A distinct feature of Muslim cities is demarcated separation between zones of public economic and private domestic activities. Such spatial distinction has been the organic extension of a social structure with limited presence of women in public zones. However, separation of spaces in the Muslim city and the way it is utilized, shaped and reproduced by men and women is not a simple case of dividing public-­private geographies and assigning them to males and females, respectively, and has been subject to appropriations and adaptations. The Shiite traditional Muharram procession is one of the instances of such appropriation which produces a semi-­private or tertiary (social and spatial) realm, where gendered behaviours are more fluid, the loyalties of the kin stretch beyond the dominant normative, and both men and women move with greater ease. Such spatial fluidity exacerbated during the rituals of Muharram, where presence of women in public space is promoted and invigorated. Among other means, the ephemeral space sanctification is utilized to create a space where the social sanctions are temporarily lifted, and gender spatial boundaries are suspended. As an ethnographical piece of research using methods informed by urban planning and urban sociology and based on a cross-­disciplinary study of gendered spatial divisions (socially and architecturally), this article endeavours to investigate the notion of ephemeral space sanctification in a Muslim city among the Guilani population in Lahijan, in northern Iran.

Based on ethnographic data gathered over a period of almost three years, this dissertation scrutinizes the everyday lives of informal workers selling auto parts in Kisekka Market, central Kampala. Its ambition is to understand how the workers navigated a highly moralized environment in today’s Uganda, where the supposed moral deterioration of society is passionately discussed in public and in private.

Analytically the dissertation focuses on three “moral landscapes,” or moral discourses of different geographical scales, that intersected in the workers’ lives: first, the Ugandan nation or the country; second, the Buganda kingdom with its cultural institutions to which the majority of the workers professed allegiance; and third, the capital city Kampala. Materializing in Kisekka Market, each landscape posed moral demands that the workers navigated daily as they struggled to balance norms with lived practices.

The workers were perceived by external observers as morally ambiguous for their supposed instrumentality in riots and violent crimes in Kampala. Their notoriousness increased for the fact that they were men, often uneducated, and therefore, in public discourse, potentially threatening. Consequently, they were referred to as bayaaye, translated as hooligans or bad guys, and this label defined their relations with customers from all parts of Kampala and Uganda.

In exploring the implications of the three moral landscapes, particular attention is paid to the in-between. Rather than focusing on mediatized events like riots and crimes, the dissertation investigates and locates the workers’ agency in the mundane processes of care and getting by and the tentative paths to a good life that unfolded daily in Kisekka Market, regardless of larger political tensions in Kampala and beyond. The city’s development plan to replace Kisekka Market with a fancy shopping mall rendered the workers’ situation increasingly exposed and their lives increasingly vulnerable. In the workers’ quest for some degree of control and self-worth, the label of bayaaye refracted into its multiple dimensions – proudly appropriated or painfully rejected by the workers themselves – attesting  to the complexities of everyday ethics, in Kampala as elsewhere. Consequently, the ethnography of this dissertation problematizes the dominant yet fraught narrative around young men in urban Africa.

La storia del mercato di Kisekka, a Kampala, è stata narrata prevalentemente attraverso una cronologia di eventi violenti. Un luogo “in crisi”, metonimia della capitale postcoloniale in cui era collocato, Kisekka era immediatamente collegato nell’immaginario urbano a rivolte, a scontri e alla reputazione dei “cattivi ragazzi” (bayaaye) che vi lavoravano. L’articolo propone di spostare il focus etnografico dalle rivolte come «eventi critici» (Das 1995) al tempo che intercorre fra essi e in cui essi sono conte-stualizzati. Al centro dell’analisi vi sono la dimensione del quotidiano e le pratiche attraverso cui i lavoratori di Kisekka convalidavano la propria mo-ralità e mantenevano il controllo sulla propria vita e sul mercato. È nei tempi e negli spazi “di mezzo”, che sfuggono agli sguardi dei mass media, che la vita scorre piena di significato, offrendo rassicuranti continuità a dispetto del caos e della precarietà della città. Negli interstizi inesplorati fra i grandi eventi e nelle zone grigie navigate ogni giorno dai lavoratori informali, l’esperienza urbana appare diversa da quanto raccontato dai mass media. Considerando l’etica ordinaria (Lambek 2010) di cui la quotidianità è espressione, il testo propone una narrazione diversa di un mercato urbano e, per estensione, di una città africana.

