Anarchic Solidarity


Book Description

"This volume analyzes a group of Southeast Asian societies that have in common a mode of sociality that maximizes personal autonomy, political egalitarianism, and inclusive forms of social solidarity. Their members make their livings as nomadic hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators, sea nomads, and peasants embedded in market economies. While political anarchy and radical equality appear in many societies as utopian ideals, these societies provide examples of actually existing, viable forms of "anarchy." This book documents the mechanisms that enable these societies to maintain their life-ways and suggests some moral and political lessons that those who appreciate them might apply to their own societies"--Back cover.




Anarchic Agreements


Book Description

A new world is possible and not just in our hearts. Anarchic Agreements is a quintessential field guide for the revolution, answering the practical questions often left out of works of political theory and philosophy. How do leaderless groups organize? How might they create constitutions, balance power and write protocols? How do group cultures and institutions maintain coalitions? This urgent and inspiring how-to is the product of more than twenty years of research. Designed explicitly for everyday use, it contains lived examples, illustrations throughout, and text from current horizontally organized constitutions. These documents illustrate the never-ending process of developing community and keeping collaborations alive in the fairest ways possible. Written by dedicated anarchist scholars and organizers, and based on the widely popular Anarchic Agreements pamphlet series, this book facilitates grassroots activism and provides methods to improve and streamline decision making. It is an inspiring celebration of the novel, complex and flexible constitutions Anarchists have created over time. This book shows how to realize another world, collectively without domination, while leaving the future open to infinite other possibilities.




Visions of Freedom


Book Description

Every ten years, notoriously eclectic thinker Brian Morris takes a year of sabbatical and launches out into another field about which he knows nothing. In the 1980s it was botany; in the 1990s, zoology; in the 2000s, entomology. The quintessential polymath, Morris has written on his incredible breadth of interests in wide-ranging essays, with subjects ranging from boxing to deep ecology to new-age gurus. Collected here for the first time, Visions of Freedom brings together all of Morris's concise yet diverse essays on politics, history, and ecology written since 1989. It includes book reviews, letters, and articles in the engaging and accessible style for which Morris is known. The thinkers he deals with are as diverse as Thomas Paine to C. L. R. James, from Karl Marx to Krishnamurti, from Max Weber to Naomi Klein. He also delves into the canon of classic anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin, Bakunin, Reclus, Proudhon, and Flores Magnon. Taking a stance against the obscurantism of contemporary academic discourse, Morris' writings demonstrate an interdisciplinary approach that moves seamlessly between topics, developing practical connections between scholarly debates and the pressing social, ecological and political issues of our times.




The Anarchist Imagination


Book Description

This is a broad ranging introduction to twenty-first-century anarchism which includes a wide array of theoretical approaches as well as a variety of empirical and geographical perspectives. The book demonstrates how the anarchist imagination has influenced the humanities and social sciences including anthropology, art, feminism, geography, international relations, political science, postcolonialism, and sociology. Drawing on a long historical narrative that encompasses the 'waves' of anarchist movements from the classical anarchists (1840s to 1940s), post-war wave of student, counter-cultural and workers' control anarchism of the 1960s and 1970s to the DIY politics and Temporary Autonomous Zones of the 1990s right up to the Occupy! Movement and beyond, the aim of this volume is to cover the humanities and the social sciences in an era of anarchist revival in academia. Anarchist philosophy and anarchistic methodologies have re-emerged in a range of disciplines from Organization Studies, to Law, to Political Economy to Political Theory and International Relations, and Anthropology to Cultural Studies. Anarchist approaches to freedom, democracy, ethics, violence, authority, punishment, homelessness, and the arbitration of justice have spawned a broad array of academic publications and research projects. But this volume remembers an older story, in other words, the continuous role of the anarchist imagination as muse, provocateur, goading adversary, and catalyst in the stimulation of research and creative activity in the humanities and social sciences from the middle of the nineteenth century to today. This work will be essential reading for scholars and students of anarchism, the humanities, and the social sciences.




Anarchic Solidarity


Book Description

"This volume analyzes a group of Southeast Asian societies that have in common a mode of sociality that maximizes personal autonomy, political egalitarianism, and inclusive forms of social solidarity. Their members make their livings as nomadic hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators, sea nomads, and peasants embedded in market economies. While political anarchy and radical equality appear in many societies as utopian ideals, these societies provide examples of actually existing, viable forms of "anarchy." This book documents the mechanisms that enable these societies to maintain their life-ways and suggests some moral and political lessons that those who appreciate them might apply to their own societies"--Back cover.




