{"title":"Niko Besnier","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"gender-on-the-edge-book-niko-besnier-9780824838829","title":"Gender on the Edge","description":"Transgender identities and other forms of gender and sexuality that transcend the normative pose important questions about society, culture, politics, and history. They force us to question, for ex- ample, the forces that divide humanity into two gender categories and render them necessary, inevitable, and natural. The transgender also exposes a host of dynamics that, at first glance, has little to do with gender or sex, such as processes of power and domination; the complex relationship among agency, subjectivity, and structure; and the mutual constitution of the global and the local.  Particularly intriguing is the fact that gender and sexual diversity appear to be more prevalent in some regions of the world than in others. Gender on the Edge is an exploration of the ways in which non-normative gendering and sexuality in one such region, the Pacific Islands, are implicated in a wide range of socio-cultural dynamics that are at once local and global, historical, and contemporary. The editors recognize that different social configurations, cultural contexts, and historical trajectories generate diverse ways of being transgender across the societies of the region, but they also acknowledge that these differences are overlaid with commonalities and predictabilities.  Rather than focusing on the definition of identities, the contributors engage with the fact that identities do things, that they are performed in everyday life, that they are transformed through events and movements, and that they are constantly negotiated. By addressing the complexities of these questions over time and space, this volume provides a model for future endeavors that seek to embed dynamics of gender and sexuality in a broad field of theoretical import.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49731126526225,"sku":"NGR9780824838829","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51144821375249,"sku":"NIN9780824838829","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52665210601745,"sku":"NLS9780824838829","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0824838823.jpg?v=1762597287"},{"product_id":"gossip-and-the-everyday-production-of-politics-book-niko-besnier-9780824833572","title":"Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics","description":"Although gossip is disapproved of across the world’s societies, it is a prominent feature of sociality, whose role in the construction of society and culture cannot be overestimated. In particular, gossip is central to the enactment of politics: through it people transform difference into inequality and enact or challenge power structures. Based on the author’s intimate ethnographic knowledge of Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu, this work uses an analysis of gossip as political action to develop a holistic understanding of a number of disparate themes, including conflict, power, agency, morality, emotion, locality, belief, and gender. It brings together two methodological traditions―the microscopic analysis of unelicited interaction and the macroscopic interpretation of social practice―that are rarely wedded successfully.  Drawing on a broad range of theoretical resources, Niko Besnier approaches gossip from several angles. A detailed analysis of how Nukulaelae’s people structure their gossip interactions demonstrates that this structure reflects and contributes to the atoll’s political ideology, which wavers between a staunch egalitarianism and a need for hierarchy. His discussion then turns to narratives of specific events in which gossip played an important role in either enacting egalitarianism or reinforcing inequality. Embedding gossip in a broad range of communicative practices enables Besnier to develop a nuanced analysis of how gossip operates, demonstrating how it allows some to gain power while others suffer because of it. Throughout, he is particularly attentive to the ways in which anthropologists themselves are the subject and object of gossip, making his work a notable contribution to reflexive social science.  Written in an engaging and accessible style, Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics will appeal to students and scholars of political, legal, linguistic, and psychological anthropology; social science methodology; communication, conflict, gender, and globalization studies; and Pacific Islands studies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50145312538897,"sku":"CIN0824833570VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52954195689745,"sku":"CIN0824833570G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0824833570.jpg?v=1762598371"},{"product_id":"sport-migration-and-gender-in-the-neoliberal-age-book-niko-besnier-9781138390652","title":"Sport, Migration, and Gender in the Neoliberal Age","description":"This ethnographic collection explores how neoliberalism has permeated the bodies, subjectivities, and gender of youth around the world as global sport industries have expanded their reach into marginal areas, luring young athletes with the dream of pursuing athletic careers in professional leagues of the Global North.  