Anthropology
Massimo Cacciari is one of the leading public intellectuals in today's Italy. This collection of essays on political topics provides the best introduction in English to his thought to date. This carefully curated collection includes chapters on Hofmannsthal, Lukacs, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Weber, Derrida, Schmitt, Canetti, and Aeschylus. Written between 1978 and 2006, these essays engagingly address the most hidden tradition in European political thought: the unpolitical.
In today's world hunter-gatherer societies struggle with seemingly insurmountable problems: deforestation and encroachment, language loss, political domination by surrounding communities. Will they manage to survive? This book is about one such society living in the monsoon rainforests of western Nepal: the Raute. "Kings of the Forest" explores how this elusive ethnic group, the last hunter-gatherers of the Himalayas, maintains its traditional way of life amidst increasing pressure to assimilate.
Related black communities claim different ethnoracial identities based in laws. Anthropologists widely agree that identities - even ethnic and racial ones - are socially constructed. Less understood are the processes by which social identities are conceived and developed. "Legalizing Identities" shows how law can successfully serve as the impetus for the transformation of cultural practices and collective identity.
How do vision quests, river locations, and warriors relate to indigenous activism? For the Aguaruna, an ethnic group at the forefront of Peru's Amazonian Movement, incorporating practices and values they define as customary allows them to shape their own experience as modern indigenous subjects. As Shane Greene reveals, this customization centers on the complex articulation of meaningful social practices, cultural logics, and the political economy of specialized production and consumption.
Aparicio examines the ways first- and second-generation Dominican-Americans in the dynamic northern Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights have shaped a new Dominican presence in local New York City politics. Through community organizing, they have formed coalitions with people of different national and ethnic backgrounds and other people of color, tackled local concerns, and created new routes for empowerment. The character of Dominican-American politics has changed since the first large wave of Dominican immigrants arrived in New York in the 1960s.
Struggles over the meaning of the past are common in postcolonial states. State cultural heritage programs build monuments to reinforce in nation building efforts often supported by international organizations and tourist dollars. These efforts often ignore the other, more troubling memories preserved by local communities markers of colonial oppression, cultural genocide, and ethnic identity, Yet, as the contributors to this volume note, questions of memory, heritage, identity and conservation are interwoven at the local, ethnic, national and global level and cannot be easily disentangled.