The Spirit of Capitalism According to the Michelin Company

Author(s): Corine Védrine

Series: Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology

Publisher: Springer International Publishing;Palgrave Macmillan, Year: 2019

ISBN: 978-3-319-96609-0

The city of Clermont-Ferrand in central France is inextricably linked to the global tire company Michelin—not only by the industrial, social, and economic realities that tie employees to employer, but also by a multi-generational, regional belief in the company’s entrepreneurial mythos, the so-called “Michelin spirit.” Since the 1980s, transformations in capitalist systems have challenged the Michelin ideology: the end of corporate paternalism, the reduction of the work force, and a new wave of managers have left employees in the region feeling the sting of abandonment. Even in the face of these significant changes, however, the ethnographic enquiry at the heart of this book testifies to the enduring strength of the “spirit of capitalism”: even as the bonds between employees, companies, and their regions are undergoing significant transformation, entrepreneurial myths endure—in part in fear of the end of a secure, organizing structure.

Indigenous Pacific Approaches to Climate Change

Author(s): Lyn Carter

Series: Palgrave Studies in Disaster Anthropology

Publisher: Springer International Publishing;Palgrave Pivot, Year: 2019

ISBN: 978-3-319-96438-6

Situating Māori Ecological Knowledge (MEK) within traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) frameworks, this book recognizes that indigenous ecological knowledge contributes to our understanding of how we live in our world (our world views), and in turn, the ways in which humans adapt to climate change. As an industrialized nation, Aotearoa/New Zealand (A/NZ) has responsibilities and obligations to other Pacific dwellers, including its indigenous populations. In this context, this book seeks to discuss how A/NZ can benefit from the wider Pacific strategies already in place; how to meet its global obligations to reducing GHG; and how A/NZ can utilize MEK to achieve substantial inroads into adaptation strategies and practices. In all respects, Māori tribal groups here are well-placed to be key players in adaptation strategies, policies, and practices that are referenced through Māori/Iwi traditional knowledge.

Living Mantra

Author(s): Mani Rao

Series: Contemporary Anthropology of Religion

Publisher: Springer International Publishing;Palgrave Macmillan, Year: 2019

ISBN: 978-3-319-96390-7

Living Mantra is an anthropology of mantra-experience among Hindu-tantric practitioners. In ancient Indian doctrine and legends, mantras perceived by rishis (seers) invoke deities and have transformative powers. Adopting a methodology that combines scholarship and practice, Mani Rao discovers a continuing tradition of visionaries (rishis/seers) and revelations in south India’s Andhra-Telangana. Both deeply researched and replete with fascinating narratives, the book reformulates the poetics of mantra-practice as it probes practical questions. Can one know if a vision is real or imagined? Is vision visual? Are deity-visions mediated by culture? If mantras are effective, what is the role of devotion? Are mantras language? Living Mantra interrogates not only theoretical questions, but also those a practitioner would ask: how does one choose a deity, for example, or what might bind one to a guru? Rao breaks fresh ground in redirecting attention to the moments that precede systematization and canon-formation, showing how authoritative sources are formed.

Legitimacy

Author(s): Italo Pardo, Giuliana B. Prato

Series: Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology

Publisher: Springer International Publishing,Palgrave Macmillan, Year: 2019

ISBN: 978-3-319-96237-5

Global in scope, this original and thought-provoking collection applies new theory on legitimacy and legitimation to urban life. An informed reflection on this comparatively new topic in anthropology in relation to morality, action, law, politics and governance is both timely and innovative, especially as worldwide discontent among ordinary people grows. The ethnographically-based analyses offered here range from banking to neighbourhoods, from poverty to political action at the grassroots. They recognize the growing gap between the rulers and the ruled with particular attention to the morality of what is right as opposed to what is legal. This book is a unique contribution to social theory, fostering discussion across the many boundaries of anthropological and sociological studies.

Hybrid Communities: Biosocial Approaches to Domestication and Other Trans-species Relationships

Author(s): Charles Stépanoff (Editor), Jean-Denis Vigne (Editor)

Series: Routledge Studies in Anthropology

Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2019

ISBN: 9781315179988

Domestication challenges our understanding of human-environment relationships because it blurs the dichotomy between what is artificial and what is natural. In domestication, biological evolution, environmental change, techniques and practices, anthropological trajectories and sociocultural choices are inextricably interconnected. Domestication is essentially a hybrid phenomenon that needs to be explored with hybrid scientific approaches.

Hybrid Communities: Biosocial Approaches to Domestication and Other Trans-species Relationships attempts for the first time to explore domestication viewed from across disciplines both in its origins and as an ongoing process. This edited collection proposes new biosocial approaches and concepts which integrate the methods of social sciences, archaeology and biology to shed new light on domestication in diachrony and in synchrony.

This book will be of great interest to all scholars working on human-environment relationships, and should also attract readers from the fields of social anthropology, archaeology, genetics, ecology, botany, zoology, history and philosophy.

An Anthropology of Academic Governance and Institutional Democracy

Author(s): Murray J. Leaf

Publisher: Springer International Publishing;Palgrave Macmillan, Year: 2019

ISBN: 978-3-319-92587-5,978-3-319-92588-2

This anthropological study of university governance organizations has four main purposes. It aims to describe the principles of effective faculty governance organizations and shared governance; to help mobilize opposition to a large and extremely well-funded system of political attacks aimed at destroying faculty governance organizations; to demonstrate the value of the theory of human social organizations; and to enable universities to become more effective in generating the intellectual advances we must make in order to solve the current global crisis of sustainability and political instability. Political democracy depends on an educated public, and academic democracy is integral to producing such knowledge.