Books published by Sean Kingston Publishing

Based primarily on a former coal-mining village in Northeast England, this book explores practices of inhabitation, from moving in or being modernized to the daily accommodation of sleep and children. It provides a demonstration of what happens to consumption research when it comes home and is positioned not in sites of exchange but within the home and in households.

The importance and ramifications of saints, sainthood and pilgrimage in contemporary Iran and neighbouring countries are great, yet the academic conceptualizations of them and their entailments are sorely lacking. This book places the saints and their pilgrims in sharper focus, and offers important correctives to all-too-common Western misunderstandings, the foremost of which is the erroneous portrayal of Islam as primarily a body of legal doctrine and corresponding practice, and the associated principle that we can 'know' Islam if we 'know' Islamic law. In an effort to challenge such a limited, and limiting, perspective, this volume suggests that both anthropology, insofar as it can focus on experience and practice, and history, insofar as it can encompass more than an institutional/political 'names and dates' discourse, can reveal something of the dynamism of the faith, as more than the sum of its laws. The approaches demonstrated in this book on Shiite Pilgrimage offer windows into the beliefs and lives of 'ordinary' people, past and present, and thereby bring forth agendas akin to those of 'subaltern studies'. Finally, the memorializing documented in these chapters provides evidence, past and present, of widespread desires for a more concrete, even immanent, relationship that is direct, unmediated and, at least partly, involves forms of intercession - even though such desires for immanence in the Islamic world have previously been considered as limited to devotees of the Sufi saints or the Shi'i Imams or their progeny.

Covers anthropology, Africa, Congo, kinship, kingship, and ritual.

Provides an insight into the effects of mining and other forms of resource extraction upon the indigenous peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea. The text offers a focus on indigenous cosmologies and their articulation or disjunction with the forces of "development", based on fieldwork with the people concerned,

Gives a vital and unique insight into the effects of mining and other forms of resource extraction upon the indigenous peoples of Australa and Papua New Guinea. Based on extensive fieldwork with the peoples concerned, it offers a comparative focus on indigenous cosmologies and their articulation or disjunction. Authors from RSPAS, ANU.

What constitutes a resource, and how do people make claims on them? Contributions from social anthropology and law in this major research project offer conceptual clarification in the context of material, intellectual, and cultural resources in Papua, New Guinea. (Anthropology)

The state is frequently conceived as a universal, although one apparently extraordinarily difficult to define. It often appears in academic discourse and, especially, in the popular imagination as an abstraction, usually nebulous, grasped as pervasive - a spectre to be feared. In this book, distinguished scholars from around the world take issue with this purported universality, exploring alternative imaginings of the state, of power and of global processes at the margins. Taking an anthropological perspective based in diverse ethnographic contexts outside Europe and North America, if not beyond their controlling influence in globalizing realities, this volume reveals different complexes of power, as well as processes that are external to power and often against it (contra Foucault, and as Pierre Clastres has famously argued). The authors stress not only the different structures of institutional power, but also the persistence or transmutation of local kinds of power and their relevant cosmologies into contemporary globalized settings. They find innovative kinds of modernity, reconfigurations that have effects that cannot be reduced to over-generalized and often intensely Eurocentric concepts of power and the kinds of subjectivities realized by them. In this, the volume opens up the diversity of experiences of the state and offers new directions for its study.