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  • Max Gluckman

    Max Gluckman

    Macmillan, H.

    This handy, concise biography describes the life and intellectual contribution of Max Gluckman (1911-75) who was one the most significant social anthropologists of the twentieth century.

    Max Gluckman was the founder in the 1950s of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology. He did fieldwork among the Zulu of South Africa in the 1930s and the Lozi of Northern Rhodesia/Zambia in the 1940s. This book describes in detail his academic career and the lasting influence of his Analysis of A Social Situation in Modern Zululand (1940-42) and of his two large monographs on the legal system of the Lozi.

    From the Introduction:
    Max Gluckman was the most influential of a group of social anthropologists who emerged from South Africa during the 1930s into what was essentially a new academic discipline. His description and analysis of events in real time implied a rejection of contemporary social anthropological practice, of the ‘ethnographic present’, and of hypothetical or conjectural reconstructions and an acceptance of the need to study ‘primitive’ societies in the context of the modern world.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
    Areas: Africa Northern Europe
    Series: Anthropology's Ancestors Volume 6
  • Dynamics of Political Domination in Africa

    Dynamics of Political Domination in Africa

    An Axel Sommerfelt Collection

    Sommerfelt, A., (au) Sommerfelt, T., Jakoubek, M., & Eriksen, T. H. (eds)

    Axel Sommerfelt has been an important influence on Norwegian and Scandinavian anthropology, but his contributions are almost unknown. This book brings together some of his critical writings, newly written articles and an interview which positions him in the history of ‘North Sea’ social anthropology and shows his continued relevance. An Africanist, Sommerfelt did research in Ruwenzori (Uganda and Belgian Congo), but also wrote about the Tallensi (Ghana) and worked for years in Salisbury (Harare) before being evicted by Ian Smith's racist regime in 1966. His contributions to political anthropology, methodology and legal anthropology have a lasting value.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)
    Area: Africa
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 46
  • Crypto Crowds

    Crypto Crowds

    Singularities and Multiplicities on the Blockchain

    Shapiro, M. (ed)

    Ownership of cryptocurrencies features contrasting forms of mobilization. On one hand, it denotes association with a global crowd of unrelated individual investors, which expands as it attracts more members. On the other hand, it includes participation in grassroots communities, which are generally more insular. Crypto Crowds demonstrates how this tension generates political, economic and moral realities in different cultural and geographical contexts. Pioneering in its approach to cryptocurrency trading, this volume will inspire scholars interested in the sociality of decentralized business models, boom-and-bust cycles on the blockchain, libertarian utopias and other postmodern crowding phenomena.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
    Series: Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis Volume 21
  • Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class, The

    The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class

    Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Soviet City

    Gorbach, D.

    Industrial workers in Ukraine have a complex political lifeworld because their political action aimed at bringing radical social change coexists with a demobilizing stance that condemns all political participation as corrupt. This contradictory attitude to politics defines the character of populist mass mobilizations that shook Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, as well as the electoral overhaul of 2019 and the popular response to the Russian invasion in 2022. Based on three years of fieldwork in the city of Kryvyi Rih, the book focuses on the moral economy that constitutes the working class and structures its relations with other social groups.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Urban Studies
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Dislocations Volume 36
  • Horse in My Blood, The

    The Horse in My Blood

    Multispecies Kinship in the Altai and Saian Mountains

    Peemot, V. S.

    A fascinating interspecies relationship can be seen among the horse breeding pastoralists in the Altai and Saian Mountains of Inner Asia. Victoria Soyan Peemot herself grew up in a community with close human-horse relationships and uses her knowledge of the local language and horsemanship practices. Building upon Indigenous research epistemologies, she engages with the study of how the human-horse relationships interact with each other, experience injustices and develop resilience strategies as multispecies unions.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Sociology
    Area: Asia
    Series: Interspecies Encounters Volume 4
  • Culturing the Body

    Culturing the Body

    Past Perspectives on Identity and Sociality

    Collins, B. & Nowell, A. (eds)

    The human body is both the site of lived experiences and a means of communicating those experiences to a diverse audience. Hominins have been culturing their bodies, that is adding social and cultural meaning through the use pigments and objects, for over 100,000 years. There is archaeological evidence for practices of adornment of the body by late Pleistocene and early Holocene hominins, including personal ornaments, clothing, hairstyles, body painting, and tattoos. These practices have been variously interpreted to reflect differences such as gender, status, and ethnicity, to attract or intimidate others, and as indices of a symbolically mediated self and personal identity. These studies contribute to a novel and growing body of evidence for diversity of cultural expression in the past, something that is a hallmark of human cultures today.

    Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General)
  • Urban Displacement

    Urban Displacement

    Syria's Refugees in the Middle East

    Knudsen, A. J. & Tobin, S. A. (eds)

    Syria’s massive displacement (2012–present) is one of the largest, most complex and intractable humanitarian emergencies of today. More than 5.7 million Syrian refugees live mainly in cities and urban areas throughout the rest of the Middle East. Urban Displacement examines multiple dimensions of this crisis from political and socioeconomic predicaments to questions of social belonging, the complexity of the international, regional and national responses and how they affect urban spaces. The volume brings together many experts in the field of forced migration studies and displacement in the Middle East and presents a range of in-depth ethnographic data, large-scale surveys, and policy recommendations.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Middle East & Israel
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 48
  • Adoption, Emotion, and Identity

    Adoption, Emotion, and Identity

    An Ethnopsychological Perspective on Kinship and Person in a Micronesian Society

    Rauchholz, M.

    Exploring adoption in the Pacific, this book goes beyond the commonplace structural-functional analysis of adoption as a positive “transaction in parenthood.” It examines the effects it has on adoptees’ inner sense of self, their conflicted emotional lives, and familial relationships that are affected by a personal sense of rejection and not belonging. This account is theoretically rooted in ethnopsychology, based on field work conducted across multiple research sites in the Chuuk Lagoon, its neighboring Chuukic-speaking atolls, and persons from neighboring Micronesian island communities.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Person, Space and Memory in the Contemporary Pacific Volume 8
  • Embodying Exchange

    Embodying Exchange

    Materiality, Morality and Global Commodity Chains in Andean Commerce

    Müller, J.

    Addressing the infrastructural, legal and moral complexities in contemporary world trade, this book uses an ethnographic analysis of the interface of multinational brand manufacturers and popular traders in the Bolivian Andes. It offers a situated account of traders’ understanding of regulatory principles, and traces commercial dynamics beyond the limits of what we define as economic. It aims to humanize our understanding of the economy by grounding it in everyday life and morality.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: The Human Economy Volume 11
  • Fig Trees and Humans

    Fig Trees and Humans

    Ficus Ecology and Mutualisms across Cultures

    Aumeeruddy-Thomas, Y.

    Humans and figs form hybrid communities within the context of anthropogenic landscapes, supported by biocultural mutualisms driven by traits of Ficus species and people’s imagination and practices, and where humans also positively influence Ficus species ecology. Fig Trees and Humans examines the interactions between the biology and ecology of the genus Ficus and how humans use and think of Ficus species across the tropics and in the Mediterranean region. It demonstrates a high level of convergence of material and symbolic uses of human-fig interactions that affect various aspects of human culture, as well as the ecology of wild or cultivated Ficus species.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 32
  • Fragile Futures

    Fragile Futures

    Ambiguities of Care in Burkina Faso

    Samuelsen, H.

    Caring for small children and the family in Burkina Faso is hard work. Although the health infrastructure in Burkina Faso is weak and many citizens feel neglected by the state, Fragile Futures shows that the state continues to play an important role in people’s engagements and hopes for a better future. Based on more than twenty years of research engagement with Burkina Faso, it is an ethnography of how rural citizens address ambiguities of sickness and care and try to secure a decent future for themselves and their families.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology Development Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: Epistemologies of Healing Volume 22
  • Evil Spirits and Rocket Debris

    Evil Spirits and Rocket Debris

    In Search of Lost Souls in Siberia

    Broz, L.

    The Altai Republic in southern Siberia is renowned for excavations of frozen mummies from high-altitude burial sites. Less well-known is the fact that it hosts fallout zones for the second stages of rockets launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome. Local inhabitants blame ‘evil spirits’ released by archaeological work and toxic fuel from rocket debris for their misfortunes. This book explores the divergent fates of such claims when confronted with state-fostered ‘rationalisms’ of science and governance.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology
    Area: Asia
  • Political Friendship

    Political Friendship

    Liberal Notables, Networks, and the Pursuit of the German Nation State, 1848-1866

    Weaver, M.

    Between periods of revolution, state repression, and war across Central and Western Europe from the 1840s through the 1860s, German liberals practiced politics beyond the more well-defined realms of voluntary associations, state legislatures, and burgeoning political parties. Political Friendship approaches 19th century German history’s trajectory to unification through the lens of academics, journalists, and artists who formed close personal relationships with one another and with powerful state leaders. Michael Weaver argues that German liberals thought with their friends by demonstrating the previously neglected aspects of political friendship were central to German political culture.

    Subject: History: 18th/19th Century
    Area: Germany
    Series: Studies in German History Volume 29
  • Invisible Labours

    Invisible Labours

    The Reproductive Politics of Second Trimester Pregnancy Loss in England

    Middlemiss, A. L.

    Tracing women’s experiences of miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly in the second trimester, before legal viability, shows how such events are positioned as less ‘real’ or significant when the foetal being does not, or will not, survive. Invisible Labours describes the reproductive politics of this category of pregnancy loss in England. It shows how second trimester pregnancy loss produces specific medical and social experiences, revealing an underlying teleological ontology of pregnancy. Some women then understand their pregnancy through kinship with the unborn baby.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Europe
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 54
  • Inclusion, Transformation, and Humility in North American Archaeology

    Inclusion, Transformation, and Humility in North American Archaeology

    Essays and Other “Great Stuff” Inspired by Kent G. Lightfoot

    Mallios, S., Gonzalez, S. L., Grone, M., Hull, K. L., Nelson, P., & Siliman, S. W. (eds)

    In a dynamic near half-century career of insight, engagement, and instruction, Kent G. Lightfoot transformed North American archaeology through his innovative ideas, robust collaborations, thoughtful field projects, and mentoring of numerous students. Authors emphasize the multifarious ways Lightfoot impacted—and continues to impact—approaches to archaeological inquiry, anthropological engagement, Indigenous issues, and professionalism. Four primary themes include: negotiations of intercultural entanglements in pluralistic settings; transformations of temporal and spatial archaeological dimensions, as well as theoretical and methodological innovations; engagement with contemporary people and issues; and leading by example with honor, humor, and humility. These reflect the remarkable depth, breadth, and growth in Lightfoot’s career, despite his unwavering stylistic devotion to Hawaiian shirts.

    Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General)
  • Houses Transformed

    Houses Transformed

    Anthropological Perspectives on Changing Practices of Dwelling and Building

    Alderman, J. & Stolz, R. (eds)

    Over the decades, there has been a world-wide transformation of so-called ‘vernacular houses’. Based on ethnographic accounts from different regions, Houses Transformed investigates the changing practices of building houses in a transnational context. It explores the intersection of house biographies and social change, the politics of housing design, the social fabrication of aspirational houses, the domestication of concrete and the intersection of materiality and ontology as well as the rhetoric of the vernacular. The volume provides new anthropological pathways to understand the dynamics of dwelling in the 21st century.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Development Studies
  • Voices of Long-Term Care Workers

    Voices of Long-Term Care Workers

    Elder Care in the Time of COVID-19 and Beyond

    Freidus, A. & Shenk, D.

    There were many challenges, successes, and concerns in providing long-term care to older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking at central North Carolina, the authors highlight the implications of providing long-term care to older Americans, with an emphasis on the importance of communication, resilience of staff, and value of human infrastructure.

    Based on extensive interviews, this collection of essays reflects on the participants’ individual experiences and represents the voices of staff and caregivers working in long-term residential care communities, in-home and community-based programs, as well as regional aging service providers and advocates.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology Applied Anthropology
    Area: North America
    Series: Life Course, Culture and Aging: Global Transformations Volume 10
  • Breathing Hearts

    Breathing Hearts

    Sufism, Healing, and Anti-Muslim Racism in Germany

    Selim, N.

    Sufism is known as the mystical dimension of Islam. Breathing Hearts explores this definition to find out what it means to ‘breathe well’ along the Sufi path in the context of anti-Muslim racism. It is the first book-length ethnographic account of Sufi practices and politics in Berlin and describes how Sufi practices are mobilized in healing secular and religious suffering. It tracks the Desire Lines of multi-ethnic immigrants of color, and white German interlocutors to show how Sufi practices complicate the post secular imagination of healing in Germany.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Germany
    Series: Epistemologies of Healing Volume 21
  • Insidious Capital

    Insidious Capital

    Frontlines of Value at the End of a Global Cycle

    Kalb, D. (ed)

    With a team of anthropologists and geographers, Insidious Capital explores “value and values” in what may well be the last phase of capitalist globalization. In a global perspective of fast-transforming social spaces that move from East to West, the book explores the struggles around the exploitation and valuation of labor, environmental politics, expansion of the ground rent, new hierarchies, the contradictions of higher education, the offshoring of “immaterial” labor, the illiberal right, and the mobilizations against it. This is a book about the variegated frontlines of value within an uneven, but not random, geography of capitalist expansion.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
    Series: Dislocations Volume 35
  • Enacted Relations

    Enacted Relations

    Performing Knowledge in an Australian Indigenous Community

    Tamisari, F.

    The Yolngu Indigenous people in the Northeast Arnhem Land of Australia respond to neo-colonial challenges by continuing to affirm their political autonomy and transmit ‘Yolngu Law’, which are ways of knowing and being with the younger generation. They deal with non-Indigenous institutions, through participation of bodies, language, things, images of movement and notions of mutual care, feelings and accountability. This book explores the Yolngu relational ontology and epistemology in the context of everyday practices, ritual ceremonies, bicultural education, vernacular Christianity and the production of popular music.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology Volume 15
  • Melanesian Mainstream

    Melanesian Mainstream

    Stringband Music and Identity in Vanuatu

    Ellerich, S. T.

    Citizens of Vanuatu (ni-Vanuatu) perceive stringband music as a marker of national identity, an indicator of their cultural, stylistic, and musical heritage. Through extensive field and ethnographic research, Melanesian Mainstream offers a detailed historical record of the roots, context, evolution, and impact of stringband music. Beyond chronicling the genre’s history and cultural significance, this thorough monograph positions the genre’s musical hybridity, communal lyrics, and unique organizational structures as key factors in the anthropological understanding of ni-Vanuatu socio-cultural history.

    Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Performance Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists Volume 11
  • Humanitarian Shame and Redemption

    Humanitarian Shame and Redemption

    Norwegian Citizens Helping Refugees in Greece

    Mogstad, H.

    Following the 2015 ‘refugee crisis,’ many different actors emerged to contest or mitigate the EU’s border policies. This book explores the birth and trajectory of a Norwegian volunteer organisation “A Drop in the Ocean”, established by a mother of five with no prior experience in humanitarian work. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, Heidi Mogstad examines the organisation’s shifting and contested efforts to ‘fill humanitarian gaps’ in Greece while witnessing and shaming the Norwegian public and politicians into action. Moving beyond existing critiques of humanitarian sentiments like pity and compassion, the book focuses specifically on the work of shame and other ‘negative’ emotions.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: Humanitarianism and Security Volume 4
  • Poverty Archaeology

    Poverty Archaeology

    Architecture, Material Culture and the Workhouse under the New Poor Law

    Newman, C. & Fennelly, K.

    The Poor Laws in the United Kingdom left a built and material legacy of over two centuries of legislative provision for the poor and infirm. Workhouses represent the first centralized, state-organized system for welfare, though they maintain a notorious historical reputation. Workhouses were intended to be specialized institutions, with dedicated subdivisions for the management of different categories of inmate. Examining the workhouse provision from an archaeological perspective, the authors demonstrate the heterogeneity of the Poor Law system from a built heritage perspective. This volume forms a social archaeology of the lived experience of poverty and health in the nineteenth century.

    Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Europe
  • Of Hoarding and Housekeeping

    Of Hoarding and Housekeeping

    Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective

    Newell, S. (ed)

    Hoarding has largely been approached from a psychological and universal perspective, and decluttering from an aesthetic and ecological one, while little work has been done to think about the cultural and global economic aspects of these phenomena. Of Hoarding and Housekeeping provides an anthropological, global, and comparative angle to the understanding of hoarding and decluttering using cases from a variety of countries including US, Japan, India, Cameroon, and Argentina. Focusing on the house, with careful attention to material flows in and out, this book examines practices of accumulation, storage, decluttering, and waste as practices of kinship and the objects themselves as material kin.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Volume 13
  • Assembling Financialisation

    Assembling Financialisation

    Local Actors and the Making of Agricultural Investment

    Langford, Z.

    Farmers, Indigenous organisations, government and private-sector intermediaries from remote Northern Australia often negotiate with private finance capital to gain funds for agricultural development.The concept of financialisation is used to explore the drivers and effects of agrifood restructuring in the area, while assemblage theory is applied to position local actors as potential sites of power in negotiating connections between local spaces and global finance. This book demonstrates that while financialisation is a useful signifier of patterns of global change, it is assembled by a diverse range of often contradictory work.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Foreigners in Their Own Country

    Foreigners in Their Own Country

    Identity and Rejection in France

    Martin, L. M.

    Based on in-depth interviews with people throughout France who trace their origins to non-European countries, Foreigners in Their Own Country reports on the experience of not being seen as “French” because of one’s physical appearance. Paying close attention to how individuals speak about themselves and their feelings of acceptance or rejection, this book provides an intimate account of the challenges faced by the millions of people in France—and throughout Western Europe—who fully participate in the life of their country but are often not seen as belonging there.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
    Area: France
  • Amazonian Puzzle, The

    The Amazonian Puzzle

    Ethnic Positionings and Social Mobilizations

    Boyer, V.

    In the Brazilian Amazon region, cultural “mixture” is expressed in the interaction of city and hinterland, of Indigenous and Black, of religiosity and politics. By examining the multiple cultural and ethnic threads that traverse this landscape, The Amazonian Puzzle sets out to show how the category of caboclo (a powerful spiritual entity to some, and to others a despised peasant of mixed ancestry) reveals deep currents of ethnic recompositions, religious interpenetration, and social hierarchy. These Amazonian dynamics are explored through the lens of ethnography, sociology, and history.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Subject of Sovereignty, The

    The Subject of Sovereignty

    Relationality and the Pivot Past Liberalism

    Feldman, G.

    Seeking new forms of democracy, progressive politics raises a fundamental question: what is the alternative to the allegedly coherent, self-contained liberal subject that represents the project of modernity? Exploring the themes of nature, race, and the divine, this book identifies the more realistic alternative in the “relational subject”: a subject that is inseparable from the global field of relations through which it emerges and yet distinct from that field because it lives a life that no one else ever has. Recognizing ourselves as such subjects allows us not only to rethink politics, but, more profoundly, to envision sovereignty as the means by which we each rejuvenate ourselves and the polities we constitute with others.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
  • Love, Loyalty and Deceit

    Love, Loyalty and Deceit

    Rosemary Firth, a Life in the Shadow of Two Eminent Men

    Firth, H. & Brown, L.

    How much do we really know about our parents’ lives? What secrets lie in plain sight? This is the true story of hidden love within a small circle of some of the most acclaimed anthropologists of the 20th century.

    Told by Rosemary and Raymond Firth's son, and the daughter of Celia and Edmund Leach, the man Rosemary loved all her life, this part love-story, part biography, part social history is the tale of a highly influential circle of social anthropologists in Britain from the 1930s, through the Second World War, to the end of the century.

    The book explores their early influences, their insecurities, their flaws, struggles and achievements. It is a story of passion and commitment, but also of deceit and betrayal, including the inexplicable disappearance, death and alleged murder of a very close friend. It also narrates Rosemary's struggles for emotional and intellectual independence in the face of societal expectations of women and her own guilt, loss and self-doubt.

    From the Prologue:
    Rosemary loved many people in many different ways, but she loved two men in particular throughout most of her life. One was her husband, Raymond Firth, regarded by some as among the founding fathers of social anthropology. Yet she also retained a passionate devotion to her first love, Edmund Leach, who would subsequently become the public intellectual face of social anthropology in the later 1960s. Both separately and together they were part of the process of defining the nature of this still growing discipline in the first part of the mid-twentieth century.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) History: 20th Century to Present
    Area: Europe
  • Alfred Cort Haddon

    Alfred Cort Haddon

    A Very English Savage

    Walsh, C.

    An innovative account of one of the least-understood characters in the history of anthropology.

    Using previously overlooked, primary sources Ciarán Walsh argues that Haddon, the grandson of anti-slavery activists, set out to revolutionize anthropology in the 1890s in association with a network of anarcho-utopian activists and philosophers. He regards most of what has been written about Haddon in the past as a form of disciplinary folklore shaped by a theory of scientific revolutions.

    The main action takes place in Ireland, where Haddon adopted the persona of a very English savage in a new form of performed photo-ethnography that constituted a singularly modernist achievement in anthropology.

    From the Introduction:

    Alfred Cort Haddon was written out of the story of anthropology for the same reasons that make him interesting today. He was passionately committed to the protection of simpler societies and their civilisations from colonists and their supporters in parliament and the armed forces.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
    Area: Europe
    Series: Anthropology's Ancestors Volume 5
  • Mary Douglas

    Mary Douglas

    Richards, P. & 6, P.

    This handy, concise book covers the life of Mary Douglas, one of the most important anthropologists of the second half of the 20th century.

    Her work focused on how human groups classify one another, and how they resolve the anomalies that then arise. Classification, she argued, emerges from practices of social life, and is a factor in all deep and intractable human disputes.

    This biography offers an introduction to how her distinctive approach developed across a long and productive career and how it applies to current pressing issues of social conflict and planetary survival.

    From the Preface:

    The influence of Professor Dame Mary Douglas (1921-2007) upon each of the social sciences and many of the disciplines in the humanities is vast. The list of her works is also vast, and this presents a problem of choice for the many readers who want to get a general idea of what she wrote and its significance, but who are somewhat baffled about where to begin. Our book offers a short overview and suggests why her key writings remain significant today.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
    Series: Anthropology's Ancestors Volume 4
  • Urban Natures

    Urban Natures

    Living the More-than-Human City

    Edwards, F., PEttersen, I. N. & Popartan, L. (eds)

    Efforts to create greener urban spaces have historically taken many forms, often disorganized and undisciplined. Recently, however, the push towards greener cities has evolved into a more cohesive movement. Drawing from multidisciplinary case studies, Urban Natures examines the possibilities of an ethical lively multi-species city with the understanding that humanity’s relationship to nature is politically constructed. Covering a wide range of sectors, cities, and urban spaces, as well as topics ranging from edible cities to issues of power, and more-than-human methodologies, this volume pushes our imagination of a green urban future.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
    Series: Urban Anthropology Unbound Volume 1
  • These Were People Once

    These Were People Once

    The Online Trade in Human Remains and Why It Matters

    Huffer, D. & Graham, S.

    People buy and sell human remains online. Most of this trade these days is over social media. In a study of this ‘bone trade’, how it works, and why it matters, the authors review and use a variety of methods drawn from the digital humanities to analyze the sheer volume of social media posts in search of answers to questions regarding this online bone trade. The answers speak to how the 21st century understands and constructs ‘heritage’ more generally: each person their own expert, yet seeking community and validation, and like the major encyclopedic museums, built on a kind of digital neocolonialist othering of the dead.

    Subjects: Archaeology Heritage Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
  • Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange, An

    An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange

    Interactions, Transactions and Ethics in Asia and Beyond

    Copeman, J., Long, N. J., Chau, L. M., Cook, J. & Marsden, M.(eds)

    Dialogues, encounters and interactions through which particular ways of knowing, understanding and thinking about the world are forged lie at the centre of anthropology. Such ‘intellectual exchange’ is also central to anthropologists’ own professional practice: from their interactions with research participants and modes of pedagogy to their engagements with each other and scholars from adjacent disciplines. This collection of essays explores how such processes might best be studied cross-culturally. Foregrounding the diverse interactions, ethical reasoning, and intellectual lives of people from across the continent of Asia, the volume develops an anthropology of intellectual exchange itself.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia
    Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 15
  • Anthropology of Disappearance, An

    An Anthropology of Disappearance

    Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing

    Huttunen, L. & Perl, G. (eds)

    All over the world, people disappear from their families, communities and the state’s bureaucratic gaze, as victims of oppressive regimes or while migrating along clandestine routes. This volume brings together scholars who engage ethnographically with such disappearances in various cultural, social and political contexts. It takes an anthropological perspective on questions about human life and death, absence and presence, rituals and mourning, liminality and structures, citizenship and personhood as well as agency and power. The chapters explore the political dimension of disappearances and address methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges of researching disappearances and the disappeared. The combination of disappearance through political violence, crime, voluntary disappearance and migration make this book a unique combination.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Memory Studies
    Series: EASA Series Volume 46
  • Translocal Care across Kosovo’s Borders

    Translocal Care across Kosovo’s Borders

    Reconfiguring Kinship along Gender and Generational Lines

    Leutloff-Grandits, C.

    In today’s globalized world, where the foundations of home and social security are destabilized due to wars and neoliberal transformations, the villagers of Kosovo are linked with a common locality despite living across borders. By tracing long-distant family relations with a special focus on cross-border marriages, this study looks at the reconfiguration of care relations, gender and generational roles among kin-members of Kosovo, who now live in different European states.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: Anthropology of Europe Volume 8
  • Madness, Bureaucracy and Gender in Mumbai, India

    Madness, Bureaucracy and Gender in Mumbai, India

    Narratives from a Psychiatric Hospital

    Strauss, A.

    Regional mental hospitals in India are perceived as colonial artefacts in need of reformation. In the last two decades, there has been discussion around the maltreatment of patients, corruption and poor quality of mental health treatment in these institutions. This ethnography scrutinizes the management of madness in one of these asylum-like institutions in the context of national change and the global mental health movement. The author explores the assembling and impact of psychiatric, bureaucratic, gendered and queer narratives in and around the hospital. Finally, the author attempts to reconcile social anthropology and psychiatry by scrutinising their divergent approaches towards ‘mad narratives’.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Asia
  • Between the Forest and the Road

    Between the Forest and the Road

    The Waorani Struggle for Living Well in the Ecuadorian Oil Circuit

    Bravo Díaz, A.

    During the past two decades Ecuadorians have engaged in a national debate around Buen Vivir (living well). This ethnography discusses one of the ways in which people experience well-being or aspire to live well in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Waponi Kewemonipa (living well) is a Waorani notion that embraces ideas of good conviviality, health and certain ecological relations. For the Waorani living along the oil roads, living well has taken many pathways. Notably, they have developed new spatial organizations as they move between several houses, and navigate between the economy of the market and the economy of the forest.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • That Sinking Feeling

    That Sinking Feeling

    On the Emotional Experience of Inferiority in Germany's Neoliberal Education System

    Wellgraf, S.

    Emotions, especially those of impoverished migrant families, have long been underrepresented in German social and cultural studies. That Sinking Feeling raises the visibility of the emotional dimensions of exclusion processes and locates students in current social transformations. Drawing from a year of ethnographic fieldwork with grade ten students, Stefan Wellgraf’s study on an array of both classic emotions and affectively charged phenomena reveals a culture of devaluation and self-assertion of the youthful, post-migrant urban underclass in neoliberal times.

    Subjects: Educational Studies Sociology Anthropology (General)
    Area: Germany
  • Silences and Divided Memories

    Silences and Divided Memories

    The Exodus and its Legacy in Post-War Istrian Society

    Virloget, K. H.

    The Istrian Peninsula, which is made up of modern-day Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy suffered from the so-called "Istrian exodus" after the Second World War. This book looks at this difficult, silenced past and shifts the usual focus from migrants to those who stayed behind and to the new immigrants who came to the “emptied” towns.The research, based on individual memories, deals with silences and competing national discourses, reasons to stay and leave, hybrid border ethnic identities, and the renewal of Istrian society and its new social relations. It is a self-critical reflection on an ignored chapter of national history, which, with an empathetic approach, allows the silence to speak.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Memory Studies
    Areas: Southern Europe Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: European Anthropology in Translation Volume 12
  • Beyond the Social Contract

    Beyond the Social Contract

    An Anthropology of Tax

    Makovicky, N. & Smith, R. (eds)

    Tax and taxation are conventionally understood as the embodiment of social contract. This ground-breaking collection of essays challenges this truism, examining what tax might tell us about the limits of social-contract thinking. The contributors shed light on contemporary fiscal structures and public debates about the moralities, practices, and imaginaries of tax systems, using tax to explore the nature of citizenship, personal freedom, and moral and economic value. Their ethnographically grounded accounts show how taxation may be influenced by spaces of fiscal sovereignty that exist outside or alongside the state, taking various forms, from alternative religious communities to economic collectives.

    Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 15
  • Feeling of the Fall, The

    The Feeling of the Fall

    An Ethnographic Writing Experiment between the Belize Barrier Reef and the Edges of Toronto, Ontario

    Taccone, I.

    As an inquiry into engagements with forces of loss and threat, this work explores experimental ways to write about climate crisis in anthropology. From Belize to Ontario and back, this ambitious piece of ethnographic writing set during a time “beyond ruin” in a fictional, ecotourist community in the year 2040. Here, loss is taken up through an inventive form of ethnographic storytelling that brings together people, animals, landscapes, and the weather in a world beyond the climate crisis right now where new entanglements with things which have fallen to ruin emerge in imagined milieus in which loss and life converge.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Urban Studies
    Areas: North America Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 46
  • Broken Glass, Broken Class

    Broken Glass, Broken Class

    Transformations of Work in Bulgaria

    Kofti, D.

    Based on a long-term study of the everyday postsocialist politics of labour in the wider context of intense socio-economic transformation in Bulgaria, this book tells the story of the flexibilization of production, the precaritization of work, shifting managerial practices, and ways in which people with different employment statuses live and work together. The ethnography starts with the rapidly moving conveyor belt of a glass factory, where a variety of global and local forces and workers’ divisions meet, and analyses how inequalities are reproduced both at the production site and back home.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 12
  • Temple Tracks

    Temple Tracks

    Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia

    Sinha, V.

    The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Temple Tracks critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and ‘traces’.

    Subjects: Transport Studies Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Asian Anthropologies Volume 16
  • Once Upon a Time is Now

    Once Upon a Time is Now

    A Kalahari Memoir

    Biesele, M.

    Fifty years after her first fieldwork with Ju/'hoan San hunter-gatherers, anthropologist Megan Biesele has written this exceptional memoir based on personal journals she wrote at the time.

    The treasure trove of vivid learning experiences and nightly ponderings she found has led to a memoir of rare value to anthropology students and academics as well as to general readers. Her experiences focus on the long-lived healing dance, known to many as the trance dance, and the intricate beliefs, artistry, and social system that support it.

    She describes her immersion in a creative community enlivened and kept healthy by that dance, which she calls "one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind."

    From the Preface:
    A few years ago I finally got around to looking back into the box of personal field journals I had not opened for over forty years. I found a treasure trove. It was an overwhelming experience. So much that I had forgotten came vividly alive: I laughed, wept, and was terrified all over again at my temerity in taking on what I had taken on. To do justice to the richness of these notebooks, I realized, I would have to do a completely different sort of writing from anything I had ever done before.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Development Studies
    Area: Africa
  • Romani Chronicles of COVID-19

    Romani Chronicles of COVID-19

    Testimonies of Harm and Resilience

    Blasco, P. G. y & Fotta, M. (eds)

    A ground-breaking volume that gathers the testimonies of NGO workers, street vendors, activists, scholars, health professionals, and creative writers to chronicle the devastating impact of COVID-19 on Romani communities globally.

    The contributors reveal how the pandemic has exacerbated Romani disenfranchisement and document the resilience and creativity with which Romanies have responded to the crisis. Deploying innovative textual formats, and including poignant personal reflections, memoirs, scholarly analyses, and diary excerpts, the volume provides a roadmap for collaboration and dialogue at a time of global emergency.

    This is the most significant chronicle of Romani stories about the COVID crisis ever assembled.

    From the Introduction:
    The contributions include memoirs, opinion essays, transcriptions of conversations or interviews, ethnographic analyses, and a compelling short story by Romani writer Iveta Kokyová, as well as pieces that stride the boundaries between one or more of these genres, or that fit into none.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Medical Anthropology
    Areas: Europe Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: New Directions in Romani Studies Volume 6
  • Cryptopolitics

    Cryptopolitics

    Exposure, Concealment, and Digital Media

    Bernal, V., Pype, K., & Rodima-Taylor, D. (eds)

    Hidden information, double meanings, double-crossing, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages have always been important techniques in negotiating social and political power dynamics. Yet these tools, “cryptopolitics,” are transformed when used within digital media. Focusing on African societies, Cryptopolitics brings together empirically grounded studies of digital media toconsider public culture, sociality, and power in all its forms, illustrating the analytical potential of cryptopolitics to elucidate intimate relationships, political protest, and economic strategies in the digital age.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Media Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: Anthropology of Media Volume 12
  • Exceptional Experiences

    Exceptional Experiences

    Engaging with Jolting Events in Art and Fieldwork

    Rethmann, P. & Wulff, H. (eds)

    Looking at encounters that can puncture or jolt us, this volume uses art as a lens through which to register and understand exceptional experiences. The volume also includes the fieldworker’s experience of unexpected events that can lead to key understandings, as well as revelatory moments that happen during artistic creation and while looking at art. By exploring exceptional experiences through art, the volume asks probing questions for anthropology. In recognizing that art is all-encompassing – including, as it does, narrative, performance, dance and images – Exceptional Experiences situates itself within a number of conversations on methodological and conceptual issues in anthropology and beyond.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
  • Spirit of Matter, The

    The Spirit of Matter

    Modernity, Religion, and the Power of Objects

    Pels, P.