The article explores how groups of informal workers understood the role of the city management in the demolition of Kisekka, a spare parts market in Kampala doomed to be replaced by an “ultramodern” shopping mall. The case unfolds between the push for entrepreneurialism, competition and individual initiative typical of neoliberal urban planning, and the re-centralisation trend that has characterised Kampala in the past decade. Despite narratives of self-entrepreneurship and independence, the presence of the central government in the urban workers’ lives was substantial. While decentralisation in Uganda has not necessarily guaranteed better service provision, the mushrooming of local administrative divisions has proved to be a winning card for the party in power. Kampala, however, represents an exception. Mayors have been elected from the opposition parties for two decades, prompting the government to re-centralise the city administration through the Kampala Capital City Authority Act 2010, which has returned the city to the government’s direct control. As a result, the municipality has intervened massively in projects of urban development, including the demolition and reconstruction of a number of city markets like Kisekka. The article shows the tension between centrifugal and centripetal forces in the administration of the capital and its consequenses in the lives of Kisekka Market workers.

The restrictions to curb the Covid-19 pandemic have caused an escalation of gender-based violence all over the world, but they have also changed the trajectories of masculinities in nuanced and complex ways. In this article, I explore the experiences of Ugandan men who became unable to provide under the national lockdown, often finding themselves confined in their homes for the first time in their life. I discuss two dimensions of this experience. On the one hand, men had to painfully withdraw from circles of reciprocity, exemplified by the practice of ‘checking on’, too burdensome in a moment of economic insecurity. On the other hand, men’s ‘being there’, at home, progressively shifted from an unwanted obligation to a welcomed responsibility, embraced intentionally. Juggling between forced proximity and distance, men explored different ways of validating themselves in the crisis. They both reproduced pre-existing dynamics, grounded on the tension between provision and withdrawal, and experienced emergent forms of caring masculinities and fatherhood, performed through sharing and reciprocity.

East African families are heterogeneous institutions, fluid and in transformation. The region is home to a range of competing and sometimes contradictory value systems, with a variety of ethics, codes and practices regarding such matters as marriage, divorce and bridewealth. The intertwining of multiple value systems, together with demographic shifts, intermarriages, dynamics of internal and international migration and new professional avenues have a fundamental bearing on expanding the array of family configurations.The spread of informal unions can in part be understood as a response to economic changes initiated by the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s, and a limited ability to meet the social prerequisites of legitimate family-making, like wedding and marriage costs and the payment of bridewealth, i.e. the transfer of wealth from the groom’s to the bride’s kin. However, individuals and couples of all generations actively re-imagine the future of marriage beyond bridewealth, increasingly questioning the meaning, role and validity of marriage payments, wedding requirements and separations.Changing family constellations and new interpretations of non conventional family-making, where marriage is not officially sanctioned, cohabitation is not an option, or patrilinear ties are less important than matrilateral, may pave alternative pathways for achieving upward social mobility, especially in the context of mobility and migration through kinship networks. In this chapter we wish to address the diversity of marriage in East Africa from a local and gendered perspective. After a quantitative overview on marriage in Kenya and Uganda, we will be focusing on marriage ceremonies, the meaning of divorce for social status and self-accomplishment and finally, the role of mobility in making and unmaking marriage.

