First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Building Noah's Ark for Migrants, Refugees, and Religious Communities examines religion within the framework of refugee studies as a public good, with the spiritual and material use of religion shedding new light on the agency of refugees in reconstructing their lives and positioning themselves in hostile environments.

“The greatest crisis of our times in a failure of the human imagination.” -Editors The world is currently undergoing a period of unprecedented crises on virtually every front: economic, ecological, and humanitarian. It is starkly apparent that a shift is needed in our dominant structural systems – and that by addressing the collective thinking that has created and maintained these systems, scholars can do their part to catalyze such a shift. The interdisciplinary field known as the Anthropology of Consciousness offers important insights for enacting this necessary shift. This book draws on the work of a group of diverse scholars to explore what the intersection of anthropology and consciousness studies can contribute to the “public turn” within anthropology and the academy in general. Its twelve chapters span disparate geographies and disciplinary frameworks, yet cohere in their focus on common themes such as imagination, empathy, agency, dialogue, and ethics. The answers to the question “So What? Now What?” differ for a linguistic anthropologist in the South Pacific, an environmental educator in Hawai‘i, a grant-writing anthropologist serving a refugee agency in Portland, Oregon and the founder of a girls’ school in Brazil. Nevertheless, they are united in the desire to reframe the anthropology of consciousness as an “anthropology of conscience,” and this pioneering volume is the result.

Drawing on methods and approaches from anthropology, media studies, film theory, and cultural studies, the contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia examine how mediated eroticism and sexuality circulating across Asia and Asian diasporas both reflect and shape the social practices of their producers and consumers. The essays in this volume cover a wide geographic and thematic range, and combine rigorous textual analysis with empirical research into the production, circulation, and consumption of various forms of media. Judith Farquhar examines how health magazines serve as sources of both medical information and erotic titillation to readers in urban China. Tom Boellstorff analyzes how queer zines produced in Indonesia construct the relationship between same-sex desire and citizenship. Purnima Mankekar examines the rearticulation of commodity affect, erotics, and nation on Indian television. Louisa Schein describes how portrayals of Hmong women in videos shot in Laos create desires for the homeland among viewers in the diaspora. Taken together, the essays offer fresh insights into research on gender, erotics, media, and Asia transnationally conceived. Contributors. Anne Allison, Tom Boellstorff, Nicole Constable, Heather Dell, Judith Farquhar, Sarah L. Friedman, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Purnima Mankekar, Louisa Schein, Everett Yuehong Zhang

This book examines the agreements and discrepancies between public understanding and assumptions about refugees, and the actual beliefs and practices among the refugees themselves in a time of increasing mobility fuelled by what many call 'refugee crisis’. With a focus on language and literacy practices among recently-arrived Karenni refugee families in the United States, this book explores the multilingual repertoires and accumulated literacies acquired through the course of the refugees' multiple movements. Through the lens of transnationalism, the author emphasizes that despite their numerous struggles, the refugees daily and diligently use and strategize their old, emerging, and evolving linguistic and literacy resources to make the best of their resettlement. This book will shed light on the language and literacy practices among transnational and diasporic communities, minoritized or marginalized groups for researchers in these fields as well as practitioners and resettlement agencies working with refugee populations.