For decades, nationalism research had been dominated by historical approaches that viewed the nation state as the product of economic and political forces channelled by elite actors. Once institutionalized, nationalism was seen as a fait accompli, except in unstable states, where fringe radicals and separatists occasionally disrupted the national equilibrium. This scholarly consensus was challe...

In an article for Foreign Affairs at the outbreak of the World War II, film producer Walter Wanger referred to Hollywood movies as '120,000 American ambassadors'. The preeminence of Hollywood in presenting US ideology to the world has been asserted ever since. Yet the relationship between Hollywood and America's actual ambassadors, employed by the global network of American embassies, has rarel...

In today’s world where the former colonized are reshaping their relation with the colonizer, the concept of decolonizing or indigenizing education is widely discussed in postcolonial studies. Decolonizing/indigenizing education counters the western systems of knowledge’s hegemony over those of non-western systems of thought and requires the development of a new approach to education that keeps ...

The American Deaf community for several decades has been involved in sometimes complicated and often contested ways of defining what it means to be Deaf. It is our thesis that the processes of identity construction and the recent discourse of Deaf identity are not unique phenomena at all but echo the experience of other embedded cultural groups around the world, particularly those that are stre...

Governance addresses a wide range of issues including social, economic and political continuity, security and integrity, individual and collective safety and the liberty and rights to self-actualization of citizens. Questions to be answered include how governance can be achieved and sustained within a social context imbued with cultural values and in which power is distributed unevenly and dyna...

Anthropologists often disagree about whether, or in what ways, anthropology is “evolutionary.” Anthropologists defending accounts of primate or human biological development and evolution that conflict with mainstream “neo-Darwinian” thinking have sometimes been called “creationists” or have been accused of being “antiscience.” As a result, many cultural anthropologists struggle with an “anti-an...