The Academic Quarter is a digital publishing project that brings together social scientists, actors and illustrators in order to popularize anthropology, giving the general public access to theoretically grounded resources and rooted in in-depth field research, which usually has limited circulation to the academic community.
The debut collection of the Academic Quarter platform includes 40 articles, each accompanied by a podcast version and an illustration inspired by the content of the text.
The topics addressed highlight central concepts of anthropological theory, such as: moral order, structure and agency, material culture, power relations, exchange relations, knowledge systems, gender, identity, self and society. At the same time, they bring new perspectives on familiar, topical issues: environment, migration, social inequalities, privatization, personal development, tourism, and others. Last but not least, revealed lesser known social worlds from abroad: Egypt, Ghana, Japan, Russia or Abkhazia are just some of the places that bring us closer to research included in this digital volume.
The struggle for land and the plasticity of tradition in Ghana / by RALUCA PERNEȘ

" Ghana has a plural legal regime - it recognizes both the laws of the state and state institutions, as well as customary, traditional laws. Property and land use rights are and have been, since the independence of the Ghanaian state, governed only by traditional laws. My ethnographic research has taken me for more than a year through the lives and stories of locals in a rural area near two large Ghanaian cities. International institutions such as the World Bank believe that promoting traditional laws can be the best way to distribute local resources as equitably and sustainably as possible. On the spot, however, I witnessed the intense struggles, often spread over years and years, of locals who have to defend their access to residential and agricultural land from traditional local leaders and their extended families, but especially entrepreneurs. raptors, who have the financial resources and knowledge to recruit local leaders and lawyers and to reinvent the "traditional laws" so that they are in line with their interests. While legal arrangements and the cultural context may seem exotic to the European eye, the processes of deepening social inequalities, the inadequacy of transnational institutions in many local contexts (despite the good intentions of these institutions) and the effects of land commodification have become quasi-universal experiences."
Badante on the front. About migration and care work / DINU GUȚU

"Although the migration of women was among the most widespread social phenomena of the transition, Romanian research on caregivers is almost non-existent. The explanations can be multiple, but I think they start from the condition of caregiver characterized by "gender inequality, exploitation, work and citizenship in the black and lack of definition of concrete work skills, living in a house with people assisted, an activity that can be compared to that of a nurse newly admitted to a total institution ”(Chiaretti, 2005). Women in the Global South, “servants of globalization” (Parreñas, 2015) end up migrating and leaving their own families to provide care to other families in the Global North or West in a more financially profitable context, while in their own homes. , other women with worse situations take care of children and family. This is how “global care networks” are formed (Yeates, 2012). Thus, the long-term loss of both formal and informal care resources and family resources in native countries results in a “care drain” (Bauer, 2013), a phenomenon much less visible than the “brain drain”. but with equally significant losses for the country of origin. The redistribution of care work today forms an “international division of reproductive work” (Parreñas, 2005) with psychic and emotional effects for the women involved. At the same time, the routine of caregiver work makes it difficult to draw a line between work and personal relationship with the elderly (Ungerson, 2005)."
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