Neoliberalism has reconfigured sport since the 1980s, as sport clubs and federations have become for-profit businesses, in conjunction with television and corporate sponsors. Neoliberal sport has had other important effects, which are rarely the object of attention: as the national economies of the Global South and local economies of marginal areas of the Global North have collapsed under pressure from global capital, many young people dream of pursuing a sport career as an escape from poverty. But this elusive future is often located elsewhere, initially in regional centres, though ultimately in the wealthy centres of the Global North that can support a sport infrastructure. The pursuit of this future has transformed kinship relations, gender relations, and the subjectivities of people. This collection of rich ethnographies from diverse regions of the world, from Ghana to Finland and from China to Fiji, pulls the reader into the lives of men and women in the global sport industries, including aspiring athletes, their families, and the agents, coaches, and academy directors shaping athletes’ dreams. It demonstrates that the ideals of neoliberalism spread in surprising ways, intermingling with categories like gender, religion, indigeneity, and kinship. Athletes’ migrations provide a novel angle on the global workings of neoliberalism.   This book will be of key interest to scholars in Gender Studies, Anthropology, Sport Studies, and Migration Studies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697443016977,"sku":"NGR9781138390652","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52406592569617,"sku":"NLS9781138390652","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53064773566737,"sku":"GOR014723085","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1138390658.jpg?v=1751112451"},{"product_id":"tuvaluan-book-niko-besnier-9781138993938","title":"Tuvaluan","description":"Tuvaluan is a Polynesian language spoken by the 9,000 inhabitants of the nine atolls of Tuvalu in the Central Pacific, as well as small and growing Tuvaluan communities in Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia. This grammar is the first detailed description of the structure of Tuvaluan, one of the least well-documented languages of Polynesia. Tuvaluan pays particular attention to discourse and sociolinguistics factors at play in the structural organization of the language.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51020693504273,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51020694028561,"sku":"NIN9781138993938","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52142320124177,"sku":"NLS9781138993938","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/113899393X.jpg?v=1750984558"},{"product_id":"literacy-emotion-and-authority-book-niko-besnier-9780521480871","title":"Literacy, Emotion and Authority","description":"Literacy continues to be a central issue in anthropology, but methods of perceiving and examining it have changed in recent years. In this 1995 study Niko Besnier analyses the transformation of Nukulaelae from a non-literate into a literate society using a contemporary perspective which emphasizes literacy as a social practice embedded in a socio-cultural context. He shows how a small and isolated Polynesian community, with no access to print technology, can become deeply steeped in literacy in little more than a century, and how literacy can take on radically divergent forms depending on the social and cultural needs and characteristics of the society in which it develops. His case study, which has implications for understanding literacy in other societies, illuminates the relationship between norm and practice, between structure and agency, and between group and individual.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51079063798033,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51079064322321,"sku":"CIN0521480876G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52617063465233,"sku":"NLS9780521480871","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0521480876.jpg?v=1751103568"},{"product_id":"on-the-edge-of-the-global-book-niko-besnier-9780804774062","title":"On the Edge of the Global","description":"Life in twenty-first century Tonga is rife with uncertainties. Though the postcolonial island kingdom may give the appearance of stability and order, there is a malaise that pervades everyday life, a disquiet rooted in the feeling that the twin forces of \"progress\" and \"development\"—and the seemingly inevitable wealth distribution that follows from them—have bypassed the society.    Niko Besnier's illuminating ethnography analyzes the ways in which segments of this small-scale society grapple with their growing anxiety and hold on to different understandings of what modernity means. How should it be made relevant to local contexts? How it should mesh with practices and symbols of tradition? In the day-to-day lives of Tongans, the weight of transformations brought on by neoliberalism and democracy press not in the abstract, but in individually significant ways: how to make ends meet, how to pay lip service to tradition, and how to present a modern self without opening oneself to ridicule. Adopting a wide-angled perspective that brings together political, economic, cultural, and social concerns, this book focuses on the interface between the different forms that modern uncertainties take.