Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
Macro-institutional analysis was once central to sociological inquiry, such that Durkheim saw it as synonymous with sociology. With the failure of Parsonsian grand macro theory, sociology shifted its lens to the organization, or meso-level of analysis….
Archaeological, historical, and ethnographic sources on the pastoralism of Inner Asia provide evidence for a resilient, but highly volatile steppe adaptation that developed several thousand years ago. This study explores some fundamental aspects of pas…
When Helle Thorning-Schmidt in 2011 became the first female Prime Minister in Denmark, this “victory for the women” was praised in highly celebratory tones in Danish newspapers. The celebration involved a paradoxical representation of gender as simulta…
All cultural representations in the form of songs, pictures, literature, theater, film, television shows, and other media are deeply emotional and ideological, often difficult to define or analyze. Emotions are embedded as a cultural and social soundtr…
“Intersectionality” has become a highly influential concept in gender research over the last 25 years. Debates have focused on differences and power asymmetries between women, in terms of race but also addressing class, age, sexuality, ability and nati…
In this article, I address the current state of cultural studies in Northern Europe and more specifically in the Nordic countries, especially in Denmark. I take my point of departure in offering an answer to the question, what is cultural studies anyho…
The vampire is still primarily a literary figure. The vampires we have seen on TV and cinema in recent years are all based on literary models. The vampire is at the same time a popular cultural icon and a figure that, especially women writers, use to p…
We are proud to present the fifth volume of Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research. This time we have some important news to share. First, the journal’s scholarly success has been financially rewarded, in that Culture Unbound has receive…
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Over the last three decades, attitudes towards cultural studies in Germany have developed within contexts of contact and conflict with a variety of disciplines, e.g. ethnology, anthropology, sociology, as well as the sociology of culture, liter-ary stu…
This article reviews aspects of the historical relationship between cultural studies and history in the UK university context and illustrates the specificity of cultural history approaches by drawing on the author’s own work on cosmopolitanism.
This article discusses the overall situation of cultural studies in Portugal. It starts by analysing some of the courses and graduate programmes currently on offer. The results suggest that cultural studies is experiencing a fast academic expansion. Wh…
Recent socio-political developments have rendered cultural studies of the Republic of Turkey an ever-widening field of study, as they lead apparently to a probable paradigm shift in a society that was once thought to be purely Western-oriented. The ana…
This article is based on an ethnographic participation study of the production of a play called All about the ADHD and A+ Children of Noisy Village (ännu mer om alla vi ADHD- och MVG-barn i Bullerbyn) staged at one of Sweden’s most prominent playhouses…
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In this article, I discuss sport and physical activities as a field of empirical investigation for feminist cultural studies with a potential to contribute to theorizing the body, gender and difference. Sport has, historically, served to legitimize and…
This article examines gender and cultural sense-making in relation to perfumes and their packaging. Gendered meanings of seduction, choice, consumption and taste are brought to the fore with the use of go-along interviews with consumers in perfume stor…
In this essay I examine the en-gendering of cultural memory in Honoré de Balzac´s story Adieu (1830), which proceeds from a repressed trauma originating in historical events. Balzac wrote the story in the spring of 1830, i. e. at a time when the French…
While hotly debated in political contexts, abortion has seldom figured in explicit terms in either literature or film in the United States. An exception is John Irving’s 1985 novel The Cider House Rules, which treats abortion insistently and explicitly…
This paper examines the effectiveness of partition in ceasing violence during ethnic conflict. Wigmore-Shepherd’s 2012 study argued that ethnic conflict is often due to the congruence between ethnic and political identity, allowing political conflicts …
Raymond Firth’s We, The Tikopia, first published in 1936, still sets the standard for detailed, nuanced, sensitive ethnography. As Malinowski’s student, Firth—who died in 2002 at the age of 100—was a hard-headed functionalist, whose forte was careful …
Kinship terminology is a human universal, a kind of cultural knowledge circulated through language. In this paper I explore the possibility that the need for social rules prompted the development of fully syntactic language via kinship terminologies. I…
We now know what kinship terminologies are and what their function is in kinship systems, even though this knowledge is not yet widespread. Every social system consists of a set of organizations built up interactively by the use of specific idea syste…
Building on data systematically gathered during a field study in Qatar, it is found that kinship structure is characterized by a property combining transformationality and dynamicality, certainly in Qatari kinship, and proposed here as a feature of the…