We have in this field study been researching how social comfort is affected by the work of social services and their collaboration with police, schools and health care within a small village located countryside in the northern part of Sweden. The attribute which sets this village a part from most other small countryside villages is the fact that the crime rate is amongst the lowest in Sweden as well as the social security feeling within the inhabitants are amongst the highest. We traveled 2298 kilometers back and forth to be able to interview professionals and gather empiric material for this study. The method we have used for data collection has been in the form of semi structured interviews. We have used previous research concerning collaboration, social comfort, social discomfort and fear of crime as our aid to analyze our findings with the help of theories regarding different types of communites (gemeinschaft and gesellschaft) invented by Ferdinand Tönnies (2001) and Human Service Organisation by Hasenfeld (1983). We have analyzed our findings with the help of a qualitative content analysis. The result showed that the collaboration between the different authorities was a key point in preserving the social comfort feeling within the community and the idea of gemeinschaft also affects the outcome in various ways. The study will provide insight in understanding how collaboration can be represented in multi professional practices in the work for social comfort for the inhabitants as well as spreading knowledge regarding positive and negative effects concerning multi professional collaboration. Nyckelord / Key words: Samverkan, samarbete, trygghet, brott, brottslighet, crime, criminality and collaboration

Focusing on the geographies between the Mekong and the Indus, this book brings objects to the centre of enquiry in the understanding of modern Asian frontiers. It explores how a range of objects have historically been significant bearers and agents of frontier making. For instance, how are objects connected to aspects of state making, social change, everyday life, diplomacy, political and ecological worlds, capital, forms of violence, resistances, circulations, and aesthetic expressions?

This book seeks to interrogate and understand the dynamism of frontiers from the vantage point of objects such as salt, rubber, tea, guns, silk scarves, horses, and opium. It attempts to explore objects as sites of encounter, mediation, or dislocation between the social and the spatial. The book not only locates objects in the specificities of frontier spaces, but it also looks at how they are produced, circulated, and come to be intricately linked to a wide range of people, institutions, networks, and geographies. In the process, it explores how objects traverse and come to inhabit multiple historical, cultural, and geographical scales.

This book will be of interest to researchers and academics working in areas of history, social and cultural anthropology, Asian studies, frontiers and borderland studies, cultural studies, political and economic studies, and museum studies.　

This volume investigates how, where and when subjects and citizens come into being, assert themselves and exercise subjecthood or citizenship in the formation of modern India. It argues for the importance of understanding legal practice – how rights are performed in dispute and negotiation – from the parliament and courts to street corners and field sites. The essays in the book explore themes such as land law and rights, court procedure, freedom of speech, sex workers’ mobilisation, refugee status, adivasi people and non-state actors, and bring together studies from across north India, spanning from early colonial to contemporary times.

Representing scholarship in history, anthropology and political science that draws on wide-ranging field and archival research, the volume will immensely benefit scholars, students and researchers of development, history, political science, sociology, anthropology, law and public policy.

The works presented in this collection take environmental scholarship in South Asia into novel territory by exploring how questions of national identity become entangled with environmental concerns in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and India. The essays provide insight into the motivations of colonial and national governments in controlling or managing nature, and bring into fresh perspective the different kinds of regional political conflicts that invoke nationalist sentiment through claims on nature. In doing all this, the volume also offers new ways to think about nationalism and, more specifically, nationalism in South Asia from the vantage point of interdisciplinary environmental studies. The contributors to this innovative volume show that manifestations of nationalism have long and complex histories in South Asia. Terrestrial entities, imagined in terms of dense ecological networks of relationships, have often been the space or reference point for national aspirations, as shared memories of Mother Nature or appropriated economic, political, and religious geographies. In recent times, different groups in South Asia have claimed and appropriated ancient landscapes and territories for the purpose of locating and justifying a specific and utopian version of nation by linking its origin to their nature-mediated attachments to these landscapes. The topics covered include forests, agriculture, marine fisheries, parks, sacred landscapes, property rights, trade, and economic development. Gunnel Cederlof is associate professor of history, Uppsala University, Sweden. K. Sivaramakrishnan is professor of anthropology and international studies and director of the South Asia Center, Jackson School of International Studies, at the University of Washington. The other contributors are Nina Bhatt, Vinita Damodaran, Claude A. Garcia, Urs Geiser, Goetz Hoeppe, Bengt G. Karlsson, Antje Linkenbach, Wolfgang Mey, Kathleen D. Morrison, J. P. Pascal, and Sarah Southwold-Llewellyn.