    A range of meaningful objects—exhibits of human remains or live people, fetishes, objects in a Catholic Museum, exotic photographs, commodities, and computers—demonstrate a subordinate modern consciousness about powerful objects and their ‘life’. The Spirit of Matter discusses these objects that move people emotionally but whose existence is often denied by modern wishful thinking of ‘mind over matter’. It traces this mindset back to Protestant Christian influences that were secularized in the course of modern and colonial history.

    Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Archaeology Museum Studies
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 45
  • Military Politics

    Military Politics

    New Perspectives

    Crosbie, T. (ed)

    Bringing together new research by leading scholars, this volume rethinks the role played by militaries in politics. It introduces new theories of military politics, arguing against the inherited theories and practices of civil-military relations, and presents rich new data on senior officership and on the intersection of military politics and military operations. As the first volume in Berghahn Books’ Military Politics series, it provides a blueprint for a new research paradigm dedicated to tracing how militaries shape their political environments, focusing particularly on the core democratic questions raised by politically-effective (and ineffective) militaries.

    Subjects: Sociology Peace and Conflict Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: Military Politics Volume 1
  • Visions of Marriage

    Visions of Marriage

    Politics and Family on Kinmen, 1920-2020

    Chiu, H.-C.

    Grounded in multi-generational stories from Kinmen in Taiwan, Visions of Marriage explores the historical entanglements between the pursuit of new personal and national futures. Focusing on the relational and future-making aspects of marriage, the ethnography highlights the intersection of transformations across familial generations and shifting political economies in Taiwan, and more globally. While theories of modernity often treat marriage as an index of social change, without adequate attention to its transformative capacities generated through personal and familial agency, this volume provides comparative insights on family change and demographic shifts in Asia.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Asia
    Series: Asian Anthropologies Volume 15
  • Pure Food

    Pure Food

    Theoretical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

    Collinson, P. & Macbeth, H. (eds)

    In presenting a variety of theoretical and cross-cultural perspectives on pure food, this volume demonstrates similarities and variations in cultural beliefs, behaviours and practices in different societies. These in turn highlight that pure food is a common issue for humanity, whatever the society, whatever the era. As a subject with much contemporary and cross-disciplinary relevance, Pure Food will appeal to students and academics involved in any food-related discipline, to professional practitioners promoting healthier foods and nutrition and to general readers with an interest in food.

    Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)
    Series: Anthropology of Food & Nutrition Volume 12
  • Innovation and Implementation

    Innovation and Implementation

    Critical Reflections on New Approaches to Historic Mortuary Data Collection, Analysis, and Dissemination

    Mytum, H. & Veit, R. (eds)

    Providing a comprehensive set of guidance to assist researchers wishing to carry out, curate and disseminate field research at a historic burial ground, chapters offer up to date methods for surface and subsurface survey and for the recording and archiving of burial monument data. Divided into three parts considering documentary research and recording of mortuary landscapes, reflections on memorial recording projects, and archiving and wider dissemination of data and interpretations. Also included is the archaeological potential of pet cemeteries and other pet memorials. Discussions therefore include how methodologies may or may not be applicable to both human and animal subjects.

    Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Anthropology (General)
  • Obstetric Violence and Systemic Disparities

    Obstetric Violence and Systemic Disparities

    Can Obstetrics Be Humanized and Decolonized?

    Davis-Floyd, R. & Premkumar, A. (eds)

    The final volume in this landmark 3-volume series The Anthropology of Obstetrics and Obstetricians: The Practice, Maintenance, and Reproduction of a Biomedical Profession looks at the challenges, and even violence, that obstetricians face across the world.

    Part I of this volume addresses obstetric violence and systemic racial, ethnic, gendered, and socio-structural disparities in obstetricians’ practices in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Peru, and the US. Part II addresses decolonizing and humanizing obstetric training and practice in the UK, Russia, Brazil, New Zealand, and the US. Part 3 presents the ethnographic challenges that the chapter authors in Volumes II and III of this series faced in finding, surveying, interviewing, and observing obstetricians in various countries.

    This book is a must-read for students, social scientists, and all maternity care practitioners who seek to understand the diverse challenges that obstetricians must overcome.

    An excerpt:
    In our Series Overview in Volume 1, we asked the question, “Can a book create a field?” and answered that question with a resounding “Yes!” … For us, the official creation of the field of the Anthropology of Obstetrics and Obstetricians has taken not one, but the 3 volumes that constitute this Book Series.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Series: The Anthropology of Obstetrics and Obstetricians: The Practice, Maintenance, and Reproduction of a Biomedical Profession Volume 3
  • Obstetricians Speak

    Obstetricians Speak

    On Training, Practice, Fear, and Transformation

    Floyd-Davis, R. & Premkumar, A. (eds)

    For the first time ever in a social science work, obstetricians tell their own stories of training, practice, fear, and transformation in this the first of the 3-volume series The Anthropology of Obstetrics and Obstetricians: The Practice, Maintenance, and Reproduction of a Biomedical Profession.

    These stories range from those of abortion providers to those of maternal-fetal medicine specialists. Several chapters tell the stories of obstetricians who have made paradigm shifts from technocratic to humanistic practices, the benefits and joys of these paradigm shifts, and the ostracism, bullying, and outright persecution these humanistic obstetricians have suffered.

    This book is a must-read for students, social scientists, and all maternity care practitioners who seek to understand the ideologies and motives of individual obstetricians.

    
An excerpt from Kathleen Hanlon-Lundberg’s chapter:
    Largely maligned in reproductive anthropological literature as callous—if not brutal—self-serving effectors of the over-medicalization of childbirth, most obstetricians whom I know and have worked with are devoted to providing respectful, individualized care to their patients.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Series: The Anthropology of Obstetrics and Obstetricians: The Practice, Maintenance, and Reproduction of a Biomedical Profession Volume 1
  • Cognition, Risk, and Responsibility in Obstetrics

    Cognition, Risk, and Responsibility in Obstetrics

    Anthropological Analyses and Critiques of Obstetricians’ Practices

    Davis-Floyd, R. & Premkumar, A. (eds)

    Volume 2 in this landmark 3-volume series The Anthropology of Obstetrics and Obstetricians: The Practice, Maintenance, and Reproduction of a Biomedical Profession looks at cognition, risk, and responsibility in obstetrics.

    This volume contains social science analyses of Swiss, Chilean, Mexican, US, Greek, and Irish obstetrics and obstetricians, particularly around their reasons for the overuse of cesareans; a chapter on "4 Stages of Cognition" and a condition called "Substage," which describes how these concepts apply to obstetricians; and a chapter on why obstetricians fear home birth.

    This book is a must-read for students, social scientists, and all maternity care practitioners who seek to understand obstetricians' differing ideologies and motives for practicing as they do.

    An excerpt from Vania Smith-Oka and Lydia Dixon's chapter:
    For systemic changes to occur, we must understand doctors’ decision-making rationales and take their fear-based perspectives about risk and responsibility into account, while also paying attention to the concerns raised by scholars and activists.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Series: The Anthropology of Obstetrics and Obstetricians: The Practice, Maintenance, and Reproduction of a Biomedical Profession Volume 2
  • Creation and Creativity in Indigenous Lowland South America

    Creation and Creativity in Indigenous Lowland South America

    Anthropological Perspectives

    Halbmayer, E. & Goletz, A. (eds)

    Investigating local Indigenous processes of creation and creativity, this book uses ethnographic and comparative anthropological perspectives to enquire about creative transformative practices in lowland South America. The volume shows how people create and reinforce their conditions of being by employing different genres of transgression and by creatively shifting contexts of significance. Local socio-cosmic orders, the interrelation of creative genres (myth, verbal art, song, ritual, and handicrafts), and their changing frames of reference (from communal celebrations to wider political and commercial realms) demonstrate the relational, generative, and processual quality of Amerindian creativity.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Against Better Judgment

    Against Better Judgment

    Akrasia in Anthropological Perspectives

    McKearney, P. & Evans, N. H. A. (eds)

    Anthropologists have long explained social behaviour as if people always do what they think is best. But what if most of these explanations only work because they are premised upon ignoring what philosophers call 'akrasia' – that is, the possibility that people might act against their better judgment? The contributors to this volume turn an ethnographic lens upon situations in which people seem to act out of line with what they judge, desire and intend. The result is a robust examination of how people around the world experience weaknesses of will, which speaks to debates in both the anthropology of ethics and moral philosophy.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology
    Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 14
  • White Eagle, Black Eagle

    White Eagle, Black Eagle

    Ethnic Relations in the German-Polish Borderlands

    Parkin, R.

    Studying the German-Polish ethnic relations, this book analyses the people and region through their respective borderlands, migration, official cooperation and unofficial suspicions across the border. The main conclusion is that, while officialdom is generally keen to develop cross-border ties, which ordinary people do take advantage of, these tend to be much more sceptical of the potential impact to their lives in what remains an economically depressed area despite cross-border cooperation having been possible for several decades.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology History: 20th Century to Present
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
  • From Village Commons to Public Goods

    From Village Commons to Public Goods

    Graduated Provision in Urbanizing China

    Trémon, A.-C.

    Illuminating the complex processes of China’s uneven urbanization through the lens of the transition from village commons to public goods, this book is set in three urbanized villages in Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Xi’an, which have experienced similar demographic explosions and dramatic changes to their landscapes, the livelihoods of its inhabitants, and the power structures governing their residents. Graduated provision is the delivery of public goods informed by the teleological ideology of urbanization, and by neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics, and has been employed as an answer to the challenges of making public goods, such as welfare provisions, public parks, education, and senior care, equally accessible to all in recently urbanized communities. 

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Sociology
    Area: Asia
    Series: Dislocations Volume 34
  • Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

    Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

    Stories from Global Frontiers

    Beuving, J.

    Presenting a new interpretation of entrepreneurial behaviour, this book focuses on how entrepreneurs consider the future, looking at their social practices, language and rituals through which they neutralize or smoothen future unknowns. The study theorizes entrepreneurial behaviour as ‘future-work’: the social practices, language and rituals through which entrepreneurs neutralize or smoothen future unknowns. The study is grounded in ethnographic case material from global frontiers: second-hand car dealers in West Africa; exporters of fresh fish from Lake Victoria, East Africa; farmed fish entrepreneurs in Greece; and investment bankers in Financial America. It targets students and scholars from the social sciences and economics, and it has theoretical and practical implications.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
    Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 11
  • Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe

    Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe

    The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus

    Hirschon, R.

    Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe is a landmark work in the areas of anthropology and migration studies. Since its first publication in 1989, this classic study has remained in demand. The third edition is published to mark the centenary of the 1923 Lausanne Convention which led to the movement of some 1.5 million persons between Greece and Turkey at the conclusion of their war. It includes updated material with a new Preface, Afterword by Ayhan Aktar, and map of the wider region. The new Preface provides the context in which the original research took place, assesses its innovative aspects and explores the dimensions of history and identity which are predominant themes in the book.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies History: 20th Century to Present
    Area: Southern Europe
  • Chicanery

    Chicanery

    Senior Academic Appointments in Antipodean Anthropology, 1920–1960

    Gray, G., Munro, D. & Winter, C.

    Academic appointments can bring forth unexpected and unforeseen contests and tensions, cause humiliation and embarrassment for unsuccessful applicants and reveal unexpected allies and enemies. It is also a time when harsh assessments can be made about colleagues’ intellectual abilities and their capacity as a scholar and fieldworker. The assessors’ reports were often disturbingly personal, laying bare their likes and dislikes that could determine the futures of peers and colleagues. Chicanery deals with how the founding Chairs at Sydney, the Australian National University, Auckland and Western Australia dealt with this process, and includes accounts of the appointments of influential anthropologists such as Raymond Firth and Alexander Ratcliffe-Brown.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) History: 20th Century to Present Theory and Methodology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 44
  • Corporate Social Responsibility and the Paradoxes of State Capitalism

    Corporate Social Responsibility and the Paradoxes of State Capitalism

    Ethnographies of Norwegian Energy and Extraction Businesses Abroad

    Knudsen, S. (ed)

    Through a series of case studies in diverse regions of the world, this book explores how transnational Norwegian energy and extractive industries handle corporate social responsibility (CSR) when operating abroad in places such as China, Brazil, and Turkey. With significant state ownership and embeddedness in the Nordic societal model, Norwegian capitalism is often represented as “benign” or ethical. By tracing CSR policy and practice—from headquarters to operations—this volume critically explores the workings of Norwegian corporate capitalism and its engagement with key issues of responsibility, accountability, and sustainability.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology
    Area: Northern Europe
    Series: Dislocations Volume 33
  • Exchange and Markets in Early Economic Development

    Exchange and Markets in Early Economic Development

    Informal Economy in the Three New Guineas

    Conroy, J. D.

    The idea of an informal economy emerged from, and is a critique of, the ideology of ‘economic development’. It originated from Keith Hart’s recognition of informal economic activity in 1960s Ghana. In the context of four colonialisms – German, British, Australian and Dutch – this book recounts Hart’s effort in 1972 to introduce the informal ‘sector’ into development planning in Papua New Guinea. This was problematic, because ‘the market’ was scarcely institutionalized, and traditional modes of exchange persisted stubbornly. Rather than conforming with post-colonial economic ideology, the subjected people pushed back against imposed bureaucracy to practice informal and hybrid modes of economic activity.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Colonial History
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: The Human Economy Volume 10
  • Integrating Strangers

    Integrating Strangers

    Sherbro Identity and The Politics of Reciprocity along the Sierra Leonean Coast

    Ménard, A.

    Drawing on an ethnography of Sherbro coastal communities in Sierra Leone, this book analyses the politics and practice of identity through the lens of the reciprocal relations that exist between socio-ethnic groups. Anaïs Ménard examines the implications of the social arrangement that binds landlords and strangers in a frontier region, the Freetown Peninsula, characterized by high degrees of individual mobility and social interactions. She showcases the processes by which Sherbro identity emerged as a flexible category of practice, allowing individuals the possibility to claim multiple origins and perform ethnic crossovers while remaining Sherbro.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 28
  • Things of the House

    Things of the House

    Material Culture and Migration from Post-Colonial Mozambique to Portugal

    Rosales, M. V.

    Discussing multiple aspects of material culture and domestic consumption, this book tackles the relationship between the trajectories and biographies of people, families, houses and objects and how they intertwine and produce each other. Focusing on the life stories of a group of European and Catholic Brahmin Goan families of the colonial elite who left Mozambique after the country's independence in 1975, the book shows how material culture interferes with structuring dimensions of migratory experiences, in the management of family memories, ties and networks of belonging, as well as in the social dynamics of positioning, hierarchy and distinction.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Memory Studies
    Series: European Anthropology in Translation Volume 11
  • Of Jaguars and Butterflies

    Of Jaguars and Butterflies

    Metalogues on Issues in Anthropology and Philosophy

    Lloyd, G. & Vilaça, A.

    What are we to make of statements that jaguars see themselves as humans, or of doubts about the boundary between dreams and waking? Jointly authored by an anthropologist and a philosopher, this book investigates some of the most puzzling ideas and practices reported in modern ethnography and ancient philosophy, concerning humans, animals, persons, spirits, agency, selfhood, consciousness, nature, life, death, disease and health. The study’s twin aims are first to explore the possibility of achieving a better understanding of the materials we discuss and then to see what lessons we can draw from them to challenge and revise our own fundamental assumptions.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
  • Contesting Moralities

    Contesting Moralities

    Roma Identities, State and Kinship

    Sarafian, I.

    Roma identities have often been presented in literature as collectively constructed and in opposition to those who are not Roma. Contesting Moralities challenges these preconceptions about Roma identification by disentangling the binaries between Roma and non-Roma, state and non-state, public and private. It explores topics resonating in contemporary Romani studies that are in need of further exploration through individual perspectives, including history, activism, kinship, childhood, and gender hierarchies. The book paints a complex picture of inequality and how it is negotiated amid conflicting, ambiguous and contradictory regimes of power and moral demands, including those of state and kin.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: New Directions in Romani Studies Volume 5
  • Working the Fabric

    Working the Fabric

    Resourcefulness, Belonging and Island Life in Scotland’s Harris Tweed Industry

    Nascimento, J.

    Trademark-protected since 1910, the famous woollen cloth known as Harris Tweed can only be produced in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland – yet it is exported to over 50 countries around the world. Examining contemporary experiences of work and life, this book is the first in-depth anthropological study of the renowned textile industry, complementing and updating existing historical and ethnographic research. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork research in the Outer Hebrides, it offers an intimate account of industry workers’ lived experiences and contributes to anthropological debates on work and labour, cultural production, inclusive belonging and place-making in global capitalism.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Northern Europe
    Series: Anthropology at Work Volume 4
  • Power of the Story, The

    The Power of the Story

    Writing Disasters in Haiti and the Circum-Caribbean

    Joos, V., Munro, M. & Ribó, J. (eds)

    A cross-disciplinary volume that combines and puts into dialogue perspectives on disasters, this book includes contributions from anthropology, history, cultural studies, sociology, and literary studies. Offering a rich and diverse set of arguments and analyses on the ever-relevant theme of catastrophe in the circum-Caribbean, it will encourage debate and collaboration between scholars working on disasters from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General) Sociology
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Catastrophes in Context Volume 6
  • Advocacy and Archaeology

    Advocacy and Archaeology

    Urban Intersections

    Britt, K. M. & George, D. F. (eds)

    Archaeologists have a history of being prime agents of change, particularly in advocating for protection and preservation of historical resources. As more social issues intersect with archaeology and historical sites, we see archaeologists and others continuing to advocate for not only historic resources, but for the larger social justice issues that threaten the communities in which these resources reside. Inspired by the idea of revolution and excitement about the ways archaeology is being used in social justice arenas, this volume seeks to visualize archaeology as part of a movement by redefining what archaeology is and does for the greater good.

    Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: North America
  • Modeling the Past

    Modeling the Past

    Archaeology, History, and Dynamic Networks

    Terrell, J., Golitko, M., Dawson, H., and Kissel, M.

    How do researchers use dynamic network analysis (DYRA) to explore, model, and try to understand the complex global history of our species? Reduced to bare bones, network analysis is a way of understanding the world around us — a way called relational thinking — that is liberating but challenging. Using this handbook, researchers learn to develop historical and archaeological research questions anchored in DYRA. Undergraduate and graduate students, as well as professional historians and archaeologists can consult on issues that range from hypothesis-driven research to critiquing dominant historical narratives, especially those that have tended to ignore the diversity of the archaeological record.

    Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Anthropology (General)
  • Former Neighbors, Future Allies?

    Former Neighbors, Future Allies?

    German Studies and Ethnography in Dialogue

    Weber, A. D. (ed)

    German studies scholars from various disciplines often use and reference ethnography, yet do not often present ethnography as a core methodology and research approach. Former Neighbors, Future Allies? emphasizes how German studies engages in methods and theories of ethnography. Through a variety of topics and from multiple perspectives including literature, folklore, history, sociology, and anthropology, this volume draws attention to how ethnography bridges transdisciplinary and international research in German studies.

    Subjects: History (General) Anthropology (General)
    Area: Germany
    Series: Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association Volume 28
  • Amnesia Remembered

    Amnesia Remembered

    Reverse Engineering a Digital Artifact

    Aycock, J.

    Our modern culture is increasingly expressed in the form of digital artifacts, yet archaeology is in its infancy when it comes to researching and understanding them. The study and reverse engineering of digital artifacts is no longer the exclusive domain of computer scientists. Presented by way of analogy to the process of archaeological fieldwork familiar to readers, the 1986 Electronic Arts game Amnesia is used as a vehicle to explain the procedure and thought process required to reverse engineer a digital artifact. As a go-to reference to learn how to begin studying the digital, Amnesia is shown to be a multi-layered artifact with a complex backstory; through it, topics in data compression, copy protection, memory management, and programming languages are covered.

    Subjects: Archaeology Media Studies Anthropology (General)
    Series: Digital Archaeology: Documenting the Anthropocene Volume 2
  • Feeding Anxieties

    Feeding Anxieties

    The Politics of Children's Food in Poland

    Boni, Z.

    Focusing on the underlying politics behind children’s food, this book highlights the variety of social relationships, expectations and emotions ingrained in feeding children in Poland. With rich ethnographic accounts, including research with children, the book demonstrates how families, schools, the food industry and state agencies shape and experience feeding anxieties, and how such anxiety is at the heart of a new form of sociality. The book complicates our understanding of health and modern subjectivity and unpacks what and how we feed children today.

    Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations Volume 6
  • Set to See Us Fail

    Set to See Us Fail

    Debating Inequalities in the Child Welfare System of New York

    Castellano, V.

    Examining the interaction between families and professionals in the child welfare system of New York, this book focuses on how inequalities are reproduced, measured, managed, and contested. The book describes how state institutions and neoliberal governance police the groups which are most represented in the child welfare system, including low income, female-headed families living in racialized neighborhoods. The book also shows how these forms of policing produce unstable terrains, and give rise to contestation among families, communities, and professionals. It questions and re-thinks how state welfare and protection is administered.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: North America
    Series: Anthropology at Work Volume 3
  • Anthropology, Nationalism and Colonialism

    Anthropology, Nationalism and Colonialism

    Mendes Correia and the Porto School of Anthropology

    Ferraz de Matos, P.

    A major contribution to the history of European anthropology, this book highlights the Porto School of Anthropology and analyses the work of its main mentor, Mendes Correia (1888-1960). It goes beyond a Portuguese focus to present a wider comparative analysis in which the colonial empire, knowledge of origins, ethnic identity and cultural practices all receive special attention. The analysis takes into account the fact that nationalism, as associated with an ethno-racial paradigm, decisively influenced discourse and scientific and political practices.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Southern Europe
  • In the Meantime

    In the Meantime

    Toward an Anthropology of the Possible

    Masquelier, A. & Durham, D. (eds)

    The “meantime” represents the gap between what is past and the unknown future. When considered as waiting, the meantime is defined as a period of suspension to be endured. By contrast, the contributors of this volume understand it as a space of “the possible” where calculation coexists with uncertainty, promises with disappointment, and imminence with deferral. Attending to the temporalities of emerging rather than settled facts, they put the stress on the temporal tactics, social commitments, material connections, dispositional orientations, and affective circuits that emerge in the meantime even in the most desperate times.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
  • Long Shore, The

    The Long Shore

    Archaeologies and Social Histories of Californias Maritime Cultural Landscapes

    Meniketti, M. (ed)

    The archaeology of maritime cultural landscapes offers insights into cultural traditions, social transitions, and cultural relationships that reach beyond the narrow confines of waterfronts and beach strands and helps construct meaningful social histories. The long shore of California is not limited to the land that borders the Pacific Ocean, but includes the navigable waters that reach inland, the off-shore islands, and the riverways flow to the sea. Authors investigate the multifaceted character of maritime landscapes and maritime oriented communities in California’s equally diverse cultural landscape; viewed through an archaeological lens, and emphasizing social behavior and community as material culture in order to reveal intersections and commonalities.

    Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Anthropology (General)
    Area: North America
  • Finding Home in Europe

    Finding Home in Europe

    Chronicles of Global Migrants

    Pérez Murcia, L. E. & Bonfanti, S. (eds)

    Bringing together the voices of nine individuals from an archive of over two hundred in-depth interviews with transnational migrants and refugees across five European countries, Finding Home in Europe critically engages with how home is experienced by those who move among changing social and cultural constraints. Highly conscious of the political strength of their voices, migrants and asylum seekers speak out loud to the authors, as this volume seeks to challenge the narrative that these people are ‘out of place’ or cannot claim their right to belong.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Theory and Methodology
    Area: Europe
    Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 13
  • Making Multiple Babies

    Making Multiple Babies

    Anticipatory Regimes of Assisted Reproduction

    Wu, C.-L.

    Human beings have been producing more twins, triplets, and quadruplets than ever before, due to the expansion of medically assisted conception. This book analyzes the anticipatory regimes of making multiple babies. With archival documents, participant observation, in-depth interviews, and registry data, this book traces the global and local governance of the assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) used to tackle multiple pregnancy since the 1970s, highlighting the early promotion of single embryo transfer in Belgium and Japan and the making of the world’s most lenient guidelines in Taiwan.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 52
  • Other Worlds, Other Bodies

    Other Worlds, Other Bodies

    Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing

    Pierini, E., Groisman, A., & Espírito Santo, D. (eds)

    When approaching the multiplicity of the spiritual experiences of healing, ethnographers are often presented with ideas of the existence of “other” worlds that may intersect with the so-called “material” or “physical” worlds. This book proposes a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Epistemological embodiment signals that personal scholarly experience of the “unknown”—be it in the form of trance, or as the embodiment of an “other”—shapes the concepts of healing, body, trance, self, and matter by which ethnographers craft out analysis.

    Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology
  • Sea of Transience, A

    A Sea of Transience

    Poetics, Politics and Aesthetics along the Black Sea Coast

    Khalvashi, T. & Demant Frederiksen, M. (eds)

    Transience is found in every meeting and form of coexistence between people and things that live and exist by, or move across or along, the Black Sea. It may come in various forms and guises, from de facto states, tourism, migration, trafficking or military troops, and it needs to be written and captured in sensuous, affective and imaginative ways. With particular attention to poetics, politics and aesthetics, this volume focuses on the scales of transient moments and histories, and enables readers to see and sense the many forms of transience that occur in a given landscape, sea or space.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Environmental Studies (General)
    Areas: Central/Eastern Europe Asia
  • Terrorism and the Pandemic

    Terrorism and the Pandemic

    Weaponizing of COVID-19

    Gunaratna, R. & Pethö-Kiss, K.

    The global pandemic has offered extraordinary opportunities for extremists and terrorists to mobilize themselves and revive as more powerful actors in the security landscape. But could these threat groups actually capitalize on the coronavirus crisis and advance their malevolent agendas? Utilizing the largest COVID-19-related terrorism database, the book presents an analysis built upon a quantitative and qualitative comparison between the nature of both the radical Islamist and the far-right-related threat in 2018 and 2020. It provides, for the first time, a true picture of novel trends since the pandemic outbreak.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology of Religion
  • Resettled Iraqi Refugees in the United States

    Resettled Iraqi Refugees in the United States

    War, Refuge, Belonging, Participation, and Protest

    Keyel, J.

    The American war against Iraq has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and displaced millions of people. Between 20 March 2003 and 30 September 2017, more than 172,000 Iraqis resettled in the United States. This book explores the experiences of fifteen Iraqis who resettled in the US after 2003. It examines the long war against Iraq that began in 1991 and the decisions some Iraqis made to leave their homes and seek refuge in the United States. The book also delves into the possibilities for belonging and cultural exchange for this cohort of Iraqis and their political engagement with non-profit organizations, advocacy, and activism against the 2017 Travel Ban.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
    Area: North America
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 47
  • Continental Encampment

    Continental Encampment

    Genealogies of Humanitarian Containment in the Middle East and Europe

    Knudsen, A. J. & Berg, K. G. (eds)

    During the past decade, Syria’s displacement crisis has made the Middle East one of the world’s foremost refugee-hosting regions. The measures to prevent refugees and migrants from leaving the region, and returning those who do, has made the region a zone of containment where millions remain displaced. The volume explores responses to mass migration and traces the genealogy of humanitarian containment from the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the first refugee camps to the present-day displacement ‘crises’ and the re-bordering of Europe.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Development Studies
    Areas: Middle East & Israel Europe
    Series: Humanitarianism and Security Volume 2
  • At Home in a Nursing Home

    At Home in a Nursing Home

    An Ethnography of Movement and Care in Australia

    Zhang, A. R. Y.

    Focusing on contemporary ideas about how aged care is provided, this book poses the question: How can people who are aged and frail live out the final phase of their lives with dignity? In seeking answers, the author examines what it means to be ‘at home’ in residential care in a novel and compassionate way. In an ethnographic study of how elderly residents can be given the right care, this book provides a new route into the bodily realities of ageing. It is a vital contribution to the search for alternative approaches to aged care provision.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Life Course, Culture and Aging: Global Transformations Volume 9
  • This Land Is Not For Sale

    This Land Is Not For Sale

    Trust and Transitions in Northern Uganda

    Meinert, L. & Reynolds Whyte, S. (eds)

    Although violent conflict has declined in northern Uganda, tensions and mistrust concerning land have increased. Residents try to deal with acquisitions by investors and exclusions from forests and wildlife reserves. Land wrangles among neighbours and relatives are widespread. The growing commodification of land challenges ideals of entrustment for future generations. Using extended case studies, collaborating researchers analyze the principles and practices that shape access to land. Contributors examine the multiplicity of land claims, the nature of transactions and the management of conflicts. They show how access to land is governed through intimate relations of gender, generation and belonging.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Sociology
    Area: Africa
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 27
  • Cosmopolitan Refugees

    Cosmopolitan Refugees

    Somali Migrant Women in Nairobi and Johannesburg

    Ripero-Muñiz, N.

    Exploring the dynamics of identity formation processes in diasporic spaces, this book analyses how gender, cultural and religious practices are renegotiated in a situation of displacement. The author presents the comparative case study of Somali migrant women in Nairobi and Johannesburg:  two cosmopolitan urban hubs in the global South. The book is based on and includes ethnographic observations in Nairobi and Johannesburg, first-person accounts of migration journeys across the African continent and women’s reflections on what it means to be a Somali woman today.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Africa
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 46
  • Glimpses of Hope

    Glimpses of Hope

    The Rise of Industrial Labor at the Urban Margins of Nepal

    Hoffmann, M.

    Over the last decade, Nepal has witnessed significant urban growth and an expanding urban middle class. Glimpses of Hope tells the story of the people who enable some of the middle-class consumer practices in urban Nepal. The book focuses on workers in areas such as modern food-processing, water-bottling, housebuilding, and sand-mining industries and explores how workers see such forms of work, where union organization can help, and how work opportunities emerge along lines of gender and ethnicity. Although global labor relations have been mostly in decline for decades, this ethnography offers insights and glimpses of hope in terms of labor dynamics and the opportunities various jobs may afford.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Asia
    Series: Dislocations Volume 32
  • From Missionaries to Main Street

    From Missionaries to Main Street

    The Story of One Sgaw Karen Family in the United States

    Gilhooly, D.

    The Htoo family, who are Sgaw Karen and originally from Burma, resettled in Georgia in the United States refugee resettlement program in 2007. This book chronicles their life in their new country. While the Htoo family’s story is singular, the family’s experiences in Burma, Thai refugee camps, and their experiences in the US are representative of other refugees from Burma and beyond. The book provides historical and cultural information on the Sgaw Karen people against the backdrop of the Htoo family’s path from Burma to Thailand. It also explores the Htoo children’s home and school learning experiences and their relationship with the author as teacher, collaborator, and friend.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: North America
  • Life with Durham Cathedral

    Life with Durham Cathedral

    A Laboratory of Community, Experience and Building

    Calvert, A. J.

    An ethnographic account of daily life in Durham Cathedral, this book examines the processes of negotiation and change between a community and their cathedral. Focusing on the role of sound, light, time, space, building and dwelling, the author argues that Durham Cathedral is much more than just a backdrop to everyday life. Rather, through the constant processes of negotiation and change, it is a fully engaged participant in the daily lives of those who use Durham Cathedral. As such, it is not a place in which life happens, but a place with which life happens.

    Subjects: Heritage Studies Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Northern Europe
  • A Magpie’s Tale

    A Magpie’s Tale

    Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on the Kazakh of Western Mongolia

    Portisch, A. O.

    Telling the story of the author's time living with a Kazakh family in a small village in western Mongolia, this book contextualizes the family’s personal stories within the broader history of the region. It looks at the position of the  Kazakh over time in relation to Tsarist Russian, Soviet, Chinese and Mongolian rule and influence. These are stories of migration across generations, bride kidnappings and marriage, domestic violence and alcoholism, adoption and family, and how people have coped in the face of political and economic crisis, poverty and loss, and, perhaps most enduringly, how love and family persist through all of this.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Asia
    Series: Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories Volume 1
  • Art of Fate Calculation, The

    The Art of Fate Calculation

    Practicing Divination in Taipei, Beijing, and Kaifeng

    Homola, S.

    From housewives to students and high-ranking officials, people from all social backgrounds in China and Taiwan visit fate calculation masters to learn about their destiny. How do clients assess the diviner’s skills? How does one become a fortune-teller? How is a person’s fate calculated? The Art of Fate Calculation explores how conceptions of fate circulate in Chinese and Taiwanese societies while resisting uniformization and institutionalization. This is not only due to the stigma of “superstition” but also to the internal dynamic of fate calculation practice and learning.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology
    Area: Asia
    Series: Asian Anthropologies Volume 14
  • Mythology and Symbolism of Eurasia and Indigenous Americas

    Mythology and Symbolism of Eurasia and Indigenous Americas

    Manifestations in Artifacts and Rituals

    Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, M.

