Böcker i Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology-serien

This collection brings together Emrys Peters' major writings on the Bedouin of Libya.

When Ladislav Holy precipitately left Czechoslovakia for the UK in 1968 he was already one of the leading anthropologists in Central Europe. In the following decades he made important field studies in Africa. Since 1986 he has been engaged in research in the Czech Republic, and he brings to this timely study of national identity the skills of a seasoned researcher, a cosmopolitan perspective, and the insights of an insider. Drawing on historical and literary sources as well as ethnography, he analyses Czech discourses on national identity. He argues that there were specifically 'Czech' aspects to the communist regime and to the 'velvet revolution', and paying particular attention to symbolic representations of what it means to be Czech, he explores how notions of Czech identity were involved in the debates surrounding the fall of communism, and the emergence of a new social system.

Java is famous for its combination of diverse cultural forms and religious beliefs. Andrew Beatty considers Javanese solutions to the problem of cultural difference, and explores the ways in which Javanese villages make sense of their complex and multi-layered culture. Pantheist mystics, supernaturalists, orthodox Muslims and Hindu converts at once construct contrasting faiths and create a common ground through syncretist ritual. Vividly evoking the religious life of Javanese villagers, its controversies and reconciliations, its humour and irony, its philosophical seriousness, and its formal beauty, Dr Beatty probes beyond the finished surfaces of ritual and cosmology to show the debate and compromise inherent in practical religion. This is the most comprehensive study of Javanese religion since Clifford Geertz's classic study of 1960.

The book is an extended study in English of Amazonian ritual. Through an analysis of a secret men's cult widespread throughout Northwest Amazonia, Hugh-Jones builds up a general picture of a South American Indian society, and of a religious and cosmological system that is common to a large area of Northwest Amazonia.

The Jola (Diola) are intensive wet-rice cultivators in the Lower Casamance region of Senegal. In this study, the author examines the reasons behind startling contrasts in the organization of agricultural tasks among three Jola communities located within a 45-kilometre radius from Ziguinchor.

Ritual action in China often takes its logic from political action. In this book Emily Ahern explores the implications of this.

In this study Dr Stauder examines the various social and spatial groupings of Majang society.

This account of an East African religion as it was during the 1950s discusses a variety of issues in the study of religion, within the context of case materials and other field data. The result is a many-sided, yet integrated picture of a single religion, that among the Taita of Kenya.

In this study, Peter Fry describes and analyses spirit-mediumship amongst a community of Zezuru people living near Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).

This is a detailed study of the political organization in Unyamwezi, an important area of Tanzania shortly before Independence.

Questions of ethnicity, religion, cultural change and the African national identity are probed in this study of the immigrant community of Kumasi, Ghana.

This study aims to resolve the century-old debate about the nature of Australian aboriginal societies. It was the first monographic treatment of the subject since Radcliffe-Brown's classic work, The Social Organization of the Australian Tribes, published in 1931, and is much more comprehensive and synthetic in its coverage of the range of variation in Australian systems of kin classification.

For centuries Andean civilization and ecology has afforded a special fascination for European travellers and officials. In this volume, eight writers - anthropologists, economists and historians working in Bolivia, Britain, France, Ireland and Peru - describe and analyse aspects of rural society in various Andean regions.

This is an account of the incorporation of 'traditional' community into a modern town. In the first part of this book Robert Launay describes two Dyula communities prior to the twentieth-century colonial period. The second part examines the ways in which they have adapted to the recent loss of their trading monopoly, and the strategies they have employed.

In this anthropological investigation of the nature of an underdeveloped peasant economy, Joel S. Kahn attempts to develop the insights generated by Marxist theorists, by means of a concrete case study of a peasant village in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. Dr Kahn's book is unusual for its combination of a theoretical analysis of underdevelopment with a detailed regional study.

This book is a comparative study of caste and class in two small villages in the Thanjavur district of southeast India based on fieldwork done by the author in 1951-3. Differing from the usual village study, Gough's work traces the history of the villages over the past century and examines the impact of colonialism on the district since 1770.

In this book Dr Goody provides an account of the rich variety of institutions, such as fostering, apprenticeship and wardship, which have developed in West Africa either in absence of, or alongside, formal schools, to prepare children for the wide range of economic and political roles now available to them in adult society.

Set against the historical background of Spain's unification as a modern state, this book is a study of Basque nationalism, which after ninety years continues to constitute a major challenge to Spain's established political order. Using a theoretical approach, the book provides an empirical analysis of one of Spain's most intractable political problems during a decisive period of Spanish history.

Mortuary rites are a feature of social reproduction in much of Melanesia, and this study combines both ethnographic and historical approaches to describe and interpret the large-scale feasts and ceremonial exchanges of gifts that follow upon death in the Tanga Islands, Papua New Guinea.

In this book, Fredrik Barth examines the changes that have taken place in the secret cosmological lore transmitted in male initiation ceremonies among the Mountain Ok of Inner New Guinea, and offers a new way of explaining how cultural change occurs.

Fenella Cannell's study of everyday life in the lowland Philippines offers a powerful alternative to existing interpretations of the relationship between culture and tradition in the region and beyond. This book addresses not only South-East Asianists, but all those with an interest in the anthropology of religion and post-colonial cultures.

Dr Tambiah describes the religious practices and beliefs of the people of a remote village in north-east Thailand, relating them to the wider context of the civilization in which they are embedded, and examining the relationship of the religious practices of the villagers to the classical Buddhist tradition.

In the Mount Hagen area of central New Guinea, warfare has been replaced since the arrival of the Europeans by a vigorous development of moka, a competitive ceremonial exchange of wealth objects. The exchanges of pigs, shells and other valuables are interpreted as acting as a bond between groups, and as a means whereby individuals, notably the big-men, can maximize their status.

The Bara, or Fish people of the Northwest Amazon form part of a network of intermarrying local communities - each community speaks a different language and marriages must take place between people from different communities with different languages. Here, Jean Jackson discusses Bar* marriage, kinship, spatial organization and other features of their social landscape.

Pierre Bourdieu, a French anthropologist, develops his theory of symbolic power through a materialistic approach, which he analyses symbolic capital and the different modes of domination. The author draws on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria) to illustrate his theoretical propositions.

Dr Frankel's study of the rapid transformation of traditional medical care among the Huli of New Guinea by Western treatments strikingly combines the methods of social anthropology and epidemiology. The study as a whole integrates material conventionally divided between anthropological and medical texts and powerfully demonstrates the limitations of this traditional separation.

A sophisticated and engaging ethnographic account of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, which investigates situations of friction, conflict and co-operation in a new town near Nazareth. This is a major contribution to our understanding of ethnic tensions between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis.

In this 1996 book, Gerhard Baumann examines the area of Southall, the most densely populated, multi-ethnic ghetto in the London area. This vivid ethnographic account analyses various immigrant groups as they come to terms with one another, and engage in rethinking their identities as well as the meaning of their cultural heritage.

In her study of domestic organization in Gonja, Esther Goody has concentrated on tracing the interrelationships between political and domestic institutions in a bilateral kinship system.

This collection of essays develops a line of thought in anthropology which was opened in the 1960s by the editors (and some of the same contributors) in Honor and Shame: The Values of a Mediterranean Society. The essays, half of them historical and half contemporary, deal with different aspects of honour and grace, and the strategies and transactions by which they can be obtained.