The works presented in this collection take environmental scholarship in South Asia into novel territory by exploring how questions of national identity become entangled with environmental concerns in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and India. The essays provide insight into the motivations of colonial and national governments in controlling or managing nature, and bring into fresh perspective the different kinds of regional political conflicts that invoke nationalist sentiment through claims on nature. In doing all this, the volume also offers new ways to think about nationalism and, more specifically, nationalism in South Asia from the vantage point of interdisciplinary environmental studies. The contributors to this innovative volume show that manifestations of nationalism have long and complex histories in South Asia. Terrestrial entities, imagined in terms of dense ecological networks of relationships, have often been the space or reference point for national aspirations, as shared memories of Mother Nature or appropriated economic, political, and religious geographies. In recent times, different groups in South Asia have claimed and appropriated ancient landscapes and territories for the purpose of locating and justifying a specific and utopian version of nation by linking its origin to their nature-mediated attachments to these landscapes. The topics covered include forests, agriculture, marine fisheries, parks, sacred landscapes, property rights, trade, and economic development. Gunnel Cederlof is associate professor of history, Uppsala University, Sweden. K. Sivaramakrishnan is professor of anthropology and international studies and director of the South Asia Center, Jackson School of International Studies, at the University of Washington. The other contributors are Nina Bhatt, Vinita Damodaran, Claude A. Garcia, Urs Geiser, Goetz Hoeppe, Bengt G. Karlsson, Antje Linkenbach, Wolfgang Mey, Kathleen D. Morrison, J. P. Pascal, and Sarah Southwold-Llewellyn.

When analysed as network places for the mobility of subjects and objects, many descriptions refer to airports as placeless and meaningless spaces carrying no singular identity to themselves and to their users. This imagery does not necessarily fit with those people whose experiences are intrinsically linked to mobility as a recurrent early life style and as a part of their subjective identity. Drawing on affect theory this paper portrays an alternative picture of airports as meaningful places through the narratives made by a particular community of onward/multiple migrants, adult “Third Culture Kids”, associated with the experiences and memories of transiting in airports. By doing it, this article aims to add another dimension to mobilities that regards people’s affections and experiences ascribed to places of mobility.

På kort har øya Ko Lanta utviklet seg til det stedet i Thailand med flest svensker. Etter tsunami katastrofen i desember 2004 har utviklingen gått fort og migrasjon til øya har blitt veldig populært av ulike grunner. Lokalsamfunnene og områdene som tidligere var bebodd av havnomader og fattige muslimske fiskere er nå i ferd med å bli fortrengt av skan- dinaver som bygger hus og hytter. Man kan ofte lese glade solskinns- historier om svensker som har brutt opp fra en trist hverdag til fordel for paradiset Ko Lanta – men hvordan opplever egentlig lokalbefolkningen denne utviklingen?

När européerna kom i kontakt med Sydost-Asien på 1500-talet möttes de av ett väl fungerande handelssystem som byggdes ut till Atlanten och Stilla havet. "Havsnomader" eller ”sjözigenare” spelade här en viktig roll, då de försåg resande med varor i viktiga hamnar mellan Indiska Oceanen och Sydkinesiska havet. De var inte själva köpmän eller grossister, utan försåg mellanhänderna med varor. Dessa "havsnomader" existerar fortfarande, men antalet som lever på enbart båtar minskar för varje år och bosättning i land vid kusten blir allt vanligare. Trots bofasthet vid kusten - ibland i flera generationer - tenderar de att bevara sin etniska identitet från andra kustnära folk.

