State of Health
State of Health

Author: Amy Cooper

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-04-02

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0520299280

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State of Health takes readers inside one of the most controversial regimes of the twenty-first century—Venezuela under Hugo Chávez—for a revealing description of how people’s lives changed for the better as the state began reorganizing society. With lively and accessible storytelling, Amy Cooper chronicles the pleasure people experienced accessing government health care and improving their quality of life. From personalized doctor’s visits to therapeutic dance classes, new health care programs provided more than medical services. State of Health offers a unique perspective on the significance of the Bolivarian Revolution for ordinary people, demonstrating how the transformed health system succeeded in exciting people and recognizing historically marginalized Venezuelans as bodies who mattered.

Vision and Society
Vision and Society

Author: John Clammer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-26

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1317935985

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The sociology of art is now an established sub-discipline of sociology. But little work has been done to explore the implications not of society on art, but of art on the nature and principles of sociology itself. Vision and Society explores the ways in which art (here mainly understood as visual art) structures in fundamental ways the constitution of society, the relations between societies and the ways in which society and culture should be theorized. Building initially on an unfulfilled project by the French sociologist of art Nathalie Heinich to derive a sociology from art, this book pushes this idea in unconventional directions. Rethinking the relationships between the study of art and the study of sociology and anthropology, this book explores how this rethinking might impact sociological theory in general, and certain aspects of it in particular – especially the study of social movements, social change, the urban, the constitution of space and the ways in which human social relationships are mediated and expressed.

From Anthropology to Social Theory
From Anthropology to Social Theory

Author: Arpad Szakolczai

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-01-17

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1108540171

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Presenting a ground-breaking revitalization of contemporary social theory, this book revisits the rise of the modern world to reopen the dialogue between anthropology and sociology. Using concepts developed by a series of 'maverick' anthropologists who were systematically marginalised as their ideas fell outside the standard academic canon, such as Arnold van Gennep, Marcel Mauss, Paul Radin, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Gregory Bateson, the authors argue that such concepts are necessary for understanding better the rise and dynamics of the modern world, including the development of the social sciences, in particular sociology and anthropology. Concepts discussed include liminality, imitation, schismogenesis and trickster, which provide an anthropological 'toolkit' for readers to develop innovative understandings of the underlying power mechanisms of globalized modernity. Aimed at graduate students and researchers, the book is clearly structured. Part I introduces the 'maverick' anthropologists, while Part II applies the maverick tool-kit to revisit the history of sociological thought and the question of modernity.

Stategraphy
Stategraphy

Author: Tatjana Thelen

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2017-11-30

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1785337017

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Stategraphy—the ethnographic exploration of relational modes, boundary work, and forms of embeddedness of actors—offers crucial analytical avenues for researching the state. By exploring interactions and negotiations of local actors in different institutional settings, the contributors explore state transformations in relation to social security in a variety of locations spanning from Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans to the United Kingdom and France. Fusing grounded empirical studies with rigorous theorizing, the volume provides new perspectives to broader related debates in social research and political analysis.

Outsourcing Justice
Outsourcing Justice

Author: Ursula Castellano

Publisher: Firstforumpress

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781935049296

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Do pretrial release programs, initiated and now operated by a range of nonprofit organizations to redress the inequalities of the bail system, affect the administration of justice? Specifically, do they lessen the barriers to justice often faced by poor and minority defendants? Ursula Castellano¿s ethnographic study of four pretrial release programs reveals the often unintended consequences of incorporating social service nonprofits in the criminal court process. Castellano explores the intimate workings of pretrial release programs to show how contract caseworkers now play a critical role at nearly every stage of the criminal justice process¿and also how well-intentioned nonprofits can end up compromising the traditional adversarial legal process in the name of treatment, sometimes in ways that are detrimental for defendants. In the process, she raises new questions about the increasing involvement of nonprofits in the operation of government.

America Observed
America Observed

Author: Virginia R. Dominguez

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1785333615

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There is surprisingly little fieldwork done on the United States by anthropologists from abroad. America Observed fills that gap by bringing into greater focus empirical as well as theoretical implications of this phenomenon. Edited by Virginia Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, the essays collected here offer a critique of such an absence, exploring its likely reasons while also illustrating the advantages of studying fieldwork-based anthropological projects conducted by colleagues from outside the U.S. This volume contains an introduction written by the editors and fieldwork-based essays written by Helena Wulff, Jasmin Habib, Limor Darash, Ulf Hannerz, and Moshe Shokeid, and reflections on the broad issue written by Geoffrey White, Keiko Ikeda, and Jane Desmond. Suitable for introductory and mid-level anthropology courses, America Observed will also be useful for American Studies courses both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The Scope of Anthropology
The Scope of Anthropology

Author: Laurent Dousset

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0857453319

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Some of the most prominent social and cultural anthropologists have come together in this volume to discuss Maurice Godelier's work. They explore and revisit some of the highly complex practices and structures social scientists encounter in their fieldwork. From the nature-culture debate to the fabrication of hereditary political systems, from transforming gender relations to the problems of the Christianization of indigenous peoples, these chapters demonstrate both the diversity of anthropological topics and the opportunity for constructive dialogue around shared methodological and theoretical models.

The Anthropology of the State
The Anthropology of the State

Author: Aradhana Sharma

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2009-02-09

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 1405155353

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This innovative reader brings together classic theoretical textsand cutting-edge ethnographic analyses of specific stateinstitutions, practices, and processes and outlines ananthropological framework for rethinking future study of “thestate”. Focuses on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, andrepresentations that constitute the “state”. Promotes cultural and transnational approaches to thesubject. Helps readers to make anthropological sense of the state as acultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing,transnational world.

Policy Worlds
Policy Worlds

Author: Cris Shore

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2011-04-01

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0857451170

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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.