David M. Hoffman

Andrew Gardner

Penned by advanced graduate students amidst their dissertation fieldwork, these provocative essays capture the challenges and intricacies of that anthropological rite of passage. The collections authors frankly portray the mistakes they made in the field, their struggle to analyze the events unfolding before their eyes, the psychological and emotional frustration seemingly endemic to doing ethnography, and the ethical complexities of researching living people. The authors present these essays not as models of ideal fieldwork or as a series of lessons about how to overcome potential hurdles one faces in the field, but rather as a window into the complexities of being an ethnographer in the contemporary world. Against a backdrop of subject populations increasingly informed about global relations of power and, more specifically, informed about the topography of American imperialism, these humanistic essays vividly reflect recent shifts in both the focus and methods of anthropological research, as well as the dilemmas underlying the construction of anthropological knowledge. They are meant to spark discussion and debate. While tailored to an audience relatively new to ethnographic fieldwork (and intended as a teaching tool), this collection should appeal to anthropologists and ethnographers at all points in their career. --Back cover

Neophyte Ethnographers in a Changing World

Dispatches from the Field

How Not To Get Murdered In Thailand is in it's rawest a shocking expose of Thailand as one of the worlds most deadly tourist destinations. Penned in advance of the much publicized murders of Hannah Witheridge and David Miller in September 2014, the book pairs grisly but altogether overdue research into the countries dark side with fascinating and just as overdue societal insights & observations.

How Not To Get Murdered In Thailand

Jason Lucas

A selection of eleven papers from the eleventh annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference; these papers are representative of the broad range of Roman archaeology today, and share a commitment to a theoretically informed approach to the subject. Contents: Considering Continuity of Deposition on Votive Sites in Northeastern France from 200 BC to AD 100 (Imogen Wellington); Pots for Cash? A Critique of the Role of the 'Free Market' in the Late Roman Economy (James Gerrard); A Topography of Death: The Buildings of the Emperor Maxentius on the Via Appia, Rome (Lorraine Kerr); Consumer Theory and Roman North Africa: A Post-colonial Approach to the Ancient Economy (Garrick Fincham); Wolves' Nipples and Otters' Noses? Rural Foodways in Roman Britain (Gillian Hawkes); Material Culture Patterns and Cultural Change in South-West Britain (Jason Lucas); Acculturation and the Temporal Features of Ritual Action (Jan Weeks); Celts, Romans and the Coligny Calendar (Cathy Swift); Regarding the Stars (Carol van Driel-Murray); Measuring Time and Inventing Histories in the Early Empire: Roman and Germanic Perspectives (Maureen Carroll); The Metaphoric Movement: Mythological and Heroic Narratives on Roman Sarcophagi (Inge Lyse Hansen) .

TRAC 2001

Gwyn Davies

Kris Lockyear

Thirteen papers on Roman archaeology from the 10th annual TRAC conference. Contents: Representing the Romans in the Museum of Scotland (David Clarke and Fraser Hunter); Representing Londinium (Francis Grew); Writing colonial conflict, acknowledging colonial weakness (Garrick Fincham); Identities in the late Roman army: material and textual perspectives (Andrew Gardner); Medicine culture and symbolism (Gwyn Davies); Animal iconographies: metaphor, meaning and identity Miranda Aldhouse Green); An archaeology of food: a case study from Roman Britain (Gillian Hawkes); Small finds: problems and possibilities (Kelly Spradley); æRomanisationÆ and the body (Gilly Carr); Infants, cemeteries and communities in the Roman provinces (John Pearce); Unpicking a myth: the infanticide of female and disabled infants in antiquity (Eleanor Scott); Playing dead (Rebecca Gowland).

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Theoretical Archaeology Conference. London 2000

TRAC 2000

This book questions the value of the concept of 'agency', a term used in sociological and philosophical literature to refer to individual free will in archaeology. On the one hand it has been argued that previous generations of archaeologists, in explaining social change in terms of structural or environmental conditions, have lost sight of the 'real people' and reduced them to passive cultural pawns, on the other, introducing the concept of agency to counteract this can be said to perpetuate a modern, Western view of the autonomous individual who is free from social constraints. This book discusses the balance between these two opposites, using a range of archaeological and historical case studies, including European and Asian prehistory, classical Greece and Rome, the Inka and other Andean cultures. While focusing on the relevance of 'agency' theory to archaeological interpretation and using it to create more diverse and open-ended accounts of ancient cultures, the authors also address the contemporary political and ethical implications of what is essentially a debate about the definition of human nature.