Urak Lawoi är en ursprungsbefolkning i Andamansjön som bl.a. bor på kända turistöar som Phuket, Phi Phi, Ko Lanta Yai och Ko Lipe utanför Thailands västkust. Deras språk och kultur skiljer sig från övriga thailändares, inte minst ifråga om kunskap att navigera på havet. Att bo på eller vid havet är centralt för deras identitet; det är där de fiskar, samlar föda på stränder och utför sina ritualer. I århundranden, ja, kanske tusentals år har Urak Lawoi levt vid stranden och av de resurser som havet kan ge. Andra kallar dem ofta efter de västerländska benämningarna; ”Sea Gypsies”, ”havsnomader” eller, på thailändska, ”Chao Ley”.Den 26 december 2004 drabbades Thailand av den mest förödande tsunamin som noterats i modern historia. Mer än 350 000 människor omkom i Sydostasien. Om tsunamin var ”den första våg” som sköljde över Urak Lawoi, blev hjälpinsatser och reformer som följde efter tsunamin ”den andra vågen”, och den kom att generera betydande sociokulturella förändringar.Syftet med den här avhandlingen är att undersöka hur reformer, hjälpinsatser och den ökade uppmärksamhet som Urak Lawoi fick efter tsunamin har påverkat deras liv, särskilt på ön Ko Lanta Yai. Avhandlingen bygger på 36 månaders etnografiska fältstudier som gjorts under olika perioder mellan 2002 och 2013, alltså både före och efter tsunamin. Monografin ger en empirisk förståelse för hur globala ekonomiska intressen och transnationell migration påverkar lokalsamhällen på de stränder där Urak Lawoi varit bosatta, och som exploaterats för turism. Fallstudier från fältarbetet används för att visa hur en ursprungsbefolkning kan berövas sitt territorium och hur detta påverkar deras identitet och livsföring.När jag träffade Urak Lawoi första gången var det en gåta för mig varför landrättigheter hade en så central betydelse för människor som var kända som ett havsfolk. Här försöker jag finna svar på denna gåta och undersöka vad dessa svar egentligen innebär. Undersökningen visar hur konflikter kan uppstå på grund av det omgivande samhällets ekonomiska intressen och en lokalbefolknings traditionella livsstil. Studien visar hur en naturkatastrof används som en förevändning för att exploatera det drabbade området och bygga upp en turistindustri, och därmed påskynda en förändringsprocess som i själva verket var planerad redan före katastrofen. Analysen visar hur en respons på en naturkatastrof kan påskynda integrationen av en lokalbefolkning i den globala ekonomiska arenan. Uppbyggnadsverksamheter, nya regler och sociala integrationsprocesser blev katalysatorer för den lokala regeringen att genomföra förändringar som passade turismens tillväxt, men inte nödvändigtvis Urak Lawois intressen. Utomstående vill skapa en stereotyp bild av detta ”havsfolk” och ge dem "rätt" att behålla sin identitet under förutsättning att deras traditioner passar in i turistindustrins expandering. Studien visar hur denna utveckling har ökat ojämlikheten i människors levnadsförhållanden och gjort dem som saknar landrättigheter mer utsatta och sårbara. Trots sin utsatthet ser de emellertid inte sig själva som offer. De visar tvärtom stark kreativitet att agera inom det omgivande samhällets normer och regler och att göra motstånd. Slutsatsen är att de som har tillgång till mark är bäst på att integrera med det thailändska samhället, men de är också bäst på att bevara sin identitet.

Thailand har etterhvert utviklet seg til å bli mange skandinaveres turistparadis. Etter tsunamikatastrofen som rammet Sørøst-Asia andre juledag 2004 fikk vi høre at den beste måten å hjelpe den thailandske befolkningen på etter hendelsen var å vende tilbake dit som turister. Den voksende turismen i Thailand har ført med seg en økt økonomisk velstand på mange av øyene solhungrige turister har lagt sin elsk på. De samme øyene er også hjem for en urfolksbefolkning, Urak Lawoi, som opplever en helt annen side av turismeeventyret.

This research is about the indigenous people Urak Lawoi in Andaman Sea, outside the west coast of Thailand. The study shows what happens to them when they are being deprived of their territory and are being forced to abandon their culture, lifestyle and traditional economic subsistence. Urak Lawoi have until recently maintained culture, language and lifestyle apart from the rest of Thai society. During the last one and half decades, rapid tourism development, with large-scale hotels and bungalow resorts, have impacted and disrupted significantly on the nomadic lifestyles of the indigenous Urak Lawoi. They have been pushed away farther from the beaches and into unproductive parts. Powerful global forces linked to the world market economy result in situations that are not favorable for the local people Urak Lawoi and the ecosystems.

The study shows how inferiority complex of an ethnic community increase under circumstances of social, political and economic pressure.

