Iain Rob Wright

Paul Manning

WELCOME TO THE BOTTOM OF THE FOOD CHAIN! Aside from being freakishly tall, Joe is just an ordinary divorcee taking his son, Danny, to the zoo for his weekend of custody. Everything is going great until a bizarre snake attack sends everybody in the zoo running for cover. It isn't long before Joe realizes that there is a lot more going on than a simple snake attack – and if the hungry lions, roaring gorillas, and rampaging elephants have anything to do about it, there will be more bloodshed to come. All of the world's animals are attacking and no one knows why. The only thing that is certain is man has fallen to the bottom of the food chain.

Animal Kingdom

Sabina Perrino

Michael Wroblewski

Jim Wilce

Language and Indigenous Pluralism in Amazonian Ecuador

Remaking Kichwa

A Critical Introduction

News and News Sources

Drink, as an embodied semiotic and material form, mediates social life. This book examines the fundamental nature of drink through a series of modular but connected ethnographic discussions. It looks at the way the materiality of a specific drink (coffee, wine, water, beer) serves as the semiotic medium for a genre of sociability in a specific time and place. As an explicitly comparative semiotic study, the book uses familiar and unfamiliar case studies to show how drinks with similar material properties are semiotically organized into very different drinking practices, including ethnographic examples as diverse as the relation of coffee to talk (in ordering at Starbucks). Further chapters look at the dryness of gin in relation to the modern cocktail party and the embedding of beer brands in the ethnographic imagination of the nation. Rather than treat drinks as mere props in the exclusively human drama of the social, the book promotes them to actors on the stage.

Semiotics of Drink and Drinking

In the remote highlands of the country of Georgia, a small group of mountaindwellers called the Khevsurs used to express sexuality and romance in ways that appear to be highly paradoxical. On the one hand, their practices were romantic, but could never lead to marriage. On the other hand, they were sexual, but didn't correspond to what North Americans, or most Georgians, would have called sex. These practices were well documented by early ethnographers before they disappeared completely by the midtwentieth century, and have become a Georgian obsession. In this fascinating book, Manning recreates the story of how these private, secretive practices became a matter of national interest, concern, and fantasy. Looking at personal expressions of love and the circulation of these narratives at the broader public level of the modern nation, Love Stories offers an ethnography of language and desire that doubles as an introduction to key linguistic genres and to the interplay of language and culture.

Language, Private Love, and Public Romance in Georgia

Love Stories

Clown

A noted journalist argues that Bormann did not die in the Berlin bunker, but escaped to Argentina, and that he was chiefly responsible for Germany's economic rebirth in the years following World War II

Martin Bormann, Nazi in Exile

Manning examines the formation of nineteenth-century intelligentsia print publics in the former Soviet republic of Georgia both anthropologically and historically. At once somehow part of “Europe,” at least aspirationally, and yet rarely recognized by others as such, Georgia attempted to forge European style publics as a strong claim to European identity. These attempts also produced a crisis of self-defi nition, as European Georgia sent newspaper correspondents into newly reconquered Oriental Georgia, only to discover that the people of these lands were strangers. In this encounter, the community of “strangers” of European Georgian publics proved unable to assimilate the people of the “strange land” of Oriental Georgia. This crisis produced both notions of Georgian public life and European identity which this book explores.

Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgian Imaginaries

Strangers in a Strange Land

The use of illegal drugs is so common that a number of commentators now refer to the 'normalisation' of drug consumption. It is surprising, then, that to date very little academic work has explored drug use as part of contemporary popular culture. This collection of readings will apply an innovatory, multi-disciplinary approach to this theme, combining some of the most recent research on 'the normalisation thesis' with fresh work on the relationship between drug use and popular culture. In drawing upon criminological, sociological and cultural studies approaches, this book will make an important contribution to the newly emerging field positioned at the intersection of these disciplines. The particular focus of the book is upon drug consumption as popular culture. It aims to provide an accessible collection of chapters and readings that will explore drug use in popular culture in a way that is relevant to undergraduates and postgraduates studying a variety of courses, including criminology, sociology, media studies, health care and social work.

Paul Manning

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