Holy Anarchy


Book Description

Perhaps, after all, the decolonising agenda isn’t extra baggage the church needs to carry on top of everything else. Perhaps, instead, it is the very heart of what the church should be about – disrupting, uncomfortable, and bringing about a kind of ‘holy anarchy’. In Holy Anarchy, Graham Adams points to a realm in which all dynamics of domination, not least in the church, are subverted. It cuts across the loyalties and boundaries of religion and fosters the greatest possible solidarity amongst the different. Urgent and timely, the book weaves together themes around Empire, liberation and decolonial practice with an exploration of the nature and scope of church community, interreligious engagement, mission, and worship.




Vulnerability, Social Capital and Disaster Preparedness


Book Description

This book addresses increasing concerns regarding the relationship between social capital and disaster, highlighting conceptual definitions related to social capital and disaster, family, community, vulnerability, disaster experience, and preparedness. Focusing on a contemporary case of disaster management in Malaysia, the authors explore and establish linkages between the level of social capital and disaster preparedness among the indigenous Orang Asli people. Taking the case of the Orang Asli families as a point of departure, the book presents solutions for mobilizing social capital for disaster preparedness through multi-stakeholder involvement, promoting participation in awareness programs, ensuring indigenous people’s access to resources, and proposing a prioritization of local values and culture in enabling proper planning and coordination for more disaster-resilient communities in Malaysia, Southeast Asia, and beyond. The book is broadly relevant to cases in similar economic settings where indigenous people are lagging behind in disaster preparedness. An excellent resource for sociologists, this pioneering book collates various concepts and theories relating to social and ecological networks and systems, family resilience, and stress and coping mechanisms. It is relevant to researchers focused on disasters in developing countries, globally, particularly those focused on indigenous communities.




Human Nature and Social Life


Book Description

What distinguishes humans from nonhuman 'others'? And how do these distinctions shape human sociality and the ways that humans relate to their others? Human Nature and Social Life brings together a collection of articles by prominent anthropologists to address these questions. The articles show how the fundamentally social nature of humans results in an extension of sociality to virtual, semiotic-material and nonhuman spheres, with humans therefore becoming part of 'extended socialities'. However, as the book's contributors demonstrate, human distinctness significantly bears upon these extended socialities, and the manner in which humans partake in them. Taking an ethnographic approach to its subject, this book demonstrates the continued value of studying the specificities of the human condition, and sets itself as a counterweight to current refutations of human exceptionalism.




Peace Ethology


Book Description

A scholarly collection of timely essays on the behavioral science of peace With contributions from experts representing a wide variety of scholarly fields (behavioral and social sciences, philosophy, environmental science, anthropology and economics), Peace Ethology offers original essays on the most recent research and findings on the topic of the behavioral science of peace. This much-needed volume includes writings that examine four main areas of study: the proximate causation of peace, the developmental aspects of peace, the function and systems of peace and the evolution of peace. The popular belief persists that, by nature, humans are not pre-disposed to peace. However, archeological and paleontological evidence reveals that the vast majority of our time as a species has been spent in small hunter-gatherer bands that are basically peaceful and egalitarian in nature. The text also reveals that most of the earth’s people are living in more peaceful societies than in centuries past. This hopeful compendium of essays: Contains writings from noted experts from a variety of academic studies Offers a social-psychological perspective on the causation of peaceful behavior Includes information on children’s peacekeeping and peacemaking Presents ideas for overcoming social tension between police and civilians Provides the most recent thinking on the behavioral science of peace Written for students and academics of the behavioral and social sciences, Peace Ethology offers scholarly essays on the development, nature, and current state of peace.




Anarchism and Animal Liberation


Book Description

Building upon anarchist critiques of racism, sexism, ableism and classism, this collection of new essays melds anarchism with animal advocacy in arguing that speciesism is an ideological and social norm rooted in hierarchy and inequality. Rising from the anarchist-influenced Occupy Movement, this book brings together international scholars and activists who challenge us all to look more critically into the causes of speciesism and to take a broader view of peace, social justice and the nature of oppression. Animal advocates have long argued that speciesism will end if the humanity adopts a vegan ethic. This concept is developed into the argument that the vegan ethic has the most promise if it is also anti-capitalist and against all forms of domination.