Lotta Granbom, a mother of three from Sweden is on holiday in Thailand. It is her first trip there together with her daughter Ebba-Lotta. After some difficulty finding accommodation at the tourist resorts, they decide instead to search for Sea Nomads in the Andaman Sea. Lotta has heard of a nomadic group of people who live on the sea around Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Indonesia. She is curious to find out more; why a people choose to live on their boats? How this does shape their culture and traditions? What is their origin? And why do so few people know of their existence? This first journey, and encounter with the Urak Lawoi Sea Nomads will change Lotta’s life. For years to come Lotta will passionately follow and document their way of life. They have maintained a culture, language and life style set apart from Thai society, but all this is now changing. Lotta’s base has been Ko Lanta Yai in Thailand. Lotta’s work will show that the Urak Lawoi Sea Nomads do not live in the “pristine paradise” anymore as she had read about and expected. During her visits she has lived in a primitive hut, right on the beach, together with her three daughters. Incredibly, the hut was not swept away by the tsunami that hit Southeast Asia on 26 December, 2004, however the luxury resort built on the same beach did not have the same luck. The Urak Lawoi Sea Nomads talk of two different changes for them: “first the tourist came to the island and then the tsunami”. This book is a field study of the Urak Lawoi, an indigenous people in Thailand, and the consequences for them with rapid tourist development.

Archaeology is the study of the past and its remains in the present. It is relevant to the long-term preservation of records, knowledge and memory, e.g. regarding final repositories of nuclear waste, in two ways. Firstly, future archaeology may promise the recovery of lost information, knowledge and meaning of remains of the past. Secondly, present-day archaeology can offer lessons about how future societies will make sense of remains of the past.

Archaeology is always situated in a larger social and cultural context and the information, knowledge and meaning it generates is necessarily of its own present. Archaeological knowledge reflects contemporary perceptions of past and future; these perceptions change over time. Indeed, we cannot assume that in the future there will be any archaeology at all. We think, therefore, that future societies will want, and need, to make their own decisions about sites associated with nuclear waste, based on their own perceptions of past and future. To facilitate this process in the long term we need to engage each present, keeping safe options open.

In this text we elaborate on these issues from our perspective as archaeologists.

Globalization and social interaction between countries are two current topics in today’s research. A shown interest in exchange studies among students all over the world is one of the positive outcomes of globalization and the social interactions that comes with it. This essay examines how a group of Japanese exchange students studying at a university in Sweden experience their social meetings with the local Swedish students and fellow Japanese exchange students. A netnographic method was applied to interview the informants online, 12 synchronous interviews were thus carried out to better understand the experiences of the Japanese exchange students. To better understand the relations that occur between the informants and the Swedish students, and the relations that occur with fellow Japanese students, the theory of “the Established and the Outsiders” by Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson (2010) is applied. This theory examines the relationship that takes place between a group that is new and has a low sense of community, and a group that is established and has a high sense of community. This study shows that the Japanese exchange students have a positive attitude when it comes to getting to know Swedish students. The X-program and also the mix of local students and exchange students in classes contributes to create a social platform for the Japanese exchange students. This study also shows that the group of Japanese exchange students have a low sense of community within the group, the study examines different factors to discuss why that may be.

Unter anthropologischer Perspektive interessiert das Thema Sinne und eine Pädagogik der Sinne vorrangig unter den Gesichtspunkten seiner Historizität sowie Kultur- und Diskursabhängigkeit. Anstatt natürlicher oder naturgegebener und so gesehen gültiger Sachverhalte werden eher kulturelle Praktiken in den Blick genommen. Anstelle von Definitionen wird auf Definitionsmacht und auf diverse Prozesse einer Bedeutungskonstitution abgehoben, die sich auch widersprechen können. Die Hervorbringung von Welt (und damit auch von Wissen und Bewusstseinsprozessen) wird nicht zuletzt an leiblich-sinnliche Prozesse und an Handeln gebunden, wobei angenommen wird, dass diese auf soziale und gesellschaftliche Bedingungen einwirken, von denen sie zugleich bestimmt werden.

