This timely Handbook provides a groundbreaking collection of anthropological research on artificial intelligence (AI), examining how anthropology can help to comprehend and critique its development. Evaluating the limits, hopes and fears of AI, leading experts explore its influence as a sociocultural phenomenon rather than a discrete technological system.Through an ethnographic lens, the Handbook analyzes human–machine entanglements as they have emerged in AI comp...

The Muhammad cartoon crisis of 2005−2006 in Denmark caught the world by surprise as the growing hostilities toward Muslims had not been widely noticed. Through the methodologies of media anthropology, cultural studies, and communication studies, this book brings together more than thirteen years of research on three significant historical media events in order to show the drastic changes and emerging fissures in Danish society and to expose the politicization of Danish news journalism, whi...

This book represents a comprehensive effort to understand discrimination, racialization, racism, Islamophobia, anti-racist activism, and the inclusion and exclusion of minorities in Nordic countries. Examining critical media events in this heavily mediatized society, the contributors explore how processes of racialization take place in an environment dominated by commercial interests, anti-migrant and anti-Muslim narratives and sentiments, and a surprising lack of informed research on nati...

Mayan People Within and Beyond Boundaries explores the Maya of Yucatan, the Maya of academic institutions and the Maya of the tourist industry. It examines the interplay between the local and the external, academic categories of the Maya, and seeks to transcend the paradoxical and incongruent relationship between the social spaces that breathe life into the categories. The notion of "shared social experience" is introduced to embody a focus on reflexivity that goes beyond the subj...

This book addresses how identity, structures, and agency affect women’s everyday lives in post-revolutionary Egypt. The authors analyse the topic both on a macro- as well as on a micro-level. Through interviews and workshops, women around Egypt express their own experiences in dialogue, in groups and in drawings. Based on the analysis of this material the reader gets insights into personal experiences, believes and opinions of a diverse group of women in terms of age, economic class, educa...

Earth Beings is the fruit of Marisol de la Cadena's decade-long conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, runakuna or Quechua people. Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and nonindigenous worlds, and the partial connections between them, de la Cadena presents how the Turpos' indigenous ways of knowing and being include and exceed modern and nonmodern practices. Her discussion of indigenous political strategies—a realm that need not ab...

The extensive changes to Emirati women's traditional rights and roles have been one of the most visible transformations taking place in the United Arab Emirates throughout its almost forty years of modern history. This book offers an interpretation of why and how these modifications came about. Its aim is to analyse the promotion of educational, employment and political rights for women as strategic state actions set within a context of broader nation-building goals. The author discovers t...

Although extensive literature exists on the violence of war, little attention has been given to the ways in which this violence becomes entrenched and normalized in the inner recesses of everyday life. In Afghanistan Remembers, Parin Dossa examines Afghan women’s recall of violence through memories and food practices in their homeland and its diaspora. Her work reveals how the suffering and trauma of violence has been rendered socially invisible following decades of life in a war-...

The third edition of this bestselling book introduces readers to anthropology, and the world around it, by connecting important concepts to current global issues. A question-based approach encourages readers to understand specific issues in a broader cross-cultural context while building an appreciation for anthropology’s role in developing global citizenship.This edition has been updated and revised throughout, including discussion of technology, design anthropology, and the effec...

The Maya of the Yucatán have long been drawn into the Mexican state's attempt to create modern Mexican citizens (mestizos). At the same time, they have contended with globalization pressures, first with hemp production and more recently with increased tourism and the fast-growing influence of American-based evangelical Protestantism. Despite these pressures to turn Maya into mestizo, the citizens of the small town of Maxcanú have used subtle forms of resistance—humor, satire, and language—...

In the West, news about the Middle East is dominated by an endless stream of reports and commentary about civil war, sectarian violence, religious extremism, and economic stagnation. But do they tell the full story? For instance, who knew that university enrolment in the war-torn Palestinian territories exceeds that of Hong Kong, or that more than a third of Lebanese entrepreneurs are women?Change is on its way in the Middle East, argues Bessma Momani, and its cause is demographic....

Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else—symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities—with their ...