    A system of myths, symbols, and rituals, dating back to the Paleolithic and Neolithic, survives in present-day imagery. In exploring this system, special attention is drawn to the linkage between ancient and contemporary civilizations of Eurasia and Mesoamerica, as seen in their cosmology, and expressed in common mythological and iconographic themes. The author examines contemporary Middle American and eastern European textiles, especially women’s garments, that contain an elaborated sacred code of symbols, and include remnants of the four horizontal directions, and the three vertical worlds that portray the structure of the universe. The cosmology contained in patterns around the world denotes striking parallels that attest to internal connections between different cultures, beyond time and place.

    Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General)
  • Politics of Making Kinship, The

    The Politics of Making Kinship

    Historical and Anthropological Perspectives

    Alber, E. (ed)

    The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no longer taken for granted, The Politics of Making Kinship demonstrates how political processes have shaped concepts of kinship over time and, conversely, how political projects have been shaped by specific understandings, idioms and uses of kinship. Taking vantage points from the post-Roman era to early modernity, and from colonial imperialism to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond this international set of scholars place kinship centerstage and reintegrate it with political theory.

    Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
    Area: Europe
  • Sentient Ecologies

    Sentient Ecologies

    Xenophobic Imaginaries of Landscape

    Coțofană, A. & Kuran, H. (eds)

    Employing methodological perspectives from the fields of political geography, environmental studies, anthropology, and their cognate disciplines, this volume explores alternative logics of sentient landscapes as racist, xenophobic, and right-wing. While the field of sentient landscapes has gained critical attention, the literature rarely seems to question the intentionality of sentient landscapes, which are often romanticized as pure, good, and just, and perceived as protectors of those who are powerless, indigenous, and colonized. The book takes a new stance on sentient landscapes with the intention of dispelling the denial of “coevalness” represented by their scholarly romanticization.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
    Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 31
  • Sexual Self-Fashioning

    Sexual Self-Fashioning

    Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belonging

    Roodsaz, R.

    Sexuality and gender have come to serve as measures for cultural belonging in discussions of the position of Muslim immigrants in multicultural Western societies. While the acceptance of assumed local norms such as sexual liberty and gender equality are seen as successful integration, rejecting them is regarded as a sign of failed citizenship. Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, this book provides an ethnographic account of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. It argues that by embracing, rejecting, and questioning modernity in stories about sexuality, the Iranian Dutch actively engage in processes of self-fashioning.

    Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Europe
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 51
  • Punching Back

    Punching Back

    Gender, Religion and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing

    Rana, J.

    In the Netherlands, girls and young women are increasingly active in women-only kickboxing. The general assumption, in the Netherlands and in western Europe more broadly, is that women’s sport is a form of secular, feminist empowerment. Muslim women’s participation would then exemplify the incongruence of Islam with the modern, secular nation-state. Punching Back provides a detailed ethnographic study that contests this view by showing that young Muslim women who kickbox establish agentive selves by playing with gender norms, challenging expectations, and living out their religious subjectivities.

    Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Europe
    Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations Volume 5
  • Sexscapes of Pleasure

    Sexscapes of Pleasure

    Women, Sexuality and the Whore Stigma in Italy

    Zambelli, E.

    Focusing on Italy, this book discusses how women negotiate sexuality and social status in a Western sexscape constituted by multifaceted articulations of women’s sexuality, commodities and modernity. Drawing from ethnographic research, this book brings together the narratives of Italian and migrant women pole dancing for leisure, women pole and lap dancing for work, as well as women selling sex. By tracing commonalities in women’s processes of subjectivation and othering across the non/sex working women divide, the book foregrounds the intersecting structures of oppression under which women negotiate selfhood.

    Subjects: Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)
    Area: Southern Europe
  • Fairies, Ghosts, and Santa Claus

    Fairies, Ghosts, and Santa Claus

    Tinted Glasses, Fetishes, and the Politics of Seeing

    Doerr, N. M.

    Investigating the politics of seeing and its effects, this book draws on Slavoj Žižek’s notion of fetish and Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious to offer newer concepts: “tinted glasses”, through which we see the world; “unit-thinking”, which renders the world as consisting of discrete units; and “coherants”, which help fragmented experiences cohere into something intelligible. Examining experiences at a Japanese heritage language school, a study-abroad trip to Sierra Leone, as well as in college classrooms, this book reveals the workings of unit-thinking and fetishism in diverse contexts and explores possibilities for social change.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Theory and Methodology
  • Enlightening Encounters

    Enlightening Encounters

    The Journeys of an Anthropologist

    Gudeman, S.

    One of the world's top anthropologists recounts his formative experiences doing fieldwork in this accessible memoir ideal for anyone interested in anthropology.

    Drawing on his research in five Latin American countries, Steve Gudeman describes his anthropological fieldwork, bringing to life the excitement of gaining an understanding of the practices and ideas of others as well as the frustrations. He weaves into the text some of his findings as well as reflections on his own background that led to better fieldwork but also led him astray.

    This readable account, shorn of technical words, complicated concepts, and abstract ideas shows the reader what it is to be an anthropologist enquiring and responding to the unexpected.

    From the Preface:
    Growing up I learned about making do when my family was putting together a dinner from leftovers or I was constructing something with my father. In fieldwork I saw people making do as they worked in the fields, repaired a tool, assembled a meal or made something for sale. Much later, I realized that making do captures some of my fieldwork practices and their presentation in this book.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology
  • Inconceivable Iran

    Inconceivable Iran

    To Reproduce or Not to Reproduce?

    Tremayne, S.

    Celebrating the 50th volume of the landmark Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality series, this book offers a much-needed analysis of shifting reproductive policies and practices in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a society that is usually represented as either “revolutionary” or “oppressive.” Instead, Tremayne reflects on more than four decades of research  arguing that changing reproductive behaviors on the part of ordinary Iranians must always be viewed against the backdrop of core cultural values and traditions, which are often reinforced, instead of radically altered, by new reproductive technologies, juridical opinions, and state policies.

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Area: Middle East & Israel
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 50
  • Living on a Time Bomb

    Living on a Time Bomb

    Local Negotiations of Oil Extraction in a Mexican Community

    Schöneich, S.

    Providing a holistic understanding of extensive oil extraction in rural Mexico, this book focuses on a campesino community, where oil extraction is deeply inscribed into the daily lives of the community members. The book shows how oil shapes the space where it is extracted in every aspect and produces multiple uncertainties. The community members express these uncertainties using the metaphor of the time bomb. The book shows how they find ways to "live off the time bomb" by using mechanisms of short-term coping and long-term adaptation and thus, developing the capability to determine their lives despite the ever-changing challenges.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 30
  • Pacific Spaces

    Pacific Spaces

    Translations and Transmutations

    Engels-Schwarzpaul, A.-C., Lopesi, L., & Refiti, A. L. (eds)

    Delving into Pacific spaces from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and interpretations, this book looks at how the anthropological and architectural can be connected. The contributors to this book – architectural practitioners, architectural and spatial design theorists, anthropologists and historians – show not only how new theoretical perspectives can arise out of comparing aspects specific to one discipline with their equivalents of another, but also demonstrate how a space of emergence is created for something that goes beyond both, enhancing both fields of potentialities.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Development Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists Volume 10
  • Gentrifications

    Gentrifications

    Views from Europe

    Chabrol, M., Collet, A., Giroud, M., Launay, L., Rousseau, M., Minassian, H. ter

    Offering an original discussion of the gentrification phenomenon in Europe, this book provides new theoretical insights into classical works on the subject. Using a thorough analysis of the diversity of the forms, places and actors of gentrification in an attempt to isolate its ‘DNA’, the book addresses the place of social groups in cities, their competition over the appropriation of space, the infrastructure unequally offered to them by economic and political actors and the stakes of everyday social relationships.

    Subjects: Urban Studies Sociology Anthropology (General)
    Area: Europe
    Series: Anthropology of Europe Volume 7
  • Ӧmie Sex Affiliation

    Ӧmie Sex Affiliation

    A Papuan Nature

    Rohatynskyj, M.

    The practice of affiliating the female child with the mother and the male child with the father was considered a rare and inexplicable practice in Papua New Guinean ethnography at the time the original data was collected some forty years ago. Marta Rohatynskyj undertakes a shift in her analytical concepts of kinship studies to reveal the deep-seated disjuncture between female and male that this practice represents. The author argues that this practice is associated with a totemic/animistic ontology and has currency in a particular type of Melanesian society.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Development Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology Volume 14
  • Dynamics of Identification and Conflict

    Dynamics of Identification and Conflict

    Anthropological Encounters

    Hoehne, M. V., Gabbert, E. C., & Eidson, J. R. (eds)

    Dealing with the dynamics of identification and conflict, this book uses theoretical orientations ranging from political ecology to rational choice theory, interpretive approaches, Marxism and multiscalar analysis. Case studies set in Africa, Europe and Central Asia are grouped in three sections devoted to pastoralism, identity and migration. What connects all of these anthropological explorations is a close focus on processes of identification and conflict at the level of particular actors in relation to the behaviour of large aggregates of people and to systemic conditions.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies
  • Anthropological Toolkit, An

    An Anthropological Toolkit

    Sixty Useful Concepts

    Zeitlyn, D.

    Presenting sixty theoretical ideas, David Zeitlyn asks ‘How to write about anthropological theory without making a specific theoretical argument.’

    “David Zeitlyn has written a wryly engaging, short book on, essentially, why we should not become theoretical partisans—that, indeed, being a serious theorist means accepting precisely that principle.”—Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University

    To answer, he offers a series of mini essays about an eclectic collection of theoretical concepts that he has found helpful over the years. The book celebrates the muddled inconsistencies in the ways that humans live their messy lives. There are, however, still patterns discernible: the actors can understand what is going on, they see an event unfolding in ways that are familiar, as belonging to a certain type and therefore, Zeitlyn suggests, so can researchers.

    From the introduction:
    This book promotes an eclectic, multi-faceted anthropology in which multiple approaches are applied in pursuit of the limited insights which each can afford…. I do not endorse any one of these idea as supplying an exclusive path to enlightenment: I absolutely do not advocate any single position. As a devout nonconformist, I hope that the following sections provide material, ammunition and succour to those undertaking nuanced anthropological analysis (and their kin in related disciplines)…. Mixing up or combining different ideas and approaches can produce results that, in their breadth and richness, are productive for anthropology and other social sciences, reflecting the endless complexities of real life.

    …This is my response to the death of grand theory. I see our task as learning how to deal with that bereavement and how to resist the siren lures of those promising synoptic overviews.

    This book is relevant to anthropology, communication studies, cultural studies and sociology.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
  • Humboldt Revisited

    Humboldt Revisited

    The Impact of the German University on American Higher Education

    Brandser, G. C.

    Humboldt Revisited offers a fresh perspective on the contemporary discourse surrounding reform of European universities. Arguing that contemporary reform derives its basis from pre-constructed truths about the so-called ‘Humboldt-university,’ this monograph traces the historical descent of these truths to the American reception of Humboldt's ideas from the mid-19th century up until the 1960s. Drawing from a rich selection of historical sources, this volume offers an alternative to conventional explanations of the forces behind the ongoing reform of European universities. It also challenges the conventional historical narrative on the Humboldt University, providing new insight into the American reception of the German ideas.

    Subjects: Educational Studies History: 20th Century to Present Sociology
    Series: Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies Volume 7
  • Ritual

    Ritual

    What It Is, How It Works, and Why

    Davis-Floyd, R. & Laughlin, C. D.

    Designed for both academic and lay audiences, this book identifies the characteristics of ritual and, via multiple examples, details how ritual works on the human body and brain to produce its often profound effects. These include enhancing courage, effecting healing, and generating group cohesion by enacting cultural—or individual—beliefs and values. It also shows what happens when ritual fails.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Anthropology of Religion
  • Critical Public Archaeology

    Critical Public Archaeology

    Confronting Social Challenges in the 21st Century

    Westmont, V. C. (ed)

    Critical approaches to public archaeology have been in use since the 1980s, however only recently have archaeologists begun using critical theory in conjunction with public archaeology to challenge dominant narratives of the past. This volume brings together current work on the theory and practice of critical public archaeology from Europe and the United States to illustrate the ways that implementing critical approaches can introduce new understandings of the past and reveal new insights on the present. Contributors to this volume explore public perceptions of museum interpretations as well as public archaeology projects related to changing perceptions of immigration, the working classes, and race.

    Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General) History (General)
  • Managing Sacralities

    Managing Sacralities

    Competing and Converging Claims of Religious Heritage

    Hemel, E. van den, Salemink†, O., & Stengs, I. (eds)

    What happens when religious sites, objects and practices become cultural heritage? What are —religious or secular—sources of expertise and authority that validate and regulate heritage sites, objects and practices? As cultural heritage becomes an increasingly popular and influential frame, these questions arise in diverse and challenging manners. The question who controls, manages, and frames religious heritage, and how, arises with particular urgency. Case studies from Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom present an analysis of the paradoxes and challenges that arise when religious sites are transformed into heritage.

    Subjects: Heritage Studies History (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Europe
    Series: Explorations in Heritage Studies Volume 6
  • Edible People

    Edible People

    The Historical Consumption of Slaves and Foreigners and the Cannibalistic Trade in Human Flesh

    Siefkes, C.

    While human cannibalism has attracted considerable notice and controversy, certain aspects of the practice have received scant attention. These include the connection between cannibalism and xenophobia: the capture and consumption of unwanted strangers. Likewise ignored is the connection to slavery: the fact that in some societies slaves and persons captured in slave raids could be, and were, killed and eaten. This book explores these largely forgotten practices and ignored connections while making explicit the links between cannibal acts, imperialist influences and the role of capitalist trading practices. These are highly important for the history of the slave trade and for understanding the colonialist history of Africa.

    Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Colonial History
    Series: Anthropology of Food & Nutrition Volume 11
  • Morality, Crisis and Capitalism

    Morality, Crisis and Capitalism

    Anthropology for Troubled Times

    Baldacchino, J.-P. & Mitchell, J. P. (eds)

    'May you live in interesting times’ was made famous by Sir Austen Chamberlain. The premise is that ‘interesting times’ are times of upheaval, conflict and insecurity - troubled times. With the growing numbers of displaced populations and the rise in the politics of fear and hate, we are facing challenges to our very ‘species-being’. Papers in the volume include ethnographic studies on the ‘refugee crisis’, the ‘financial crisis’ and the ‘rule of law crisis' in the Mediterranean as well as the crisis of violence and hunger in South America.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies
  • Francophone Migrations, French Islam and Wellbeing

    Francophone Migrations, French Islam and Wellbeing

    The Soninké Foyer in Paris

    Accoroni, D.

    Addressing several issues of significance in the fields of Anthropology of Migration, Politics of Healthcare, Religious and Francophone Studies, this book pursues an unprecedented line of research by bringing to the fore the geopolitical dimension of francophonie, understood as a political construct, as much as a cultural, artistic and a linguistic space, with French as common language. The book is based on participant observation carried out in Paris in a foyer among Soninké migrants, the principal ethnographic focus, and at the secondary field-site based at the Mouride Islamic Centre of Taverny, which serves to show an important facet of the so-called Francophone Islam.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology of Religion
    Area: France
  • Risky Futures

    Risky Futures

    Climate, Geopolitics and Local Realities in the Uncertain Circumpolar North

    Ulturgasheva, O. & Bodenhorn, B. (eds)

    The volume examines complex intersections of environmental conditions, geopolitical tensions and local innovative reactions characterising ‘the Arctic’ in the early twenty-first century. What happens in the region (such as permafrost thaw or methane release) not only sweeps rapidly through local ecosystems but also has profound global implications. Bringing together a unique combination of authors who are local practitioners, indigenous scholars and international researchers, the book provides nuanced views of the social consequences of climate change and environmental risks across human and non-human realms.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Circumpolar
    Series: Studies in the Circumpolar North Volume 6
  • Unusual Death and Memorialization

    Unusual Death and Memorialization

    Burial, Space, and Memory in the Post-Medieval North

    Kallio-Seppa, T., Lipkin, S., Väre, T., Moilanen, U. & Tranberg, A. (eds)

    Most cultures and societies have their own customs and traditions of treating their dead. In the past, some deceased received a burial that deviated from tradition. The reasons for unusual burial could result from reasons such as outbreaks of epidemics or wars, or from premature births, distinctive social status, or disability. Authors present a selection of cases addressing the issue of unusual deaths, burials, or ways to remember the deceased. Chapters explore theoretical views related to social memory of death and memorializing the deceased and their resting places during modern period. The case studies introduce varied views on ‘otherness’ that are visible in burial customs and memorialization.

    Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General) Memory Studies
  • Ethnographies of Deservingness

    Ethnographies of Deservingness

    Unpacking Ideologies of Distribution and Inequality

    Tošić, J. & Streinzer, A. (eds)

    Claims around 'who deserves what and why' moralise inequality in the current global context of unprecedented wealth and its ever more selective distribution. Ethnographies of Deservingness explores this seeming paradox and the role of moralized assessments of distribution by reconnecting disparate discussions in the anthropology of migration, economic anthropology and political anthropology. This edited collection provides a novel and systematic conceptualization of Deservingness and shows how it can serve as a prime and integrative conceptual prism to ethnographically explore transforming welfare states, regimes of migration, as well as capitalist social reproduction and relations at large.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
    Series: EASA Series Volume 45
  • New Perspectives on Moral Change

    New Perspectives on Moral Change

    Anthropologists and Philosophers Engage with Transformations of Life Worlds

    Eriksen, C. & Hämäläinen, N. (eds)

    The world we live in is constantly changing. Climate change, transforming gender conceptions, emerging issues of food consumption, novel forms of family life and technological developments are altering central areas of our forms of life. This raises questions of how to cope with and understand the moral changes implicit in such alterations. This volume is the first to address moral change as such. It brings together anthropologists and philosophers to discuss how to study and theorize the change of norms, concepts, emotions, moral frameworks and forms of personhood.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 13
  • Return of Polyandry, The

    The Return of Polyandry

    Kinship and Marriage in Central Tibet

    Fjeld, H. E.

    Tibet is known for its broad range of marriage practices, particularly polyandry, where two or more brothers share one wife. With economic development and massive Chinese social and political reforms, including new marriage laws prohibiting plural marriages, polyandry was expected to disappear from Tibetan social lives. This book takes as its starting point the surprising increase in polyandry in Panam valley from the 1980s. It explores married lives in polyandrous houses and develops a theory of a flexible kinship of potentiality through the lens of a farming village in Tibet Autonomous Region.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Asia
  • Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology

    Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology

    Another Step Toward an Evolutionary Synthesis of Culture

    Eren, M. I. & Buchanan, B. (eds)

    Calculating the diversity of biological or cultural classes is a fundamental way of describing, analyzing, and understanding the world around us. Understanding archaeological diversity is key to understanding human culture in the past. Archaeologists have long experienced a tenuous relationship with statistics; however, the regular integration of diversity measures and concepts into archaeological practice is becoming increasingly important. This volume includes chapters that cover a wide range of archaeological applications of diversity measures. Featuring studies of archaeological diversity ranging from the data-driven to the theoretical, from the Paleolithic to the Historic periods, authors illustrate the range of data sets to which diversity measures can be applied, as well as offer new methods to examine archaeological diversity.

    Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
  • Tangled Mobilities

    Tangled Mobilities

    Places, Affects, and Personhood across Social Spheres in Asian Migration

    Fresnoza-Flot, A. & Liu-Farrer, G. (eds)

    The emotional, social, and economic challenges faced by migrants and their families are interconnected through complex decisions related to mobility. Tangled Mobilities examines the different crisscrossing and intersecting mobilities in the lives of Asian migrants, their family members across Asia and Europe, and the social spaces connecting these regions. In exploring how the migratory process unfolds in different stages of migrants’ lives, the chapters in this collected volume broaden perspectives on mobility, offering insight into the way places, affects, and personhood are shaped by and connected to it.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 12
  • Heritage, Gentrification and Resistance in the Neoliberal City

    Heritage, Gentrification and Resistance in the Neoliberal City

    Hammami, F., Jewesbury, D., & Valli, C. (eds)

    What happens when versions of the past become silenced, suppressed, or privileged due to urban restructuring? In what ways are the interpretations and performances of ‘the past’ linked to urban gentrification, marginalization, displacement, and social responses? Authors explore a variety of attempts to interrupt and interrogate urban restructuring, and to imagine alternative forms of urban organization, produced by diverse coalitions of resisting groups and individuals. Armed with historical narratives, oral histories, objects, physical built environment, memorials, and intangible aspects of heritage that include traditions, local knowledge and experiences, memories, authors challenge the ‘devaluation’ of their neighborhoods in official heritage and development narratives.

    Subjects: Heritage Studies Cultural Studies (General) History (General)
    Series: Explorations in Heritage Studies Volume 5
  • Where is the Good in the World?

    Where is the Good in the World?

    Ethical Life between Social Theory and Philosophy

    Henig, D., Strhan, A., & Robbins, J. (eds)

    Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might engage with and enrich each other. The chapters examine how people realize the good in social life, exploring how ethics and values relate to forms of suffering, power and inequality, and, in doing so, demonstrate how focusing on the good enhances social theory. This is the first interdisciplinary engagement with what it means to study the good as a fundamental aspect of social life.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Anthropology of Religion
    Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 12
  • Chinese Medicine in East Africa

    Chinese Medicine in East Africa

    An Intimacy with Strangers

    Hsu, E.

    Based on fieldwork conducted between 2001-2008 in urban East Africa, this book explores who the patients, practitioners and paraprofessionals doing Chinese medicine were in this early period of renewed China-Africa relations. Rather than taking recourse to the ‘placebo effect’, the author explains through the spatialities and materialities of the medical procedures provided why -  apart from purchasing the Chinese antimalarial called Artemisinin -  locals would try out their ‘alternatively modern’ formulas for treating a wide range of post-colonial disorders and seek their sexual enhancement medicines.

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Area: Africa
    Series: Epistemologies of Healing Volume 20
  • Making Things Happen

    Making Things Happen

    Community Participation and Disaster Reconstruction in Pakistan

    Murphy Thomas, J.

    Drawing on the Pakistan Earthquake Reconstruction and Recovery Project (PERRP), this volume explores the sociocultural side of post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction. As the latter is often fraught with delays and even abandonment—one cause being ineffective interactions between construction and local people—PERRP used anthropological and participatory approaches. Along with strong construction management, such approaches led to the rebuilding being completed on time. As disasters are increasing in number and intensity, so too will be the need for reconstruction, for which PERRP has lessons to offer.

    Subjects: Applied Anthropology Development Studies
    Area: Asia
    Series: Catastrophes in Context Volume 5
  • Working With Diagrams

    Working With Diagrams

    Engelmann, L., Humphrey, C. & Lynteris, C.

    Arising from the need to go beyond the semiotic, cognitive, epistemic and symbolic reading of diagrams, this book looks at what diagrams are capable of in scholarly work related to the social sciences. Rather than attempting to define what diagrams are, and what their dietic capacity might be, contributions to this volume draw together the work diagrams do in the development of theories. Across a range of disciplines, the chapters introduce the ephemeral dimensions of scientist’s interactions and collaboration with diagrams, consider how diagrams configure cooperation across disciplines, and explore how diagrams have been made to work in ways that point beyond simplification, clarification and formalization.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 14
  • Communication

    Communication

    A House Seen from Everywhere

    Klyukanov, I. E.

    Focusing on the scientific study of communication, this book is a systematic examination. To that end, the natural, social, cultural, and rational scientific perspectives on communication are presented and then brought together in one unifying framework of the semiotic square, showing how all four views are interconnected. The question of whether the study of communication can be considered a unique science is addressed. It is argued that communication is never separate from any object of study and thus we always deal with its manifestations, captured in the four scientific perspectives discussed in the book.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Series: Studies in Linguistic Anthropology Volume 2
  • Ethnographers Before Malinowski

    Ethnographers Before Malinowski

    Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 1870-1922

    Rosa, F. & Vermeulen, H. F. (eds)

    Focusing on some of the most important ethnographers in early anthropology, this volume explores twelve defining works in the foundational period from 1870 to 1922. It challenges the assumption that intensive fieldwork and monographs based on it emerged only in the twentieth century. What has been regarded as the age of armchair anthropologists was in reality an era of active ethnographic fieldworkers, including women practitioners and Indigenous experts. Their accounts have multiple layers of meaning, style, and content that deserve fresh reading. This reference work is a vital source for rewriting the history of anthropology.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General) Colonial History
    Series: EASA Series Volume 44
  • Technology and the Common Good

    Technology and the Common Good

    The Unity and Division of a Democratic Society

    Batteau, A. W.

    Building on the work of Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons) the author examines how the different shared goods of a democratic society are shaped by technology and  demonstrates how club goods, common pool resources, and public goods are supported, enhanced, and disrupted by technology. He further argues that as the common good is undermined by different interests, it should be possible to reclaim technology, if the members of the society conclude that they have something in common.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
  • Migration and Health

    Migration and Health

    Challenging the Borders of Belonging, Care, and Policy

    El-Shaarawi, N. & Larchanché, S. (eds)

    Despite the centrality of migration in our contemporary world, scholarship on mobility and health frequently separates migrants according to legal status, country of origin, destination, or health concern. Yet people on the move and health systems face challenges and opportunities that transcend these boundaries, including border fortification, neoliberal agendas, and climate change. This volume explores these epistemic borders, recognizing the necessity of a new conversation about migration and health. Each of the empirically grounded chapters introduces readers to pressing questions of migration and health in diverse social, political, and geographical settings.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
    Series: Rethinking Biosocial Anthropology Volume 10
  • Cracked Art World, The

    The Cracked Art World

    Conflict, Austerity, and Community Arts in Northern Ireland

    Rush, K.

    This book presents a nuanced view of Northern Ireland, a place at once deeply mired in its past and seeking to forge a new future for itself as a ‘post-post-conflict’ place within the context of a changing United Kingdom, a disintegrating Europe, and a globalized world. This is a Northern Ireland that is conflicted, segregated, and marginalized within modern Europe, but also hopeful and forward looking, seeking to articulate for itself a new place in the contemporary world.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sociology
    Area: Europe
    Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Volume 12
  • Food Connections

    Food Connections

    Production, Exchange and Consumption in West African Migration

    Abranches, M.

    Food Connections follows the movement of food from its production sites in West Africa to its final spaces of consumption in Europe. It is an ethnographic study of economic and social life amongst a close-knit community of food producers, traders and consumers and a wide range of small intermediaries that operate in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal. By investigating the way meanings of food and land are embedded in everyday experiences and relationships in the various phases of the movement, on both sides of the migration, it reveals the connections that transnational processes of food production, exchange and consumption generate between two lifeworlds.

    Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: Anthropology of Food & Nutrition Volume 10
  • Wine Is Our Bread

    Wine Is Our Bread

    Labour and Value in Moldovan Winemaking

    Ana, D.

    Based on ethnographic work in a Moldovan winemaking village, Wine Is Our Bread shows how workers in a prestigious winery have experienced the country’s recent entry into the globalized wine market and how their productive activities at home and in the winery contribute to the value of commercial terroir wines. Drawing on theories of globalization, economic anthropology and political economy, the book contributes to understanding how crises and inequalities in capitalism lead to the ‘creative destruction’ of local products, their accelerated standardization and the increased exploitation of labour.

    Subjects: Food & Nutrition Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 9
  • Making Better Lives

    Making Better Lives

    Hope, Freedom and Home-Making among People Sleeping Rough in Paris

    Lenhard, J.

    In this ethnographic study, Johannes Lenhard observes the daily practices, routines and techniques of people who are sleeping rough on the streets of Paris. The book focusses on their survival practises, their short-term desires and hopes, how they earn money through begging, how they choose the best place to sleep at night and what role drugs and alcohol play in their lives. The book also follows people through different institutional settings, including a homeless day centre, a needle exchange, a centre for people with alcohol problems and a homeless shelter.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Urban Studies
    Area: France
    Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 11
  • Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America

    Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America

    González Gálvez, M., Di Giminiani, P., & Bacchiddu, G. (eds)

    Whether invented, discovered, implicit, or directly addressed, relations remain the main focus of most anthropological inquiries. These relations, once conceptualized in ethnographic fieldwork as self-evident connections between discrete social units, have been increasingly explored through local ontological theories. This collected volume explores how ethnographies of indigenous South America have helped to inspire this analytic shift, demonstrating the continued importance of ethnographic diversity. Most importantly, this volume asserts that comparative ethnographic research can help illustrate complex questions surrounding relations vis-à-vis the homogenizing effects of modern coloniality.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 13
  • Profiles of Anthropological Praxis

    Profiles of Anthropological Praxis

    An International Casebook

    Redding, T. M. & Cheney, C. C. (eds)

    The book Profiles of Anthropological Praxis is something of a sequel to Anthropological Praxis: Translating Knowledge into Action, published in 1987 (Westview Press).  As a casebook of anthropological projects, the new version shares a fascinating breadth of award-winning projects undertaken by applied anthropologists to address the needs of an array of stakeholders and situations. Each chapter will describe a problem and how a project attempted to address it with the following structure: Problem Overview, Project Description, Anthropologist’s Role and Impact, Outcomes, and the Anthropological Difference – that is, how the unique approaches of anthropology were effectively applied to address human problems.

    Subjects: Applied Anthropology Theory and Methodology
  • Bulldozer Capitalism

    Bulldozer Capitalism

    Accumulation, Ruination, and Dispossession in Northeastern Turkey

    Evren, E.

    Set in the resource frontier of northeastern Turkey, Bulldozer Capitalism studies the rise and decline of an anti-dam/anti-displacement campaign and the political responses to other extractive projects that it helped to shape in its aftermath. The book shows that people can accommodate their own dispossession and displacement if they are directed to negotiate, invest in, and speculate on the destruction of their built environment and nature, and their material and immaterial bonds, wealth, and activities.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
    Area: Middle East & Israel
    Series: Dislocations Volume 31
  • Gender, Power, and Non-Governance

    Gender, Power, and Non-Governance

    Is Female to Male as NGO Is to State?

    Timmer, A. D. & Wirtz, E. (eds)

    Using Sherry Ortner’s analogy of Female/Nature, Male/Culture, this volume interrogates the gendered aspects of governance by exploring the NGO/State relationship. By examining how NGOs/States perform gendered roles and actions and the gendered divisions of labor involved in different types of institutional engagement, this volume attends to the ways in which gender and governance constitute flexible, relational, and contingent systems of power. The chapters in this volume present diverse analyses of the ways in which projects of governance both reproduce and challenge binaries.

    Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General) Development Studies
  • Grazing Communities

    Grazing Communities

    Pastoralism on the Move and Biocultural Heritage Frictions

    Bindi, L. (ed)

    Pastoralism is a diffused and ancient form of human subsistence and probably one of the most studied by anthropologists at the crossroads between continuities and transformations. The present critical discourse on sustainable and responsible development implies a change of practices, a huge socio-economic transformation, and the return of new shepherds and herders in different European regions. Transhumance and extensive breeding are revitalized as a potential resource for inner and rural areas of Europe against depopulation and as an efficient form of farming deeply influencing landscape and functioning as a perfect eco-system service. This book is an occasion to reconsider grazing communities’ frictions in the new global heritage scenario.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Development Studies
    Area: Europe
    Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 29
  • Thrift and Its Paradoxes

    Thrift and Its Paradoxes

    From Domestic to Political Economy

    Alexander, C. & Sosna, D. (eds)

    Thrift is a central concern for most people, especially in turbulent economic times. It is both an economic and an ethical logic of frugal living, saving and avoiding waste for long-term kin care. These logics echo the ancient ideal of household self-sufficiency, contrasting with capitalism’s wasteful present-focused growth. But thrift now exceeds domestic matters straying across scales to justify public expenditure cuts. Through a wide range of ethnographic contexts this book explores how practices and moralities of thrift are intertwined with austerity, debt, welfare, and patronage across various social and temporal scales and are constantly re-negotiated at the nexus of socio-economic, religious, and kinship ideals and praxis.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
    Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 10
  • Minority Discourses in Germany since 1990

    Minority Discourses in Germany since 1990

    Gezen, E., Layne, P., & Skolnik, J. (eds)

    While German unification promised a new historical beginning, it also stirred discussions about contemporary Germany’s Nazi past and ideas of citizenship and belonging in a changing Europe. Minority Discourses in Germany Since 1990 explores the intersections and divergences between Black German, Turkish German, and German Jewish experiences, with reflections on the evolving academic paradigms with which these are studied. Informed by comparative approaches, the volume investigates social and aesthetic interventions into contemporary German public and political discourse on memory, racism, citizenship, immigration, and history.

    Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Germany
    Series: Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association Volume 23
  • Arctic Abstractive Industry

    Arctic Abstractive Industry

    Assembling the Valuable and Vulnerable North

    Mason, A. (ed)

    Through diverse engagements with natural resource extraction and ecological vulnerability in the contemporary Arctic, contributors to this volume apprehend Arctic resource regimes through the concept of abstraction. Abstraction refers to the creation of new material substances and cultural values by detaching parts from existing substances and values. The abstractive process differs from the activity of extractive industries by its focus on the conceptual resources that conceal processes of exploitation associated with extraction. The study of abstraction can thus help us attune to the formal operations that make appropriations of value possible while disclosing the politics of extraction and of its representation.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies
    Area: Circumpolar
    Series: Studies in the Circumpolar North Volume 5
  • Fire on the Island

    Fire on the Island

    Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu

    Bratrud, T.