This article presents an ethnographic analysis of the biggest money-maker in Swedish gambling, namely, the state-owned electronic gambling machines, called Jack Vegas machines. The focus is on (1) social dimensions of the game and (2) various gambler types that develop in the Jack Vegas environment. In the section about social dimensions, there is a discussion about social interaction between gamblers and between gamblers and staff/owners of restaurants with the machines. There is a kind of sociality in Jack Vegas environments, but also feelings of irritation and frustration among the players. The textdiscusses the gambling types developed by Sue Fisher and, to some degree, Robert Custer and relates them to the Swedish ethnographic findings. But the article develops new gambler types as well. The gambler types developed by previous researchers in academic and empirical contexts need to be revitalized and further developed in new gamingenvironments.

The concept of magic is frequently used to discuss technology, a practice considered useful by some with others arguing that viewing technology as magic precludes a proper understanding of technology. The concept of magic is especially prominent in discussions of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Based on an anthropological perspective, this paper juxtaposes ML technology with magic, using descriptions drawn from a project on an ML-powered system for propulsion control of cargo ships. The paper concludes that prior scholarly work on technology has failed to both define magic adequately and use research into magic. It also argues that although the distinction between ML technology and magic is important, recognition of the similarities is useful for understanding ML technology.

Countries with significant indigenous populations, such as Australia, New Zealand and the Nordic countries, are providing increased support for improvements in the number of indigenous academics represented in higher education and engaged in research. Such developments have occurred at the same time as the implementation of performance-based research funding systems. However, despite the significance of such systems for academic careers and knowledge diffusion there has been relatively little consideration of the way within which they meet the needs of indigenous academics and knowledges. Drawing primarily on the New Zealand context, this perspective paper questions the positioning of Māori researchers and Māori research epistemologies (Kaupapa Maori) within the Performance Based Research Fund and the contemporary neoliberal higher education system. It is argued that the present system, rather than being genuinely inclusive, serves to reinforce the othering of Māori episteme and therefore perpetuates the hegemony of Western and colonial epistemologies and research structures. As such, there is a need to raise fundamental questions about the present ecologies of knowledge that performance based research systems create not only in the New Zealand higher education research context but also within other countries that seek to advance indigenous research.

Through his metaphor landscapes of meaning, Reed provides a way of looking at meaning in terms of how it explains action, with the assumption that action occurs within landscapes of meaning. However, my ethnographic evidence suggests that Reed’s metaphor needs to enlarge its scope. In doing this I use my research on immigrant girls in Sweden. The aim is to demonstrate that people can and do live across, within and between landscapes of meaning. This interstitiality can both produce extreme hardship and possibilities of freedom and agency. I share the story of one person, Nazira, who is negotiating with different social and cultural worlds. This allows her to criticize different cultural contexts and to work towards emergent cultural forms. I conclude by arguing that my ethnographical accounts could be used in support and as a critique of the theoretical understanding of landscapes of meaning within Reed’s interpretivist sociology.

In their article, Jane Anderson and Sonya Atalay propose that we rethink repatriation. Instead of viewing it as mainly about transfer of ownership, they propose that we also understand it as a pedagogic opportunity. The power of this suggestion lies not only in the benefits of learning, which, of course are fundamental, but also in the realization that repatriation is necessary—not only for descending communities but also for the institutions that are in possession of their cultural heri- tage and ancestors. I argue that while native interest and survival are and should remain central to repatriation as a process, it is increasingly also becoming about the survival of these institutions—their reputation, their legitimacy, and their sustainability. Perhaps we have reached a point where museums and other institutions holding collections from indigenous communities need the process of repatriation as much as the communities of origin.

This book provides a nuanced analysis of the transformations that the ritual cutting of Female Circumcision (FC) recently underwent within the changing medical and institutional context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic among Ejagham tribes in Southwest Cameroon.

