Books published by Sean Kingston Publishing

An original ethnography of sound and listening in one of our major institutions, Hearing and the Hospital reveals the hospital to be a space in which several modes of listening are simultaneously in play and in which different layers of auditory knowledge and experience coexist. Engaging withSound Studies, the Anthropology of the Senses, Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies in this volume, Tom Rice shows how sound and listening produce, articulate and mediate social relations inside the hospital; how listening acquires direction and focus within that environment; and how certain sounds become endowed with particular meanings and associations. He also exposes many of the sensory minutiae that both underpin and underminethe production of medical knowledge and skill. Hearing and the Hospital creates an acoustic interrogation of hospital life, and in doing so questions accepted ideas about the sense of hearing itself.There's a great deal to admire in Tom Rice's ethnography of the aural politics of the hospital. First because it represents a unique conjunction of the ethnography of sound and senses with medical anthropology and social studies ofscience. Next because it patiently details how sound as a way of knowing so deeply informs social practices of medical listening. And finally because it is so successful in revealing both how hospitals and bodies pulse as acousticspaces, and how patients and doctors professionalize, personalize, and participate as situated listeners.(Steven Feld, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music, University of New Mexico).Tom Rice is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Exeter, and specializes in auditory culture. As well as writing and teaching on sound he has produced audio pieces including the BBC Radio 4 feature The Art of Water Music.

A truly exceptional resource for ethnobiologists combining rigorous data collected over long-term fieldwork with the Nuaulu with informed, sophisticated and lively engagement with key conceptual, methodological and theoretical debates in the field by one its leading figures. A landmark study that confirms the author's highly respected status.

This book offers nothing less than a comprehensive theory of the sacred object from the viewpoint of anthropology and the history of religion. Taking the riddle of fetishism as its starting point, it shows how people of all cultures ascribe immeasurable value to things, even to the point of making their own destiny dependent on them.

This collection brings together research supported by the RAI's Urgent Anthropology Fellowships Fund into communities whose culture and social life are under immediate threat with the aim of identifying ways of strengthening such communities through ethnographic work.

Aimed at both curious novice and experienced practitioner, the book is an exploration of what field notes are, can do and could be.

Polish anthropology developed in the past and innovates today in a twilight zone between French-Anglo-US hegemony and an Eastern European intellectual and political heritage. This collection offers original contributions to world anthropologies on themes such as gender, memory, engagement, activism, health and politic from this decentred context.

This book explores the relationship between African Americans, descendants of Africans brought to America as slaves, and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, who have come to the United States of America voluntarily, mainly since the 1990s. This in-depth study on a little-researched subject brings new understanding of contemporary American society.

Dunbar's Number, the limit on the size of both social groups and personal social networks, has reached iconic status in both the worlds of academia and business, its design underpinning social networking sites. Dunbar joins authors from different fields to explore its conceptual origins and supporting evidence and to reflect on its implications.

This book takes the radical theories of Roy Wagner as a basis for conceptual improvisation. Applying insights into the on-going invention of culture, developed in Melanesia, this collection explores Native American and Afro-American ethnographies from the Americas and concludes with a commentary responding to each author's work by Wagner himself.

In an analysis of the increasing use of copyright law, literary, anthropological & legal experts explore, from a local African point of view, what happens to intangible cultural goods when they are confronted with large-scale commodification, distributed through media, and defined by globalized & divergent judicial systems & cultural norms.

Anthropologists often have fieldwork experiences that are not explicitly analysed in their writings, though they shape their understandings. This volume uncovers these layers of knowledge-making in order to develop a new language for building anthropological works, rooted primarily in the pre-textual worlds of tacit and intense experiences.

Specialists from anthropology, psychology, cinematography, art history and linguistics explore colour in relation to light and movement, memory and landscape, language and narrative, in case studies in Australia, British Columbia, Russia and the UK.

Contemporary indigenous peoples are modern societies, shaped by their ways of dealing with and transforming contexts imposed by nation-states, colonial systems and globalization. Case studies from South America on shamanism and Christianity, traditional clothing, as well as indigenous cosmologies, technology and welfare, explore these processes

A timely collection on contemporary relationships between the state and society, which uses case studies beyond the heartland of political theory to consider state control under challenge or in transition.

A ground-breaking study of hip-hop in all its forms - rapping, DJing, break-dancing, graffiti, and now political organization - in Portuguese-speaking countries. In particular, it looks at the way young people use hip-hop to occupy social space in the city and critique the social order, in a global movement that incorporates many local forms.

A powerfully written memoir, by a respected anthropologist with more than five decades of experience as an ethnographer, author, editor, and mentor, that makes the case for serious ethnography as the foundation of anthropological theory and provides valuable and sometimes surprising perspectives on American Anthropology from 1950s to the present.

Illustrated ethnographic tour de force documenting the architecture and construction techniques of the Wola of Papua New Guinea, exploring the role of tacit understandings and know-how in both skilled work and everyday dwelling. Companion volume to Made in Niugini: technology in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (expanded, revised 2nd edition).