    In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision’. However, it ended dramatically when two men believed to be sorcerers and responsible for much of the society’s problems were hung by persons fearing for the island’s future security. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on Ahamb between 2010 and 2017, this book investigates how upheavals like the Ahamb revival can emerge to address and sometimes resolve social problems, but also carry risks of exacerbating the same problems they arise to address.

    Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology Volume 13
  • African Political Systems Revisited

    African Political Systems Revisited

    Changing Perspectives on Statehood and Power

    Bošković, A. & Schlee, G. (eds)

    Reexamining a classical work of social anthropology, African Political Systems (1940), edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, this book looks at the colonial and academic context from which the work arose, as well as its reception and its subject matter, and looks at how the work can help with analysis of current politics in Africa. This book critically reflects upon the history of anthropology. It also contributes to a political anthropology which is aware of its antecedents, self-reflexive as a discipline, conscious of pitfalls and biases, and able to locate itself in its academic, social and political environment.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Colonial History Development Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 26
  • Nurturing the Other

    Nurturing the Other

    First Contacts and the Making of Christian Bodies in Amazonia

    Grotti, V.

    Combining archival research, oral history and long-term ethnography, this book studies relations between Amerindians and outsiders, such as American missionaries, through a series of contact expeditions that led to the 'pacification' of three native Amazonian groups in Suriname and French Guiana. The author examines and contrasts Amerindian and non-Amerindian views on this process of social transformation through the lens of the body, notions of peacefulness and kinship, as well as native warfare and shamanism. The book addresses questions of change and continuity, and the little explored links between first contacts, capture and native conversion to Christianity in contemporary indigenous Amazonia.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Precarity of Masculinity, The

    The Precarity of Masculinity

    Football, Pentecostalism, and Transnational Aspirations in Cameroon

    Kovač, U.

    Since the 1990s, an increasing number of young men in Cameroon have aspired to play football as a career and a strategy to migrate abroad. Migration through the sport promises fulfillment of masculine dreams of sports stardom, as well as opportunities to earn a living that have been hollowed out by the country’s long economic stalemate. The aspiring footballers are increasingly turning to Pentecostal Christianity, which allows them to challenge common tropes of young men as stubborn and promiscuous, while also offering a moral and bodily regime that promises success despite the odds. Yet the transnational sports market is tough and unpredictable: it demands disciplined young bodies and introduces new forms of uncertainty. This book unpacks young Cameroonians' football dreams, Pentecostal faith, obligations to provide, and desires to migrate to highlight the precarity of masculinity in structurally adjusted Africa and neoliberal capitalism.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Africa
  • Indigenous Resurgence

    Indigenous Resurgence

    Decolonialization and Movements for Environmental Justice

    Dhillon, J.

    From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community’s protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology Colonial History
  • New African Elite, A

    A New African Elite

    Place in the Making of a Bridge Generation

    Pellow, D.

    Focusing on a sub-set of the Dagomba of northern Ghana, this book looks at the first generation to go through secondary school in the north. After university and post-graduate education, they relocate to Accra, the capital, hundreds of miles south. They crossed social and physical space and have become cosmopolitan while holding on to tradition and attachment to their home town. This bridge generation are patrons to those living up north. This book charts their path into elite status and argues that they use the tools gained through education and social connections to influence politics back home.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies Development Studies
    Area: Africa
  • Engaging environments in Tonga

    Engaging Environments in Tonga

    Cultivating Beauty and Nurturing Relations in a Changing World

    Perminow, A. A.

    On March 11, 2011, a tsunami warning was issued for Tonga in Polynesia. On the low and small island of Kotu, people were unperturbed in the face of impending catastrophe. The book starts out from the puzzle of peoples’ responses and reactions to this warning as well as their attitudes to a gradual rise of sea level and questions why people seemed so unconcerned about this and the accompanying loss of land. The book is an ethnography of the relationship between people and their environment based on fieldwork over three decades.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists Volume 9
  • Social Origins of Thought, The

    The Social Origins of Thought

    Durkheim, Mauss, and the Category Project

    Schick, Johannes F. M.

    By studying how different societies understand categories such as time and causality, the Durkheimians decentered Western epistemology.  With contributions from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, media studies, and sinology, this volume illustrates the interdisciplinarity and intellectual rigor of the “category project” which did not only stir controversies among contemporary scholars but paved the way for other theories exploring how the thoughts of individuals are prefigured by society and vice versa.

    Subjects: Sociology Theory and Methodology Media Studies
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 43
  • Self in the World

    Self in the World

    Connecting Life's Extremes

    Hart, K.

    Eminent anthropologist Keith Hart draws on the humanities, popular culture and his own experiences to help readers explore their own place in history.

    We each embark on two life journeys – one out into the world, the other inward to the self. With these journeys in mind, anthropologist, amateur economist and globetrotter Keith Hart reflects on a life of learning, sharing and remembering to offer readers the means of connecting life’s extremes – individual and society, local and global, personal and impersonal dimensions of existence and explores what it is that makes us fully human.

    “This is a work of great originality. Keith Hart has had an unorthodox academic career and it has liberated him in many ways from academic pieties. His background in African ethnography gives him a fascinating angle on all sorts of things, not least the possibility of a more African-influenced global future. The book is full of surprises and mind-shifting observations. I actually couldn't put it down.”—Sherry B. Ortner, UCLA

    From the introduction:
    People have many sides, but I will focus here on two. Each of us is a biological organism with a historical personality that together make us a unique individual. But we cannot live outside society which shapes us in unfathomable ways. Human beings must learn to be self-reliant (not self-interested) in small and large ways: no-one will brush your teeth for you or save you from being run over while crossing the street. We each must also learn to belong to others, merging personal identity in a plethora of social relations and categories. Modern ideology insists that being individual and mutual is problematic. The culture of capitalist societies anticipates a conflict between them. Yet they are inseparable aspects of human nature.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
  • Contested Holdings

    Contested Holdings

    Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return

    Bodenstein, F., Otoiu, D., & Troelenberg, E.-M. (eds)

    Going beyond strictly legal and property-oriented aspects of the restitution debate, restitution is considered as part of a larger set of processes of return that affect museums and collections, as well as notions of heritage and object status. Covering a range of case studies and a global geography, the authors aim to historicize and bring depth to contemporary debates in relation to both the return of material culture and human remains. Defined as contested holdings, differing museum collections ranging from fine arts to physical anthropology provide connections between the treatment and conceptualization of collections that generally occupy separate realms in the museum world.

    Subjects: Museum Studies Archaeology Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: Museums and Collections Volume 14
  • Afropolitan Horizons

    Afropolitan Horizons

    Essays toward a Literary Anthropology of Nigeria

    Hannerz, U.

    Nigeria is a country shaped by internal diversity and transnational connections, past and present. Leading Nigerian writers from Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole have portrayed these Nigerian issues, and have also written about some of the momentous events in Nigerian history. Afropolitan Horizons discusses their work alongside other novelists and commentators, as well as describing the ways in which Nigeria has appeared in foreign news reporting. It is all interwoven with the author’s own anthropological field research in a town in Central Nigeria.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Literary Studies Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Africa
  • Cooling Down

    Cooling Down

    Local Responses to Global Climate Change

    Hoffman, S. M., Eriksen, T. H., & Mendes, P. (eds)

    Climate change is a slowly advancing crisis sweeping over the planet and affecting different habitats in strikingly diverse ways. While nations have signed treaties and implemented policies, most actual climate change assessments, adaptations, and countermeasures take place at the local level. People are responding by adjusting their practices, livelihoods, and cultures, protesting and migrating. This book portrays the diversity of explanations and remedies as expressed at the community level and its emphasis on the crucial importance of ethnographic detail in demonstrating how people in different parts of the world are scaling down the phenomenon of global warming.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Urban Studies
  • Configuring Contagion

    Configuring Contagion

    Ethnographies of Biosocial Epidemics

    Meinert, L. & Seeberg, J. (eds)

    Expanding our understanding of contagion beyond the typical notions of infection and pandemics, this book widens the field to include the concept of biosocial epidemics. The chapters propose varied and detailed answers to questions about epidemics and their contagious potential for specific infections and non-infectious conditions. Together they explore how inseparable social and biological processes configure co-existing influences, which create epidemics, and in doing so stress the role of social inequality in these processes. The authors compellingly show that epidemics do not spread evenly in populations or through simple coincidental biological contagion: they are biosocially structured and selective, and happen under specific economic, political and environmental conditions. This volume illustrates that an understanding of biosocial factors is vital for ensuring effective strategies for the containment of epidemics.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology
    Series: Epistemologies of Healing Volume 19
  • Refugees on the Move

    Refugees on the Move

    Crisis and Response in Turkey and Europe

    Balkan, E. & Kutlu Tonak, Z. (eds)

    Refugees on the Move highlights and explores the profound complexities of the current refugee issue by focusing specifically on Syrian refugees in Turkey and other European countries and responses from the host countries involved. It examines the causes of the movement of refugee populations, the difficulties they face during their journeys, the daily challenges and obstacles they experience, and host governments’ attempts to manage and overcome the so-called “refugee crisis.”

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 45
  • Opening Up the University

    Opening Up the University

    Teaching and Learning with Refugees

    Cantat, C., Cook, I., & Rajaram, P. K. (eds)

    Through a series of empirically and theoretically informed reflections, Opening Up the University offers insights into the process of setting up and running programs that cater to displaced students. Including contributions from educators, administrators, practitioners, and students, this expansive collected volume aims to inspire and question those who are considering creating their own interventions, speaking to policy makers and university administrators on specific points relating to the access and success of refugees in higher education, and suggests concrete avenues for further action within existing academic structures.

    Subjects: Educational Studies Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
    Series: Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies Volume 5
  • Durable Solutions

    Durable Solutions

    Challenges with Implementing Global Norms for Internally Displaced Persons in Georgia

    Funke, C.

    Focusing on Georgia, this book presents a theoretical and empirical study on the implementation of durable solutions for internally displaced persons (IDPs). Building on extensive field research, it describes and explains the considerable problems which Georgia faces in establishing global norms, as well as the ongoing hardship that IDPs experience. Importantly, the book reveals the simultaneous progress and setbacks in implementing durable solutions. Successfully combining approaches from humanistic studies, international relations, and organizational sociology, this book explains the interaction of norms and actors at and among three societal levels: the international, national, and local.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 44
  • Representing 21st-Century Migration in Europe

    Representing 21st-Century Migration in Europe

    Performing Borders, Identities and Texts

    González Ortega, N. & Martínez García, A. B. (eds)

    The 21st century has witnessed some of the largest human migrations in history. Europe in particular has seen a major influx of refugees, redefining notions of borders and national identity. This interdisciplinary volume brings together leading international scholars of migration from perspectives as varied as literature, linguistics, area and cultural studies, media and communication, visual arts, and film studies. Together, they offer innovative interpretations of migrants and contemporary migration to Europe, enriching today’s political and media landscape, and engaging with the ongoing debate on forced mobility and rights of both extra-European migrants and European citizens.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies
    Area: Europe
  • American Icon in Puerto Rico, An

    An American Icon in Puerto Rico

    Barbie, Girlhood, and Colonialism at Play

    Aguiló-Pérez, E. R.

    Focusing on multigenerational Puerto Rican women and girls, Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez masterfully illustrates how Barbie dolls impact femininity, body image, and cultural identity.

    Since her debut in 1959, Barbie has transcended boundaries and transformed into a global symbol of femininity, capturing the imaginations of girls all around the world. An American Icon in Puerto Rico offers a captivating study of that iconic influence by focusing on a group of multigenerational Puerto Rican women and girls.

    Through personal narratives and insights, author Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez unveils the emotional attachment that these women and girls have formed with the doll during their formative years. This connection serves as a powerful lens to explore the intricate relationships girls have with their Barbie dolls and the complex role Barbie plays in shaping their identities.

    Aguiló-Pérez boldly confronts the challenges and contradictions that arise, offering a compelling analysis of how playing with Barbie dolls can impact a girl's perception of femininity, body image, race, and even national identity. Through these nuanced explorations, she unearths the potential pitfalls of these influences, encouraging readers to reflect on their own relationships with the iconic doll.

    By weaving together personal anecdotes, historical context, and sociocultural analysis, Aguiló-Pérez masterfully illustrates how these women and girls navigate the diverse landscapes of femininity, body image, and cultural identity, with Barbie serving as both a facilitator and a reflection of their growth. In doing so, she redefines the significance of Barbie in the lives of Puerto Rican women and girls, prompting readers from all around the world to reevaluate their perceptions of femininity and embrace a more inclusive understanding of beauty, body image, and self-expression.

    Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General) Sociology
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Transnational Girlhoods Volume 4
  • Walls and Gateways

    Walls and Gateways

    Contested Heritage in Dubrovnik

    Loades, C. M.

    In 1979 Dubrovnik was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, which had consequences for the city's broader cultural heritage. Walls and Gateways explores how this status intersects with the reconstruction and consolidation of identities and locality in the city’s post-war context. It analyses how representations, perceptions and uses of Dubrovnik’s heritage are embedded in particular cultural practices, materiality and place. In Dubrovnik’s post-war context, different uses of cultural memory and heritage provoke both dissonance and unity, shape practices and mobilize cultural and political activism.

    Subjects: Heritage Studies Anthropology (General) Memory Studies
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Explorations in Heritage Studies Volume 3
  • Land and the Mortgage

    Land and the Mortgage

    History, Culture, Belonging

    Rodima-Taylor, D. & Shipton, P. (eds)

    The mortgaging of land is not just economic and legal but also social and cultural. Here, anthropologists, historians, and economists explore origins, variations, and meanings of the land mortgage, and the risks to homes and livelihoods. Combining findings from archives, printed records, and live ethnography, the book describes the changing and problematic assumptions surrounding mortgage.  It shows how mortgages affect people on the ground, where local forms of mutuality mix with larger bureaucracies. The outcomes of mortgage in Africa, Europe, Asia, and America challenge economic development orthodoxies, calling for a human-centered exploration of this age-old institution.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
    Series: The Human Economy Volume 9
  • Neoliberalizing Diversity in Liberal Arts College Life

    Neoliberalizing Diversity in Liberal Arts College Life

    Urciuoli, B.

    As neoliberalism has expanded from corporations to higher education, the notion of “diversity” is increasingly seen as the contribution of individuals to an organization. By focusing on one liberal arts college, author Bonnie Urciuoli shows how schools market themselves as “diverse” communities to which all members contribute. She explores how students of color are recruited, how their lives are institutionally organized, and how they provide the faces, numbers, and stories that represent schools as diverse. In doing so, she finds that unlike students’ routine experiences of racism or other social differences, neoliberal diversity is mainly about improving schools’ images.

    Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: North America
    Series: Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies Volume 6
  • An Urban Future for Sápmi?

    An Urban Future for Sápmi?

    Indigenous Urbanization in the Nordic States and Russia

    Berg-Nordlie, M., Dankertsen, A, & Winsvold, M. (eds)

    Presenting the political and cultural processes that occur within the indigenous Sámi people of North Europe as they undergo urbanization, this book examines how they have retained their sense of history and culture in this new setting. The book presents data and analysis on subjects such as indigenous urbanization history, urban indigenous identity issues, urban indigenous youth, and the governance of urban “spaces” for indigenous culture and community. The book is written by a team of researchers, mostly Sámi, from all the countries covered in the book.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Sociology
    Area: Circumpolar
    Series: Studies in the Circumpolar North Volume 4
  • Migration in the Making of the Gulf Space

    Migration in the Making of the Gulf Space

    Social, Political, and Cultural Dimensions

    Bouzas, A. M. & Casini, L. (eds)

    Combining visual and literary analyses and original ethnographic studies as part of a more general political reflection, Migration in the Making of Gulf Space examines the role of migrants and non-citizens in the processes of settling in the Arab States of the Gulf region. The contributions underscore the aspirational character of the Gulf as a place where migrant recognition can be attained while also reflecting on practices of exclusion. The book is the result of an interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars and includes an original contribution by the acclaimed author of the novel Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Middle East & Israel
    Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 11
  • Françoise Héritier

    Françoise Héritier

    Gaillard, G.

    Follows the life of French anthropologist Françoise Héritier, who had a lasting impact on a generation of French anthropologists that continues to this day.

    A great intellectual figure, Françoise Héritier succeeded Claude Lévi-Strauss as the Chair of Anthropology at the Collège de France in 1982. She was an Africanist, author of magnificent works on the Samo population, the scientific progenitor of kinship studies, the creator of a theoretical base to feminist thought and an activist for many causes.

    “I read this intellectual biography of Françoise Héritier with great pleasure. Though highly regarded in France, she is not yet well known in English-language academic circles, but she certainly should be. This book will be a revelation to many anthropologists and feminist scholars.”—Adam Kuper, London School of Economics

    From the Forword by Michelle Perrot:
    I came to know her at the National Council for HIV, that she chaired from 1989 to 1994…. Her theoretical concerns were also crucial to the understanding of pandemics, but we did not then realise that HIV/AIDS was also a precursor and a warning of pandemics to come. She grasped the importance of conceptions of bodily ‘humours’—blood, semen, milk—that seemed to play a role in the horrific spread of an epidemic of which we knew nothing, except that it resulted in an appalling mortality rate, particularly among young men…. she was a remarkable chair, concerned to share her insights into the illness and to anchor—necessary—interventions within a framework that would be respectful of human rights.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Series: Anthropology's Ancestors Volume 3
  • Mediated Lives

    Mediated Lives

    Waiting and Hope among Iraqi Refugees in Jordan

    Twigt, M.

    Using the example of Iraqi refugees in Jordan's capital of Amman, this book describes how information and communication technologies (ICTs) play out in the everyday experiences of urban refugees, geographically located in the Global South, and shows how interactions between online and offline spaces are key for making sense of the humanitarian regime, for carving out a sense of home and for sustaining hope. This book paints a humanizing account of making do amid legal marginalization, prolonged insecurity, and the proliferation of digital technologies.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Media Studies
    Area: Middle East & Israel
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 43
  • Franz Baermann Steiner

    Franz Baermann Steiner

    A Stranger in the World

    Adler, J. & Fardon, R.

    Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-52) provided the vital link between the intellectual culture of central Europe and the Oxford Institute of Anthropology in its post-Second World War years.

    This book demonstrates his quiet influence within anthropology, which has extended from Mary Douglas to David Graeber, and how his remarkable poetry reflected profoundly on the slavery and murder of the Shoah, an event which he escaped from. Steiner’s concerns including inter-disciplinarity, genre, refugees and exile, colonialism and violence, and the sources of European anthropology speak to contemporary concerns more directly now than at any time since his early death.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Literary Studies
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 42
  • We are All Africans Here

    We are All Africans Here

    Race, Mobilities and West Africans in Europe

    Loftsdóttir, K.

    Europe is often described as "flooded" by migrants or by Muslim "others," with Western African men especially portrayed as a security risk. At the same time the intensified mobility of privileged people in the Global North is celebrated as creating an increasingly cosmopolitan world. This book looks critically at racialization of mobility in Europe, anchoring the discussion in the aspiration of precarious migrants from Niger in Belgium and Italy. The book contextualizes their experiences within the ongoing securitization of mobility in their home country and the persistent denial of racism and colonialism that seeks to portray the innocence of Europe.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Europe
    Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 10
  • Extremism, Society, and the State

    Extremism, Society, and the State

    Loperfido, G. (ed)

    Extremism does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, extremism is a relative concept that often emerges in crisis situations, taking shape within the tense and contradictory relations that tie marginal spaces, state orders, and mainstream culture. This collected volume brings together leading anthropologists and cultural analysts to offer a concise look at the narratives, symbolic, and metaphoric fields related to extremism, systematizing an approach to extremism, and placing these ideologies into historical, political, and geo-systemic contexts.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis Volume 20
  • Good Enough Mothers

    Good Enough Mothers

    Practicing Nurture and Motherhood in Chiapas, Mexico

    López, JM

    Motherhood in Mexico is profoundly shaped by the legacy of colonialism. This ethnography situates motherhood in a critical global health analysis of maternal health inequalities and interventions in the southeast state of Chiapas. Using a transitional life course framework, it demonstrates how the transition to motherhood is never complete. Once a good mother is defined, she becomes undefined, the goal posts moved, and the rules confronted.

    Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 49
  • Pursuit of Pleasurable Work, The

    The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work

    Craftwork in Twenty-First Century England

    Marchand, T. H. J.

    Against the backdrop of an alienating, technologizing and ever-accelerating world of material production, this book tells an intimate story: one about a community of woodworkers training at an historic institution in London’s East End during the present ‘renaissance of craftsmanship’. The animated and scholarly accounts of learning, achievement and challenges reveal the deep human desire to create with our hands, the persistent longing to find meaningful work, and the struggle to realise dreams. In its penetrating explorations of the nature of embodied skill, the book champions greater appreciation for the dexterity, ingenuity and intelligence that lie at the heart of craftwork.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Northern Europe
    Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations Volume 4
  • Cosmic Coherence

    Cosmic Coherence

    A Cognitive Anthropology Through Chinese Divination

    Matthews, W.

    Humans are unique in their ability to create systematic accounts of the world – theories based on guiding cosmological principles. This book is about the role of cognition in creating cosmologies, and explores this through the ethnography and history of Yijing divination in China. Diviners explain the cosmos in terms of a single substance, qi, unfolding across scales of increasing complexity to create natural phenomena and human experience. Combined with an understanding of human cognition, it shows how this conception of scale offers a new way for anthropologists and other social scientists to think about cosmology, comparison and cultural difference.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia
    Series: Asian Anthropologies Volume 13
  • Dressing Up

    Dressing Up

    Menswear in the Age of Social Media

    Bluteau, J. M.

    What does men’s fashion say about contemporary masculinity? How do these notions operate in an increasingly digitized world? To answer these questions, author Joshua M. Bluteau combines theoretical analysis with vibrant narrative, exploring men’s fashion in the online world of social media as well as the offline worlds of retail, production, and the catwalk. Is it time to reassess notions of masculinity? How do we construct ourselves in the online world, and what are the dangers of doing so? From the ateliers of London to the digital landscape of Instagram, Dressing Up re-examines the ways men dress, and the ways men post.

    Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies Anthropology (General)
  • Nothing New in Europe?

    Nothing New in Europe?

    Israelis Look at Antisemitism Today

    Haviv-Horiner, A.

    Today, more than 75 years after the Holocaust and World War II, antisemitism remains a poisonous force in European culture and politics, whether cloaked in the garb of reactionary nationalism or manifested in outright physical violence. Nothing New in Europe? provides a sobering look at the persistence of European antisemitism today through fifteen interviews with Jewish Israelis living in Germany, Poland, France, and other countries, supplemented with in-depth scholarly essays. The interviewees draw upon their lived experiences to reflect on anti-Jewish rhetoric, the role of Israel, and the relationship between antisemitism and the persecution of other minorities.

    Subject: Sociology
    Area: Europe
  • Carnivalizing Reconciliation

    Carnivalizing Reconciliation

    Contemporary Australian and Canadian Literature and Film beyond the Victim Paradigm

    Teichler, H.

    Transitional justice and national inquiries may be the most established means for coming to terms with traumatic legacies, but it is in the more subtle social and cultural processes of “memory work” that the pitfalls and promises of reconciliation are laid bare. This book analyzes, within the realms of literature and film, recent Australian and Canadian attempts to reconcile with Indigenous populations in the wake of forced child removal. As Hanna Teichler demonstrates, their systematic emphasis on the subjectivity of the victim is problematic, reproducing simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization. Such fictions of reconciliation venture beyond simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization, offering new opportunities for confronting painful histories.

    Subjects: Memory Studies Literary Studies Film and Television Studies
    Areas: North America Asia-Pacific
    Series: Worlds of Memory Volume 8
  • Collaborative Happiness

    Collaborative Happiness

    Building the Good Life in Urban Cohousing Communities

    Kingfisher, C.

    Understudied relative to other forms of intentional community, and under-recognized in policy-making circles, urban cohousing communities situate wellbeing as simultaneously social and subjective, while catering for groups of people so diverse in age. Collaborative Happiness looks at two such urban cohousing communities: Kankanmori, in Tokyo; and Quayside Village, in Vancouver. In expanding beyond mainstream approaches to happiness focused exclusively on the individual, Quayside Village and Kankanmori provide an alternative model for how to understand and practice the good life in an increasingly urbanized world marked by crisis of both social and environmental sustainability.

    Subjects: Applied Anthropology Urban Studies Sociology
    Series: Life Course, Culture and Aging: Global Transformations Volume 8
  • Anthroposcene of Weather and Climate, The

    The Anthroposcene of Weather and Climate

    Ethnographic Contributions to the Climate Change Debate

    Sillitoe, P. (ed)

    While it is widely acknowledged that climate change is among the greatest global challenges of our times, it has local implications too.  This volume forefronts these local issues, giving anthropology a voice in this great debate, which is otherwise dominated by natural scientists and policy makers.  It shows what an ethnographic focus can offer in furthering our understanding of the lived realities of climate debates. Contributors from communities around the world discuss local knowledge of, and responses to, environmental changes that need to feature in scientifically framed policies regarding mitigation and adaptation measures if they are to be effective.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Urban Studies
  • Crafting Chinese Memories

    Crafting Chinese Memories

    The Art and Materiality of Storytelling

    Swancutt, K. (ed)

    Through an interdisciplinary conversation with contributors from social anthropology, religious studies, film studies, literary studies, cultural studies, and history, Crafting Chinese Memories is a novel book which addresses how works of art shape memories, and offers new ways of conceptualising storytelling, memory-making, art, and materiality. It explores the memories of artists, filmmakers, novelists, storytellers, and persons who come to terms with their own histories even as they reveal the social memories of watershed events in modern China.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Memory Studies Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia
    Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Volume 11
  • Moral Economy at Work

    Moral Economy at Work

    Ethnographic Investigations in Eurasia

    Yalçın-Heckmann, L. (ed)

    The idea of a moral economy has been explored and assessed in numerous disciplines. The anthropological studies in this volume provide a new perspective to this idea by showing how the relations of workers, employees and employers, and of firms, families and households are interwoven with local notions of moralities. From concepts of individual autonomy, kinship obligations, to ways of expressing mutuality or creativity, moral values exert an unrealized influence, and these often produce more consent than resistance or outrage.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
    Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 8
  • Cattle Poetics

    Cattle Poetics

    How Aesthetics Shapes Politics in Mursiland, Ethiopia

    Eczet, J.-B.

    Loving cows, then killing them. The relation with cattle in Mursi country is shaped by the dichotomy between the value given to it during life and the death imposed upon it. The killing of cattle may be brief and inflicted with few words, but it is preceded by a series of intense aesthetic practices, such as body painting and adornments, colour poetics, poems and oratory art. This book investigates the link between the nurturing and killing of cattle with Mursi daily life and finds that these rituals cut across pastoralism, social organisation and politics in forming the very fabric of Mursi society.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Development Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: Ethnography, Theory, Experiment Volume 9
  • Hope and Insufficiency

    Hope and Insufficiency

    Capacity Building in Ethnographic Comparison

    Douglas-Jones, R. & Shaffner, J. (eds)

    A process through which skills, knowledge, and resources are expanded, capacity building, remains a tantalizing and pervasive concept throughout the field of anthropology, though it has received little in the way of critical analysis. By exploring the concept’s role in a variety of different settings including government lexicons, religious organizations, environmental campaigns, biomedical training, and fieldwork from around the globe, Hope and Insufficiency seeks to question the histories, assumptions, intentions, and enactments that have led to the ubiquity of capacity building, thereby developing a much-needed critical purchase on its persuasive power.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)
  • How is a Man Supposed to be a Man?

    How is a Man Supposed to be a Man?

    Male Childlessness – a Life Course Disrupted

    Hadley, R. A.

    The global trend of declining fertility rates and an increasingly ageing population has serious implications for individuals and institutions alike. Childless men are mostly excluded from ageing, social science and reproduction scholarship and almost completely absent from most national statistics. This unique book examines the lived experiences of a hidden and disenfranchised population: men who wanted to be fathers. It explores the complex intersections that influence childlessness over the life course.

    Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)
    Area: Northern Europe
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 48
  • Dictionary of Authentic American Proverbs

    Dictionary of Authentic American Proverbs

    Mieder, W.

    Dictionary of Authentic American Proverbs offers a comprehensive reference guide for distinctly American proverbs. Compiled by Wolfgang Mieder, a key figure in the field of proverb studies, this compendium features nearly 1,500 proverbs with American origins, spanning the 17th century to present day, including a scholarly introduction exploring the history of proverbs in America, the structure and variants of these proverbs, known authors and sources, and cultural values expressed in these proverbs. Along with a comprehensive bibliography of proverb collections and interpretive scholarship, this dictionary offers a glimpse into the history of American social and cultural attitudes through uniquely American language.

    Subjects: Literary Studies Heritage Studies Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: North America
  • Digital Archives and Collections

    Digital Archives and Collections

    Creating Online Access to Cultural Heritage

    Müller, K.

    Museums and archives all over the world digitize their collections and provide online access to heritage material. But what factors determine the content, structure and use of these online inventories? This book turns to India and Europe to answer this question. It explains how museums and archives envision, decide and conduct digitization and online dissemination. It also sheds light on born-digital, community-based archives, which have established themselves as new actors in the field. Based on anthropological fieldwork, the chapters in the book trace digital archives from technical advancements and postcolonial initiatives to programming alternatives, editing content, and active use of digital archives.

    Subjects: Museum Studies Media Studies Anthropology (General)
    Series: Anthropology of Media Volume 11
  • Camino de Santiago, The

    The Camino de Santiago

    Curating the Pilgrimage as Heritage and Tourism

    Murray, M.

    Pilgrimage, as a global activity linked to the sacred, speaks to the special significance of persons, places and events. This book relates these sentiments to the curatorship of the Camino de Santiago that comprises a lattice of European pilgrimage itineraries converging at Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. The detailed analysis focuses on the management of pilgrimage settings as heritage and tourism linked to the shrine of Saint James and gives particular attention to investment guidelines, land use planning regulations, environmental stewardship, information dissemination and museology.

    Subjects: Heritage Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
    Area: Southern Europe
  • Work, Society, and the Ethical Self

    Work, Society, and the Ethical Self

    Chimeras of Freedom in the Neoliberal Era

    Hann, C. (ed)

    Primarily on the basis of ethnographic case-studies from around the world, this volume links investigations of work to questions of personal and professional identity and social relations. In the era of digitalized neoliberalism, particular attention is paid to notions of freedom, both collective (in social relations) and individual (in subjective experiences). These cannot be investigated separately. Rather than juxtapose economy with ethics (or the profitable with the good), the authors uncover complex entanglements between the drudgery experienced by most people in the course of making a living and ideals of emancipated personhood.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
    Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 7
  • Bigger Fish to Fry

    Bigger Fish to Fry

    A Theory of Cooking as Risk, with Greek Examples

    Sutton, D. E.

    What defines cooking as cooking, and why does cooking matter to the understanding of society, cultural change and everyday life? This book explores these questions by proposing a new theory of the meaning of cooking as a willingness to put oneself and one’s meals at risk on a daily basis. Richly illustrated with examples from the author’s anthropology fieldwork in Greece, Bigger Fish to Fry proposes a new approach to the meaning of cooking and how the study of cooking can reshape our understanding of social processes more generally.

    Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations Volume 3
  • Vertiginous Life

    Vertiginous Life

    An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen

    Knight, D. M.

    Vertiginous Life provides a theory of the intense temporal disorientation brought about by life in crisis. In the whirlpool of unforeseen social change, people experience confusion as to where and when they belong on timelines of previously unquestioned pasts and futures. Through individual stories from crisis Greece, this book explores the everyday affects of vertigo: nausea, dizziness, breathlessness, the sense of falling, and unknowingness of Self. Being lost in time, caught in the spin-cycle of crisis, people reflect on belonging to modern Europe, neoliberal promises of accumulation, defeated futures, and the existential dilemmas of life held captive in the uncanny elsewhen.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations Volume 2
  • Latin America and Refugee Protection

    Latin America and Refugee Protection

    Regimes, Logics, and Challenges

    Jubilut, L. L., Vera Espinoza, M., & Mezzanotti, G. (eds)

    Looking at refugee protection in Latin America, this landmark edited collection assesses what the region has achieved in recent years. It analyses Latin America’s main documents in refugee protection, evaluates the particular aspects of different regimes, and reviews their emergence, development and effect, to develop understanding of refugee protection in the region. Drawing from multidisciplinary texts from both leading academics and practitioners, this comprehensive, innovative and highly topical book adopts an analytical framework to understand and improve Latin America’s protection of refugees.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 41
  • Contemporary Megaprojects

    Contemporary Megaprojects

    Organization, Vision, and Resistance in the 21st Century

    Schindler, S., Fadaere, S., Brockington, D. (eds)

    Contemporary megaprojects have evolved from the discreet, modernist projects undertaken in the past by centralized authorities to encompass everything from large-scale construction to space exploration. Contemporary Megaprojects explores how these projects have been impacted by cutting-edge technology, the private sector, and the processes of decentralization and dematerialization. With case studies ranging from mega-plantations in Southeast Asia to ocean mapping to sports events, the contributions in this collected volume demonstrate the increasing ambition and pervasiveness of these projects, as well as their significant impact on both society and the environment.

