Product Description: The British Parliament rewards close scrutiny not just for the sake of democracy, but also because the surprises it contains challenge our understanding of British politics. Commons and Lords pulls back the curtain on both the upper House of Lords and the lower House of Commons to examine their unexpected inner workings...read more

Product Description: By bringing together three different academic disciplines -- anthropology, political science and history -- and covering a variety of different parliamentary assemblies, both in Europe and in the United States, this book aims to offer a fresh approach to parliamentary studies...read more

This work marks the first time a researcher has had largely unlimited access, and every significant aspect of the Upper Chamber has been scrutinized. The result is a unique portrait, packed with the unexpected, of a surprising institution which is becoming increasingly influential. Meticulous scholarship is combined with clarity in explanation to produce a work that helps to bridge the gap between anthropology and political science.

This book is an ethnography of development in practice. It builds on recent work in the anthropology of development in its examination of the evolution and persistence of a number of key ideas about gender, technology and race. It explores how these are rooted in both material practices and ideologies, notably the Enlightenment and colonialism, but goes beyond previous studies which have tended to focus mainly on the apparently monolithic power of the developers. The authors argue for a more nuanced account of power through analysis of the relationship between individual agency and structural constraint. Their fascinating study shows how a simple dichotomy between "us," the developers, and "them," the victims of development, misconstrues the nature of the proccesses involved.