* Includes essays by some of today’s leading anthropologists working in development studies. * Furthers the goals of both poverty reduction and ethnographic research by detailing their contributions to and reliance on each another. * Provides a practical and theoretical resource for development agencies, policy makers, and students wishing to access a variety of case studies and new analytical approaches. The success of any international development agency depends on an understanding of the ways in which a community and individuals relate to ideas and resources. David Lewis and David Mosse have brought together a number of anthropologists engaged in development research to show how ethnography can be an indispensable tool for understanding these complex and dynamic relationships. The world that this ethnography of development reveals does not divide neatly into the developers and the developed, perpetrators and victims, domination and resistance, or the incompatible rationalities of scientific and indigenous knowledge. It is a world in which interests and practices are always hybrids, where the realms of reason and the real world are not neatly separate, and in which rational policy representations frequently conceal the messiness of practice that precedes the ideas and technologies of development. The wealth of new ideas offered in this collection will be especially valuable to graduate students in anthropology and development studies, but also to undergraduates and those working in development organizations who wish to run more effective operations on every level. Other contributors: Tim Bending, Bina Desai, Amity Doolittle, Pierre-Yves Le Meur, Peter Luetchford, Wiebe Nauta, Sergio Rosendo, Benedetta Rossi, Oscar Salemink, and Celayne Heaton Shrestha.

Anthropological interest in new subjects of research and contemporary knowledge practices has turned ethnographic attention to a wide ranging variety of professional fields. Among these the encounter with international development has perhaps been longer and more intimate than any of the others. Anthropologists have drawn critical attention to the interfaces and social effects of development's discursive regimes but, oddly enough, have paid scant attention to knowledge producers themselves, despite anthropologists being among them. This is the focus of this volume. It concerns the construction and transmission of knowledge about global poverty and its reduction but is equally interested in the social life of development professionals, in the capacity of ideas to mediate relationships, in networks of experts and communities of aid workers, and in the dilemmas of maintaining professional identities. Going well beyond obsolete debates about 'pure' and 'applied' anthropology, the book examines the transformations that occur as social scientific concepts and practices cross and re-cross the boundary between anthropological and policy making knowledge.

Though the dynamics of immigrant family life has gained attention from scholars, little is known about the younger generation, often considered "invisible." Translating Childhoods, a unique contribution to the study of immigrant youth, brings children to the forefront by exploring the "work" they perform as language and culture brokers, and the impact of this largely unseen contribution. Skilled in two vernaculars, children shoulder basic and more complicated verbal exchanges for non-English speaking adults. Readers hear, through children's own words, what it means be "in the middle" or the "keys to communication" that adults otherwise would lack. Drawing from ethnographic data and research in three immigrant communities, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana's study expands the definition of child labor by assessing children's roles as translators as part of a cost equation in an era of global restructuring and considers how sociocultural learning and development is shaped as a result of children's contributions as translators.

The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices draws on a wide array of case studies from all over the world to demonstrate the value of different forms of translation - written, oral, audiovisual - as social practices that are essential to achieve sustainability, accessibility, inclusion, multiculturalism, and multilingualism. Edited by Meng Ji and Sara Laviosa, this timely collection illustrates the interactions between translation studies and thesocial and natural sciences, reformulating the scope of this discipline as a socially-oriented, empirical, and ethical research field in the 21st century.

Anthropological field studies of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in their unique cultural and political contexts. Cultures of Doing Good: Anthropologists and NGOs serves as a foundational text to advance a growing subfield of social science inquiry: the anthropology of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Thorough introductory chapters provide a short history of NGO anthropology, address how the study of NGOs contributes to anthropology more broadly, and examine ways that anthropological studies of NGOs expand research agendas spawned by other disciplines. In addition, the theoretical concepts and debates that have anchored the analysis of NGOs since they entered scholarly discourse after World War II are explained. The wide-ranging volume is organized into thematic parts: “Changing Landscapes of Power,” “Doing Good Work,” and “Methodological Challenges of NGO Anthropology.” Each part is introduced by an original, reflective essay that contextualizes and links the themes of each chapter to broader bodies of research and to theoretical and methodological debates. A concluding chapter synthesizes how current lines of inquiry consolidate and advance the first generation of anthropological NGO studies, highlighting new and promising directions in this field. In contrast to studies about surveys of NGOs that cover a single issue or region, this book offers a survey of NGO dynamics in varied cultural and political settings. The chapters herein cover NGO life in Tanzania, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Peru, the United States, and India. The diverse institutional worlds and networks include feminist activism, international aid donors, USAID democracy experts, Romani housing activism, academic gender studies, volunteer tourism, Jewish philanthropy, Islamic faith-based development, child welfare, women’s legal arbitration, and environmental conservation. The collection explores issues such as normative democratic civic engagement, elitism and professionalization, the governance of feminist advocacy, disciplining religion, the politics of philanthropic neutrality, NGO tourism and consumption, blurred boundaries between anthropologists as researchers and activists, and barriers to producing critical NGO ethnographies.

This book sets the grounds for a new approach exploring cultural mediators as key figures in literary and cultural history. It proposes an innovative conceptual and methodological understanding of the figure of the cultural mediator, defined as a cultural actor active across linguistic, cultural and geographical borders, occupying strategic positions within large networks and being the carrier of cultural transfer. Many studies on translation and cultural mediation privileged the major metropolis of Paris, London, and New York as centres of cultural production and translation. However, other cities and megacities that are not global centres of culture also feature vibrant translation scenes. This book abandons the focus on ‘innovative’ centres and ‘imitative’ peripheries and follows processes of cultural exchange as they develop. Thus, it analyses the role of cultural mediators as customs officers or smugglers (or both in different proportions) in so-called ‘peripheral’ cultures and offers insights into an under-analysed body of actors and institutions promoting intercultural transfer in often multilingual and less studied venues such as Trieste, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, Lima, Lahore, or Cape Town.

This volume contributes to the emerging research on the social formation of translators and interpreters as specific occupational groups. Despite the rising academic interest in sociological perspectives in Translation Studies, relatively little research has so far been devoted to translators' social background, status struggles and sense of self. The articles assembled here zoom in on the “groups of individuals” who perform the complex translating and/or interpreting tasks, thereby creating their own space of cultural production. Cutting across varied translatorial and geographical arenas, they reflect a view of the interrelatedness between the macro-level question of professional status and micro-level aspects of practitioners' identity. Addressing central theoretical issues relating to translators' habitus and role perception, as well as methodological challenges of using qualitative and quantitative measures, this endeavor also contributes to the critical discourse on translators' agency and ethics and to questions of reformulating their social role.The contributions to this volume were originally published in Translation and Interpreting Studies 4:2 (2009) and 5:1 (2010).