    Subjects: Development Studies Environmental Studies (General) Cultural Studies (General)
  • Living Like a Girl

    Living Like a Girl

    Agency, Social Vulnerability and Welfare Measures in Europe and Beyond

    Vogel, M. & Arnell, L. (eds)

    In recent decades, large-scale social changes have taken place in Europe. Ranging from neoliberal social policies to globalization and the growth of EU, these changes have significantly affected the conditions in which girls shape their lives. Living Like a Girl explores the relationship between changing social conditions and girls’ agency, with a particular focus on social services such as school programs and compulsory institutional care. The contributions in this collected volume seek to expand our understanding of contemporary European girlhood by demonstrating how social problems are managed in different cultural contexts, political and social systems.

    Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Europe
    Series: Transnational Girlhoods Volume 3
  • Tracing Slavery

    Tracing Slavery

    The Politics of Atlantic Memory in The Netherlands

    Balkenhol, M.

    Looking at the ways in which the memory of slavery affects present-day relations in Amsterdam, this ethnographic account reveals a paradox: while there is growing official attention to the country’s slavery past (monuments, festivals, ritual occasions), many interlocutors showed little interest in the topic. Developing the notion of “trace” as a seminal notion to explore this paradox, this book follows the issue of slavery in everyday realities and offers a fine-grained ethnography of how people refer to this past – often in almost unconscious ways – and weave it into their perceptions of present-day issues.

    Subjects: Memory Studies Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies
    Area: Europe
    Series: EASA Series Volume 43
  • Stories from an Ancient Land

    Stories from an Ancient Land

    Perspectives on Wa History and Culture

    Fiskesjö, M.

    The Wa people have a rich civilization of their own, and a deep history in the mountains of Southeast Asia. Their mythology suggests their land is the first place inhabited by humans, which they care for on behalf of the world. This book introduces aspects of Wa culture, including their approach to the world’s troubles and the lessons others might learn from it. It also presents a new interpretation of Wa headhunting, questioning explanations that see it as a primitive custom, and instead placing it within the fraught history of the last few centuries.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Asian Anthropologies Volume 12
  • William Robertson Smith

    William Robertson Smith

    Bošković, A.

    The life and career of one of anthropology’s most important ancestors, William Robertson Smith in the context of the history of anthropology.

    William Robertson Smith’s influence on anthropology ranged from his relationship with John Ferguson McLennan, to advising James George Frazer to write about “Totem” and “Taboo” for the Encyclopaedia Britannica that he edited. This biography places a special emphasis on the notes and observations from his travels to Arabia, as well as on his influence on the representatives of the “Myth and Ritual School.”

    With his discussion of myth and ritual, Smith influenced generations of scholars, and his insistence on the connection between the people, their God, and the land they inhabited inspired many of the concepts later developed by Émile Durkheim.

    “This is a clear, well-informed and interesting account of Robertson Smith’s central ideas. The theories are set in the context of debates of the day, and their influence on anthropology and bible studies is discussed. An original and fascinating section reviews Robertson Smith’s field work in the Middle East, which was much more extensive and intensive than is, I think, generally appreciated.”—Adam Kuper, London School of Economics

    From the introduction:
    Although respected and studied, especially since the 1990s, Smith has a somewhat paradoxical position in the history of social and cultural anthropology. Anthropologists educated in the twentieth century admire him, but many contemporary scholars are not quite sure what to make of him.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Series: Anthropology's Ancestors Volume 2
  • Matsutake Worlds

    Matsutake Worlds

    Faier, L. & Hathaway, M. J. (eds)

    The matsutake mushroom continues to be a highly sought delicacy, especially in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cuisine. Matsutake Worlds explores this mushroom through the lens of multi-species encounters centered around the matsutake’s notorious elusiveness. The mushroom’s success, the contributors of this volume argue, cannot be accounted for by any one cultural, social, political, or economic process. Rather, the matsutake mushroom has flourished as the result of a number of different processes and dynamics, culminating in the culinary institution we know today.

    Subjects: Sociology Food & Nutrition
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 12
  • Explorations in Economic Anthropology

    Explorations in Economic Anthropology

    Key Issues and Critical Reflections

    Kaneff, D. & Endres, K. W. (eds)

    At a time of rising global economic precarity and social inequality, the field of economic anthropology offers solutions through the study of local and contextualized economic practices. This book is made up of an exciting collection of succinct essays authored by leading scholars primarily from the field of economic anthropology, but also featuring contributions from sociology and history. The chapters engage with debates at the cutting edge of research on the topics of Eurasia, the anthropology of postsocialism and the embeddedness of economic practices.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
  • Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula

    Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula

    An Anthropological Study of the Tapija Phenomenon in Northwest Croatia

    Matošević, A.

    Based on interviews and fieldwork conducted among residents of Pula, a coastal city in Northwestern Croatia, this study explores various aspects of a local feeling of boredom. This is mirrored in the term tapija, a word of Turkish origin describing a property deed, and in Pula’s urban slang it has morphed from its original sense describing a set of affective states into one of lameness, loneliness, unwillingness, and irony. Combining lively conversations with a significant bibliography of the topic, the result is a compelling local anthropological study of boredom in a wider historical and global context.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: European Anthropology in Translation Volume 10
  • Textures of Belonging

    Textures of Belonging

    Senses, Objects and Spaces of Romanian Roma

    Racleş, A.

    The longstanding European conception that Roma and non-Roma are separated by unambiguous socio-cultural distinctions has led to the construction of Roma as “non-belonging others.” Challenging this conception, Textures of Belonging explores how Roma negotiate and feel belonging at the everyday level. Inspired by material culture, sensorial anthropology, and human geography approaches, this book uses ethnographic research to examine the role of domestic material forms and their sensorial qualities in nurturing connections with people and places that transcend socio-political boundaries.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: New Directions in Romani Studies Volume 4
  • After Corporate Paternalism

    After Corporate Paternalism

    Material Renovation and Social Change in Times of Ruination

    Straube, C.

    In this ethnographic study of post-paternalist ruination and renovation, Christian Straube explores social change at the intersection of material decay and social disconnection in the former mine township Mpatamatu of Luanshya, one of the oldest mining towns on the Zambian Copperbelt. Touching on topics including industrial history, colonial town planning, social control and materiality, gender relations and neoliberal structural change, After Corporate Paternalism offers unique insights into how people reappropriate former corporate spaces and transform them into personal projects of renovation, fundamentally changing the characteristics of their community.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Sociology
    Area: Africa
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 24
  • Margaret Mead

    Margaret Mead

    Shankman, P.

    This short volume is an ideal starting point for anyone wanting to learn about, arguably, the most famous anthropologist of the twentieth century.

    “Since her death, a steady drip of books about Mead, one of the most significant women in twentieth century social science and American society, has appeared, some interesting, many quite a bit less so. While Shankman’s biography makes use of them, it nevertheless stands out among the better ones, not only for its well-informed and balanced view of Mead, but also for its concision.”—Times Literary Supplement

    Tracing Mead’s career as an ethnographer, as the early voice of public anthropology, and as a public figure, this elegantly written biography links the professional and personal sides of her career. The book looks at Mead’s early career through the end of World War II, when she produced her most important anthropological works, as well as her role as a public figure in the post-war period, through the 1960s until her death in 1978. The criticisms of Mead are also discussed and analyzed.

    From the introduction:
    After her death, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter…. On the other side of the world, Mead’s passing was remembered in a very different context. On the island of Manus off the coast of New Guinea, the people of Pere village also mourned her death. Mead first studied the people of Pere in the late 1920s, returning in the 1950s with further visits thereafter. Over a span of five decades, she touched their lives, and they touched hers. Such was Mead’s stature that they commemorated her death with a ceremony befitting a great leader.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Series: Anthropology's Ancestors Volume 1
  • How Kinship Systems Change

    How Kinship Systems Change

    On the Dialectics of Practice and Classification

    Parkin, R.

    Using some of his landmark publications on kinship, along with a new introduction, chapter and conclusion, Robert Parkin discusses here the changes in kinship terminologies and marriage practices, as well as the dialectics between them. The chapters also focus on a suggested trajectory, linking South Asia and Europe and the specific question of the status of Crow-Omaha systems. The collection culminates in the argument that, whereas marriage systems and practices seem infinitely varied when examined from a very close perspective, the terminologies that accompany them are much more restricted.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
  • All Tomorrow's Cultures

    All Tomorrow's Cultures

    Anthropological Engagements with the Future

    Collins, S. G.

    The first edition of All Tomorrow’s Cultures explored the legacy of futures-thinking in anthropology and marked the beginning of a resurgence of interest in anthropological futures.  The new edition has been updated to reflect some of the outpouring of work since then, particularly in science and technology studies and in anthropological analyses of indigenous futures.  In addition, Collins has updated the final chapter to expand the field of anthropological possibility in an age of both despair and hope.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)
  • Age of Capitalism and Bureaucracy

    The Age of Capitalism and Bureaucracy

    Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber

    Mommsen, W. J.

    The historian Wolfgang Mommsen was one of the foremost experts on Max Weber as well as an insightful and accessible interpreter of his work. Mommsen’s classic book, first published in 1974 under the title The Age of Bureaucracy, not only concisely explains the basic concepts underlying Weber’s worldview, but also explores the historical, social, and intellectual contexts in which he operated, including Weber’s development as an academic, his relationship to German nationalism, and his engagement with Marxism. Supplemented with a new foreword, a bibliography that includes recent studies, and a postscript by Volker Berghahn that surveys the most important debates on Weber's work since his death, this short volume serves as an excellent resource for scholars and students alike.

    Subjects: Sociology History: 20th Century to Present
    Area: Germany
  • Un-Settling Middle Eastern Refugees

    Un-Settling Middle Eastern Refugees

    Regimes of Exclusion and Inclusion in the Middle East, Europe, and North America

    Inhorn, M. C. & Volk, L. (eds)

    Since the Iraq war, the Middle East has been in continuous upheaval, resulting in the displacement of millions of people. Arriving from Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Syria in other parts of the world, the refugees show remarkable resilience and creativity amidst profound adversity. Through careful ethnography, this book vividly illustrates how refugees navigate regimes of exclusion, including cumbersome bureaucracies, financial insecurities, medical challenges, vilifying stereotypes, and threats of violence. The collection bears witness to their struggles, while also highlighting their  aspirations for safety, settlement, and social inclusion in their host societies and new homes.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 40
  • Evil Eye in Christian Orthodox Society

    Evil Eye in Christian Orthodox Society

    A Journey from Envy to Personhood

    Souvlakis, N.

    Evil eye is a phenomenon observed globally and has to do with the misfortune and calamities that we can cause to someone else out of jealousy of their possessions. The book engages with evil eye beliefs in Corfu and investigates the Christian Orthodox influences on the phenomenon and how it affects individuals’ reactions to it. Developing an interdisciplinary dialogue, it offers a fresh view of evil eye as a facilitator of wellbeing rather than a generator of calamities.

    Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
    Area: Southern Europe
  • Delta Life

    Delta Life

    Exploring Dynamic Environments where Rivers Meet the Sea

    Krause, F. & Harris, M. (eds)

    Proposing a series of innovative steps towards better understanding human lives at the interstices of water and land, this volume includes eight ethnographies from deltas around the world. The book presents ‘delta life’ with intimate descriptions of the predicaments, imaginations and activities of delta inhabitants. Conceptually, the collection develops ‘delta life’ as a metaphor for approaching continual and intersecting sociocultural, economic and material transformations more widely. The book revolves around questions of hydrosociality, volatility, rhythms and scale. It thereby yields insights into people’s lives that conventional, hydrological approaches to deltas cannot provide.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 28
  • Embracing Landscape

    Embracing Landscape

    Living with Reindeer and Hunting among Spirits in South Siberia

    Küçüküstel, S.

    Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, this book focuses on concepts such as domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. By looking into hunting rituals and herding techniques, the ethnography questions the dynamics between people, domesticated reindeer, and wild animals. It focuses on the role of the spirited landscape which embraces all living creatures and acts as a unifying concept at the center of the human and non-human relations.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Asia
    Series: Interspecies Encounters Volume 3
  • Moral Work of Anthropology, The

    The Moral Work of Anthropology

    Ethnographic Studies of Anthropologists at Work

    Mogensen, H. & Hansen, B. G. (eds)

    Looking at anthropologists at work, this book investigates what kind of morality they perform in their occupations and what the impact of this morality is. The book includes ethnographic studies in four professional arenas: health care, business, management and interdisciplinary research. The discussion is positioned at the intersection of ‘applied or public anthropology’ and ‘the anthropology of ethics’ and analyses the ways in which anthropologists can carry out ‘moral work’ both inside and outside of academia.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Applied Anthropology
    Series: Anthropology at Work Volume 2
  • NGOs and Lifeworlds in Africa

    NGOs and Lifeworlds in Africa

    Transdisciplinary Perspectives

    Kalfelis, M. C. & Knodel, K. (eds)

    Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become ubiquitous in the development sector in Africa and attracting more academic attention. However, the fact that NGOs are an integral part of the everyday lives of men and women on the continent has been overlooked thus far. In Africa, NGOs are not remote, but familiar players, situated in the midst of cities and communities. By taking a radical empirical stance, this book studies NGOs as a vital part of the lifeworlds of Africans. Its contributions are immersed in the pasts, presents and futures of personal encounters, memories, decision-making and politics.

    Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Africa
  • In Memory of Times to Come

    In Memory of Times to Come

    Ironies of History in Southeastern Papua New Guinea

    Demian, M.

    Drawing on twenty years of research, this book examines the historical perspective of a Pacific people who saw “globalization” come and go. Suau people encountered the leading edge of missionization and colonialism in Papua New Guinea and were active participants in the Second World War. In Memory of Times to Come offers a nuanced account of how people assess their own experience of change over the course of a critical century. It asks two key questions: What does it mean to claim that global connections are in the past rather than the present or the future, and what does it mean to claim that one has lost one’s culture, but not because anyone else took it away or destroyed it?

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology Volume 12
  • Sovereign Forces

    Sovereign Forces

    Everyday Challenges to Environmental Governance in Latin America

    McNeish, J.-A.

    Sovereignty is a significant force regarding the ownership, use, protection and management of natural resources. By placing an emphasis on the complex intertwined relationship between natural resources and diverse claims to resource sovereignty, this book reveals the backstory of contemporary resource contestations in Latin America and their positioning within a more extensive history of extraction in the region. Exploring cases of resource contestation in Bolivia, Colombia and Guatemala, Sovereign Forces highlights the value of these relationships to the practice of environmental governance and peacebuilding in the region.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience

    Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience

    New Phenomenological and Cognitivist Perspectives

    Sinnerbrink, R. (ed)

    Since the early 1990s, phenomenology and cognitivism have become two of the most influential approaches to film theory. Yet far from being at odds with each other, both approaches offer important insights on our subjective experience of cinema. Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience explores how these two approaches might work together to create a philosophy of film that is both descriptively rich and theoretically productive by addressing the key relationship between cinematic experience, emotions, and ethics.

    Subjects: Film and Television Studies Media Studies Sociology
  • To See a Moose

    To See a Moose

    The History of Polish Sex Education

    Kościańska, A.

    Guiding the reader through the development of sex education in Poland, Agnieszka Kościańska looks at how it has changed from the 19th century to the present day. The book compares how sex was described in school textbooks, including those scrapped by the communists for fear of offending religious sentiments, and explores how the Catholic church retained its power in Poland under various regimes. The book also identifies the women and men who changed the way sex was written about in the country, and how they established the field of Polish sex education.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality History (General)
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: European Anthropology in Translation Volume 9
  • Beyond the Veil

    Beyond the Veil

    Reflexive Studies of Death and Dying

    Thamann, A. & Christodoulaki, K. M. (eds)

    Looking at the cultural responses to death and dying, this collection explores the emotional aspects that death provokes in humans, whether it is disgust, fear, awe, sadness, anger, or even joy. Whereas most studies of death and dying treat the subject from an objective viewpoint, the scholars in this collection recognize their inherent connection with death which allows for a new and more personal form of study. More broadly, this collection suggests a new paradigm in the study of death and dying.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion
  • Mattering the Invisible

    Mattering the Invisible

    Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral

    Espírito Santo, D. & Hunter, J. (eds)

    Exploring how technological apparatuses “capture” invisible worlds, this book looks at how spirits, UFOs, discarnate entities, spectral energies, atmospheric forces and particles are mattered into existence by human minds. Technological and scientific discourse has always been central to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualist quest for legitimacy, but as this book shows, machines, people, and invisible beings are much more ontologically entangled in their definitions and constitution than we would expect. The book shows this entanglement through a series of contemporary case studies where the realm of the invisible arises through technological engagement, and where the paranormal intertwines with modern technology.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Media Studies
  • Twisted Style, A

    A Twisted Style

    The Culture of Dreadlocks in “Western” Societies

    Jerrentrup, M. T.

    In "western" cultures, some people have chosen a dreadlock hairstyle, despite many in mainstream society looking at it in a negative light. This book deals with contradictions surrounding the hairstyle such as often representing a protest against the prevailing right-wing political systems, yet also emphasizing the white person’s power to appropriate any style. Based on interviews and close observations in social media, the book offers insights into the culture(s) surrounding dreadlocks and ultimately interprets the phenomenon as a postmodern form of individuality.

    Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
    Area: Europe
  • Making Scenes

    Making Scenes

    Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art

    Davidson, I. & Nowell, A. (eds)

    Dating back to at least 50,000 years ago, rock art is one of the oldest forms of human symbolic expression. Geographically, it spans all the continents on Earth. Scenes are common in some rock art, and recent work suggests that there are some hints of expression that looks like some of the conventions of western scenic art. In this unique volume examining the nature of scenes in rock art, researchers examine what defines a scene, what are the necessary elements of a scene, and what can the evolutionary history tell us about storytelling, sequential memory, and cognitive evolution among ancient and living cultures?

    Subject: Archaeology
  • Liminal Moves

    Liminal Moves

    Traveling along Places, Meanings, and Times

    Cangià, F.

    Moving, slowing down, or watching others moving allows people to cross physical, symbolic, and temporal boundaries. Exploring the imaginative power of liminality that makes this possible, Liminal Moves looks at the (im)mobilities of three groups of people - street monkey performers in Japan, adolescents writing about migrants in Italy, and men accompanying their partners in Switzerland for work. The book explores how, for these ‘travelers’, the interplay of mobility and immobility creates a ‘liminal hotspot’: a condition of suspension and ambivalence as they find themselves caught between places, meanings and times.

    Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 9
  • Remaking the Human

    Remaking the Human

    Cosmetic Technologies of Body Repair, Reshaping, and Replacement

    Jarrín, A. & Pussetti, C. (eds)

    The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions – is now part of our lives. Humanity is confronted with a variety of affordable and non-invasive 'enhancement technologies': anti-ageing medicine, aesthetic surgery, cognitive and sexual enhancers, lifestyle drugs, prosthetics and hormone supplements. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive and provides ethnographic insights into people’s motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity.

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Series: Politics of Repair Volume 2
  • Ethnography in the Raw

    Ethnography in the Raw

    Life in a Luzon Village

    Moeran, B.

    Ethnography in the Raw describes the author’s encounters with the Philippine family into which he has married, his wife’s friends and acquaintances, and their lives in a remote rural village in the rice basin of Luzon, about 130 miles northeast of Manila. The book links detailed descriptions of his Philippine family with cultural practices such as circumcision, marriage and cockfights combined with theoretical musings on the concepts of sacrifice, social exchange, patron-client relations, food, and religious symbolism. It is both anthropological fieldwork ‘in the raw,’ and an incisive analysis of contemporary Philippine society and culture.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Ethnographies of Power

    Ethnographies of Power

    A Political Anthropology of Energy

    Loloum, T., Abram, S., & Ortar, N. (eds)

    Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General)
    Series: EASA Series Volume 42
  • Exchanging Objects

    Exchanging Objects

    Nineteenth-Century Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution

    Nichols, C. A.

    As an historical account of the exchange of “duplicate specimens” between anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and museums, collectors, and schools around the world in the late nineteenth century, this book reveals connections between both well-known museums and little-known local institutions, created through the exchange of museum objects. It explores how anthropologists categorized some objects in their collections as “duplicate specimens,” making them potential candidates for exchange. This historical form of what museum professionals would now call deaccessioning considers the intellectual and technical requirement of classifying objects in museums, and suggests that a deeper understanding of past museum practice can inform mission-driven contemporary museum work.

    Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: Museums and Collections Volume 12
  • In-Betweenness in Greater Khartoum

    In-Betweenness in Greater Khartoum

    Spaces, Temporalities, and Identities from Separation to Revolution

    Franck, A., Casciarri, B., & Salim El-Hassan, I. (eds)

    Focusing on Greater Khartoum following South Sudanese independence in 2011, In-Betweenness in Greater Khartoum explores the impact on society of major political events in areas that are neither urban nor rural, public nor private. This volume uses these in-between spaces as a lens to analyze how these events, in combination with other processes, such as globalization and economic neo-liberalization, impact communities across the region. Drawing on original fieldwork and empirical data, the authors uncover the reshaping of new categories of people that reinforce old dichotomies and in doing so underscore a common Sudanese identity.

    Subjects: Urban Studies Peace and Conflict Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: Space and Place Volume 20
  • Perspectives in Motion

    Perspectives in Motion

    Engaging the Visual in Dance and Music

    Stepputat, K & Diettrich, B. (eds)

    Focusing on visual approaches to performance in global cultural contexts, Perspectives in Motion explores the work of Adrienne L. Kaeppler, a pioneering researcher who has made a number of interdisciplinary contributions over five decades to dance and performance studies. Through a diverse range of case studies from Oceania, Asia, and Europe, and interdisciplinary approaches, this edited collection offers new critical and ethnographic frameworks for understanding and experiencing practices of music and dance across the globe.

    Subjects: Performance Studies Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: Dance and Performance Studies Volume 15
  • Floating Economies

    Floating Economies

    The Cultural Ecology of the Dal Lake in Kashmir, India

    Casimir, M. J.

    In the Himalayas of the Indian part of Kashmir three communities depend on the ecology of the Dal lake: market gardeners, houseboat owners and fishers.  Floating Economies describes for the first time the complex intermeshing economy, social structure and ecology of the area against the background of history and the present volatile socio-political situation. Using a holistic and multidisciplinary approach, the author deals with the socioeconomic strategies of the communities whose livelihoods are embedded here and analyses the ecological condition of the Dal, and the reasons for its progressive degradation.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Asia
  • Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls

    Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls

    Transnational Approaches

    Moletsane, R., Wiebesiek, L.,Treffry-Goatley, A. & Mandrona, A. (eds)

    Girls and young women, particularly those from rural and indigenous communities around the world, face some of the most adverse social issues in the world despite the existence of protective laws and international treaties. Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls explores the potential of participatory visual method (PVM) for girls and young women in these communities, presenting and critiquing the everyday ethical dilemmas visual researchers face and the strategies they implement to address them, reflecting on principles of autonomy, social justice, and beneficence in transnational, indigenous and rural contexts.

    Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology
    Series: Transnational Girlhoods Volume 2
  • Best We Share, The

    The Best We Share

    Nation, Culture and World-Making in the UNESCO World Heritage Arena

    Brumann, C.

    The UNESCO World Heritage Convention is one of the most widely ratified international treaties, and a place on the World Heritage List is a widely coveted mark of distinction. Building on ethnographic fieldwork at Committee sessions, interviews and documentary study, the book links the change in operations of the World Heritage Committee with structural nation-centeredness, vulnerable procedures for evaluation, monitoring and decision-making, and loose heritage conceptions that have been inconsistently applied. As the most ambitious study of the World Heritage arena so far, this volume dissects the inner workings of a prominent global body, demonstrating the power of ethnography in the highly formalised and diplomatic context of a multilateral organisation.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Museum Studies Cultural Studies (General)
  • Agent of Change

    Agent of Change

    The Deposition and Manipulation of Ash in the Past

    Roth, B. J. & Adams, E. C. (eds)

    Ash is an important and yet understudied aspect of ritual deposition in the archaeological record of North America. Ash has been found in a wide variety of contexts across many regions and often it is associated with rare or unusual objects or in contexts that suggest its use in the transition or transformation of houses and ritual features. Drawn from across the U.S. and Mesoamerica, the chapters in this volume explore the use, meanings, and cross-cultural patterns present in the use of ash. and highlight the importance of ash in ritual closure, social memory, and cultural transformation.

    Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Area: North America
  • Taste for Oppression, A

    A Taste for Oppression

    A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus

    Hervouet, R.

    Belarus has emerged from communism in a unique manner as an authoritarian regime. The author, who has lived in Belarus for several years, highlights several mechanisms of tyranny, beyond the regime’s ability to control and repress, which should not be underestimated. The book immerses the reader in the depths of the Belarusian countryside, among the kolkhozes and rural communities at the heart of this authoritarian regime under Alexander Lukashenko, and offers vivid descriptions of the everyday life of Belarusians. It sheds light on the reasons why part of the population supports Lukashenko and takes a fresh look at the functioning of what has been called 'the last dictatorship in Europe'.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Anthropology of Europe Volume 6
  • South Africa's Dreams

    South Africa's Dreams

    Ethnologists and Apartheid in Namibia

    Gordon, R. J.

    In the early sixties, South Africa’s colonial policies in Namibia served as a testing ground for many key features of its repressive ‘Grand Apartheid’ infrastructure, including strategies for countering anti-apartheid resistance. Exposing the role that anthropologists played, this book analyses how the knowledge used to justify and implement apartheid was created. Understanding these practices and the ways in which South Africa’s experiences in Namibia influenced later policy at home is also critically evaluated, as is the matter of adjudicating the many South African anthropologists who supported the regime.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Peace and Conflict Studies
    Area: Africa
  • Political Graffiti in Critical Times

    Political Graffiti in Critical Times

    The Aesthetics of Street Politics

    Campos, R., Pavoni, A., & Zaimakis, Y. (eds)

    Whether aesthetically or politically inspired, graffiti is among the oldest forms of expression in human history, one that becomes especially significant during periods of social and political upheaval. With a particular focus on the demographic, ecological, and economic crises of today, this volume provides a wide-ranging exploration of urban space and visual protest. Assembling case studies that cover topics such as gentrification in Cyprus, the convulsions of post-independence East Timor, and opposition to Donald Trump in the American capital, it reveals the diverse ways in which street artists challenge existing social orders and reimagine urban landscapes.

    Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Urban Studies Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: Protest, Culture & Society Volume 28
  • Experiencing Materiality

    Experiencing Materiality

    Museum Perspectives

    Gamberi, V.

    Representing a cutting-edge study of the junction between theoretical anthropology, material culture studies, religious studies and museum anthropology, this study examines the interaction between the human and the nonhuman in a museum setting usually defined as ‘non-Western’, ‘non-scientific’ and ‘religious.’ Combining an on-site analysis of exhibitive spaces with archival research and interviews with museum curators, the chapters highlight contradictions of museum practices, and suggests that museum practitioners use museum spaces and artefacts as a way of formulating new theoretical stances in material culture studies, thus viewing museums as producers of theories together with affective engagements.

    Subjects: Museum Studies Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
  • Rhetoric and Social Relations

    Rhetoric and Social Relations

    Dialectics of Bonding and Contestation

    Abbink, J. & LaTosky, S. (eds)

    This volume explores the constitutive role of rhetoric in socio-cultural relations, where discursive persuasion is so important, and contains both theoretical chapters as well as fascinating examples of the ambiguities and effects of rhetoric used (un)consciously in social praxis. The elements of power, competition and political persuasion figure prominently. It is an accessible collection of studies, speaking to common issues and problems in social life, and shows the heuristic and often explanatory value of the rhetorical perspective.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Series: Studies in Rhetoric and Culture Volume 8
  • Risk on the Table

    Risk on the Table

    Food Production, Health, and the Environment

    Creager, A. N. H. & Gaudilière, J.-P. (eds)

    Over the last century, the industrialization of agriculture and processing technologies have made food abundant and relatively inexpensive for much of the world’s population. Simultaneously, pesticides, nitrates, and other technological innovations intended to improve the food supply’s productivity and safety have generated new, often poorly understood risks for consumers and the environment. From the proliferation of synthetic additives to the threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the chapters in Risk on the Table zero in on key historical cases in North America and Europe that illuminate the history of food safety, highlighting the powerful tensions that exists among scientific understandings of risk, policymakers’ decisions, and cultural notions of “pure” food.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present Food & Nutrition
    Series: Environment in History: International Perspectives Volume 21
  • Lands of the Future

    Lands of the Future

    Anthropological Perspectives on Pastoralism, Land Deals and Tropes of Modernity in Eastern Africa

    Gabbert, E. C., Gebresenbet, F., Galaty, J. G., & Schlee, G. (eds)

    Rangeland, forests and riverine landscapes of pastoral communities in Eastern Africa are increasingly under threat. Abetted by states who think that outsiders can better use the lands than the people who have lived there for centuries, outside commercial interests have displaced indigenous dwellers from pastoral territories. This volume presents case studies from Eastern Africa, based on long-term field research, that vividly illustrate the struggles and strategies of those who face dispossession and also discredit ideological false modernist tropes like ‘backwardness’ and ‘primitiveness’.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Mobility Studies Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Africa
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 23
  • Imagining Bosnian Muslims in Central Europe

    Imagining Bosnian Muslims in Central Europe

    Representations, Transfers and Exchanges

    Šístek, F. (ed)

    As a Slavic-speaking religious and ethnic “Other” living just a stone’s throw from the symbolic heart of the continent, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina have long occupied a liminal space in the European imagination. To a significant degree, the wider representations and perceptions of this population can be traced to the reports of Central European—and especially Habsburg—diplomats, scholars, journalists, tourists, and other observers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This volume assembles contributions from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and literary scholars to examine the political, social, and discursive dimensions of Bosnian Muslims’ encounters with the West since the nineteenth century.

    Subjects: History (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Austrian and Habsburg Studies Volume 32
  • Embodying Borders

    Embodying Borders

    A Migrant’s Right to Health, Universal Rights and Local Policies

    Ferrero, L., Quagliariello, C., & Vargas, A. C. (eds)

    Based on extensive field research, the essays in this volume illuminate the experiences of migrants from their own point of view, providing a critical understanding of the complex social reality in which each experience is grounded. Access to medical care for migrants is a fundamental right which is often ignored. The book provides a critical understanding of the social reality in which social inequalities are grounded and offers the opportunity to show that right to health does not correspond uniquely with access to healthcare.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Medical Anthropology
    Series: EASA Series Volume 41
  • Anthropology and Ethnography are Not Equivalent

    Anthropology and Ethnography are Not Equivalent

    Reorienting Anthropology for the Future

    Ahmad, I. (ed)

    In recent years, crucial questions have been raised about anthropology as a discipline, such as whether ethnography is central to the subject, and how imagination, reality and truth are joined in anthropological enterprises. These interventions have impacted anthropologists and scholars at large. This volume contributes to the debate about the interrelationships between ethnography and anthropology and takes it to a new plane. Six anthropologists with field experience in Egypt, Greece, India, Laos, Mauritius, Thailand and Switzerland critically discuss these propositions in order to renew anthropology for the future. The volume concludes with an Afterword from Tim Ingold.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 41
  • Tropological Thought and Action

    Tropological Thought and Action

    Essays on the Poetics of Imagination

    Živković, M., Pelkey, J. & Fernandez, J. W. (eds)

    From twilight in the Himalayas to dream worlds in the Serbian state, this book provides a unique collection of anthropological and cross-cultural inquiry into the power of rhetorical tropes and their relevance to the formation and analysis of social thought and action through a series of ethnographic essays offering in-depth studies of the human imagination at work and play around the world.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Series: Studies in Rhetoric and Culture Volume 9
  • Unlocking the Love-Lock

    Unlocking the Love-Lock

    The History and Heritage of a Contemporary Custom

    Houlbrook, C.

    Explores the worldwide popularity of the love-lock as a ritual token of love and commitment by considering its history, symbolism, and heritage.

    “[T]his is an eminently enjoyable and thorough investigation of a popular phenomenon through the lens of heritage and folk tradition.”—Sara De Nardi, Western Sydney University

    A padlock is a mundane object, designed to fulfil a specific – and secular – purpose. A contemporary custom has given padlocks new significance. This custom is ‘love-locking’, where padlocks are engraved with names and attached to bridges in declaration of romantic commitment. This custom became popular in the 2000s, and its dissemination was rapid, geographically unbound, and highly divisive, with love-locks emerging in locations as diverse as Paris and Taiwan; New York and Seoul; Melbourne and Moscow.

    From the introduction:
    I was distractedly perusing the photo frame aisle, my eyes skimming the generically sentimental stock pictures of happy families smiling at the camera, pretty landscapes, cute pets and couples walking hand-in-hand, when I came across one that jumped out at me…. I recognised the image instantly as a photograph of love-locks: the padlocks that had been appearing
    en masse on bridges and other public structures on a global scale since the early 2000s. And, having been researching the custom known as lovelocking for about five years at that point, it was with a peculiar sense of pride that I realised love-locks had accomplished the status of a stock image.

    Subjects: Heritage Studies Archaeology Museum Studies Cultural Studies (General)
  • Commerce as Politics

    Commerce as Politics

    The Two Centuries of Struggle for Basotho Economic Independence

    Maliehe, S. M.

