Academic literature on the topic 'Cultural anthropology|Social research|Geography'

This book brings together international academics, policy makers, and practitioners to build bridges between the real world and scholarship on breastfeeding. It asks the question: How can the latest social science research into breastfeeding be used to improve support at both policy and practice level, in order to help women breastfeed and to breastfeed for longer? The book includes discussion about the social and cultural contexts of breastfeeding and looks at how policy and practice can apply this to women's experiences. This will be essential reading for academics, policy makers and practit

Innovative and multidisciplinary in approaches, the book discusses the most cardinal features of any social or religious movement: definition, gender, leadership, demographic size, geography, economy, and decline of Hasidism, one of the most important religious movements of modern Eastern Europe. This is the first such attempt to respond to those central questions of Hasidism in one book. Recognizing the major limitations of the existing research on Hasidism, the book offers four important corrections. First, it offers an anti-elitist corrective attempting to investigate Hasidism beyond its le

Now in its sixth decade, country music studies is a thriving field of inquiry involving scholars working in the fields of American history, folklore, sociology, anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and geography, among many others. Covering issues of historiography and practice as well as the ways in which the genre interacts with media and social concerns such as class, gender, and sexuality, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music interrogates prevailing narratives, explores significant lacunae in the current literature, and provides guidance for future research. More th

This collaborative Oxford Handbook of Borderlands in the Iberian World integrates interdisciplinary approaches to illustrate the historical processes that produced borderlands in the Americas and connected them to global circuits of exchange and migration in the early modern world, extending from the fifteenth to the nineteenth-centuries. It brings together specialists in the Spanish and Portuguese imperial spheres, their geographic and cultural borderlands in both South and North America, and their maritime networks across the Caribbean, Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Its objectives emphasize (

AbstractA significant effort in theorising and conceptualising the visual has been made within various disciplines. To mention only a few, Howard Becker (Art as collective action. Am Sociol Rev 767–776, 1974) in visual sociology, Lucien Taylor (Visualising theory. Routledge, 1994), Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy ((eds): Rethinking visual anthropology. Yale University Press, London, 1999) and Jay Ruby (Picturing culture: explorations of film and anthropology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000) in visual anthropology, Chris Jenk ((ed): Visual culture. Routledge, 1995) in cultural studies, Gillian Rose (Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual methods. Sage, 2001) in geography and Sarah Pink (Doing visual ethnography. Sage, London, 2001) in visual ethnography, all produced fundamental works focusing on the visual in social sciences. This book, however, without diminishing the disciplinary work within the subject, proposes to approach visual methodologies in the specific context of a field of study, adopting an interdisciplinary approach that brings together geography, sociology, anthropology and communication studies. As Adrian Favell (Rebooting migration theory: interdisciplinarity, globality and postdisciplinarity in migration studies. In: Brettell C, Hollifield J (eds) Migration theory: talking across disciplines. Routledge, pp 259–278, 2007, p. 1988) has suggested: “On the face of it, there could hardly be a topic in the contemporary social sciences more naturally ripe for interdisciplinary thinking than migration studies.” In this piece we will attempt to explain why the adoption of visual methodologies in the field of migration studies is of particular interest.

With the recent developing trend of redefining ‘culture’ across disciplines in intercultural and foreign language education (Corbett, 2003; Shaules, 2007; Spencer-Oatey & Franklin, 2010), it is widely agreed that culture requires a broader definition to improve the teaching and learning of it. Wilkinson (2012) suggests “a redefinition of culture in anthropological rather than aesthetic terms” (p. 302) to ensure that intercultural and language learning leads to Intercultural Competence (IC). Others (Buttjes, 1991; Risager, 2006) also note the importance of anthropological conceptualization when culture is taught in foreign and/or second language classrooms, because motivation to learn the language is increased. Byram (1991) similarly emphasized the need to include active ‘cultural experience’ in the foreign language classroom, and provided examples including cooking and geography lessons, in which students learn about the food and geography of the country whose language they are studying. A crucial element in research within the anthropology field is ethnography. Thus, to achieve a fuller understanding of culture “as the full gauntlet of social experience that students of foreign languages both learn and participate in” (Wilkinson, 2012, p. 302), including Holliday's (2004) concept of ‘small culture’, students should take on the role of ethnographer too; ethnography practices, in a variety of forms, have become central to intercultural approaches to culture and language teaching and learning (Corbett, 2003).

Contemporary geographical research concerning North America’s native peoples is most conspicuous for its remarkably diverse set of subjects, methods, and epistemological stances. Indeed, it would be hard to find another AAG specialty group whose members do research in as many corners of the natural and social sciences and humanities. Some perspectives developed quite recently, while others emanate from a century of prior research by geographers, especially Carl Sauer and his students. We think these observations important enough to require opening our review with a description, albeit a painfully brief one, of the historical context for the current scene. In the early twentieth century, as now, there was a great deal of cross-fertilization between anthropology and geography. Deterministic thinking associated with environmentalist theory (e.g. Hans 1925; Huntington 1919; Semple 1903) elicited many critical responses from both fields. For example, the geographer-turned-anthropologist Franz Boas and his students sought to illuminate the full complexity of Native American life, producing a vast corpus of empirical studies. Many addressed geographical topics, including Native North American place-names, environmental knowledge, and resource use. These works were frequently termed “ethnogeographies” (e.g. Barrett 1908; Boas 1934; Harrington 1916). Others attempted sweeping continental studies of regional variation based on historical and cultural processes (Kroeber 1939; Wissler 1926). The historicist critique of environmentalist theory resonated with a young geographer, Carl Sauer. Sauer (1920) long had interests in American Indian land-use practices, or “land management” in current parlance. Regular interaction with Boas’s students, especially Kroeber and Lowie, coupled with independent development of their own geographical ideas, led Sauer and his students to expand their research on North American Indian cultural geography, including such subjects as settlement patterns (e.g. Sauer and Brand 1930), plant use (e.g. Carter 1945), and resources and material and oral culture (e.g. Kniffen 1939). Sauer, his large number of Ph.D. students, and his student’s students, continued to define this research agenda throughout the twentieth century (e.g. Kniffen et al. 1987; Sauer 1971). The continued relevance of this work was signaled recently by the reissue of two classic texts in new editions (Denevan 1992a; Waterman 1993).