A study of the reinvention of Zisha ceramics, after disbanding of communist era factory co-operatives and the reintroduction of family businesses based on artisan workshops. This work explores new forms of state intervention and the construction of notions of Chinese values and their relationship to authenticity, tradition and mastery of the craft.

A compelling travel book based on fieldnotes and diaries and a landmark study of Greek island life in the mid 1960s on the eve of changes that would transform Greece by mass tourism., In this new edition, Kenna returns to Anafi to find the world she observed almost gone but not quite yet.

In 1928 in Tikopia Firth made a collection he saw as a scientific record of a culture. Bonshek revisits the objects' documentation & ethnography to highlight the social relations the collecting process illuminates and to acknowledge Tikopia voices. She charts its later role in museums in the transmission of "cultural heritage" between generations.

Focusing on attempts by elites over three generations to gain distinction in public life in the urban setting of a mid-range town, this book illuminates public debates on education, aspirations of youth, state and citizen, delivery of good government and the place of ethnic and settler minorities in post-apartheid southern Africa.

An acclaimed ethnography of the material culture of the Wola Papua New Guinea, of broad implications to anthropology, museology & archaeology, with numerous illustrations, showing the making of the everyday artefacts by those who will use them in an economy with egalitarian access to resources. The companion volume to Built in Niugini.

In investigating both customary and modern Pacific art, these collected essays present a wide-ranging view across time and space, taking the reader from antiquities to contemporary art and travelling across the region from Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, New Zealand to Samoa. Studies of artefacts and traditions, such as self-portraiture, wood carvings, shields, tapa, dance and masks, use a variety of approaches, some deriving from museum studies while others are based on field investigation. Together they reveal the oppositional tensions between tradition and innovation, and the inspiration this provides for contemporary artistic practice, either through conscious implementation or through rejection of past definitions. Engagement with these cultural performances and objects provide new possibilities for the creation of current identities. The drafting of antiquities legislation, the tortuous journeys objects have taken to find a place in galleries, the use of exhibitions in cultural exchange, framed by the architecture of museums, as well as the role of film and photography in appropriating Pacific art culture for emerging nationalisms, all of these are considered here to enhance our understanding of indigenous art's place in the world today. These historical perspectives provide the framework in which to explore contemporary acquisition and outreach work with Pacific communities that seeks to reconnect people with objects taken away from the places and intentions of their makers. Questions of how identity is maintained and expressed through art are considered for both individuals and groups. What role does the transformations of objects play in this process? What impacts have been made by colonialism, modernism and the great migrations of people between Pacific countries, and from rural to urban environments? Ultimately, how is 'Pacific Islander' defined and by whom?In Repositioning Pacific Art, artists, curators and academics, including Maori and other Islanders, bring fresh approaches to Oceanic Art History and raise questions of relevance not only to scholars of indigenous art in the region but also in other parts of world.

Sketches and local legends are interwoven in this travelogue, on the Ethiopian Central Highlands, exploring the Portuguese architectural legacy, near ruins now but with echoes of its lost splendour still remaining in the Amhara oral tradition. This book perfectly illustrates and illuminates how drawing can play a more active part in ethnography.

Essays examine the influence of Levi-Strauss, debates on anthropology's place within French culture, the readiness of French anthropologists to combine an interest in public life and philosophy with anthropology, French approaches to the dilemmas of practising in a globalized world, and the shifting relationship between anthropology and museums.

Offering an alternative to cult-centred accounts, this book looks at the relationships between Afro-Cuban traditions and indeed goes beyond 'traditions' to place the focus on creativity as an embedded logic in everyday religious practice.

In an analysis of the increasing use of copyright law, literary, anthropological & legal experts explore, from a local African point of view, what happens to intangible cultural goods when they are confronted with large-scale commodification, distributed through media, and defined by globalized & divergent judicial systems & cultural norms.

At the centre of this collection are the actors and processes referred to by the distinguished Oceania thinker and visionary Epeli Hau'ofa as 'ordinary people ... who, because of the poor flows of benefits from the top, scepticism about stated policies and the like, tend to plan and make decisions about their lives independently, sometimes with surprising and dramatic results that go unnoticed or ignored at the top'. The contributors explore innovative social, cultural and political responses to global processes as they influence and unfold in a range of Pacific locations - with a major focus on Island Melanesia and a further range of contributions on Palau, Pohnpei, Rotuma and Australia. A multidisciplinary group, including a number of Pacific Islanders, the authorspresent contemporary connections between expanding perceptions of cultural heritage and the emergence of new political forms, in the context of challenges posed by the global political economy. At issue in the volume are viable local Pacific alternatives to the institutions and practices commonly advocated in development discourse, but difficult to implement in Pacific settings.Pacific Alternatives provides fresh perspectives on the ways that cultural heritage serves as a unique source of engaging the modern state and global non-state actors. The volume showcases two of the strongest features of contemporary Pacific Studies scholarship: the ability to find new insights in experience-near analyses of Islander life that have world-enlarging potentials, and the foregrounding of Indigenous voices in the evolving dialogue around land, politics, culture, tradition, custom, and identity. Ty K¿wika Tengan - Professor of Anthropology & Chair of the Dept. of Ethnic Studies,University of Hawai'i