    This is the first comprehensive economic history of the Basotho people of Southern Africa (in colonial Basutoland, then Lesotho) and spans from the 1820s to the present day. The book documents what the Basotho have done on their own account, focusing on their systematic exclusion from trade and their political efforts to insert themselves into their country’s commerce. Although the colonial and post-colonial periods were unfavourable to the Basotho, they have, before and after colonial rule, launched impressive commercial initiatives of their own, which bring hope for greater development and freedom in their struggle for economic independence.

    Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Colonial History
    Area: Africa
    Series: The Human Economy Volume 8
  • Waithood

    Waithood

    Gender, Education, and Global Delays in Marriage and Childbearing

    Inhorn, M. C. & Smith-Hefner, N. J. (eds)

    The concept of “Waithood” was developed by political scientist Diane Singerman to describe the expanding period of time between adolescence and full adulthood as young people wait to secure steady employment and marry. The contributors to this volume employ the waithood concept as a frame for richly detailed ethnographic studies of “youth in waiting” from a variety of world areas, including the Middle East Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the U.S, revealing that whether voluntary or involuntary, the phenomenon of youth waithood necessitates a recognition of new gender and family roles.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 47
  • Sea Commands, The

    The Sea Commands

    Community and Perception of the Environment in a Portuguese Fishing Village

    Mendes, P.

    Azenha do Mar is a fishing community on the southwest coast of Portugal. It came into existence around forty years ago, as an outcome of the abandonment of work in the fields and of propitious ecological conditions. This book looks at the migration processes since the founding of the community and how they relate to the social inequalities for property and labour which prevail today. The book also reflects upon the personal experience of the ethnographer in the field balancing the importance of methodology on the one hand and fieldwork as a research process on the other.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: EASA Series Volume 40
  • Politics of the Dunes

    Politics of the Dunes

    Poetry, Architecture, and Coloniality at the Open City

    Woods, M.

    Founded in the late 1960s on Chile’s Pacific coast, the Open City (la Ciudad Abierta) has become an internationally recognized site of cutting-edge architectural experimentation. Yet with a global reputation as an apolitical collective, little has been discussed about the Open City’s relationship with Chilean history and politics. Politics of the Dunes explores the ways in which the Open City’s architectural and urban practice is devoted to keeping open the utopian possibility for multiplicity, pluralism, and democratization in the face of authoritarianism, a powerful mode of postcolonial environmental urbanism that can inform architectural practices today.

    Subjects: Urban Studies Sociology History (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Space and Place Volume 19
  • Nature Wars

    Nature Wars

    Essays Around a Contested Concept

    Ellen, R.

    Organized around issues, debates and discussions concerning the various ways in which the concept of nature has been used, this book looks at how the term has been endlessly deconstructed and reclaimed, as reflected in anthropological, scientific, and similar writing over the last several decades. Made up of ten of Roy Ellen’s finest articles, this book looks back at his ideas about nature and includes a new introduction that contextualizes the arguments and takes them forward. Many of the chapters focus on research the author has conducted amongst the Nuaulu people of eastern Indonesia.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
    Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 27
  • Collective and State Violence in Turkey

    Collective and State Violence in Turkey

    The Construction of a National Identity from Empire to Nation-State

    Astourian, S. & Kévorkian, R. (eds)

    Turkey has gone through significant transformations over the last century—from the Ottoman Empire and Young Turk era to the Republic of today—but throughout it has demonstrated troubling continuities in its encouragement and deployment of mass violence. In particular, the construction of a Muslim-Turkish identity has been achieved in part by designating “internal enemies” at whom public hatred can be directed. This volume provides a wide range of case studies and historiographical reflections on the alarming recurrence of such violence in Turkish history, as atrocities against varied ethnic-religious groups from the nineteenth century to today have propelled the nation’s very sense of itself.

    Subjects: History (General) Genocide History Peace and Conflict Studies
    Area: Middle East & Israel
  • Dust Inside

    Dust Inside

    Fighting and Living with Asbestos-Related Disasters in Brazil

    Mazzeo, A.

    Toxic production, disrupted lives and contaminated bodies. Care for unacknowledged suffering, incurable cancers, and immeasurable losses. This book bears witness to the invisible disasters provoked by the asbestos market worldwide and gives a voice to the communities of survivors who struggle daily in the name of social and environmental justice. Grounded in a profound, touching ethnography, this book offers an original contribution to understanding global health disasters and grassroots health-based activism.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Homo Itinerans

    Homo Itinerans

    Towards a Global Ethnography of Afghanistan

    Monsutti, A.

    Afghan society has been marked in a lasting way by war and the exodus of part of its population. While many have emigrated to countries across the world, they have been matched by the flow of experts who arrive in Afghanistan after having been in other war-torn countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Palestine or East Timor. This book builds on more than two decades of ethnographic travels in some twenty countries, bringing the readers from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran to Europe, North America and Australia. It describes the everyday life and transnational circulations of Afghan refugees and expatriates.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
    Areas: Middle East & Israel Asia
  • Invisible Faces and Hidden Stories

    Invisible Faces and Hidden Stories

    Narratives of Vulnerable Populations and Their Caregivers

    Obeng, C. S. & Obeng, S. G. (eds)

    Dealing with narratives of vulnerable populations, this book looks at how they deal with dimensions of their social life, especially in regards to health. It reflects the socio-political ecologies like public hostility and stereotyping, neglect of their unique health needs, their courage to overcome adversity, and the love of family and healthcare providers in mitigating their problems. American society likes to give the impression that it is listening to the plight of vulnerable populations, but the stories in this volume prove otherwise.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Applied Anthropology Sociology
    Area: North America
    Series: Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology Volume 12
  • Long Journey, The

    The Long Journey

    Exploring Travel and Travel Writing

    Di Bella, M. P. & Yothers, B. (eds)

    Travel writing has, for centuries, composed an essential historical record and wide-ranging literary form, reflecting the rich diversity of travel as a social and cultural practice, metaphorical process, and driver of globalization. This interdisciplinary volume brings together anthropologists, literary scholars, social historians, and other scholars to illuminate travel writing in all its forms. With studies ranging from colonial adventurism to the legacies of the Holocaust, The Long Journey offers a unique dual focus on experience and genre as it applies to three key realms: memory and trauma, confrontations with the Other, and the cultivation of cultural perspective.

    Subjects: Literary Studies Mobility Studies Cultural Studies (General) Travel and Tourism
  • Spanish Comics

    Spanish Comics

    Historical and Cultural Perspectives

    Magnussen, A. (ed)

    Spanish comics represent an exciting and diverse field, yet one that is often overlooked outside of Spain. Spanish Comics offers an overview on contemporary scholarship on Spanish comics, focusing on a wide range of comics dating from the Francoist dictatorship, 1939-1975; the Political Transition, 1970-1985; and Democratic Spain since the early 1980s including the emergence of the graphic novel in 2000. Touching on themes of memory, gender, regional identities, and history, the chapters in this collection demonstrate the historical and cultural significance of Spanish comics.

    Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies
    Area: Southern Europe
  • Engaging with Chaucer

    Engaging with Chaucer

    Practice, Authority, Reading

    Moseley, C.W.R.D. (ed)

    Why do we still read and discuss Chaucer? The answer may be simple: he is fun, and he challenges our intelligence and questions our certainties. This collected volume represents an homage to a toweringly great poet, as well as an acknowledgement of the intellectual excitement, challenges, and pleasure that readers owe to him as even today, his poems have the capacity to change the way we engage with fundamental questions of knowledge, understanding, and beauty.

    Subjects: Media Studies Cultural Studies (General)
  • Helmand Baluch, The

    The Helmand Baluch

    A Native Ethnography of the People of Southwest Afghanistan

    Amiri, G. R.

    In the 1970s, in his capacity as government representative from the Afghan Institute of Archaeology, Ghulam Rahman Amiri accompanied a joint Afghan-US archaeological mission to the Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan. The results of his work were published in Farsi as a descriptive ethnographic monograph. The Helmand Baluch is the first English translation of Amiri’s extraordinary encounters. This rich ethnography describes the cultural, political, and economic systems of the Baluch people living in the lower Helmand River Valley of Afghanistan. It is an area that has received little study since the early 20th Century, yet is a region with a remarkable history in one of the most volatile territories in the world.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Archaeology
    Area: Middle East & Israel
  • Captives, Colonists and Craftspeople

    Captives, Colonists and Craftspeople

    Material Culture and Institutional Power in Malta, 1600–1900

    Palmer, R.

    Over the course of four centuries, the island of Malta underwent several significant political transformations, including its roles as a Catholic bastion under the Knights of St. John between 1530 and 1798, and as a British maritime hub in the nineteenth century. This innovative study draws on both archival evidence and archeological findings to compare slavery and coerced labor, resource control, globalization, and other historical phenomena in Malta under the two regimes: one feudal, the other colonial. Spanning conventional divides between the early and late modern eras, Russell Palmer offers here a rich analysis of a Mediterranean island against a background of immense European and global change.

    Subjects: Colonial History Archaeology
    Area: Southern Europe
  • Revealing the Invisible Mine

    Revealing the Invisible Mine

    Social Complexities of an Undeveloped Mining Project

    Skrzypek, E. E.

    Exploring the social complexities of the Frieda River Project in Papua New Guinea, this book tells the story of local stakeholder strategies on the eve of industrial development, largely from the perspective of the Paiyamo – one of the project’s so-called ‘impact communities’. Engaging ideas of knowledge, belief and personhood, it explains how fifty years of encounters with exploration companies shaped the Paiyamo’s aspirations, made them revisit and re-examine their past, and develop new strategies to move towards a better, more prosperous future.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists Volume 8
  • Moebius Anthropology

    Moebius Anthropology

    Essays on the Forming of Form

    Handelman, D., Shapiro, M. (ed), & Feldman, J. (ed)

    Don Handelman’s groundbreaking work in anthropology is showcased in this collection of his most powerful essays, edited by Matan Shapiro and Jackie Feldman. The book looks at the intellectual and spiritual roots of Handelman’s initiation into anthropology; his work on ritual and on “bureaucratic logic”; analyses of cosmology; and innovative essays on Anthropology and Deleuzian thinking. Handelman reconsiders his theory of the forming of form and how this relates to a new theory of the dynamics of time. This will be the definitive collection of articles by one of the most important anthropologists of the late 20th Century.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology of Religion
  • Mobility of Memory, The

    The Mobility of Memory

    Migrations and Diasporas across European Borders

    Passerini, L., Trakilović, M., & Proglio, G. (eds)

    Migration is most concretely defined by the movement of human bodies, but it leaves indelible traces on everything from individual psychology to major social movements. Drawing on extensive field research, and with a special focus on Italy and the Netherlands, this interdisciplinary volume explores the interrelationship of migration and memory at scales both large and small, ranging across topics that include oral and visual forms of memory, archives, and artistic innovations. By engaging with the complex tensions between roots and routes, minds and bodies, The Mobility of Memory offers an incisive and empirically grounded perspective on a social phenomenon that continues to reshape both Europe and the world.

    Subjects: Mobility Studies Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology Memory Studies
    Area: Europe
    Series: Worlds of Memory Volume 5
  • What Now

    What Now

    Everyday Endurance and Social Intensity in an Australian Aboriginal Community

    Dalley, C.

    Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork undertaken since 2006, the book addresses some of the most topical aspects of remote Aboriginal life in Australia. This includes the role of kinship and family, relationships to land and sea, and cross-cultural relations with non-Aboriginal residents. There is also extensive treatment of contemporary issues relating to alcohol consumption, violence and the impact of systemic ill health. This richly detailed portrayal provides a nuanced account of everyday endurance and social intensity on Mornington Island.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • We Come as Members of the Superior Race

    We Come as Members of the Superior Race

    Distortions and Education Policy Discourse in Sub-Saharan Africa

    Mfum-Mensah, O.

    Westerners have long represented Africans as “backwards,” “primitive,” and “unintelligent,” distortions which have opened the door for American philanthropies to push their own education agendas in Africa. We Come as Members of the Superior Race discusses the origin and history of these dangerous stereotypes and western “infantilization” of African societies, exploring how their legacy continues to inform contemporary educational and development discourses. By viewing African societies as subordinated in a global geopolitical order, these problematic stereotypes continue to influence education policy and research in Sub-Sahara Africa today.

    Subjects: Educational Studies Development Studies Sociology
    Area: Africa
  • Aspirations of Young Adults in Urban Asia

    Aspirations of Young Adults in Urban Asia

    Values, Family, and Identity

    Westendorp, M., Remmert, D. & Finis, K. (eds)

    Comparing first-person ethnographic accounts of young people living, working, and creating relationships in cities across Asia, this volume explores their contemporary lives, pressures, ideals, and aspirations. Delving into topical issues such as education, social inequality, family pressures, changing values, precarious employment, and political discontent, the book explores how young people are pushing boundaries and imagining their future. In this way, they explore and create the identities of their local and global surroundings.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies
    Areas: Asia Asia-Pacific
    Series: Asian Anthropologies Volume 11
  • Preventing Dementia?

    Preventing Dementia?

    Critical Perspectives on a New Paradigm of Preparing for Old Age

    Leibing, A. & Schicktanz, S. (eds)

    The conceptualization of dementia has changed dramatically in recent years with the claim that, through early detection and by controlling several risk factors, a prevention of dementia is possible. Although encouraging and providing hope against this feared condition, this claim is open to scrutiny. This volume looks at how this new conceptualization ignores many of the factors which influence a dementia sufferers’ prognosis, including their history with education, food and exercise as well as their living in different epistemic cultures. The central aim is to question the concept of prevention and analyze its impact on aging people and aging societies.

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Series: Life Course, Culture and Aging: Global Transformations Volume 7
  • Shakespeare & Biography

    Shakespeare and Biography

    Scheil, K. & Holderness, G. (eds)

    From Shakespeare’s religion to his wife to his competitors in the world of early modern theatre, biographers have approached the question of the Bard’s life from numerous angles. Shakespeare & Biography offers a fresh look at the biographical questions connected with the famous playwright’s life, through essays and reflections written by prominent international scholars and biographers.

    Subjects: Literary Studies Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: Shakespeare & Volume 8
  • Facing the Crisis

    Facing the Crisis

    Ethnographies of Work in Italian Industrial Capitalism

    D'Aloisio, F. & Ghezzi, S. (eds)

    Among the founding nations of the European Union, no nation has experienced a more devastating affect from the 2008 economic crisis than Italy. Although its recovery has recently begun, Italy has fallen even further behind EU economic leaders and the EU average. Looking at how and why this happened, Facing the Crisis brings together ethnographic material from anthropological research projects carried out in various Italian industrial locations. With its wide breadth of locations and industries, the volume looks at all corners of the diverse Italian manufacturing system.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: Dislocations Volume 30
  • Estates and Constitution

    Estates and Constitution

    The Parliament in Eighteenth-Century Hungary

    Szijártó, I. M.

    Across eighteenth-century Europe, political power resided overwhelmingly with absolute monarchs, with notable exceptions including the much-studied British Parliament as well as the frequently overlooked Hungarian Diet, which placed serious constraints on royal power and broadened opportunities for political participation. Estates and Constitution provides a rich account of Hungarian politics during this period, restoring the Diet to its rightful place as one of the era’s major innovations in government. István M. Szijártó traces the religious, economic, and partisan forces that shaped the Diet, putting its historical significance in international perspective.

    Subject: History: 18th/19th Century
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Austrian and Habsburg Studies Volume 30
  • Reconciliation Road

    Reconciliation Road

    Willy Brandt, Ostpolitik and the Quest for European Peace

    Schoenborn, B.

    Among postwar political leaders, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt played one of the most significant roles in reconciling Germans with other Europeans and in creating the international framework that enabled peaceful reunification in 1990. Based on extensive archival research, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of Brandt’s Ostpolitik from its inception until the end of the Cold War through the lens of reconciliation. Here, Benedikt Schoenborn gives us a Brandt who passionately insisted on a gradual reduction of Cold War hostility and a lasting European peace, while remaining strategically and intellectually adaptable in a way that exemplified the ‘imaginativeness of history’.

    Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present Peace and Conflict Studies
    Area: Germany
    Series: Studies in Contemporary European History Volume 25
  • Heirs of the Bamboo

    Heirs of the Bamboo

    Identity and Ambivalence among the Eurasian Macanese

    Gaspar, M. C.

    In 1999 Macao, previously a territory under Portuguese rule, was handed over to the People’s Republic of China and transformed into one of the gambling capitals of the world. These political and economic phenomena were accompanied by unprecedented social changes that, ultimately, have redefined the Macanese identity. This book is about the Macanese living in Portugal and their intimate social networks in loco and interactions with their counterparts in Macao and elsewhere in the diaspora, by the use of Internet. Memory and ambivalence, deeply associated with kinship, language, food and heritage, are the cornerstones of this research, which overturns colonial stereotypes and concepts of Macanese cultural purity.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: European Anthropology in Translation Volume 8
  • Going Forward by Looking Back

    Going Forward by Looking Back

    Archaeological Perspectives on Socio-Ecological Crisis, Response, and Collapse

    Riede, F. & Sheets, P. (eds)

    Catastrophes are on the rise due to climate change, as is their toll in terms of lives and livelihoods as world populations rise and people settle into hazardous places. While disaster response and management are traditionally seen as the domain of the natural and technical sciences, awareness of the importance and role of cultural adaptation is essential. This book catalogues a wide and diverse range of case studies of such disasters and human responses. This serves as inspiration for building culturally sensitive adaptations to present and future calamities, to mitigate their impact, and facilitate recoveries.

    Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology
    Series: Catastrophes in Context Volume 3
  • Search After Method

    Search After Method

    Sensing, Moving, and Imagining in Anthropological Fieldwork

    Laplante, J., Gandsman, A., & Scobie, W. (eds)

    Reigniting a tradition of learning from experience, Search After Method is a plea for livelier forms of anthropology. The anthropologists in the collection recount their experiences of working in the field, framed within a range of anthropological debates. The book thus provides accounts of lived experiences from both extensive and contemporary fieldwork as well as offering solutions for how to evolve the art of anthropological research beyond what is currently imagined.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 40
  • Nourishing Life

    Nourishing Life

    Foodways and Humanity in an African Town

    Huhn, A.

    In this accessible ethnography of a small town in northern Mozambique, everyday cultural knowledge and behaviors about food, cooking, and eating reveal the deeply human pursuit of a nourishing life. This emerges less through the consumption of specific nutrients than it does in the affective experience of alimentation in contexts that support vitality, compassion, and generative relations. Embedded within central themes in the study of Africa south of the Sahara, the volume combines insights from philosophy and food studies to find textured layers of meaning in a seemingly simple cuisine.

    Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Africa
    Series: Food, Nutrition, and Culture Volume 7
  • On Mediation

    On Mediation

    Historical, Legal, Anthropological and International Perspectives

    Härter, K., Hillemanns, C. & Schlee, G. (eds)

    Exploring mediation and related practices of conflict regulation, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach that includes historical, legal, anthropological and international perspectives. Divided into three sections, the volume observes historical and current relations between mediation and the criminal justice system and provides anthropological perspectives and case studies to explore mediation and arbitration in international arenas. In this regard, the book provides an innovative perspective on mediation and new insights into conflict regulation.

    Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Applied Anthropology
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 22
  • Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure

    Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure

    Remembering Ghosts on the Margins of History

    Surface-Evans, S., Garrison, A. E. & Supernant, K. (eds)

    What happens when we blur time and allow ourselves to haunt or to become haunted by ghosts of the past? Drawing on archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data, Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure demonstrates the value of conceiving of ghosts not just as metaphors, but as mechanisms for making the past more concrete and allowing the negative specters of enduring historical legacies, such as colonialism and capitalism, to be exorcised.

    Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General) Memory Studies Heritage Studies
  • Globalizing Automobilism

    Globalizing Automobilism

    Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900–1980

    Mom, G.

    Why has “car society” proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In this follow-up to his magisterial Atlantic Automobilism, Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so difficult. Drawing on archival research as well as wide-ranging forays into popular culture, Mom reveals here the roots of the exuberance, excess, and danger that define modern automotive culture.

    Subjects: Transport Studies History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Mobility Studies
  • Imperial Culture and Colonial Projects

    Imperial Culture and Colonial Projects

    The Portuguese-Speaking World from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries

    Curto, D. R.

    Beyond the immeasurable political and economic changes it brought, colonial expansion exerted a powerful effect on Portuguese culture. And as this book demonstrates, the imperial culture that emerged over the course of four centuries was hardly a homogeneous whole, as triumphalist literature and other cultural forms mingled with recurrent doubts about the expansionist project. In a series of illuminating case studies, Ramada Curto follows the history and perception of major colonial initiatives while integrating the complex perspectives of participating agents to show how the empire’s life and culture were richly inflected by the operations of imperial expansion.

    Subjects: History: Medieval/Early Modern Colonial History
    Area: Southern Europe
  • Financialization

    Financialization

    Relational Approaches

    Hann, C. & Kalb, D. (eds)

    Beginning with an original historical vision of financialization in human history, this volume then continues with a rich set of contemporary ethnographic case studies from Europe, Asia and Africa. Authors explore the ways in which finance inserts itself into relationships of class and kinship, how it adapts to non-Western religious traditions, and how it reconfigures legal and ecological dimensions of social organization, and urban social relations in general. Central themes include the indebtedness of individuals and households, the impact of digital technologies, the struggle for housing, financial education, and political contestation.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology History (General)
    Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 6
  • Antisemitism in Galicia

    Antisemitism in Galicia

    Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy

    Buchen, T.

    In the last third of the nineteenth century, the discourse on the “Jewish question” in the Habsburg crownlands of Galicia changed fundamentally, as clerical and populist politicians emerged to denounce the Jewish assimilation and citizenship. This pioneering study investigates the interaction of agitation, violence, and politics against Jews on the periphery of the Danube monarchy. In its comprehensive analysis of the functions and limitations of propaganda, rumors, and mass media, it shows just how significant antisemitism was to the politics of coexistence among Christians and Jews on the eve of the Great War.

    Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Jewish Studies
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Austrian and Habsburg Studies Volume 29
  • Modernity and the Unmaking of Men

    Modernity and the Unmaking of Men

    Schubert, V.

    Responding to the renewed emphasis on the significance of village studies, this book focuses on aging bachelorhood as a site of intolerable angst when faced with rural depopulation and social precarity. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Macedonian society, the book explores the intersections between modernity, kinship and gender. It argues that as a critical consequence of demographic rupture, changing values and societal shifts, aging bachelorhood illuminates and challenges conceptualizations of performativity and social presence.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations Volume 1
  • Under the Sign of the Cross

    Under the Sign of the Cross

    The People’s Salvation Cathedral and the Church-Building Industry in Postsocialist Romania

    Tateo, G.

    Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book delves into the thriving industry of religious infrastructure in Romania, where 4,000 Orthodox churches and cathedrals have been built in three decades. Following the construction of the world’s highest Orthodox cathedral in Bucharest, the book brings together sociological and anthropological scholarship on eastern Christianity, secularization, urban change and nationalism. Reading postsocialism through the prism of religious change, the author argues that the emergence of political, entrepreneurial and intellectual figures after 1990 has happened ‘under the sign of the cross’.

    Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Urban Studies
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Space and Place Volume 18
  • Punks and Skins United

    Punks and Skins United

    Identity, Class and the Economics of an Eastern German Subculture

    Venstel, A.

    Germany has one of the liveliest and well-developed punk scenes in the world. However, punk in this country is not just a style-based music community. This book provides an anthropological examination of how punk reflects the larger changes and contradictions in post-reunification Germany, such as social segmentation, east-west tensions and local politics. Punk in eastern Germany is a reaction to the marginalization of the working class. As a cultural, social and economic niche, punks create their own controversial “substitute society” to compensate for their low status in mainstream society.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Germany
    Series: Anthropology of Europe Volume 5
  • Who's Cashing In?

    Who’s Cashing In?

    Contemporary Perspectives on New Monies and Global Cashlessness

    Sen, A., Lindquist, J., & Kolling, M. (eds)

    Cashless infrastructures are rapidly increasing, as credit cards, cryptocurrencies, online and mobile money, remittances, demonetization, and digitalization process replace coins and currencies around the world. Who’s Cashing In? explores how different modes of cashlessness impact, transform and challenge the everyday lives and livelihoods of local communities. Drawing from a wide range of ethnographic studies, this volume offers a concise look at how social actors and intermediaries respond to this change in the materiality of money throughout multiple regional contexts.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
    Series: Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis Volume 19
  • Birds of Passage

    Birds of Passage

    Hunting and Conservation in Malta

    Falzon, M.-A.

    Bird migration between Europe and Africa is a fraught journey, particularly in the Mediterranean, where migratory birds are shot and trapped in large numbers. In Malta, thousands of hunters share a shrinking countryside. They also rub shoulders with a strong bird-protection and conservation lobby. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, this book traces the complex interactions between hunters, birds and the landscapes they inhabit, as well as the dynamics and politics of bird conservation. Birds of Passage looks at the practice and meaning of hunting in a specific context, and raises broader questions about human-wildlife interactions and the uncertain outcomes of conservation.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 25
  • After Society

    After Society

    Anthropological Trajectories out of Oxford

    Pina-Cabral, J. & Bowman, G. (eds)

    In the early 1980s, when the contributors to this volume completed their graduate training at Oxford, the conditions of practice in anthropology were undergoing profound change. Professionally, the immediate postcolonial period was over and neoliberal reforms were marginalizing the social sciences. Analytically, the poststructuralist critique of the notion of ‘society’ challenged a discipline that dubbed itself as ‘social’. Here self-ethnography is used to portray the contributors’ anthropological trajectories, showing how analytical and academic engagements interacted creatively over time.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
    Area: Europe
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 39
  • Beyond Filial Piety

    Beyond Filial Piety

    Rethinking Aging and Caregiving in Contemporary East Asian Societies

    Shea, J., Moore, K., & Zhang, H. (eds)

    Known for a tradition of Confucian filial piety, East Asian societies have some of the oldest and most rapidly aging populations on earth. Today these societies are experiencing unprecedented social challenges to the filial tradition of adult children caring for aging parents at home. Marshalling mixed methods data, this volume explores the complexities of aging and caregiving in contemporary East Asia. Questioning romantic visions of a senior’s paradise, chapters examine emerging cultural meanings of and social responses to population aging, including caregiving both for and by the elderly. Themes include traditional ideals versus contemporary realities, the role of the state, patterns of familial and non-familial care, social stratification, and intersections of caregiving and death. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, policy, archival, and media data, the authors trace both common patterns and diverging trends across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Korea.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Life Course, Culture and Aging: Global Transformations Volume 6
  • Tides of Empire

    Tides of Empire

    Religion, Development, and Environment in Cambodia

    Work, C.

    At the forested edge of Cambodia’s development frontier, the infrastructures of global development engulf the land and existing social practices like an incoming tide. Cambodia’s distinctive history of imperial surge and rupture makes it easier to see the remains of earlier tides, which are embedded in the physical landscape, and also floating about in the solidifying boundaries of religious, economic, and political classifications. Using stories from the hybrid population of settler-farmers, loggers, and soldiers, all cutting new social realities from the water and the land, this book illuminates the contradictions and continuities in what the author suggests is the final tide of empire.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Asian Anthropologies Volume 10
  • Agency in Transnational Memory Politics

    Agency in Transnational Memory Politics

    Wüstenberg, J. & Sierp, A. (eds)

    The dynamics of transnational memory play a central role in modern politics, from postsocialist efforts at transitional justice to the global legacies of colonialism. Yet, the relatively young subfield of transnational memory studies remains underdeveloped and fractured across numerous disciplines, even as nascent, boundary-crossing theories on topics such as multi-vocal, traveling, or entangled remembrance suggest new ways of negotiating difficult political questions. This volume brings together theoretical and practical considerations to provide transnational memory scholars with an interdisciplinary investigation into agency—the “who” and the “how” of cross-border commemoration that motivates activists and fascinates observers.

    Subjects: History (General) Sociology Memory Studies
    Series: Worlds of Memory Volume 4
  • Ours Once More

    Ours Once More

    Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece

    Herzfeld, M.

    When this work – one that contributes to both the history and anthropology fields – first appeared in 1982, it was hailed as a landmark study of the role of folklore in nation-building. It has since been highly influential in reshaping the analysis of Greek and European cultural dynamics.  In this expanded edition, a new introduction by the author and an epilogue by Sharon Macdonald document its importance for the emergence of serious anthropological interest in European culture and society and for current debates about Greece’s often contested place in the complex politics of the European Union.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General)
    Area: Southern Europe
  • States of Imitation

    States of Imitation

    Mimetic Governmentality and Colonial Rule

    Ladwig, P. & Roque, R. (eds)

    Late Western colonialism often relied on the practice of imitating indigenous forms of rule in order to maintain power; conversely, indigenous polities could imitate Western sociopolitical forms to their own benefit. Drawing on historical ethnographic studies of colonialism in Asia and Africa, States of Imitation examines how the colonial state attempted to administer, control, and integrate its indigenous subjects through mimetic governmentality, as well the ways indigenous states adopted these imitative practices to establish reciprocal ties with, or to resist the presence of, the colonial state.

    Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 11
  • Pacing Mobilities

    Pacing Mobilities

    Timing, Intensity, Tempo and Duration of Human Movements

    Amit, V. & Salazar, N. B. (eds)

    Turning the attention to the temporal as well as the more familiar spatial dimensions of mobility, this volume focuses on the momentum for and temporal composition of mobility, the rate at which people enact or deploy their movements as well as the conditions under which these moves are being marshalled, represented and contested. This is an anthropological exploration of temporality as a form of action, a process of actively modulating or responding to how people are moving rather than the more usual focus in mobility studies on where they are heading.

    Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General)
    Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 8
  • Urban Sustainability in the Arctic

    Urban Sustainability in the Arctic

    Measuring Progress in Circumpolar Cities

    Orttung, R. W.

    Urban Sustainability in the Arctic advances our understanding of cities in the far north by applying elements of the international standard for urban sustainability (ISO 37120) to numerous Arctic cities. In delivering rich material about northern cities in Alaska, Canada, and Russia, the book examines how well the ISO 37120 measures sustainability and how well it applies in northern conditions. In doing so, it links the Arctic cities into a broader conversation about urban sustainability more generally.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology Urban Studies
    Area: Circumpolar
    Series: Studies in the Circumpolar North Volume 3
  • Borders across Healthcare

    Borders across Healthcare

    Moral Economies of Healthcare and Migration in Europe

    Sahraoui, N. (ed)

    Examining which actors determine undocumented migrants’ access to healthcare on the ground, this volume looks at what happens in the daily interactions between administrative personnel, healthcare professionals and migrant patients in healthcare institutions across Europe. Borders across Healthcare explores contemporary moral economies of the healthcare-migration nexus. The volume documents the many ways in which borders come to disrupt healthcare settings and illuminates how judgements of a health-related deservingness become increasingly important, producing hierarchies that undermine a universal right to healthcare.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Mobility Studies Sociology
    Area: Europe
  • Time Work

    Time Work

    Studies of Temporal Agency

    Flaherty, M. G., Meinert, L., & Dalsgård, A. L. (eds)

    Examining how people alter or customize various dimensions of their temporal experience, this volume discovers how we resist external sources of temporal constraint or structure. These ethnographic studies are international in scope and look at many different countries and continents. They come to the overall conclusion that people construct their own circumstances with the intention to modify their experience of time.

    Subjects: Applied Anthropology Sociology Anthropology (General)
  • Don't Need No Thought Control

    Don't Need No Thought Control

    Western Culture in East Germany and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

    Horten, G.

    The fall of the Berlin Wall is typically understood as the culmination of political-economic trends that fatally weakened the East German state. Meanwhile, comparatively little attention has been paid to the cultural dimension of these dramatic events, particularly the role played by Western mass media and consumer culture. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Don’t Need No Thought Control explores the dynamic interplay of popular unrest, intensifying economic crises, and cultural policies under Erich Honecker. It shows how the widespread influence of (and public demands for) Western cultural products forced GDR leaders into a series of grudging accommodations that undermined state power to a hitherto underappreciated extent.

    Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Media Studies Cultural Studies (General) Film and Television Studies
    Area: Germany
  • Abortion in Post-revolutionary Tunisia

    Abortion in Post-revolutionary Tunisia

    Politics, Medicine and Morality

    Maffi, I.

    After the revolution of 2011, the electoral victory of the Islamist party ‘Ennahdha’ allowed previously silenced religious and conservative ideas about women’s right to abortion to be expressed. This also allowed healthcare providers in the public sector to refuse abortion and contraceptive care. This book explores the changes and continuity in the local discourses and practices related to the body, sexuality, reproduction and gender relationships. It also investigates how the bureaucratic apparatus of government healthcare facilities affects the complex moral world of clinicians and patients.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Africa
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 46
  • Can Academics Change the World?

    Can Academics Change the World?

    An Israeli Anthropologist's Testimony on the Rise and Fall of a Protest Movement on Campus

    Shokeid, M.

    Moshe Shokeid narrates his experiences as a member of AD KAN (NO MORE), a protest movement of Israeli academics at Tel Aviv University, who fought against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, founded during the first Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993). However, since the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin and the later obliteration of the Oslo accord, public manifestations of dissent on Israeli campuses have been remarkably mute. This chronicle of AD KAN is explored in view of the ongoing theoretical discourse on the role of the intellectual in society and is compared with other account of academic involvement in different countries during periods of acute political conflict.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Jewish Studies Anthropology (General) Educational Studies
    Area: Middle East & Israel
    Series: EASA Series Volume 39
  • Structures of Protection?

