Pnina Werbner

Tariq Modood

Why is it still so difficult to negotiate differences across cultures? In what ways does racism continue to strike at the foundations of multiculturalism? Bringing together some of the world's most influential postcolonial theorists, this classic collection examines the place and meaning of cultural hybridity in the context of growing global crisis, xenophobia and racism. Starting from the reality that personal identities are multicultural identities, Debating Cultural Hybridity illuminates the complexity and the flexibility of culture and identity, defining their potential openness as well as their closures, to show why anti-racism and multiculturalism are today still such hard roads to travel.

Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism

Debating Cultural Hybridity

It is now 50 years since E.P. Thompson published his classic, The Making of the English Working Class. The Making of an African Working Class follows Thompson in exploring the formation of working class identity among low-paid African workers. In arguing for a radical public anthropology of worker identity, the book seeks to analyse the cultural, legal, ideological and experiential dimensions of labour activism often neglected in other labour studies. Pnina Werbner shows that by fusing cosmopolitan and local popular cultural forms of protest, unionists have created a distinctive, vernacular way of being a worker in Botswana: one that does not deny workers' roots at home or in the countryside, while being cognisant of a wider world of cosmopolitan labour rights. The assertion of working class dignity, honour and respect, Pnina argues, is a powerful motivating force for manual workers. Against legal-sceptical approaches, The Making of an African Working Class argues that in challenging the government - their employer - in court, manual workers' protests and mobilisation are deeply embedded in ethics, social justice and the law.

Politics, Law, and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers' Union of Botswana

The Making of an African Working Class

Explores the central role the aesthetic played in energising the massive mobilisations of young people, the disaffected, the middle classes and the apolitical silent majority in the North African and Middle Eastern uprisings with protest movements such as

Political Aesthetics of Global Protest

Helene Basu

The continued vitality of Sufism as a living embodied postcolonial reality challenges the argument that Sufism has 'died' in recent times. Throughout India and Bangladesh, Sufi shrines exist in both the rural and urban areas, from the remotest wilderness to the modern Asian city, lying opposite banks and skyscrapers. This book illuminates the remarkable resilience of South Asian Sufi saints and their cults in the face of radical economic and political dislocations and breaks new ground in current research. It addresses the most recent debates on the encounter between Islam and modernity and presents important new comparative ethnographic material. Embodying Charisma re-examines some basic concepts in the sociology and anthropology of religion and the organization of religious movements.

Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults

Embodying Charisma

Nira Yuval Davis

This is an important contribution toward an understanding of citizenship as mediated by other collective, historically determined identities: of gender, ethnicity, class and national status. It brings together prominent international scholars from moral philosophy, law, political science and sociology to offer a major reconceptualization of the idea of citizenship. Throughout, it is concerned with the dismantling of welfare states, the attack on civil society and the rise in state terror and religious and cultural fundamentalisms. Contributors demonstrate how the growing ambivalence of state sovereignty in the face of multinational capitalism and the absence of political accountability structures are complicit in the definitions of gendered citizenship. Against these, women's communal mobilization and political activism are considered in terms of their power effects and political potentialities; the book as a whole shows the need to negotiate and transcend difference and to find means for creating alliances across differences.

Women, Citizenship and Difference

Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism inaugurates a new, situated, cosmopolitan anthropology. It examines the rise of postcolonial movements responsive to global rights movements, which espouse a politics of dignity, cultural difference, democracy, dissent and tolerance. The book starts from the premise that cosmopolitanism is not, and never has been, a 'western', elitist ideal exclusively. The book's major innovation is to show the way cosmopolitans beyond the North--in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Malaysia, India, Africa, the Middle East and Mexico--juggle universalist commitments with roots in local cultural milieus and particular communities.Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism breaks new ground in theorizing the role of social anthropology as a discipline that engages with the moral, economic, legal and political transformations and dislocations of a globalizing world. It introduces the reader to key debates surrounding cosmopolitanism in the social sciences, and is written clearly and accessibly for undergraduates in anthropology and related subjects.

Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives

Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism

Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism inaugurates a new, situated, cosmopolitan anthropology. It examines the rise of postcolonial movements responsive to global rights movements, which espouse a politics of dignity, cultural difference, democracy, dissent and tolerance. The book starts from the premise that cosmopolitanism is not, and never has been, a 'western', elitist ideal exclusively. The book's major innovation is to show the way cosmopolitans beyond the North - in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Malaysia, India, Africa, the Middle East and Mexico - juggle universalist commitments with roots in local cultural milieus and particular communities.Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism breaks new ground in theorizing the role of social anthropology as a discipline that engages with the moral, economic, legal and political transformations and dislocations of a globalizing world. It introduces the reader to key debates surrounding cosmopolitanism in the social sciences, and is written clearly and accessibly for undergraduates in anthropology and related subjects.

Modernity, Locality, and Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults

This is a study of the transnational Sufi Naqshbandi order. It discusses the complex organisation of Sufi orders as regional & transnational cults & how such cults are manifested through ritual action & embodied in sacred mythology.

The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult

Pilgrims of Love

From Egypt to India, and from Botswana to London, worker, youth and middle class rebellions have taken on the political and bureaucratic status quo. When most people can no longer earn a decent wage, they pit themselves against the privilege of small, wealthy and often corrupt elites. A remarkable feature of the protests from the Arab Spring onwards has been the salience of images, songs, videos, humour, satire and dramatic performances. This collection explores the central role the aesthetic played in energising the massive mobilisations of young people, the disaffected, the middle classes and the apolitical silent majority. Discover how it fuelled solidarities and alliances among democrats, workers, trade unions, civil rights activists and opposition parties.

Pnina Werbner

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