Boundless Worlds

ISBN 10: 1845451996 / ISBN 13: 9781845451998

Published by Berghahn Books, 2010

About this Item

pp. 244 23:B&W 6 x 9 in or 229 x 152 mm Perfect Bound on White w/Gloss Lam.

Seller Inventory # 3465237

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Boundless Worlds
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1845451996
• ISBN 13: 9781845451998
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Where lived experience of surroundings is shifting, visceral, and immersive, interpretation of social spaces tends to be static and remote. "Space" and "place" are also often analyzed without grappling much (if at all) with the social, political, and historical roots of spatial practice. This volume embarks upon the novel strategy of focusing on movement as a way of understanding social spaces, which offers a means to get beyond biases inherent in the social science of space. Ethnographic studies of social life in settings as varied as nomadic Mongolia and island Melanesia, as distinct as contemporary Tokyo and war-torn Palestine, challenge Western assumptions about the universality of "space" and allow concrete understanding of how life plays out over different socio-cultural topographies. In a world that is becoming increasingly "bounded" in many ways - despite enormous changes wrought by technological, ideological, and other social developments - Boundless Worlds urges a scholarly turn, away from the purely global, toward the human dimension of social lives lived in conditions of conflict, upheaval, remapping, and improvisation through movement.

About the Author

Peter Wynn Kirby is Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of Japan at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK, and a research fellow at the EHESS, Paris. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Author of the forthcoming book Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan, he scrutinizes environments, including cities, with specific reference to Japan and France.