Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
Though digital media have unquestionably affected the features and functions of modern encyclopedias, such works also continue to be shaped by factors thoroughly conventional by the end of the historical Enlightenment. As William Smellie, editor of the…
Store norske leksikon (SNL) [Great Norwegian Encyclopaedia] is an edited, online encyclopaedia that strives towards radical transparency. Our aim is for as many parts of text production as possible to be visible to everyone, much like in the model that…
Through the integrated framework of participation theory and political economy, this article analyzes participatory opportunities in the virtual world Habbo Hotel, and how participation is constrained and framed by the producer’s commercial strategies,…
The death of the encyclopaedia is increasingly reported in connection with the abandonment of hard copy reference publishing, the dispersal of library reference collections and the preference for end-users to seek information from search engines and so…
Shunta Mori Introduction In the 1980s and the early 1990s there were three camps competing for representation of women’s roles in Japan: the Neotraditionalists; “New Women”; and Radical Egalitarians. Neotraditionalists promoted the idea that women’s pr…
Introduction Anthropologist Harumi Befu claims that the appreciation of “diversity within diversity” is essential for twenty-first century Japan (Befu 2008, p. xxiv). The immensity of this c…
John Clammer (Photo by FreeDigitalPhotos.net coward_lion) Social scientists are wont to announce “crises” in the societies that attract their scholarly attention. While it might be stretching the evidence a little too far to suggest that co…
Wolfram Manzenreiter, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna Introduction The 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan was the first to be staged on the world’s most populous continent, Asia, and it was the first to be co-hosted by two nations. …
This is a paper on the transformation of campus activism in Japan since the 1990’s. Japan’s so-called freeter movements (movements of young men and women lacking regular employment) are often said to have emerged as young people shifted their base of a…
Many scholars have noted that secular belief systems, despite lack of a spiritual base, can possess qualities and display features similar to religion. The most well-known and forceful formulation of this is, arguably, Durkheim’s claim that elementary …
No abstract available.
This article focuses on the strategies of protest employed by the climate-change activist network Klimax (circa 2007-10). My questions are: What, in their view, was the main threat to our environment? How did they protest against it? The study is based…
The goal of this article is to explore the website communication of urban activist gardeners by focusing on the concept of ritual as a heuristic category. In contrast to the majority of those doing research on ritual, I use a systems-theoretical approa…
This article uses social-movement analysis to understand the rituals, memory-work and spatialties of Waffen-SS veterans and their sympathizers. Most social-movement analysis focuses on left-wing protesters; our concern is with the marginalized counter-…
This article focuses on the identity work that takes place on the biggest Polish Internet forum for infertile people (www.nasz-bocian.pl). It is an example of a wider trend of “digital groupings created by and for those who struggle with the physical a…
The vernacular online videos produced by the Arab revolutions constitute an un-precedented (though not unproblematic) historical resource for understanding the subjective experience of the ordinary people who find themselves on the front line of revolu…
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Gender Identities, Human Rights, Female Farmers, Gender Analyses, Women’s Movements, Female Migrants, and more.
African Studies Quarterly
This article explores three different inflections of the idea of economy: imagined, real and moral. Each offers a distinctive way of thinking about economies and each raises the possibility of providing critical purchase on the formations of ’actually …
The figure of the self-reliant, risk-bearing, non-unionised, self-exploiting, always-on flexibly employed worker in the creative industries has been positioned as a role model of contemporary capitalism. Although the notion of the model-worker is a com…
No abstract available.
Written from the participant perspective of the author, the article documents the debt resistance movement that is one of the enduring offshoots of Occupy Wall Street. Addressing the household debt crisis in the wake of the financial crash, it focuses …
The concepts and phenomena of civil society, political economy and labour are ambivalent matters in Hegel’s political philosophy. They simultaneously contain productive and destructive potential in the realization of the political community. This artic…
Notions of Kulturkritik stemming from twentieth century accounts of mass con-sumption present culture as an effect of the mode or relations of production. Culture becomes the means by which capitalism imposes itself as an ideological system. This paper…