    Structures of Protection?

    Rethinking Refugee Shelter

    Scott-Smith, T. & Breeze, M. E. (eds)

    Questioning what shelter is and how we can define it, this volume brings together essays on different forms of refugee shelter, with a view to widening public understanding about the lives of forced migrants and developing theoretical understanding of this oft-neglected facet of the refugee experience. Drawing on a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, law, architecture, and history, each of the chapters describes a particular shelter and uses this to open up theoretical reflections on the relationship between architecture, place, politics, design and displacement.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 39
  • Finding Ways Through Eurospace

    Finding Ways Through Eurospace

    West African Movers Re-viewing Europe from the Inside

    Schapendonk, J.

    Studying the im/mobility trajectories of West Africans in the EU, this book presents a new approach to West African migrants in Europe. It argues that a migration lens is not necessarily the best starting point to understand these dynamic im/mobility processes. Rather than seeing migrancy as the primary marker of their lives, this book positions these trajectories in a wider social script of mobility and discusses how African migrants are confronted with rigid mobility regimes, but also how they manage to transgress and circumvent them.

    Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Europe
    Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 7
  • Spaces of Solidarity

    Spaces of Solidarity

    Karen Activism in the Thailand-Burma Borderlands

    Sharples, R.

    Exploring notions of activism and space as narrated by Karen displaced persons and refugees in the Thai-Burma borderlands, this book looks beyond refugees as passive victims or a ‘humanitarian case’. Instead, the book examines the active engagement the Karen have with their persecution and displacement and their subsequent emplacement in the borderlands. A key focus of the book is to look at this engagement in terms of spaces of solidarity – constructed through patterns of activism, paths of connectivity and processes of cultural recovery. The book also studies the spatial configuration of borderlands, examining the impact of cross-border activities and their inter-related nature.

    Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Total Atheism

    Total Atheism

    Secular Activism and the Politics of Difference in South India

    Binder, S.

    Exploring lived atheism in the South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this book offers a unique insight into India’s rapidly transforming multi-religious society. It explores the social, cultural, and aesthetic challenges faced by a movement of secular activists in their endeavors to establish atheism as a practical and comprehensive way of life. On the basis of original ethnographic material and engaged conceptual analysis, Total Atheism develops an alternative to Eurocentric accounts of secularity and critically revisits central themes of South Asian scholarship from the hitherto marginalized vantage point of radically secular and explicitly irreligious atheists in India.

    Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
    Area: Asia
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 38
  • Theorising Media and Conflict

    Theorising Media and Conflict

    Budka, P. & Bräuchler, B. (eds)

    Theorising Media and Conflict brings together anthropologists as well as media and communication scholars to collectively address the elusive and complex relationship between media and conflict. Through epistemological and methodological reflections and the analyses of various case studies from around the globe, this volume provides evidence for the co-constitutiveness of media and conflict and contributes to their consolidation as a distinct area of scholarship. Practitioners, policymakers, students and scholars who wish to understand the lived realities and dynamics of contemporary conflicts will find this book invaluable.

    Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General)
    Series: Anthropology of Media Volume 10
  • Selfishness and Selflessness

    Selfishness and Selflessness

    New Approaches to Understanding Morality

    Layne, L. L. (ed)

    We are said to be suffering a narcissism epidemic when the need for collective action seems more pressing than ever. The traits of Selfishness and selflessness address the ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ relationship between one’s self and others. The work they do during periods of social instability and cultural change is probed in this original, interdisciplinary collection. Contributions range from an examination of how these concepts animated the eighteenth-century anti-slavery campaigners to a dissection of the way middle-class mothers’ experiences illustrate gendered struggles over how much and to whom one is morally obliged to give.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology
    Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 10
  • Rhetorical Minds

    Rhetorical Minds

    Meditations on the Cognitive Science of Persuasion

    Oakley, T.

    Minds are rhetorical. From the moment we are born others are shaping our capacity for mental agency. As a meditation on the nature of human thought and action, this book starts with the proposition that human thinking is inherently and irreducibly social, and that the long rhetorical tradition in the West has been a neglected source for thinking about cognition. Each chapter reflects on a different dimension of human thought based on the fundamental proposition that our rhetoric thinks and acts with and through others.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Series: Studies in Linguistic Anthropology Volume 1
  • Beyond Wild and Tame

    Beyond Wild and Tame

    Soiot Encounters in a Sentient Landscape

    Oehler, A. C.

    Responding to recent scholarship, this book examines animal domestication and offers a Soiot approach to animals and landscapes, which transcends the wild-tame dichotomy. Following herder-hunters of the Eastern Saian Mountains in southern Siberia, the author examines how Soiot and Tofa households embrace unpredictability, recognize sentience, and encourage autonomy in all their relations with animals, spirits, and land features. It is an ethnography intended to help us reinvent our relations with the earth in unpredictable times.

    Subject: Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Interspecies Encounters Volume 2
  • Navigating Miscarriage

    Navigating Miscarriage

    Social, Medical and Conceptual Perspectives

    Kilshaw, S. & Borg, K. (eds)

    Miscarriage is a significant women's health issue. Research has consistently shown that one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. This collected volume explores miscarriage in diverse historical and cultural settings with contributions from anthropologists, historians and medical professionals. Contributors use rich ethnographic and historical material to discuss how pregnancy loss is managed and negotiated in a range of societies. The book considers meanings attached to miscarriage and how religious, cultural, medical and legal forces impact the way miscarriage is experienced and perceived.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 45
  • Space, Place and Identity

    Space, Place and Identity

    Wodaabe of Niger in the 21st Century

    Köhler, F.

    Known as highly mobile cattle nomads, the Wodaabe in Niger are today increasingly engaged in a transformation process towards a more diversified livelihood based primarily on agro-pastoralism and urban work migration. This book examines recent transformations in spatial patterns, notably in the context of urban migration and in processes of sedentarization in rural proto-villages. The book analyses the consequences that the recent change entails for social group formation and collective identification, and how this impacts integration into wider society amid the structures of the modern nation state.

    Subjects: Mobility Studies Urban Studies Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 21
  • Children of Gregoria, The

    The Children of Gregoria

    Dogme Ethnography of a Mexican Family

    Kristensen, R. & Adeath Villamil, C.

    The Children of Gregoria portrays a struggling Mexico, told through the story of the Rosales family. The people entrenched in the violent communities that the Rosales belong to have been discussed, condemned, analyzed, joked about and cheered, but rarely have they been seriously listened to. This book highlights their voices and allows them to tell their own stories in an accessible, literary manner without prejudice, persecution or judgment.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Media Studies
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Ethnography, Theory, Experiment Volume 8
  • After the Pink Tide

    After the Pink Tide

    Corporate State Formation and New Egalitarianisms in Latin America

    Gold, M. & Zagato, A. (eds)

    The left-wing Pink Tide movement that swept across Latin America seems now to be overturned, as a new wave of free-market thinkers emerge across the continent. This book analyses the emergence of corporate power within Latin America and the response of egalitarian movements across the continent trying to break open the constraints of the state. Through an ethnographically grounded and localized anthropological perspective, this book argues that at a time when the regular structures of political participation have been ruptured, the Latin American context reveals multiple expressions of egalitarian movements that strive (and sometimes momentarily manage) to break through the state’s apparatus.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Egalitarianism Volume 1
  • Media Practices and Changing African Socialities

    Media Practices and Changing African Socialities

    Non-media-centric Perspectives

    Helle-Valle, J. & Strom-Mathiesen, A. (eds)

    Deriving from innovative new work by six researchers, this book questions what the new media's role is in contemporary Africa. The chapters are diverse - covering different areas of sociality in different countries - but they unite in their methodological and analytical foundation. The focus is on media-related practices, which require engagement with different perspectives and concerns while situating these in a wider analytical context. The contributions to this collection provide fresh ethnographic descriptions of how new media practices can affect socialities in significant but unpredictable ways.

    Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General) Development Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: Anthropology of Media Volume 9
  • On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise

    On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise

    Affect, Tourism, Belize

    Little, K.

    There are beastly forces in Belize. Forces that are actively involved in making paradise impossible. On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise is a collection of seven stories about local lives in the fictional village of Wallaceville. They turn rogue in the face of runaway forces that take the form and figure of a Belize beast-time, which can appear as a comic mishap, social ruin, tragic excess, or wild guesses. Inciting the affective politics of life in the region, this fable of emergence evokes the unnerving uncertainties of life in the tourist state of Belize.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Literary Studies
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 45
  • Velvet Retro

    Velvet Retro

    Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture

    Pehe, V.

    Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked “nostalgia” to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a “retro” fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. This innovative study locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature, film, and other cultural forms, enriching our understanding of not only the nation’s memory culture, but also the ways in which popular culture can structure collective memory.

    Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present Film and Television Studies Memory Studies
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Worlds of Memory Volume 2
  • Credit and Debt in an Unequal Society

    Credit and Debt in an Unequal Society

    Establishing a Consumer Credit Market in South Africa

    Schraten, J.

    South Africa was one of the first countries in the Global South that established a financialized consumer credit market. This market consolidates rather than alleviates the extreme social inequality within a country. This book investigates the political reasons for adopting an allegedly self-regulating market despite its disastrous effects and identifies the colonialist ideas of property rights as a mainstay of the existing social order. The book addresses sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and legal scholars interested in the interaction of economy and law in contemporary market societies.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Africa
    Series: The Human Economy Volume 7
  • Roma and Their Struggle for Identity in Contemporary Europe, The

    The Roma and Their Struggle for Identity in Contemporary Europe

    Baar, H. van & Kóczé, A. (eds)

    Thirty years after the collapse of Communism, and at a time of increasing anti-migrant and anti-Roma sentiment, this book analyses how Roma identity is expressed in contemporary Europe. From backgrounds ranging from political theory, postcolonial, cultural and gender studies to art history, feminist critique and anthropology, the contributors reflect on the extent to which a politics of identity regarding historically disadvantaged, racialized minorities such as the Roma can still be legitimately articulated.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Europe
    Series: New Directions in Romani Studies Volume 3
  • If Everyone Returned, The Island Would Sink

    If Everyone Returned, The Island Would Sink

    Urbanisation and Migration in Vanuatu

    Petrou, K.

    Focusing on the small island of Paama, Vanuatu, and the capital, Port Vila, this book presents a rare and recent study of the ongoing significance of urbanisation and internal migration in the Global South. Based on longitudinal research undertaken in rural ‘home’ places, urban suburbs and informal settlements over thirty years, this book reveals the deep ambivalence of the outcome of migration, and argues that continuity in the fundamental organising principles of cultural life – in this case centred on kinship and an ‘island home’ – is significantly more important for urban and rural lives than the transformative impacts of migration and urbanisation.

    Subjects: Mobility Studies Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists Volume 7
  • Money Counts

    Money Counts

    Revisiting Economic Calculation

    Schmidt, M. & Ross, S. (eds)

    Traditionally viewed as an abstraction, the quantitative nature of money is essential in evaluating the relationship between monetary systems and society. Money Counts moves beyond abstraction, exploring the conceptual diversity and everyday enactment of money’s quantity. Drawing from case studies including British jewelers, blood-money payments in Germanic law codes, and the quotidian use of money in cosmopolitical Moscow, a Western Kenyan village, and socialist Havana, the chapters in this volume offer new theoretical and empirical interpretations of money’s quantitative nature as it relates to abstraction, sociality, materiality, freedom, and morality.

    Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 10
  • Devil is Disorder, The

    The Devil is Disorder

    Bodies, Spirits and Misfortune in a Trinidadian Village

    Lynch, R.

    What role might the Devil have in health and illness? The Devil is Disorder explores constructions of the body, health, illness and wider misfortune in a Trinidadian village where evangelical Christianity is growing in popularity. Based on long-term ethnography and locating the village in historical and global context, the book takes a nuanced cosmological approach to situate evangelical Christian understandings as shaping and being shaped by their context and, in the process, shaping individuals themselves. As people move from local to global subjects, health here stretches beyond being a matter of individual bodies and is connected to worldwide flows and networks, spirit entities, and expansive moral orders.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion Sociology
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Jaguars of the Dawn

    Jaguars of the Dawn

    Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer

    Pierini, E.

    The Brazilian Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) is the place where the worlds of the living and the spirits merge and the boundaries between lives are regularly crossed. Drawing upon over a decade of extensive fieldwork in temples of the Amanhecer in Brazil and Europe, the author explores how mediums understand their experiences and how they learn to establish relationships with their spirit guides. She sheds light on the ways in which mediumistic development in the Vale do Amanhecer is used for therapeutic purposes and informs notions of body and self, of illness and wellbeing.

    Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology Sociology
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Management and Morality

    Management and Morality

    An Ethnographic Exploration of Management Consultancy Seminars

    Henningsen, E.

    Drawing on extended ethnographic studies of management consultancies in the Oslo region of Norway, this book seeks to find a richer understanding of their role in contemporary work life and the attraction their practices exert on people. The author shows that management consultancy is an arena of meaning that should be analysed as a ‘cultural space’. With a detailed investigation into consultancy as a cultural phenomenon, Henningsen argues that  its services can be viewed as a ‘micro-utopian’ vision which can lead to  a happier working environment for individuals.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Applied Anthropology
    Area: Northern Europe
    Series: Anthropology at Work Volume 1
  • Sustaining Indigenous Songs

    Sustaining Indigenous Songs

    Contemporary Warlpiri Ceremonial Life in Central Australia

    Curran, G.

    As an ethnography of Central Australian singing traditions and ceremonial contexts, this book asks questions about the vitality of the cultural knowledge and practices highly valued by Warlpiri people and fundamental to their cultural heritage. Set against a discussion of the contemporary vitality of Aboriginal musical traditions in Australia and embedded in the historical background of this region, the book lays out the features of Warlpiri songs and ceremonies, and centers on a focal case study of the Warlpiri Kurdiji ceremony to illustrate the modes in which core cultural themes are being passed on through song to future generations.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Fifty Years of Peasant Wars in Latin America

    Fifty Years of Peasant Wars in Latin America

    Binford, L., Gill, L., & Striffler, S. (eds)

    Informed by Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, published in 1969, this book examines selected peasant struggles in seven Latin American countries during the last fifty years and suggests the continuing relevance of Wolf’s approach. The seven case studies are preceded by an Introduction in which the editors assess the continuing relevance of Wolf’s political economy. The book concludes with Gavin Smith’s reflection on reading Eric Wolf as a public intellectual today.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Dislocations Volume 28
  • Big Capital in an Unequal World

    Big Capital in an Unequal World

    The Micropolitics of Wealth in Pakistan

    Armytage, R.

    Inside the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of Pakistan’s elite.

    Benefitting from rare access and keen analytical insight, Rosita Armytage’s rich study reveals the daily, even mundane, ways in which elites contribute to and shape the inequality that characterizes the modern world. Operating in a rapidly developing economic environment, the experience of Pakistan’s wealthiest and most powerful members contradicts widely held assumptions that economic growth is leading to increasingly impersonalized and globally standardized economic and political structures.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
    Area: Asia
    Series: Dislocations Volume 29
  • Institutionalised Dreams

    Institutionalised Dreams

    The Art of Managing Foreign Aid

    Drążkiewicz, E.

    Using examples from Poland, Elżbieta Drążkiewicz explores the question of why states become donors and  individuals decide to share their wealth with others through foreign aid. She comes to the conclusion that the concept of foreign aid requires the establishment of a specific moral economy which links national ideologies and local cultures of charitable giving with broader ideas about the global political economy. It is through these processes that faith in foreign aid interventions as a solution to global issues is generated. The book also explores the relationship linking a state institution with its NGO partners, as well as international players such as the EU or OECD.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: EASA Series Volume 38
  • Social Im/mobilities in Africa

    Social Im/mobilities in Africa

    Ethnographic Approaches

    Noret, J. (ed)

    Grounded in both theory and ethnography, this volume insists on taking social positionality seriously when accounting for Africa’s current age of polarizing wealth. To this end, the book advocates a multidimensional view of African societies, in which social positions consist of a variety of intersecting social powers - or ‘capitals’ – including wealth, education, social relationships, religion, ethnicity, and others. Accordingly, the notion of social im/mobilities emphasizes the complexities of current changes, taking us beyond the prism of a one-dimensional social ladder, for social moves cannot always be apprehended through the binaries of ‘gains’ and ‘losses’.

    Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Africa
  • Heritage Movements in Asia

    Heritage Movements in Asia

    Cultural Heritage Activism, Politics, and Identity

    Mozaffari, A. & Jones, T. (eds)

    Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical, and historical contexts. This volume is unique in that it is dedicated to approaching the analysis of heritage through the concepts of social movements. Adapting the latest developments in the field of social movements, the chapters examine the formation, use and contestation of heritage by various official, non-official and activist players and the spaces where such ongoing negotiations and contestation take place. By bringing social movements into heritage studies, the book advocates a shift of perspective in understanding heritage, one that is no longer bound by (at times arbitrary) divisions such as those assumed between the state and people or between experts and non-experts.

    Subjects: Heritage Studies Museum Studies Anthropology (General)
    Areas: Asia Asia-Pacific
    Series: Explorations in Heritage Studies Volume 2
  • It Happens Among People

    It Happens Among People

    Resonances and Extensions of the Work of Fredrik Barth

    Wu, K. & Weller, R. P. (eds)

    Written by eleven leading anthropologists from around the world, this volume extends the insights of Fredrik Barth, one of the most important anthropologists of the twentieth century, to push even further at the frontiers of anthropology and honor his memory. As a collection, the chapters thus expand Barth’s pioneering work on values, further develop his insights on human agency and its potential creativity, as well as continuing to develop the relevance for his work as a way of thinking about and beyond the state. The work is grounded on his insistence that theory should grow only from observed life.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 8
  • Privileges of Birth

    Privileges of Birth

    Constellations of Care, Myth, and Race in South Africa

    Rogerson, J. J. M.

    Focussing ethnographically on private-sector maternity care in South Africa, Privileges of Birth looks at the ways healthcare and childbirth are shaped by South Africa’s racialised history. Birth is one of the most medicalised aspects of the lifecycle across all sectors of society, and there is deep division between what the privileged can afford compared with the rest of the population. Examining the ethics of care in midwife-attended birth, the author situates the argument in the context of a growing literature on care in anthropological and feminist scholarship, offering a unique account of birthing care in the context of elite care services.

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Area: Africa
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 44
  • Brazilian Steel Town

    Brazilian Steel Town

    Machines, Land, Money and Commoning in the Making of the Working Class

    Mollona, M.

    Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getúlio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. The city’s economy, and consequently its citizen’s lives, revolves around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest industrial complex in Latin America. Although the glory days of the CSN have long passed, the company still controls life in Volta Redonda today, creating as much dispossession as wealth for the community. Brazilian Steel Town tells the story of the people tied to this ailing giant – of their fears, hopes, and everyday struggles.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Dislocations Volume 27
  • Access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies

    Access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies

    The Case of France and Belgium

    Merchant, J. (ed)

    Despite France and Belgium sharing and interacting constantly with similar culinary tastes, music and pop culture, access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies are strikingly different. Discrimination written into French law acutely contrasts with non-discriminatory access to ART in Belgium. The contributors of this volume are social scientists from France, Belgium, England and the United States, representing different disciplines: law, political science, philosophy, sociology and anthropology. Each author has attempted, through the prism of their specialties, to demonstrate and analyse how and why this striking difference in access to ART exists.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology
    Areas: France Europe
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 43
  • Nourishing the Nation

    Nourishing the Nation

    Food as National Identity in Catalonia

    Johannes, V.

    In the early twenty-first century, nationalism has seen a surprising resurgence across the Western world. In the Catalan Autonomous Community in northeastern Spain, this resurgence has been most apparent in widespread support for Catalonia’s pro-independence movement, and the popular assertion of Catalan symbols, culture and identity in everyday life. Nourishing the Nation provides an ethnographic account of the everyday experience of national identity in Catalonia, using an essential, everyday object of consumption: food. As a crucial element of Catalan cultural life, a focus on food provides unique insight into the lived realities of Catalan nationalism, and how Catalans experience and express their national identity today.

    Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 44
  • Atlantic Perspectives

    Atlantic Perspectives

    Places, Spirits and Heritage

    Balkenhol, M., Blanes, R. L., & Sarró, R. (eds)

    Focusing on mobility, religion, and belonging, the volume contributes to transatlantic anthropology and history by bringing together religion, cultural heritage and placemaking in the Atlantic world. The entanglements of these domains are ethnographically scrutinized to perceive the connections and disconnections of specific places which, despite a common history, are today very different in terms of secular regimes and the presence of religion in the public sphere. Ideally suited to a variety of scholars and students in different fields, Atlantic Perspectives will lead to new debates and conversations throughout the fields of anthropology, religion and history.

    Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies
  • Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

    Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

    Fahy, J.

    Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City centers on a growing multinational community of ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) devotees in Mayapur, West Bengal. While ISKCON’s history is often presented in terms of an Indian guru ‘transplanting’ Indian spirituality to the West, this book focusses on the efforts to bring ISKCON back to India. Paying particular attention to devotees’ failure to consistently live up to ISKCON’s ideals and the ongoing struggle to realize the utopian vision of an ‘ideal Vedic city’, this book argues that the anthropology of ethics must account for how moral systems accommodate the problem of moral failure.

    Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
    Area: Asia
    Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 9
  • Bourdieu and Social Space

    Bourdieu and Social Space

    Mobilities, Trajectories, Emplacements

    Reed-Danahay, D.

    French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu’s relevance for studies of spatiality and mobility has received less attention than other aspects of his work. Here, Deborah Reed-Danahay argues that the concept of social space, central to Bourdieu’s ideas, addresses the structured inequalities that prevail in spatial choices and practices. She provides an ethnographically informed interpretation of social space that demonstrates its potential for new directions in studies of mobility, immobility, and emplacement.  This book traces the links between habitus and social space across the span of Bourdieu’s writings, and places his work in dialogue with historical and contemporary approaches to mobility.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Mobility Studies Sociology
    Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 6
  • Claiming Homes

    Claiming Homes

    Confronting Domicide in Rural China

    Bruckermann, C.

    Chinese citizens make themselves at home despite economic transformation, political rupture, and domestic dislocation in the contemporary countryside. By mobilizing labor and kinship to make claims over homes, people, and things, rural residents withstand devaluation and confront dispossession. As a particular configuration of red capitalism and socialist sovereignty takes root, this process challenges the relationship between the politics of place and the location of class in China and beyond.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Dislocations Volume 26
  • Inward Looking

    Inward Looking

    The Impact of Migration on Romanipe from the Romani Perspective

    Marinov, A. G.

    At present, Roma are an integral part of Europe, though they face structural and social inequalities and different forms of exclusion and discrimination. Inward Looking seeks to understand the relationship between Romani identity, performance and migration. Particularly, it studies the idea of ‘Romanipe’ through the prism of the personal accounts of Romani migrants. It also seeks to understand the relationships between the Romani groups in Europe, due to their increased travel and convergence, and predict the effects of migration on (new) Romani consciousness. The findings are based on qualitative data gathered from Romani migrants from three towns in Bulgaria.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Europe
    Series: New Directions in Romani Studies Volume 2
  • Regimes of Responsibility in Africa

    Regimes of Responsibility in Africa

    Genealogies, Rationalities and Conflicts

    Rubbers, B. & Jedlowski, A. (eds)

    Regimes of Responsibility in Africa ­analyses the transformations that discourses and practices of responsibility have undergone in Africa. By doing so, this collection develops a stronger grasp of the specific political, economic and social transformations taking place today in Africa. At the same time, while focusing on case studies from the African continent, the work enters into a dialogue with the emerging corpus of studies in the field of ethics, adding to it a set of analytical perspectives that can help further enlarge its theoretical and geographical scope.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
    Area: Africa
  • Sometime Kin

    Sometime Kin

    Layers of Memory, Boundaries of Ethnography

    Wallman, S.

    In Sometime Kin, Sandra Wallman paints the portrait of an Alpine settlement – its history, economy and culture, and its unusual resistance to outsiders and modernization. Against this, her journal shows the villagers embracing her four small children and acting as participant observers in the two-way process of research. This project happened more than forty years ago and involved a uniquely large fieldwork family, but its insights have wider significance. The book argues that the intrusion of observation inevitably distorts the ordinary life observed, that the challenges of multi-vocality and “truth” are always with us, and that memory is the bedrock of every ethnographic enterprise.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology
    Area: Southern Europe
  • Disaster Upon Disaster

    Disaster Upon Disaster

    Exploring the Gap Between Knowledge, Policy and Practice

    Hoffman, S. M. & Barrios, R. E. (eds)

    A consistent problem that confronts disaster reduction is the disjunction between academic and expert knowledge and policies and practices of agencies mandated to deal with the concern. Although a great deal of knowledge has been acquired regarding many aspects of disasters, such as driving factors, risk construction, complexity of resettlement, and importance of peoples’ culture, very little has become protocol and procedure. Disaster Upon Disaster illuminates the numerous disjunctions between the suppositions, realities, agendas, and executions in the field, goes on to detail contingencies, predicaments, old and new plights, and finally advances solutions toward greatly improved outcomes.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Applied Anthropology
    Series: Catastrophes in Context Volume 2
  • Water, Life, and Profit

    Water, Life, and Profit

    Fluid Economies and Cultures of Niamey, Niger

    Keough, S. B. & Youngstedt, S. M

    Water, Life, and Profit offers a holistic analysis of the people, economies, cultural symbolism, and material culture involved in the management, production, distribution, and consumption of drinking water in the urban context of Niamey, Niger. Paying particular attention to two key groups of people who provide water to most of Niamey’s residents - door-to-door water vendors, and those who sell water in one-half-liter plastic bags (sachets) on the street or in small shops – the authors offer new insights into how Niamey’s water economies  affect gender, ethnicity, class, and spatial structure today.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Africa
  • Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough

    Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough

    Ethnographic Responses

    Martínez, F. & Laviolette, P. (eds)

    Exploring some of the ways in which repair practices and perceptions of brokenness vary culturally, Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough argues that repair is both a process and also a consequence which is sought out—an attempt to extend the life of things as well as an answer to failures, gaps, wrongdoings, and leftovers. This volume develops an open-ended combination of empirical and theoretical questions including: What does it mean to claim that something is broken? At what point is something broken repairable? What are the social relationships that take place around repair? And how much tolerance for failure do our societies have?

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Heritage Studies
    Series: Politics of Repair Volume 1
  • Sound of Silence, The

    The Sound of Silence

    Indigenous Perspectives on the Historical Archaeology of Colonialism

    Äikäs, T. & Salmi, A.-K. (eds)

    Colonial encounters between indigenous peoples and European state powers are overarching themes in the historical archaeology of the modern era, and postcolonial historical archaeology has repeatedly emphasized the complex two-way nature of colonial encounters. This volume examines common trajectories in indigenous colonial histories, and explores new ways to understand cultural contact, hybridization and power relations between indigenous peoples and colonial powers from the indigenous point of view. By bringing together a wide geographical range and combining multiple sources such as oral histories, historical records, and contemporary discourses with archaeological data, the volume finds new multivocal interpretations of colonial histories.

    Subjects: Archaeology Colonial History Memory Studies Anthropology (General)
  • Ambiguous Childhoods

    Ambiguous Childhoods

    Peer Socialisation, Schooling and Agency in a Zambian Village

    Clemensen, N.

    Growing up with social and economic upheaval in the peripheries of global neoliberalism, children in rural Zambia are presented with diverging social and moral protocols across homes, classrooms, church halls, and the streets. Mostly unmonitored by adults, they explore the ambiguities of adult life in playful interactions with their siblings and kin across gender and age. Drawing on rich linguistic-ethnographic details of such interactions combined with observations of school and household procedures, the author provides a rare insight into the lives, voices, and learning paths of children in a rural African setting.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Development Studies Educational Studies
    Area: Africa
  • Museum of Mankind, The

    The Museum of Mankind

    Man and Boy in the British Museum Ethnography Department

    Burt, B.

    The Museum of Mankind was an innovative and popular showcase for minority cultures from around the non-Western world from 1970 to 1997. This memoir is a critical appreciation of its achievements in the various roles of a national museum, of the personalities of its staff and of the issues raised in the representation of exotic cultures. Issues of changing museum theory and practice are raised in a detailed case-study that also focuses on the social life of the museum community. This is the first history of a remarkable museum and a memorable interlude in the long history of one of the world’s oldest and greatest museums. Although not presented as an academic study, it should be useful for museum and cultural studies as a well as a wider readership interested in the British Museum.

    Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Northern Europe
  • Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies

    Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies

    Bruun Jensen, C. & Morita, A. (eds)

    Over time, the role of nature in anthropology has evolved from being a mere backdrop for social and cultural diversity to being viewed as an integral part of the ontological entanglement of human and nonhuman agents. This transformation of the role of nature offers important insight into the relationships between diverse anthropological traditions. By highlighting natural-cultural worlds alongside these traditions, Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies explores the potential for creating more sophisticated conjunctions of anthropological knowledge and practice.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 9
  • Muted Memories

    Muted Memories

    Heritage-Making, Bagamoyo, and the East African Caravan Trade

    Lindström, J.

    In the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of porters carried ivory every year from the African interior to Bagamoyo, a port town at the Indian Ocean. In the opposite direction, they carried millions of meters of cloth, manufactured in the USA, Europe, and India. This book examines the centrality of the caravan trade, both culturally and economically, to Bagamoyo’s development and cosmopolitan character, while also exploring how this history was silenced when Bagamoyo was instead branded as a slave route town in 2006 in an attempt to qualify it for the UNESCO World Heritage List.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Development Studies
    Area: Africa
  • Fierce Medicines, Fragile Socialities

    Fierce Medicines, Fragile Socialities

    Grounding Global HIV Treatment in Tanzania

    Mattes, D.

    Set in Tanga, a city on the Tanzanian Swahili coast, Dominik Mattes examines the implementation of antiretroviral HIV-treatment (ART) in the area, exploring the manifold infrastructural and social fragilities of treatment provision in public HIV clinics as well as patients’ multi-layered struggles of coming to terms with ART in their everyday lives. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book shows that, notwithstanding the massive rollout of ART, providing treatment and living a life with HIV in settings like Tanga continue to entail social, economic, and moral challenges and long-term uncertainties, which contradict the global rhetoric of the “normalization of HIV”.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Development Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: Epistemologies of Healing Volume 18
  • When Will We Talk About Hitler?

    When Will We Talk About Hitler?

    German Students and the Nazi Past

    Oeser, A.

    For more than half a century, discourses on the Nazi past have powerfully shaped German social and cultural policy. Specifically, an institutional determination not to forget has expressed a “duty of remembrance” through commemorative activities and educational curricula. But as the horrors of the Third Reich retreat ever further from living memory, what do new generations of Germans actually think about this past? Combining observation, interviews, and archival research, this book provides a rich survey of the perspectives and experiences of German adolescents from diverse backgrounds, revealing the extent to which social, economic, and cultural factors have conditioned how they view representations of Germany’s complex history.

    Subjects: History (General) Educational Studies Anthropology (General) Memory Studies
    Area: Germany
    Series: Worlds of Memory Volume 1
  • PC Worlds

    PC Worlds

    Political Correctness and Rising Elites at the End of Hegemony

    Friedman, J.

    This provocative work offers an anthropological analysis of the phenomenon of political correctness, both as a general phenomenon of communication, in which associations in space and time take precedence over the content of what is communicated, and at specific critical historical conjunctures at which new elites attempt to redefine social reality. Focusing on the crises over the last thirty years of immigration and multiculturalist politics in Sweden, the book examines cases, some in which the author was himself involved, but also comparative material from other countries.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Media Studies
    Series: Loose Can(n)ons Volume 2
  • Civil–Military Entanglements

    Civil–Military Entanglements

    Anthropological Perspectives

    Sørensen, B. R. & Ben-Ari, E. (eds)

    Military-civilian encounters are multiple and diverse in our times. Contributors to this volume demonstrate how military and civilian domains are constituted through entanglements undermining the classic civil-military binary and manifest themselves in unexpected places and manners. Moreover, the essays trace out the ripples, reverberations and resonations of civil-military entanglements in areas not usually associated with such ties, but which are nevertheless real and significant for an understanding of the roles war, violence and the military play in shaping contemporary societies and the everyday life of its citizens.

    Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Applied Anthropology
  • Anti-Social Contract, The

    The Anti-Social Contract

    Injurious Talk and Dangerous Exchanges in Northern Mongolia

    Højer, L.

    Set in a remote district of villagers and nomadic pastoralists in the northernmost part of Mongolia, this book introduces a local world where social relationships are cast in witchcraft-like idioms of mistrust and suspicion. While the apparent social breakdown that followed the collapse of state socialism in Mongolia often implied a chaotic lack of social cohesion, this ethnography reveals an everyday universe where uncertain relations are as much internally cultivated in indigenous Mongolian perceptions of social relatedness, as they are externally confronted in postsocialist surroundings of unemployment and diminished social security.

    Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Critique of Identity Thinking

    Critique of Identity Thinking

    Jackson, M.

