The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology is an invaluable guide and major reference source for students and scholars alike, introducing its readers to key contemporary perspectives and approaches within the field. Written by an experienced international team of contributors, with an interdisciplinary range of essays, this collection provides a powerful overview of the transformations currently affecting anthropology. The volume both addresses the concerns of the discipline and comments on its construction through texts, classroom interactions, engagements with various publics, and changing relations with other academic subjects. Persuasively demonstrating that a number of key contemporary issues can be usefully analyzed through an anthropological lens, the contributors cover important topics such as globalization, law and politics, collaborative archaeology, economics, religion, citizenship and community, health, and the environment. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology is a fascinating examination of this lively and constantly evolving discipline.

In a democracy power is obtained via competition. Yet, as women gain access to parliaments in record numbers worldwide collaboration appears to be on the rise. This is puzzling: Why, if politicians can secure power via competition, would we ever observe collaboration? Using evidence from 200 interviews with political elites from 19 Argentine provinces, a novel dataset from 23 Argentine chambers over 18 years, and qualitative case studies from across the world, I reexamine traditional notions of competitive democracy by evaluating patterns of collaboration among legislators. In doing so, I tackle three important questions.

 

My first question is: Can democracy be collaborative? I argue that collaborative democracy is not antithetical to competitive democracy. While only the bare majority can secure the power to decide via competition, I explain that all legislators—particularly those who do not have power—can influence the policy-making process through collaboration. Using bill cosponsorship data, which represents the culmination of the collaborative process, I demonstrate that democracy can be collaborative, that out-of-power legislators collaborate more frequently than those in power, and that women collaborate more than men.



This raises a second question: Why are female legislators more inclined to collaborate than their male colleagues? I explain that women collaborate more than men because they face structural barriers that restrict their ability to exert influence on the policy-making process. By collaborating with other women they can overcome structural barriers and attain political power. I show empirically that despite having high levels of descriptive representation as a group and seniority as individuals, women’s marginalization exists across a vast array of legislative power including legislative leadership posts, committee leadership posts, and powerful committee appointments. This marginalization limits women’s political power and motivates collaboration among women.



Finally, this leads to my third question; if women are more collaborative, why do some female legislators collaborate successfully among themselves, while other women fail to do so? Specifically, I tackle the question: When do women collaborate? I argue that despite the benefits of collaboration, patterns of collaboration vary among female legislators because not all women have the same opportunities to work cooperatively. Different legislative contexts either facilitate or constrain women’s collaboration. I show empirically that six key contextual variables that vary both across and within legislative chambers shape policy collaboration. First, I examine women’s numeric representation and partisan pressures; both factors vary largely across legislative chambers. Then I focus on affiliation with the executive party, seniority, legislation targeting women’s issues, and membership in a women’s caucus or committee; each of these factors vary within legislative chambers. Taken together, the answers to these three important questions, contribute to our understanding of democracy by explaining why and when we can expect to observe collaboration in a democracy where power is obtained via competition.



This book uses a rich combination of both qualitative and quantitative data to support my central argument. The primary case analyzed is Argentina, where I compare women’s legislative behavior at the provincial level in order to capture variation in institutional contexts within a single case. As the first country to adopt legislative gender quotas, Argentina is one of the only contexts in the world where women have held a sizable share of seats in the legislature over a long timeline in a large number of chambers. Gender quotas were first adopted in Argentina at the national level in 1991. The following year, quota adoption began to spread rapidly across the provincial legislatures. The figure below charts the adoption of gender quotas across the Argentine provinces.



I draw on qualitative evidence from over 200 interviews with male and female legislators and elite political observers from 19 Argentine provinces. The fieldwork was conducted between 2007 and 2013 during six different trips to Argentina. My quantitative evidence comes from a novel dataset that I developed using archival data from 23 Argentine chambers over an 18-year period. The data includes all cosponsored legislation, committee appointments, and leadership posts for over 7,000 male and female legislators.



I augment my careful analysis of Argentina with a series of qualitative case studies that examine women’s legislative collaboration. This approach, which draws on examples from across the world, allows me to demonstrate the generalizability of the relationships observed in Argentina. Here I can account for more informal types of collaboration that occur in the policy-making process and extend my analysis to other legislative contexts. The depth provided by the Argentine analyses—coupled with the breadth offered by these additional case studies—makes this book the most comprehensive study of collaboration to date.

Covering a wide range of historical actors in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, Measuring Manhood analyzes how race became the purview of science and reveals the role of gender, sex, and sexuality in the scientific making—and unmaking—of race. 

As more states strike down laws restricting marriage to "one man and one woman," same-sex relationships are becoming more visible and more socially accepted. Nevertheless, many couples still experience significant stress because of their same-sex status. In every life context — family, work, neighborhood, religious communities, and in social and legal contexts — same-sex couples have to make decisions about disclosure, how to respond to prejudice, and how to cope with negative feelings about themselves and their experiences.

