Do notions of community remain central to our sense of who we are, or can we see beyond community closures to a human whole?This volume explores the nature of contemporary sociality. It focuses on the ethical, organisational and emotional claims and opportunities sought or fashioned for mobilising and evading social collectivities in a world of mobile subjects.Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport present an examination of the tensions and interactions between everyday forms of flui...

'Community' is one of social science's longest-standing concepts. The assumption of much social science has been that humans belong in communities, as social and cultural beings.The trouble with 'community' is that this is not necessarily so; the personal social networks of individuals' actual experience crosscut collective categories, situations and institutions. Communities can prove unviable or imprisoning; the reality of community life and identity can often be very different f...

'Community' is so overused both in everyday language as well as in scholarly work that it could easily be dismissed as a truism. However, the persistence of the term itself shows that the idea continues to resonate powerfully in our daily lives, ethnographic accounts as well as theoretical analyses. This book returns a timely and concerted anthropological gaze to community as part of a broader consideration of contemporary circumstances of social affiliation and solidarity.

Anthropology is particularly well suited to explore the contemporary predicament in the coming of age of young men. Its grounded and comparative empiricism provides the opportunity to move beyond statistics, moral panics, or gender stereotypes in order to explore specific aspects of life course transitions, as well as the similar or divergent barriers or opportunities that young men in different parts of the world face. Yet, effective contextualization and comparison cannot be achieved by ...

First published in 1995, Youth Cultures critically studies an anthropologically neglected population: the youth. The book broadens the scope for analysing young people’s behaviour by moving away from notions of resistance and deviance and offers a range of ethnographically based studies of different kinds of youth in varied national contexts. From Nepal to Canada, Europe, the Solomon Islands and Algeria, it addresses issues relating to globalisation in Third World cities, ethnic d...

Turning the attention to the temporal as well as the more familiar spatial dimensions of mobility, this volume focuses on the momentum for and temporal composition of mobility, the rate at which people enact or deploy their movements as well as the conditions under which these moves are being marshalled, represented and contested. This is an anthropological exploration of temporality as a form of action, a process of actively modulating or responding to how people are moving rathe...

In academic descriptions of cosmopolitanism, one particularly important distinction often recurs. Specifically, scholars have been concerned to distinguish between cosmopolitanism as a set of mundane practices and/or competences on the one hand and cosmopolitanism as a cultivated form of consciousness or moral aspiration on the other. For anthropologists whose ethnographic studies reveal many different expressions of cosmopolitanism, this distinction between aspiration and practice can oft...

Foucault - The Key Ideas is a concise introduction to the life, works and ideas of this ground-breaking modern philosopher. This book will not only guide you through the events of Foucault's life and help you to understand his most complex ideas with ease; it will also demonstrate the practical impact of those ideas on life today. Covering everything from Foucault's views on the philosophy and sociology of knowledge to his analysis of power and institutions in society, this book offers a f...

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is one of the best-selling works of critical theory and a key text on many undergraduate courses. However, it is a long, difficult text which makes Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro's excellent step-by-step reading guide a welcome addition to the How to Read Theory series.Undergraduates across a wide range of disciplines are expected to have a solid understanding of Foucault's key terms, which have become commonplace in critical thinking today....

This introduction to social and cultural anthropology has become a modern classic, revealing the rich global variation in social life and culture across the world.Presenting a clear overview of anthropology, it focuses on central topics such as kinship, ethnicity, ritual and political systems, offering a wealth of examples that demonstrate the enormous scope of anthropology and the importance of a comparative perspective. Unlike other texts on the subject, Small Places, Large Issue...

How can we rebel against the capitalist system? John Holloway argues that by creating, cracks, fractures and fissures that forge spaces of rebellion and disrupt the current economic order.John Holloway, author of the groundbreaking Change the World Without Taking Power, sparked a world-wide debate among activists and scholars about the most effective methods of fighting capitalism from within. From campaigns against water privatisation, to simply not going to work and reading a boo...

We live in the twilight of neoliberalism: the ruling classes can no longer rule as before, and ordinary people are no longer willing to be ruled in the old way. Pursued by global elites since the 1970s, neoliberalism is defined by dispossession and ever-increasing inequality. The refusal to continue to be ruled like this - 'ya basta!' - appears in an arc of resistance stretching from rural India to the cities of the global North.From this network of movements, new visions are emerg...