SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social
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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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Preserving Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age
Margie M. Burton, Nicola Lercari, Thomas E. Levy, Benjamin W. Porter, Willeke Wendrich
In late August 2015, international media outlets and cultural institutions reported that the Islamic State beheaded the Syrian scholar Khaled al Asaad and destroyed the 1st-century CE Temple of Bel in Palmyra, Syria. The world was horrorstruck. Apart from the human tragedy, archaeologists and the in...
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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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Seaways to Complexity
This book focuses on the sociopolitical development and the organisational differences between societies in northwestern Scandinavia in the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age (2350-1100 BCE). Grounded in a political economy approach, the book presents a theoretical model that emphases a dialectic n...
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Identifying Roots
This volume presents a cultural history of Alex Haley's Roots as a case study in 'operational acts of identification.' It examines the strategy and tactics Haley employed in developing a family origin story into an acclaimed national history. Where cultural studies scholars have critiqued notions of...
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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...