Archaeological Perspectives on Social Agency, Power, and Being Human

Agency Uncovered

Arturo Escobar

Alf Hornborg

James Greenberg

Michael Dove

Mette Brodgen

Hanne Svarstad

Anne Ferguson

Charles Stevens

Josiah Heyman

Fiona Mackenzie

William Derman

Environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies. In response, scholars are paying more attention to conventional politics and to more broadly defined relations of power and difference in the interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments. Such issues are at the heart of the relatively new interdisciplinary field of political ecology, forged at the intersection of political economy and cultural ecology. This volume provides a toolkit of vital concepts and a set of research models and analytic frameworks for researchers at all levels. The two opening chapters trace rich traditions of thought and practice that inform current approaches to political ecology. They point to the entangled relationship between humans, politics, economies, and environments at the dawn of the twenty-first century and address challenges that scholars face in navigating the blurring boundaries among relevant fields of enquiry. The twelve case studies that follow demonstrate ways that culture and politics serve to mediate human-environmental relationships in specific ecological and geographical contexts. Taken together, they describe uses of and conflicts over resources including land, water, soil, trees, biodiversity, money, knowledge, and information; they exemplify wide-ranging ecological settings including deserts, coasts, rainforests, high mountains, and modern cities; and they explore sites located around the world, from Canada to Tonga and cyberspace.

Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups

"Andrew M. Gardner expertly combines in-depth ethnography with theoretical sophistication in this important look at the complex linkages between labor, migration, globalization, and the structural violence that accompanies the new world economic order. Gardner follows the labyrinthine paths of migrant workers in the Gulf, drawing on powerful qualitative data to complicate existing assumptions about the lives of skilled and unskilled workers in the Middle East's fastest growing region. Beautifully written and compelling, the book sheds light on a population and area of the world that remains understudied despite its rapid emergence onto the global market."---Pardis Mahdavi, Pomona College, author of Passionate Uprisings "With an anthropologist's fine eye for detail, Andrew M. Gardner chronicles the structural violence that migrant workers experience in Bahrain. By mapping the machinery that produces this violence, and how it shapes the experiences of Bahrain's transnational proletariat, Gardner has produced an extremely effective and useful analysis of labor migration both in Bahrain and elsewhere in the region. City of Strangers is a must-read for anyone interested in the serious study of the Persian Gulf in general and its small sheikdoms in particular."---Mehran Kamrava, Georgetown University "All over the world there is a great trade in people. Men and women move to rich countries for the dangerous, dirty, and demeaning jobs we don't want. They seek work abroad for exactly the same reasons we would if we filled their shoes: to feed their children, to seek opportunity, to escape oppression. But on arrival they find new oppression as second-class citizens suffering under laws reminiscent of the worst of Jim Crow. Andrew M. Gardner lifts the lid on their lives and the many ways that they adapt and resist, as well as the ways they are beaten down. This is the best of inquiry, engaged but clear-headed, analytical yet ready to make clear the injustices suffered."---Kevin Bales, coeditor of To Plead Our Own Cause "In City of Strangers Andrew M. Gardner presents new information about the forces that bear on expatriate workers in Bahrain, and he compares his findings and analysis to other relevant work on the Gulf and on structural violence. Gardner's ethnography is compellingly written, and his material on social organizations and newspapers is intriguing."---Karen Leonard, University of California, Irvine.

Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain

City of Strangers

Run! I scream to myself inside my head, anything to get me to move. I stand paralyzed, frozen to the ground. I see oft in the distance the shadowy figure drawing nearer to me. My heart skips a beat, and I panic. I have to run, but I can’t. I watch as the figure pulls closer. He is nearly upon me. Finally, in a last-second action of self-preservation, I turn and begin to flee, running as quickly as my feet can carry me yet losing ground to this entity. I feel my legs starting to

Andrew Gardner

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