Social and cultural anthropology
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Religion Evolving
Benjamin Grant Purzycki, Richard Sosis
The scientific study of religion has made significant advances in recent decades, explaining how the mind produces religious ideas, the motivations underlying religious behaviour, and the transmission of religious cultures within and across generations. In Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and...
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Levantine Entanglements
Terje Stordalen, Oystein S. LaBianca
This cross-disciplinary volume makes the case for the Levant, including the use of the term, as a unit of analysis for the study of cultural production and change over the long-term in the Eastern Mediterranean. It offers a new perspective on the history of this region that overcomes Orientalist app...
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Bikutsi
This book offers the first ethnographically informed, in-depth historical study of the Cameroonian popular music genre bikutsi. The thriving dance music in Cameroon's day-to-day life has its foundation in the specific historical processes of the 1970s and 1980s, which led to the recognition of bikut...
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Turkish Folk Music Between Ghent and Turkey
In our twenty-first-century world, shaped by the transformative processes of migration, diasporization, and cosmopolitanization, musical performance conditions and contexts constantly change, while musical forms newly emerge and evolve. The development of Turkish folk music is well-documented, provi...
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Cultural Mapping and Musical Diversity
'Cultural mapping' has become a central keyword in the UNESCO strategy to protect natural and world cultural heritage, including music traditions. As a tool to increase the awareness of cultural diversity it transforms the concept of intangible cultural heritage to visible items by establishing mult...
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Being Viking
Contemporary Paganism has been a growing segment of American religiosity for over forty years and is composed of a variety of groups, practices, and ideologies. Asatru (Asatru), a movement that seeks to revive the practice of pre-Christian Norse religion, remains one of the least studied of these Pa...
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Restoring the Chain of Memory
This book describes and analyses the writings and records compiled by the notable linguist, T.G.H. Strehlow (1908-1978), on Australian Aboriginal religions, particularly as practised by the Arrernte of the central desert region. During numerous research trips between 1932 and 1966, the local Indigen...
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Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity
Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity is a multi-authored work that tackles the problem of how to examine the historicity of identity. Six scholars of religion, all members of the Culture on the Edge group, engage in a constructive dialogue mediating and critically cross-examining issues of identi...
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Historical Archaeologies of Cognition
James Symonds, Anna Badcock, Jeff Oliver
This collection of essays draws inspiration from the late James Deetz's In Small Things Forgotten (1977). Deetz's seminal work broke new ground by using structuralist theory to show how artefacts reflected the 'worldviews' or ideologies of their makers and users, and went on to claim that the Americ...
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The Imagined Sky
The sky forms fifty percent of our visual world and as such has a voice across cultures. This sky-voice is informed by human images, dreams, and aspirations and thus is complex and contains great diversity. The inherent nature of this sky-voice is transmitted from one generation to another through t...