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51180621988113,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51180622315793,"sku":"CIN0804774064VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0804774064.jpg?v=1757414667"},{"product_id":"gender-on-the-edge-book-niko-besnier-9780824838836","title":"Gender on the Edge","description":"Transgender identities and other forms of gender and sexuality that transcend the normative pose important questions about society, culture, politics, and history. They force us to question, for ex- ample, the forces that divide humanity into two gender categories and render them necessary, inevitable, and natural. The transgender also exposes a host of dynamics that, at first glance, has little to do with gender or sex, such as processes of power and domination; the complex relationship among agency, subjectivity, and structure; and the mutual constitution of the global and the local.  Particularly intriguing is the fact that gender and sexual diversity appear to be more prevalent in some regions of the world than in others. Gender on the Edge is an exploration of the ways in which non-normative gendering and sexuality in one such region, the Pacific Islands, are implicated in a wide range of socio-cultural dynamics that are at once local and global, historical, and contemporary. The editors recognize that different social configurations, cultural contexts, and historical trajectories generate diverse ways of being transgender across the societies of the region, but they also acknowledge that these differences are overlaid with commonalities and predictabilities.  Rather than focusing on the definition of identities, the contributors engage with the fact that identities do things, that they are performed in everyday life, that they are transformed through events and movements, and that they are constantly negotiated. By addressing the complexities of these questions over time and space, this volume provides a model for future endeavors that seek to embed dynamics of gender and sexuality in a broad field of theoretical import.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51606208512273,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51606209102097,"sku":"CIN0824838831G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0824838831.jpg?v=1762597597"},{"product_id":"sport-migration-and-gender-in-the-neoliberal-age-book-niko-besnier-9781138390645","title":"Sport, Migration, and Gender in the Neoliberal Age","description":"The intersection of sport, mobility, and gender gives a lens through which this collection of ethnographic chapters explore the effects of neoliberalism on the life projects of athletes in the Global South, examining gender relations, the dynamics of neoliberal sport and the way these redefine social relations.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52333451575569,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52333452132625,"sku":"NLS9781138390645","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781138390645.jpg?v=1758154815"},{"product_id":"literacy-emotion-and-authority-book-niko-besnier-9780521485395","title":"Literacy, Emotion and Authority","description":"Literacy continues to be a central issue in anthropology, but methods of perceiving and examining it have changed in recent years. In this 1995 study Niko Besnier analyses the transformation of Nukulaelae from a non-literate into a literate society using a contemporary perspective which emphasizes literacy as a social practice embedded in a socio-cultural context. He shows how a small and isolated Polynesian community, with no access to print technology, can become deeply steeped in literacy in little more than a century, and how literacy can take on radically divergent forms depending on the social and cultural needs and characteristics of the society in which it develops. His case study, which has implications for understanding literacy in other societies, illuminates the relationship between norm and practice, between structure and agency, and between group and individual.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52403140296977,"sku":"NLS9780521485395","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52580116300049,"sku":"CIN0521485398G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780521485395.jpg?v=1758759936"},{"product_id":"tuvaluan-book-niko-besnier-9780415024563","title":"Tuvaluan","description":"Tuvaluan is a Polynesian language spoken by the 9,000 inhabitants of the nine atolls of Tuvalu in the Central Pacific, as well as small and growing Tuvaluan communities in Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia. This grammar is the first detailed description of the structure of Tuvaluan, one of the least well-documented languages of Polynesia. Tuvaluan pays particular attention to discourse and sociolinguistics factors at play in the structural organization of the language.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52451282092305,"sku":"NLS9780415024563","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53013797863697,"sku":"NIN9780415024563","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780415024563.jpg?v=1759361127"},{"product_id":"on-the-edge-of-the-global-book-niko-besnier-9780804774055","title":"On the Edge of the Global","description":"This book explores the malaise present in post-colonial Tonga, analyzing the way in which segments of this small-scale society hold on to different understandings of what modernity is, how it should be made relevant to local contexts, and how it should mesh with practices and symbols of tradition.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53014034546961,"sku":"NIN9780804774055","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780804774055.jpg?v=1768142925"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-niko-besnier.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}