This book helps couples work together to identify, develop, and use their strengths and skills to successfully navigate these issues and flourish. Tough tasks like confronting prejudice will never be easy, but thanks to the stories, tools, and resources presented in this book, readers will learn to manage such situations in a positive way.

Learning activities in each chapter guide couples to become more aware of the causes of stress in their relationship, and to take positive actions to strengthen their commitment. Readers will learn how to cultivate the strengths of their LGBTQ identities, assert appropriate boundaries, create supportive relationships with others, and contribute authentically to their families and communities.

Uses the state of Oklahoma as a case study for how US conservatives have attempted to unqueer America since the 1950s.



By exploring the scandal-filled lives of four Oklahomans, this book demonstrates how unqueering operates in a conservative American context. Carol Mason weaves a story about how homogenizing, antigay ideas evolve from generation to generation so that they achieve particular economic, imperial, racial, and gendered goals. Using engaging and accessible commentary on antigay crusaders (Sally Kern and Anita Bryant) and two queer teachers dismissed from their positions (Billy James Hargis and Bruce Goff), Mason illustrates how the lives of these figures represent paradigmatic moments in conservative confrontations with queers and help us to understand the conflation of terrorism with homosexuality, which dates back to the McCarthy era.

The Destruction of Hillary Clinton is an answer to the question many have been asking: How did an extraordinarily well-qualified, experienced, and admired candidate—whose victory would have been as historic as Barack Obama’s—come to be seen as a tool of the establishment, a chronic liar, and a talentless politician?

In this masterful narrative of the 2016 campaign year and the events that led up to it, Susan Bordo unpacks the Right’s assault on Clinton and her reputation, the way the Left provoked suspicion and indifference among young voters, the inescapable presence of James Comey, questions about Russian influence, and the media’s malpractice in covering the candidate.

In Peruvian Lives across Borders, M. Cristina Alcalde examines the evolution of belonging and the making of home among middle- and upper-class Peruvians in Peru, the United States, Canada, and Germany.

Alcalde draws on interviews, surveys, participant observation, and textual analysis to argue that to belong is to exclude. To that end, transnational Peruvians engage in both subtle and direct policing along the borders of belonging. These acts allow them to claim and maintain the social status they enjoyed in their homeland even as they profess their openness and tolerance. Alcalde details these processes and their origins in Peru's gender, racial, and class hierarchies. As she shows, the idea of return—whether desired or rejected, imagined or physical—spurs constructions of Peruvianness, belonging, and home.

Deeply researched and theoretically daring, Peruvian Lives across Borders answers fascinating questions about an understudied group of migrants.

From the beginning, rhetoric has been a productive and practical art aimed at preparing citizens to participate in communal life. Possibilities for this participation are continually evolving in light of cultural and technological changes. The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric explores the ways that public rhetoric has changed due to emerging technologies that enable us to produce, reproduce, and distribute compositions that integrate visual, aural, and alphabetic elements. David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel argue that to exploit such options fully, rhetorical theory and pedagogy need to be reconfigured. Rhetorical concepts such as invention, context, and ethics need to be transformed, which has important implications for the writing classroom, among other sites of rhetorical education.

Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel suggest an expanded understanding of the ancient rhetorical concept of kairos (the opportune moment) as a unifying heuristic that can help theorists, teachers, and practitioners understand, teach, and produce multimodal public rhetoric more effectively. In this expanded sense, kairos includes considerations of genre and dissemination through material-cultural contexts. Ultimately, they argue that culture itself is at stake in our understanding of multimodal public rhetoric. Important cultural categories such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and place, are produced and reproduced not just through the dynamics of language but through the full range of multimodal practices.

The digital humanities is a rapidly growing field that is transforming humanities research through digital tools and resources. Researchers can now quickly trace every one of Issac Newton’s annotations, use social media to engage academic and public audiences in the interpretation of cultural texts, and visualize travel via ox cart in third-century Rome or camel caravan in ancient Egypt. Rhetorical scholars are leading the revolution by fully utilizing the digital toolbox, finding themselves at the nexus of digital innovation.



Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities is a timely, multidisciplinary collection that is the first to bridge scholarship in rhetorical studies and the digital humanities. It offers much-needed guidance on how the theories and methodologies of rhetorical studies can enhance all work in digital humanities, and vice versa. Twenty-three essays over three sections delve into connections, research methodology, and future directions in this field. Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson have assembled a broad group of more than thirty accomplished scholars. Read together, these essays represent the cutting edge of research, offering guidance that will energize and inspire future collaborations.

Digital Samaritans explores rhetorical delivery and cultural sovereignty in the digital humanities. The exigence for the book is rooted in a practical digital humanities project based on the digitization of manuscripts in diaspora for the Samaritan community, the smallest religious/ethnic group of 770 Samaritans split between Mount Gerizim in the Palestinian Authority and in Holon, Israel. Based on interviews with members of the Samaritan community and archival research, Digital Samaritans explores what some Samaritans want from their diaspora of manuscripts, and how their rhetorical goals and objectives relate to the contemporary existential and rhetorical situation of the Samaritans as a living, breathing people.