Based on local level ethnography, it captures the multivocale perspectives and agency of participants thereby putting to question the uncritical feminist stance that “Third World Women” lack agency and are chattel. As the highest rite of patriarchy, the quintessential icon of gendered personhood and femininity, FC remains salient even when it is no longer the criterion for membership into the Moninkim secret society especially within the new medical and institutional context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic because it is intertwined with the whole cultural political economy of the Ejaghams. The commercialization of this feminine institution charged with feminine personhood through its spectacular performances (enacting matrimonial relations) within and beyond the Ejagham locale is evidence of its continuous centrality in the life world of participants. By focusing on health alone, anti-HIV/AIDS and anti-FC interventions by both the state and civil society actors miss the point. FC is increasingly becoming a human, social, gender rights and development issue calling for a multi-pronged development approach. The threat of the HIV/AIDS pandemic led to ferocious intergenerational debates over moral values about female inordinate sexuality and to the double appropriation of the concept of human security. Conservatives maintain that FC tempers with women’s sexuality and is therefore a useful mechanism to keep women in matrimonial service, a moral check on inordinate sexuality and a ‘‘native’’ antidote against the scourge of the pandemic. Anti-FC advocates point to the bloodletting entailed by the ritual procedures as fuelling the spread of the pandemic through the spread of diseases with HIV/AIDS inclusive among participants. A third group of cultural insiders are rather opting but for the cautious appropriation of modernity while simultaneously maintaining tradition: medicalisation of the ritual procedures. By reducing the complexity and nuances of the ritual cutting to health alone, anti-FC activism has instead produced a backlash marked by simultaneous contestation and practice. Paradoxically, the anti-FC campaigns have resulted in the privatization of FC on increasingly younger girls. However, the recent waiving of the ritual cutting as a precondition for membership into the Moninkim cult-partly because of the ageing of the initial initiates, the health risk of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and anti-FC advocacy campaigns by local NGOs shows that change is underway. Simultaneously, inter-tribal marriages with members of non-circumcising tribes and romantic love relationships beyond the purview of the traditional patriarchal orbit have led younger lovers  increasingly seeking mutually satisfying love relationships for which  FC, a ‘virtuous cut’, becomes an obstacle.

While internal socio-cultural change is imminent and needs to consolidated, Western positionality on ritual FC has instead stonewalled eradication initiatives usefully calling for the need to “wear native spectacles”: engage participants in meaningful dialogue and convert them into their own change agents, tailor health education and social change initiatives with and not against the target population. Local processes are rooted in wider fields of power and are affected by forces at various scales calling for the need to look at the entanglement between local and global, economic, social, political and historical processes in the study of, and in interventions to change health and other cultural issues.

Human rights-based interventions against genital cutting practices (FGC) have increasingly emphasised the need for legislation against such practices with little attention to the consequences. Accordingly,the international community has compelled state parties by linking international development aid to good governance and human rights- the rights of women and children- through the elimination of genital surgeries and other gender-based discriminatory practices by adopting appropriate legislation that will deter practitioners. This ethnographic study explores diverse local reactions among FGC practicing Ejagham ethnicities in Southwest Cameroon. It highlights the dilemmas inherent in an anti-genital cutting legislation. Drawing from the experiences of African countries that adopted anti- FGC legislation, it demonstrates that the ''bifurcated power structure” in the postcolonial Context and therefore multiple overlapping authority systems- between the national government and traditional village authority system - and the state's lack of '”statehardness” are some of the dilemmas compromising the adoption and implementation of an anti-FGC legislation in Cameroon.

In African traditional societies, women oversaw the maintenance of the household by assuming responsibilities such as mother, wife and caretaker. In addition to this, women were involved in economic and political affairs. During the colonial era, however, men were in charge of education, politics and economic affairs, to the near exclusion of women who were specifically trained for home caring roles and on being good wives. This study explores the impact of traditional and colonial systems on women's identities and lives in French Cameroon. Data was collected from five focus group discussions involving 24 conveniently sampled Cameroonian women aged 55 and above and analyzed using the framework of Content Analysis. The women acknowledged the marginal roles of women in traditional societies although respected and loved, social control and compliance rooted in traditional societies and exacerbated during colonial times, social isolation of women during colonialism because of the traditional roles assigned to women and their fear of white male colonialists, and gender-discriminate colonial education.