Assa Doron investigates how the boatmen of Banaras have repositioned themselves within the traditional social organization and used their privileged position on the river to contest upper-caste and state domination. Caste, Occupation and Politics on the Ganges examines the evolution of the boatmen community, drawing on a variety of sources to illuminate the cultural politics of social and economic inequality in contemporary India and offers insight into recent debates about the cultural and historical forms of social practice and resistance at the juncture between tradition and the global economy.

John Halligan, an expert on public sector governance, looks at the establishment and conduct of Centrelink as a service delivery agency. For many years there was a real ‘buzz' around the Centrelink experiment and staff and clients were generally enthusiastic about the transformation. However, after around eight years, the experiment was reined in and Centrelink was placed under closer ministerial direction and under a new managing department. The experiment continues, but its trajectory reflects the different pressures impacting on such dedicated ‘services delivery agencies'.

This book contains the first study of state-building intervention in the so-called 'Pacific arc of crisis', stretching from Aceh, through Timor, Ambon, Irian Jaya and Papua New Guinea to the Solomon Islands and Fiji. Editor Greg Fry is Hedley Bull Fellow and Director of Graduate Studies in International Affairs in the Department of International Relations at ANU. Editor Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka is Research Fellow at the East-West Center's Pacific Islands Development Program.

In this book, Yon Machmudiprovides a thoughtful and authoritative context for viewing PKS. He critiques the existing categorisations for Indonesian Islam and points to their inadequacy when describing the PKS and the campus-based Tarbiyah movement from which it sprang. He reworks the santri typology, dividing it into convergent, radical and global substreams. This offers new possibilities for explaining the PKS phenomenon and assists in differentiating between various types of Islamic revivalism in contemporary Indonesia. It also allows a more understanding of the accommodatory stance which PKS has towards the state and other political forces.

‘Leadership' is routinely admired, vilified, ridiculed, invoked, trivialised, explained and speculated about in the media and in everyday conversation. This book brings together academics from a broad array of social science disciplines who are interested in contemporary understandings of leadership in the public domain. Their work on political, administrative and civil society leadership represents a stock-take of what we need to know and offers original examples of what we do know about public leadership.

The financial crisis that swept across East Asia during 1997-1998 was devastating not only in its economic impact but also in its social and political effects. The authors of Crisis as Catalyst examine what has changed (as well as what has not changed) in East Asia since the crisis, explain these variations, and reflect on the long-term significance of these developments.

This book offers another frame through which to view the event of the outrigger landing of 43 West Papuans in Australia in 2006. West Papuans have crossed boundaries to seek asylum since 1962, usually eastward into Papua New Guinea (PNG), and occasionally southward to Australia. Between 1984-86, around 11,000 people crossed into PNG seeking asylum. After the Government of PNG acceded to the United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, West Papuans were relocated from informal camps on the international border to a single inland location called East Awin. This volume provides an ethnography of that settlement based on the author's fieldwork carried out in 1998-99.

Agenda is the quarterly journal of the ANU College of Business and Economics at The Australian National University. Launched in 1994, Agenda provides a forum for debate on public policy, mainly (but not exclusively) in Australia and New Zealand. It deals largely with economic issues but gives space to social and legal policy and also to the moral and philosophical foundations and implications of policy.

Remembering Hedley commemorates the life of Hedley Bull (1932–85), a pivotal figure in the fields of international relations and strategic studies. Its publication coincides with the official opening on 6 August 2008 of the Hedley Bull Centre at The Australian National University in Canberra.

Many people want a career in conservation. What kinds of jobs are available? What training is needed? Is post-graduate training necessary and what would a research project or thesis involve? What are the ways that a conservation professional can contribute to helping to “save the earth”? These and many other questions are tackled in the new book “Saving the Earth”. The book provides a window on the array of different career options are open to conservation professionals.

The Australian nation is a work in progress. So conclude the authors whose views are represented in this most recent offering in the ANZSOG monograph series, Australia Under Construction: Nation-building past, present and future . From its beginnings as a settler society through to present day concerns about ‘broadbanding the nation’, the nation-building narrative has resonated with Australians. A stimulating read for anyone interested in the history, challenges and prospects of nation-building in Australia.

Think 'seven deadly sins', link them to Australia's runaway obesity epidemic, and most people's minds will turn to St Thomas Aquinas and the likes of Sloth and Gluttony. The Seven Deadly Sins of Obesity takes an entirely different tack on the topic. It argues that the skyrocketing increase in obesity levels is not caused by individuals' moral weakness, but is due to modern society lacking the virtues necessary for people to adopt and maintain healthy behaviours.

Art auctions have long captured the public imagination. They regularly make news headlines and have become synonymous with glamour, money and social distinction. The marketing of auction houses and the works they sell has resulted in firms attaining authoritative positions and the ability both to influence and reflect collecting tastes. Pedigree and Panache is the first comprehensive history of the art auction in Australia.

This edited volume represents the first book-length study of the history of research on Australian Aboriginal languages, and collects together 18 original papers on a wide variety of topics, spanning the period from first settlement to the present day. The papers challenge the typically anachronistic approaches to the history of Aboriginal linguistics, and reveal the need to examine previous research in the context of their times — and the advantages of doing so to contemporary understanding and language documentation.

Faces of the Living Dead, a new British Library publication by Martyn Jolly, examines the phenomenon of spirit photography that developed in the 1870s and is the first book of its kind to bring together the extensive collection of spirit photographs from the British Library’s Barlow Collection. Illustrated by works of the leading spirit photographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Ada Deane, William Hope, Frederick Hudson and Edward Wyllie it also includes spirit photographs of one of spirit photography’s most high-profile advocates, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

The Western and Central Pacific Ocean is home to the largest tuna fishery in the world - around half of the world’s tuna supply - and is a vital economic resource for Pacific island countries. The potential of the Pacific tuna fishery to contribute to economic development in the Pacific island countries is enormous, but will require a cooperative regional strategy to maximise access fees from distant water fishing nations, as well as targeted domestic policy.

This fascinating account of the vigorous survival of an Islamic community in the strife-torn borderlands of the lower Mekong delta, and of its creative accommodation to the modernizing reforms of the Vietnamese government, shows how Islam provides a unifying focus for Cham Muslims in their diversely constituted rural settlements. Full of Cham Muslim people's stories and voices, this highly readable ethnographic study reverberates with the texture of everyday life in rural Southeast Asia.