Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
This article deals with the complexity of relations of urban dwellers with the natural environment. It explores a rich variety of practices in engaging with non-built environments developed by the population of mining cities in the Murmansk…
Published: December 1995.
Published: December 1995.
Kinship is an essential factor in human social life. Many years of research devoted to develop a better understanding of kinship bear witness to this fact. Important advances were made on conceptual, modeling and empirical grounds. Computational social…
This paper presents a simulation of world-systems theory’s iteration model of early human societies. The polities modeled are composed of sedentary foragers and/or simple horticulturalists that rely upon basic subsistence technologies and display low l…
No abstract available.
Today’s clothing industry is based on a system where clothes are made in ready-to-wear sizes and meant to fit most people. Studies have pointed out that consumers are discontent with the use of these systems: size designations are not accurate enough t…
Fashion and retail ought to be a happy marriage. Yet several entrepreneurs in the field of fashion speak of a climate that is difficult to penetrate because of economic and cultural factors. For example, the chain store concept is an expression of the …
This article discusses the mobilization of the nation for fashion, based on how the relationship between fashion and nation unfolds in the case of fashion design practice and the fashion industry in Denmark. The otherwise globalized fashion industry is…
The story of fastskin swimsuits reflects some of the challenges facing the impact of technology in postmodern culture. Introduced in 1999 and ratified for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, fastskin swimsuits were touted as revolutionising competitive swim…
With Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological view that human beings ’take in’ the world and experience themselves as subjects through their bodies as a starting point, players in both men’s and women’s teams, kit men, purchasing managers, sporting dir…
No abstract available.
In ’Costume Cinema and Materiality: Telling the Story of Marie Antoinette through Dress’ a materiality-based approach for analysing film narratives through costumes is examined. Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette (2006) serves as the empirical start…
No abstract available.
When people say Shanghai looks like the future the setting is almost always the same. Evening descends and the skyscrapers clustered on the eastern shore of the Huangpu light up. Super towers are transformed into giant screens. The spectacular skyline,…
This article examines different types of queer spaces in contemporary Shanghai together with the various same-sex subjects that inhabit these spaces. In doing so, it discusses the impact of transnational capitalism, the nation state and local histories…
This article discusses different accounts of Shanghai Modern, the period between 1920s and 1940s in which the city occupied a unique position within China and the world. It places discussions of this period in the context of the resurgence of urban led…
Shanghai is invariably used in film sets and popular discourse as an image of the future. But what sort of future can be found here? Is it a qualitative or quantitative advance? Is there any trace in the landscape of China’s officially still-Communist …
No abstract available.
The state-sanctioned Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) is the only film festival accredited by the Fédération Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Films (FIAPF) in the Greater China region. This paper intends to explore the perce…
This essay is an allegorical reading of Shanghai futures through a fictive woman, Wang Qiyao, in Wang Anyi’s novel, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (1996). The novel is about her life in China from the 1940s to the 1980s. Using Benj…
This paper deals with the development of ’art clusters’ and their relocation in the city of Shanghai. It first looks at the revival of the city’s old inner city industrial area (along banks of Suzhou River) through ’organic’ or ’alternative’ artist-led…
No abstract available.
This article presents a case study of the development of a local cultural form – Shanghai Yueju – caught up in the rapid urban redevelopment of post-socialist China. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of ’habitus’ and ’distinction’, it analyses the proce…
After decades of fierce political struggles in the Mao era, the People’s Republic of China has strived economically under the open-door policy since the end of the 1970s. However, the still firm national monuments that weathered the social vicissitudes…