1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology

Edited By Simon Coleman, Susan Hyatt, Ann Kingsolver Copyright 2017
    530 Pages
    by Routledge

    546 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology is an invaluable guide and major reference source for students and scholars alike, introducing its readers to key contemporary perspectives and approaches within the field. Written by an experienced international team of contributors, with an interdisciplinary range of essays, this collection provides a powerful overview of the transformations currently affecting anthropology. The volume both addresses the concerns of the discipline and comments on its construction through texts, classroom interactions, engagements with various publics, and changing relations with other academic subjects. Persuasively demonstrating that a number of key contemporary issues can be usefully analyzed through an anthropological lens, the contributors cover important topics such as globalization, law and politics, collaborative archaeology, economics, religion, citizenship and community, health, and the environment. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology is a fascinating examination of this lively and constantly evolving discipline.

    PART I

    Introduction

    1. Introduction to an engaging discipline: The challenge of creating a companion to contemporary anthropology
    Simon Coleman, Susan B. Hyatt, and Ann Kingsolver

    PART II

    Conceptualizing the field in/of anthropology

    2. Engaging theory in the new millennium
    Faye V. Harrison

    3. Participating, observing, witnessing
    Deborah Reed-Danahay

    4. Beyond sites and methods: The field, history and global capitalism
    Patrick Neveling

    5. Anthropology and the internet
    Anna Stewart

    6. Hand in hand: Homelessness, heritage and collaborative approaches to the material past
    Rachael Kiddey

    7. Communicating anthropology: Writing, screening, and exhibiting culture
    Paul Basu

    8. Teaching anthropological theory in neoliberal times
    Elizabeth Chin

    PART III

    Transforming disciplinary conversations

    9. Doing and being: Process, essence and hierarchy in making kin
    Susan McKinnon

    10. "Religion" after religion, "ritual" after ritual
    Jon Bialecki

    11. Language, gender, and desire in performance
    Peter C. Haney

    12. Selves and codified bodies
    Subhadra Channa

    13. Law and politics: An anthropological history, and research and practice among vulnerable populations
    Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban

    14. Objectifying economies: contemporary themes in the anthropology of economic knowledge and practice
    Daromir Rudnyckyj

    15. Research, representation, redemption and repatriation: Archaeology and
    community relationships in 21st-century America
    Joe Watkins

    16. Critical biocultural anthropology: A model for anthropological integration
    Thomas Leatherman and Morgan Hoke

    PART IV

    Anthropology in conversation with other fields

    17. Anthropology and Science
    Jonathan Marks

    18. Joined at the head: Anthropology, geography and the environment
    Michael J. Watts

    19. Entangled subjects and art objects
    Shelly Errington

    20. Psychological anthropology: An awkward hybrid?
    Andrew Beatty

    21. Whither anthropology in public policy?: Reflections from India
    Soumendra Mohan Patnaik

    22. Health and anthropology in the era of anthropogenic climatic and environmental change
    Merrill Singer

    23. Immersive politics and the ethnographic encounter: Anthropology and political science
    Joseph MacKay and Jamie Levin

    24. Social movements as process
    Marianne Maeckelbergh

    25. Ethnography as aprendizaje: Growing and using collaborative knowledge with the People's Produce Project in San Diego
    A. L. Anderson-Lazo

    26. Interdisciplinary approaches to cultural citizenship and migration
    Mattia Fumanti

    Biography

    Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. He has previously been editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and is currently co-editor of the journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research. He works on Pentecostalism, pilgrimage, hospital chaplaincies, and cathedrals, and has carried out fieldwork in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Nigeria. Previous general works on anthropology have included Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology (2006, ed. with Peter Collins) and Multi-sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods (2011, ed. with Pauline von Hellerman).


    Susan B. Hyatt is Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and Chair of the Anthropology Department. She is also founder of the department’s MA program in Applied Anthropology. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts in 1996. With Boone Shear and Susan Wright, she co-edited a recent volume entitled, Learning Under Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education (2015). She is committed to involving her students in collaborative fieldwork with neighbourhoods in Indianapolis, and in 2010, the Indiana Campus Compact awarded her with the Brian Hiltunen Award for the Outstanding Scholarship of Civic Engagement, and in 2012 she received the IUPUI Chancellor’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Civic Engagement.


    Ann Kingsolver is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Her work as a cultural anthropologist, in ethnographic fieldwork in the United States, Mexico, and Sri Lanka, has been focused on variously situated interpretations of, and responses to, all that gets glossed as capitalist globalization. Her books include NAFTA Stories: Fears and Hopes in Mexico and the United States (2001) and Tobacco Town Futures: Global Encounters in Rural Kentucky (2011), and edited collections More than Class: Studying Power in U.S. Workplaces (1998) and, with Nandini Gunewardena, The Gender of Globalization: Women Navigating Cultural and Economic Marginalities (2007).