Product Description: Questions surrounding modernity and its meanings weigh heavily on students and scholars who study Africa. Becoming modern carries a lot of different meanings and puts concepts of culture, tradition, and nation into uneasy use. Readings in Modernity in Africa brings together classic essays, old and new, to help assess the issues and problems of modernity in an African context...read more

Product Description: We assume that voting by secret ballot is an essential and fundamental principle of representative democracy, but the social history of the secret ballot has rarely been investigated, until now. Voting by secret ballot is a surprisingly recent phenomenon in the West...read more

Product Description: Embedding Ethics questions why ethics have been divorced from scientific expertise. Invoking different disciplinary practices from biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, contributors show how ethics should be resituated at the heart of, rather than exterior to, scientific activity...read more

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It is often forgotten that anthropology--the scientific study of cultural difference--arose from situations that required a practical management of cultural differences. Out of the practical contexts of colonial contact--administration, mission, nationalism, policing, settler cultivation, tourism, warfare--emerged methods, and images of otherness, that inform anthropological notions of cultural difference to this day.The essays in this volume share the assumption that "ethnography," far from being the unique purview of anthropology, is a broader field of practice out of which and alongside which anthropology attempted to distinguish itself as a scientific discipline. They explore a variety of situations in colonial South and Southeast Asia and Africa and in the treatment of the indigenous inhabitants of North America and Australia to provide genealogies of present-day anthropological practices, tracing them back to the subjects of colonial ethnography.This book introduces into the history of anthropology many of the insights developed in recent studies in history, cultural studies, and the anthropology of colonialism. It can serve as a course book in the history of anthropology and the anthropology of colonialism, while at the same time addressing a much larger audience of students of colonial history, of the history of science and modernity, and of globalization.Peter Pels is Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. Oscar Salemink is Program Officer for Social Sciences and Humanities, The Ford Foundation-Vietnam.

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Product Description: Throughout the social sciences, traditional certainties about the nature of knowledge and the `scientific project' have been subjected to critique. This book examines the implications of that critique from the perspective of anthropology...read more