion. This book is comprised of 15 articles published in this edited volume as a research topic collection in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience titled “The Role of Primary Motor Cortex as a Marker and Modulator of Pain Control and Emotional-Affective Processing.”