Author: Fenella Cannell File Type: pdf This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical repressed of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Because of this, anthropology has been less successful in considering Christianity as an ethnographic object than it has in considering other religions. This collection is designed to advance a more subtle and less self-limiting anthropological study of Christianity. The contributors examine the contours of Christianity among diverse groups Catholics in India, the Philippines, and Bolivia, and Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar the Swedish branch of Word of Life, a charismatic church based in the United States and Protestants in Amazonia, Melanesia, and Indonesia. Highlighting the wide variation in what it means to be Christian, the contributors reveal vastly different understandings and valuations of conversion, orthodoxy, Scripture, the inspired word, ritual, gifts, and the concept of heaven. In the process they bring to light how local Christian practices and beliefs are affected by encounters with colonialism and modernity, by the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism, and by the proximity of other religions and belief systems. Together the contributors show that it not sufficient for anthropologists to assume that they know in advance what the Christian experience is each local variation must be encountered on its own terms. Contributors. Cecilia Busby, Fenella Cannell, Simon Coleman, Peter Gow, Olivia Harris, Webb Keane, Eva Keller, David Mosse, Danilyn Rutherford, Christina Toren, Harvey Whitehouse **

Author: Adeline Masquelier File Type: pdf Landlocked and with an economy reliant on subsistence agriculture, Niger often comes into the public eye only as example of deprivation and insecurity. Urban centers have become concentrated areas of unemployment filled with young men bored and idle, trying, against all odds, to find meaning where little is given. At the heart of Adeline Masqueliers groundbreaking book is the fadaconversation groups where men gather to talk, play cards, listen to music, and drink tea. As a place where young men forge new forms of sociability and belonging outside the arena of work, the fada is an integral part of Nigers urban landscape. By considering the fada as a site of experimentation, Masquelier offers a nuanced depiction of how young men in urban Niger engage in the quest for recognition and reinvent their own masculinity in the absence of conventional avenues to self-realization. In an era when fledgling and advanced economies alike are struggling to support meaningful forms of employment, this book offers a timely glimpse into how to create spaces of stability, respect, and creativity despite precarious conditions.

Author: Stephen Budiansky File Type: epub A sweeping, in-depth history of NSA, whose famous cult of silence has left the agency shrouded in mystery for decades The National Security Agency was born out of the legendary codebreaking programs of World War II that cracked the famed Enigma machine and other German and Japanese codes, thereby turning the tide of Allied victory. In the postwar years, as the United States developed a new enemy in the Soviet Union, our intelligence community found itself targeting not soldiers on the battlefield, but suspected spies, foreign leaders, and even American citizens. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, NSA played a vital, often fraught and controversial role in the major events of the Cold War, from the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam and beyond. In Code Warriors, Stephen Budianskya longtime expert in cryptologytells the fascinating story of how NSA came to be, from its roots in World War II through the fall of the Berlin Wall. Along the way, he guides us through the fascinating challenges faced by cryptanalysts, and how they broke some of the most complicated codes of the twentieth century. With access to new documents, Budiansky shows where the agency succeeded and failed during the Cold War, but his account also offers crucial perspective for assessing NSA today in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations. Budiansky shows how NSAs obsession with recording every bit of data and decoding every signal is far from a new development throughout its history the depth and breadth of the agencys reach has resulted in both remarkable successes and destructive failures. Featuring a series of appendixes that explain the technical details of Soviet codes and how they were broken, this is a rich and riveting history of the underbelly of the Cold War, and an essential and timely read for all who seek to understand the origins of the modern NSA. From the Hardcover edition. **Review The dysfunctions and overreach of the total surveillance state were present at its birth, according to this engrossing history of the National Security Administration. Journalist Budiansky traces the development of American signals intelligence... [and] is lucid in describing the science and art of breaking complex ciphers, which helped drive advances in electronics and computing Budiansky leavens the history and technology with colorful profiles of crytographers and spies the results is a lively account of how todays information controversies emerged. *Publishers Weekly This is a balanced, authoritative portrait of an institution in which brilliant innovation in mathematics, computing and technology has coexisted with gross invasions of societal privacy. Nature* From the Hardcover edition. About the Author STEPHEN BUDIANSKYwas the national security correspondent and foreign editor ofU.S. News & World Report, Washington editor ofNature,and editor of World War IImagazine. He is the author of six books of military and intelligence history, includingBlacketts War, aWashington PostNotable Book. He has served as a Congressional Fellow, he frequently lectures on intelligence and military history, and his articles have appeared inThe New York Times,The Washington Post,The Wall Street Journal,The Atlantic,The Economist, and other publications. He is a member of the editorial board ofCryptologia,the leading academic journal of codes, codebreaking, and cryptologic history. From the Hardcover edition.

Author: R. Dale Guthrie File Type: epub Frozen mammals of the Ice Age, preserved for millennia in the tundra, have been a source of fascination and mystery since their first discovery over two centuries ago. These mummies, their ecology, and their preservation are the subject of this compelling book by paleontologist Dale Guthrie. The 1979 find of a frozen, extinct steppe bison in an Alaskan gold mine allowed him to undertake the first scientific excavation of an Ice Age mummy in North America and to test theories about these enigmatic frozen fauna. The 36,000-year-old bison mummy, coated with blue mineral crystals, was dubbed Blue Babe. Guthrie conveys the excitement of its excavation and shows how he made use of evidence from living animals, other Pleistocene mummies, Paleolithic art, and geological data. With photographs and scoresof detailed drawings, he takes the reader through the excavation and subsequent detective work, analyzing the animals carcass and its surroundings, the circumstances of its death, its appearance in life, the landscape it inhabited, and the processes of preservation by freezing. His examination shows that Blue Babe died in early winter, falling prey to lions that inhabited the Arctic during the Pleistocene era. Guthrie uses information gleaned from his study of Blue Babe to provide a broad picture of bison evolutionary history and ecology, including speculations on the interactions of bison and Ice Age peoples. His description of the Mammoth Steppe as a cold, dry, grassy plain is based on an entirely new way of reading the fossil record.