    Recent world-wide political developments have persuaded many people that we are again living in what Hannah Arendt called “dark times.” Jackson’s response to this age of uncertainty is to remind us how much experience falls outside the concepts and categories we habitually deploy in rendering life manageable and intelligible.  Drawing on such critical thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Karl Jaspers, whose work was profoundly influenced by the catastrophes that overwhelmed the world in the middle of the last century, Jackson explores the transformative and redemptive power of marginalized voices in the contemporary conversation of humankind.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)
  • From Bullies to Officers and Gentlemen

    From Bullies to Officers and Gentlemen

    How Notions of Professionalism and Civility Transformed the Ghana Armed Forces

    Agyekum, H. A.

    Based on unprecedented access to the Ghanaian military barracks and inspired by the recent resurgence of coups in West Africa, Agyekum assesses why and how the Ghana Armed Forces were transformed from an organization that actively orchestrated coups into an institution that accepts the authority of the democratically elected civilian government. Focusing on the process of professionalization of the Ghanaian military, this ethnography based monograph examines both historical and contemporary themes, and assesses the shift in military personnel from ‘Buga Buga’ soldiers – uneducated, lower-class soldiers, human rights abusers – to a more ‘modern’ fighting force.

    Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Applied Anthropology
    Area: Africa
  • Articulate Necrographies

    Articulate Necrographies

    Comparative Perspectives on the Voices and Silences of the Dead

    Panagiotopoulos, A. & Espírito Santo, D. (eds)

    Going beyond the frameworks of the anthropology of death, Articulate Necrographies offers a dramatic new way of studying the dead and their interactions with the living. Traditional anthropology has tended to dichotomize societies where death “speaks” from those where death is “silent” – the latter is deemed “scientific” and the former “religious” or “magical”. The collection introduces the concept of “necrography” to describe the way death and the dead create their own kinds of biographies in and among the living, and asks what kinds of articulations and silences this in turn produces in the lives of those affected.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Heritage Studies Literary Studies
  • Mobile Urbanity

    Mobile Urbanity

    Somali Presence in Urban East Africa

    Carrier, N. & Scharrer, T. (eds)

    The increased presence of Somalis has brought much change to East African towns and cities in recent decades, change that has met with ambivalence and suspicion, especially within Kenya. This volume demystifies Somali residence and mobility in urban East Africa, showing its historical depth, and exploring the social, cultural and political underpinnings of Somali-led urban transformation. In so doing, it offers a vivid case study of the transformative power of (forced) migration on urban centres, and the intertwining of urbanity and mobility. The volume will be of interest for readers working in the broader field of migration, as well as anthropology and urban studies.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Urban Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 20
  • Lewis Henry Morgan's Comparisons

    Lewis Henry Morgan's Comparisons

    Reassessing Terminology, Anarchy and Worldview in Indigenous Societies of America, Australia and Highland Middle India

    Pfeffer, G.

    About 150 years ago Lewis Henry Morgan compared relationship terminologies, societal forms and ideas of property to recognize the interdependence of the three domains. From a new perspective, the book re-examines, confirms and criticizes Morgan’s findings to conclude that reciprocal affinal relations determine most ‘classificatory’ terminologies and regulate many non-state societies, their property notions and their rituals. Apart from references to American and Australian features, such holistic socio-cultural constructs are exemplified by elaborate descriptions of little known contemporary Indigenous societies in Highland Middle India, altogether comprising many millions of members.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
  • Crossing Histories and Ethnographies

    Crossing Histories and Ethnographies

    Following Colonial Historicities in Timor-Leste

    Roque, R. & Traube, E. G. (eds)

    The key question for many anthropologists and historians today is not whether to cross the boundary between their disciplines, but whether the idea of a disciplinary boundary should be sustained. Reinterpreting the dynamic interplay between archive and field, these essays propose a method for mutually productive crossings between historical and ethnographic research. It engages critically with the colonial pasts of indigenous societies and examines how fieldwork and archival studies together lead to fruitful insights into the making of different colonial historicities. Timor-Leste’s unusually long and in some ways unique colonial history is explored as a compelling case for these crossings.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Sociology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 37
  • Making Bodies Kosher

    Making Bodies Kosher

    The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England

    Kasstan, B.

    Minority populations are often regarded as being ‘hard to reach’ and evading state expectations of health protection. This ethnographic and archival study analyses how devout Jews in Britain negotiate healthcare services to preserve the reproduction of culture and continuity. This book demonstrates how the transformative and transgressive possibilities of technology reveal multiple pursuits of protection between this religious minority and the state. Making Bodies Kosher advances theoretical perspectives of immunity, and sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, social history and the study of religions.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Jewish Studies Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Northern Europe
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 42
  • 24 Bars to Kill

    24 Bars to Kill

    Hip Hop, Aspiration, and Japan's Social Margins

    Armstrong, A. B.

    The most clearly identifiable and popular form of Japanese hip-hop, “ghetto” or “gangsta” music has much in common with its corresponding American subgenres, including its portrayal of life on the margins, confrontational style, and aspirational “rags-to-riches” narratives. Contrary to depictions of an ethnically and economically homogeneous Japan, gangsta J-hop gives voice to the suffering, deprivation, and social exclusion experienced by many modern Japanese. 24 Bars to Kill offers a fascinating ethnographic account of this music as well as the subculture around it, showing how gangsta hip-hop arises from widespread dissatisfaction and malaise.

    Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Dance and Performance Studies Volume 14
  • In Pursuit of Belonging

    In Pursuit of Belonging

    Forging an Ethical Life in European-Turkish Spaces

    Rottmann, S, B.

    Belonging is a not a state that we achieve, but a struggle that we wage. The struggle for belonging is more difficult if one is returning to a homeland after many years abroad. In Pursuit of Belonging is an ethnography of Turkish migrants’ struggle for understanding, intimacy and appreciation when they return from Germany to their Turkish homeland. Drawing on an established tradition of life story writing in anthropology, Rottmann conveys the struggle to forge an ethical life by relating the experiences of a second-generation German-Turkish woman named Leyla.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
    Areas: Europe Middle East & Israel
    Series: Anthropology of Europe Volume 4
  • Money Games

    Money Games

    Gambling in a Papua New Guinea Town

    Pickles, A. J.

    Gambling in Papua New Guinea, despite being completely absent prior to the Colonial era, has come to supersede storytelling as the region’s main nighttime activity. Money Games is an ethnographic monograph which reveals the contemporary importance of gambling in urban Papua New Guinea. Rich ethnographic detail is coupled with cross-cultural comparison which span the globe. This anthropological study of everyday economics in Melanesia thereby intersects with theories of money, value, play, informal economy, social change and leadership.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology Volume 10
  • Food and Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century

    Food and Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century

    Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

    Collinson, P., Young, I., Antal, L., & Macbeth, H. (eds)

    Sustainability is one of the great problems facing food production today. Using cross-disciplinary perspectives from international scholars working in social, cultural and biological anthropology, ecology and environmental biology, this volume brings many new perspectives to the problems we face.  Its cross-disciplinary framework of chapters with local, regional and continental perspectives provides a global outlook on sustainability issues. These case studies will appeal to those working in public sector agencies, NGOs, consultancies and other bodies focused on food security, human nutrition and environmental sustainability.

    Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)
    Series: Anthropology of Food & Nutrition Volume 9
  • Market Frictions

    Market Frictions

    Trade and Urbanization at the Vietnam-China Border

    Endres, K. W.

    Based on ethnographic research conducted over several years, Market Frictions examines the tensions and frictions that emerge from the interaction of global market forces, urban planning policies, and small-scale trading activities in the Vietnamese border city of Lào Cai. Here, it is revealed how small-scale traders and market vendors experience the marketplace, reflect upon their trading activities, and negotiate current state policies and regulations. It shows how “traditional” Vietnamese marketplaces have continually been reshaped and adapted to meet the changing political-economic circumstances and civilizational ideals of the time.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 5
  • Engaging Evil

    Engaging Evil

    A Moral Anthropology

    Olsen, W. C. & Csordas, T. J. (eds)

    Anthropologists have expressed wariness about the concept of evil even in discussions of morality and ethics, in part because the concept carries its own cultural baggage and theological implications in Euro-American societies. Addressing the problem of evil as a distinctly human phenomenon and a category of ethnographic analysis, this volume shows the usefulness of engaging evil as a descriptor of empirical reality where concepts such as violence, criminality, and hatred fall short of capturing the darkest side of human existence.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology Anthropology of Religion
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 36
  • Marketing Hope

    Marketing Hope

    Get-Rich-Quick Schemes in Siberia

    Schiffauer, L.

    Multilevel marketing and pyramid schemes promote the idea that participants can easily become rich. These popular economies turn ordinary people into advocates of their interests and missionaries of the American Dream. Marketing Hope looks at how different types of get-rich-quick schemes manifest themselves in a Siberian town. By focusing on their social dynamics, Leonie Schiffauer provides insights into how capitalist logic is learned and negotiated, and how it affects local realities in a post-Soviet environment.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Asia
  • Management by Seclusion

    Management by Seclusion

    A Critique of World Bank Promises to End Global Poverty

    Cochrane, G.

    50 years ago, World Bank President Robert McNamara promised to end poverty. Alleviation was to rely on economic growth, resulting in higher incomes stimulated by Bank loans processed by deskbound Washington staff, trickling down to the poorest.  Instead, child poverty and homelessness are on the increase everywhere. In this book, anthropologist and former World Bank Advisor Glynn Cochrane argues that instead of Washington’s “management by seclusion,” poverty alleviation requires personal engagement with the poorest by helpers with hands-on local and cultural skills. Here, the author argues, the insights provided by anthropological fieldwork have a crucial role to play.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
  • Post-Ottoman Topologies

    Post-Ottoman Topologies

    The Presence of the Past in the Era of the Nation-State

    Argenti, N. (ed)

    How are historians and social scientists to understand the emergence, the multiplicity, and the mutability of collective memories of the Ottoman Empire in the political formations that succeeded it? With contributions focussing on several of the nation-states whose peoples once were united under the aegis of Ottoman suzerainty, this volume proposes new theoretical approaches to the experience and transmission of the past through time. Developing the concept of topology, contributors explore collective memories of Ottoman identity and post-Ottoman state formation in a contemporary epoch that, echoing late modernity, we might term “late nationalism”.

    Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Memory Studies
    Areas: Southern Europe Middle East & Israel
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 8
  • Cyborg Mind

    Cyborg Mind

    What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

    MacKellar, C.

    With the development of new direct interfaces between the human brain and computer systems, the time has come for an in-depth ethical examination of the way these neuronal interfaces may support an interaction between the mind and cyberspace.

    In so doing, this book does not hesitate to blend disciplines including neurobiology, philosophy, anthropology and politics. It also invites society, as a whole, to seek a path in the use of these interfaces enabling humanity to prosper while avoiding the relevant risks. As such, the volume is the first extensive study in cyberneuroethics, a subject matter which is certain to have a significant impact in the 21st century and beyond.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology
  • Democracy's Paradox

    Democracy's Paradox

    Populism and its Contemporary Crisis

    Kapferer, B. & Theodossopoulos, D. (eds)

    Does populism indicate a radical crisis in Western democratic political systems? Is it a revolt by those who feel they have too little voice in the affairs of state or are otherwise marginalized or oppressed? Or are populist movements part of the democratic process?

    Bringing together different anthropological experiences of current populist movements, this volume makes a timely contribution to these questions. Contrary to more conventional interpretations of populism as crisis, the authors instead recognize populism as integral to Western democratic systems. In doing so, the volume provides an important critique that exposes the exclusionary essentialisms spread by populist rhetoric while also directing attention to local views of political accountability and historical consciousness that are key to understanding this paradox of democracy.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
    Series: Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis Volume 18
  • On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

    On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

    Chun, A.

    On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification explores the discursive spaces of our speaking position, or what has routinely been referred to in the literature as the poetics and politics of writing culture. At issue here are its problematic underlying notions of cultural identity, authorial subjectivity and postcolonial critique. Contrary to the widespread assumption that cultural studies and the social sciences share a common discourse of culture and society, Allen Chun argues that 'modern' disciplinary practices and axioms have in fact produced inherently incompatible theories. Anthropology's ethical relativism has also created obstacles for a critical theory of culture and society.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: Loose Can(n)ons Volume 4
  • Rethinking and Unthinking Development

    Rethinking and Unthinking Development

    Perspectives on Inequality and Poverty in South Africa and Zimbabwe

    Mpofu, B. & Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (eds)

    Development has remained elusive in Africa. Through theoretical contributions and case studies focusing on Southern Africa’s former white settler states, South Africa and Zimbabwe, this volume responds to the current need to rethink (and unthink) development in the region. The authors explore how Africa can adapt Western development models suited to its political, economic, social and cultural circumstances, while rejecting development practices and discourses based on exploitative capitalist and colonial tendencies. Beyond the legacies of colonialism, the volume also explores other factors impacting development, including regional politics, corruption, poor policies on empowerment and indigenization, and socio-economic and cultural barriers.

    Subjects: Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Africa
  • Raccomandazione

    Raccomandazione

    Clientelism and Connections in Italy

    Zinn, D. L.

    The issue of patronage-clientelism has long been of interest in the social sciences. Based on long-term ethnographic research in southern Italy, this book examines the concept and practice of raccomandazione: the omnipresent social institution of using connections to get things done. Viewing the practice both from an indigenous perspective – as a morally ambivalent social fact – and considering it in light of the power relations that position southern Italy within the nesting relations of global Norths and Souths, it builds on and extends past scholarship to consider the nature of patronage in a contemporary society and its relationship to corruption.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Applied Anthropology
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: European Anthropology in Translation Volume 7
  • Playing the Marginality Game

    Playing the Marginality Game

    Identity Politics in West Africa

    Schroven, A.

    In Guinea, situated against the background of central government struggles, rural elites use identity politics through contemporary political reforms to maintain their privileges and perpetuate a generations-old local social contract that bridges ethnic and religious divides. Simultaneously, administrative reform and national unrest lead to the creative re-combination of sources of authority and practices of legitimate rule. Past periods of colonization, socialism and authoritarian regime are reflected in contemporary struggles to make sense of participatory democracy and the future of the embattled Guinean national state.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Development Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 19
  • How Materials Matter

    How Materials Matter

    Design, Innovation and Materiality in the Pacific

    Were, G.

    How does design and innovation shape people’s lives in the Pacific? Focusing on plant materials from the region, How Materials Matter reveals ways in which a variety of people – from craftswomen and scientists to architects and politicians – work with materials to transform worlds. Recognizing the fragile and ephemeral nature of plant fibres, this work delves into how the biophysical properties of certain leaves and their aesthetic appearance are utilized to communicate information and manage different forms of relations. It breaks new ground by situating plant materials at the centre of innovation in a region.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Fate Calculation Experts

    Fate Calculation Experts

    Diviners Seeking Legitimation in Contemporary China

    Li, G.

    Having long been stigmatized as an immoral and even illegal “superstition”, the popular practice of divination is experiencing a revival in contemporary China. Fate Calculation Experts explores how diviners attempt to achieve legitimation in a society which identifies strongly with modernity, science, and rationality. As well as associating with modern knowledge production systems, diviners build a positive social image for their occupation via claims to moral authority and appeals to “tradition”. Beyond matters of image management, diviners’ efforts towards legitimation also figure in the social relationships and fundamental cultural values they develop in their practice.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Asian Anthropologies Volume 9
  • Extinct Monsters to Deep Time

    Extinct Monsters to Deep Time

    Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian's Fossil Halls

    Marsh, D. E.

    Via the Smithsonian Institution, an exploration of the growing friction between the research and outreach functions of museums in the 21st century.

    Describing participant observation and historical research at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History as it prepared for its largest-ever exhibit renovation, Deep Time, the author provides a grounded perspective on the inner-workings of the world’s largest natural history museum and the social processes of communicating science to the public.

    From the introduction:

    In exhibit projects, the tension plays out between curatorial staff—academic, research, or scientific staff  charged with content—and exhibitions, public engagement, or educational staff—which I broadly group together as “audience advocates” charged with translating content for a broader public. I have heard Kirk Johnson, Sant Director of the NMNH, say many times that if you look at dinosaur halls at different museums across the country, you can see whether the curators or the exhibits staff  has “won.” At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it was the curators. The hall is stark white and organized by phylogeny—or the evolutionary relationships of species—with simple, albeit long, text panels. At the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Johnson will tell you, it was the “exhibits people.” The hall is story driven and chronologically organized, full of big graphic prints, bold fonts, immersive and interactive spaces, and touchscreens. At the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where Johnson had previously been vice president and chief curator, “we actually fought to a draw.” That, he says, is the best outcome; a win on either side skews the final product too extremely in one direction or the other. This creative tension, when based on mutual respect, is often what makes good exhibitions.

    Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General)
    Series: Museums and Collections Volume 11
  • At Home on the Waves

    At Home on the Waves

    Human Habitation of the Sea from the Mesolithic to Today

    King, T. J. & Robinson, G. (eds)

    Contemporary public discourses about the ocean are routinely characterized by scientific and environmentalist narratives that imagine and idealize marine spaces in which humans are absent. In contrast, this collection explores the variety of ways in which people have long made themselves at home at sea, and continue to live intimately with it. In doing so, it brings together both ethnographic and archaeological research – much of it with an explicit Ingoldian approach – on a wide range of geographical areas and historical periods.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Archaeology Environmental Studies (General)
    Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 24
  • Going to Pentecost

    Going to Pentecost

    An Experimental Approach to Studies in Pentecostalism

    Eriksen, A. Blanes, R. L., MacCarthy, M.

    Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Vanuatu, Angola, and Papua New Guinea/the Trobriand Islands respectively, Going to Pentecost offers a comparative study of Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, focusing on key issues as economy, urban sociality, and healing. More than an ordinary comparative book, it recognizes the changing nature of religion in the contemporary world – in particular the emergence of “non-territorial” religion (which is no longer specific to places or cultures) – and represents an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements in general and Pentecostalism in particular.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Areas: Africa Asia-Pacific
    Series: Ethnography, Theory, Experiment Volume 7
  • Being Bedouin Around Petra

    Being Bedouin Around Petra

    Life at a World Heritage Site in the Twenty-First Century

    Bille, M.

    Petra, Jordan became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1985, and the semi-nomadic Bedouin inhabiting the area were resettled as a consequence. The Bedouin themselves paradoxically became UNESCO Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage in 2005 for the way in which their oral traditions and everyday lives relate to the landscape they no longer live in. Being Bedouin Around Petra asks: How could this happen? And what does it mean to be Bedouin when tourism, heritage protection, national discourse, an Islamic Revival and even New Age spiritualism lay competing claims to the past in the present?

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Heritage Studies
    Area: Middle East & Israel
  • Refugees Welcome?

    Refugees Welcome?

    Difference and Diversity in a Changing Germany

    Bock, J.-J. & Macdonald, S. (eds)

    The arrival in 2015 and 2016 of over one million asylum seekers and refugees in Germany had major social consequences and gave rise to extensive debates about the nature of cultural diversity and collective life. This volume examines the responses and implications of what was widely seen as the most significant and contested social change since German reunification in 1990. It combines in-depth studies based on anthropological fieldwork with analyses of the longer trajectories of migration and social change. Its original conclusions have significance not only for Germany but also for the understanding of diversity and difference more widely.

    Subjects: Sociology Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Germany
  • Monetising the Dividual Self

    Monetising the Dividual Self

    The Emergence of the Lifestyle Blog and Influencers in Malaysia

    Hopkins, J.

    Combining theoretical and empirical discussions with shorter “thick description” case studies, this book offers an anthropological exploration of the emergence in Malaysia of lifestyle bloggers – precursors to current social media “microcelebrities” and “influencers.” It tracks the transformation of personal blogs, which attracted readers with spontaneous and authentic accounts of everyday life, into lifestyle blogs that generate income through advertising and foreground consumerist lifestyles. It argues that lifestyle blogs are dialogically constituted between the blogger, the readers, and the blog itself, and challenges the assumption of a unitary self by proposing that lifestyle blogs can best be understood in terms of the “dividual self.”

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Media Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Anthropology of Media Volume 8
  • Transforming Study Abroad

    Transforming Study Abroad

    A Handbook

    Doerr, N. M.

    Written for study abroad practitioners, this book introduces theoretical understandings of key study abroad terms including “the global/national,” “culture,” “native speaker,” “immersion,” and “host society.” Building theories on these notions with perspectives from cultural anthropology, political science, educational studies, linguistics, and narrative studies, it suggests ways to incorporate them in study abroad practices. Through attention to daily activities via the concept of immersion, it reframes study abroad not as an encounter with cultural others but as an occasion to analyze constructions of “differences” in daily life, backgrounded by structural arrangements.

    Subjects: Travel and Tourism Educational Studies Mobility Studies
  • Democracy Struggles

    Democracy Struggles

    NGOs and the Politics of Aid in Serbia

    Vetta, T.

    Tracing the boom of local NGOs since the 1990s in the context of the global political economy of aid, current trends of neoliberal state restructuring, and shifting post-Cold War hegemonies, this book explores the “associational revolution” in post-socialist, post-conflict Serbia. Looking into the country’s “transition” through a global and relational analytical prism, the ethnography unpacks the various forms of dispossession and inequality entailed in the democracy-promotion project.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Dislocations Volume 25
  • Of Life and Health

    Of Life and Health

    The Language of Art and Religion in an African Medical System

    Tengan, A. B.

    An anthropological study of the health system of the Dagara people of northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso, Of Life and Health develops a cultural and epistemological lexicon of Dagara life by examining its religious, ritual, and artistic expressions. Consisting of ethnographic descriptions and analyses of six Dagara cultic institutions, each of which deals with different aspects of sustaining and transmitting life, the volume gives a holistic account of the Dagara knowledge system.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology
    Area: Africa
  • From Storeroom to Stage

    From Storeroom to Stage

    Romanian Attire and the Politics of Folklore

    Urdea, A.

    Departing from an ethnographic collection in London, From Storeroom to Stage traces the journey of its artefacts back to the Romanian villages where they were made 70 years ago, and to other places where similar objects are still in use. The book explores the role that material culture plays in the production of value and meaning by examining how folk objects are mobilized in national ideologies, transmissions of personal and family memory, museological discourses, and artistic acts.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Museum Studies Heritage Studies
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Volume 10
  • Artifak

    Artifak

    Cultural Revival, Tourism, and the Recrafting of History in Vanuatu

    DeBlock, H.

    In Vanuatu, commoditization and revitalization of culture and the arts do not necessarily work against each other; both revolve around value formation and the authentication of things. This book investigates the meaning and value of (art) objects as commodities in differing states of transit and transition: in the local place, on the market, in the museum. It provides an ethnographic account of commoditization in a context of revitalization of culture and the arts in Vanuatu, and the issues this generates, such as authentication of actions and things, indigenized copyright, and kastom disputes over ownership and the nature of kastom itself.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Museum Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Pacific Realities

    Pacific Realities

    Changing Perspectives on Resilience and Resistance

    Dousset, L. & Nayral, M. (eds)

    Throughout the Pacific region, people are faced with dramatic changes, often described as processes of “glocalization”; individuals and groups espouse multilayered forms of identity, in which global modes of thinking and doing are embedded in renewed perceptions of local or regional specificities. Consequently, new forms of resistance and resilience – the processes by which communities attempt to regain their original social, political, and economic status and structure after disruption or displacement – emerge. Through case studies from across the Pacific which transcend the conventional “local-global” dichotomy, this volume aims to explore these complex and interwoven phenomena from a new perspective.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists Volume 6
  • Non-Humans in Amerindian South America

    Non-Humans in Amerindian South America

    Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs

    Rivera Andía, J. J. (ed)

    Drawing on fieldwork from diverse Amerindian societies whose lives and worlds are undergoing processes of transformation, adaptation, and deterioration, this volume offers new insights into the indigenous constitutions of humanity, personhood, and environment characteristic of the South American highlands and lowlands. The resulting ethnographies – depicting non-human entities emerging in ritual, oral tradition, cosmology, shamanism and music – explore the conditions and effects of unequally ranked life forms, increased extraction of resources, continuous migration to urban centers, and the (usually) forced incorporation of current expressions of modernity into indigenous societies.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: EASA Series Volume 37
  • Competing Power

    Competing Power

    Landscapes of Migration, Violence and the State

    Halstead, N.

    Drawing from ethnographic material based on long-term research, this volume considers competing forms of power at micro- and macro-levels in Guyana, where the local is marked by extensive migration, corruption, and differing levels of violence. It shows how the local is occupied and re-occupied by various powerful and powerless people and entities (“big ones” and “small ones”), and how it becomes the site of intense power negotiations in relation to external ideas of empowerment.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Global Age-Friendly Community Movement, The

    The Global Age-Friendly Community Movement

    A Critical Appraisal

    Stafford, P. B. (ed)

    The age-friendly community movement is a global phenomenon, currently growing with the support of the WHO and multiple international and national organizations in the field of aging. Drawing on an extensive collection of international case studies, this volume provides an introduction to the movement. The contributors – both researchers and practitioners – touch on a number of current tensions and issues in the movement and offer a wide-ranging set of recommendations for advancing age-friendly community development. The book concludes with a call for a radical transformation of a medical and lifestyle model of aging into a relational model of health and social/individual wellbeing.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology
    Series: Life Course, Culture and Aging: Global Transformations Volume 5
  • Social DNA

    Social DNA

    Rethinking Our Evolutionary Past

    Martin, M. K.

    What set our ancestors off on a separate evolutionary trajectory was the ability to flex their reproductive and social strategies in response to changing environmental conditions. Exploring new cross-disciplinary research that links this capacity to critical changes in the organization of the primate brain, Social DNA presents a new synthesis of ideas on human social origins – challenging models that trace our beginnings to traits shaped by ancient hunting economies, or to genetic platforms shared with contemporary apes.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Archaeology
  • Indeterminacy

    Indeterminacy

    Waste, Value, and the Imagination

    Alexander, C. & Sanchez, A. (eds)

    What happens to people, places and objects that do not fit the ordering regimes and progressive narratives of modernity? Conventional understandings imply that progress leaves such things behind, and excludes them as though they were valueless waste. This volume uses the concept of indeterminacy to explore how conditions of exclusion and abandonment may give rise to new values, as well as to states of despair and alienation. Drawing upon ethnographic research about a wide variety of contexts, the chapters here explore how indeterminacy is created and experienced in relationship to projects of classification and progress.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 7
  • Elite Malay Polygamy

    Elite Malay Polygamy

    Wives, Wealth and Woes in Malaysia

    Zeitzen, M. K.

    Elite Malay women’s polygamy narratives are multiple and varied, and their sentiments regarding the practice are conflicted, as they are often torn between personal and religious convictions. This volume explores the ways in which this increasingly prominent practice impacts Malay gender relations. As Muslims, elite Malay women may be forced to accept polygamy, but they mostly condemn it as women and wives, as it forces them to manage their lives and loves under the “threat” of polygamy from a husband able to marry another woman without their knowledge or consent; a husband that is married but available.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 41
  • Edges, Fringes, Frontiers

    Edges, Fringes, Frontiers

    Integral Ecology, Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainability in Guyana

    Henfrey, T. B.

    Based on an ethnographic account of subsistence use of Amazonian forests by Wapishana people in Guyana, Edges, Frontiers, Fringes examines the social, cultural and behavioral bases for sustainability and resilience in indigenous resource use. Developing an original framework for holistic analysis, it demonstrates that flexible interplay among multiple modes of environmental understanding and decision-making allows the Wapishana to navigate socio-ecological complexity successfully in ways that reconcile short-term material needs with long-term maintenance and enhancement of the resource base.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 23
  • Medicinal Rule

    Medicinal Rule

    A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa

    Stroeken, K.

    As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings – and found them. The resulting misunderstandings have lasted until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine – and not the colonizer’s despotic administrator, the missionary’s divine king, or Vansina’s big man. In a wide area populated by speakers of Bantu and other languages of the Niger-Congo cluster, both cult and dynastic clan draw on the fertility shrine, rainmaking charm and drum they inherit.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History
    Area: Africa
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 35
  • Cash Transfers in Context

    Cash Transfers in Context

    An Anthropological Perspective

    Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. & Piccoli, E. (eds)

    Marginal in status a decade ago, cash transfer programs have become the preferred channel for delivering emergency aid or tackling poverty in low- and middle-income countries. While these programs have had positive effects, they are typical of top-down development interventions in that they impose on local contexts standardized norms and procedures regarding conditionality, targeting, and delivery. This book sheds light on the crucial importance of these contexts and the many unpredicted consequences of cash transfer programs worldwide - detailing how the latter are used by actors to pursue their own strategies, and how external norms are reinterpreted, circumvented, and contested by local populations.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
  • Economy, Crime and Wrong in a Neoliberal Era

    Economy, Crime and Wrong in a Neoliberal Era

    Carrier, J. G. (ed)

    Corporate scandals since the 1990s have made it clear that economic wrongdoing is more common in Western societies than might be expected. This volume examines the relationship between such wrong-doing and the neoliberal orientations, policies, and practices that have been influential since around 1980, considering whether neoliberalism has affected the likelihood that people and firms will act in ways that many people would consider wrong. It furthermore asks whether ideas of economic right and wrong have become so fragmented and localized that collective judgement has become almost impossible.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: EASA Series Volume 36
  • Being a Sperm Donor

    Being a Sperm Donor

    Masculinity, Sexuality, and Biosociality in Denmark

    Mohr, S.

    What does it mean to be a man in our biomedical day and age? Through ethnographic explorations of the everyday lives of Danish sperm donors, Being a Sperm Donor explores how masculinity and sexuality are reconfigured in a time in which the norms and logics of (reproductive) biomedicine have become ordinary. It investigates men’s moral reasoning regarding donation, their handling of transgressive experiences at the sperm bank, and their negotiations of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and relatedness, showing how the socio-cultural and political dimensions of (reproductive) biomedicine become intertwined with men’s intimate sense of self.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology
    Area: Northern Europe
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 40
  • Roma Activism

    Roma Activism

    Reimagining Power and Knowledge

    Beck, S. & Ivasiuc, A. (eds)

    Exploring contemporary debates and developments in Roma-related research and forms of activism, this volume argues for taking up reflexivity as practice in these fields, and advocates a necessary renewal of research sites, methods, and epistemologies. The contributors gathered here – whose professional trajectories often lie at the confluence between activism, academia, and policy or development interventions – are exceptionally well placed to reflect on mainstream practices in all these fields, and, from their particular positions, envision a reimagining of these practices.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Europe
    Series: New Directions in Romani Studies Volume 1
  • Wheel of Autonomy, The

    The Wheel of Autonomy

    Rhetoric and Ethnicity in the Omo Valley

    Girke, F.

    How do the Kara, a small population residing on the eastern bank of the Omo River in southern Ethiopia, manage to be neither annexed nor exterminated by any of the larger groups that surround them? Through the theoretical lens of rhetoric, this book offers an interactionalist analysis of how the Kara negotiate ethnic and non-ethnic differences among themselves, the relations with their various neighbors, and eventually their integration in the Ethiopian state. The model of the “Wheel of Autonomy” captures the interplay of distinction, agency and autonomy that drives these dynamics and offers an innovative perspective on social relations.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Africa
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 18
  • Healthcare in Motion

    Healthcare in Motion

    Immobilities in Health Service Delivery and Access

    Vindrola-Padros, C., Johnson G. A., & Pfister, A. E. (eds)

    How does the need to obtain and deliver health services engender particular (im)mobility forms? And how is mobility experienced and imagined when it is required for healthcare access or delivery? Guided by these questions, Healthcare in Motion explores the dynamic interrelationship between mobility and healthcare, drawing on case studies from across the world and shedding light on the day-to-day practices of patients and professionals.

    Subjects: Mobility Studies Medical Anthropology
    Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 5
  • Lullabies and Battle Cries

    Lullabies and Battle Cries

    Music, Identity and Emotion among Republican Parading Bands in Northern Ireland

    Rollins, J.

    Set against a volatile political landscape, Irish republican culture has struggled to maintain continuity with the past, affirm legitimacy in the present, and generate a sense of community for the future. Lullabies and Battle Cries explores the relationship between music, emotion, memory, and identity in republican parading bands, with a focus on how this music continues to be utilized in a post-conflict climate. As author Jaime Rollins shows, rebel parade music provides a foundational idiom of national and republican expression, acting as a critical medium for shaping new political identities within continually shifting dynamics of republican culture.

    Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Northern Europe
    Series: Dance and Performance Studies Volume 13
  • All or None

    All or None

    Cooperation and Sustainability in Italy's Red Belt

    Sánchez Hall, A.

    At once a social history and anthropological study of the world’s oldest voluntary collective farms, All or None is a story of how landless laborers joined together in Ravenna, Italy to acquire land, sometimes by occupying private land in what they called a “strike in reverse,” and how they developed sophisticated land use plans, based not only on the goal of profit, but on the human value of providing work where none was available. It addresses the question of the viability of cooperative enterprise as a potential solution for displaced workers, and as a more humane alternative to capitalist agribusiness.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: Anthropology of Europe Volume 3
  • Rite of Urban Passage, The

    The Rite of Urban Passage

    The Spatial Ritualization of Iranian Urban Transformation

    Masoudi, R.

    The Iranian city experienced a major transformation when the Pahlavi Dynasty initiated a project of modernization in the 1920s. The Rite of Urban Passage investigates this process by focusing on the spatial dynamics of Muharram processions, a ritual that commemorates the tragic massacre of Hussein and his companions in 680 CE. In doing so, this volume offers not only an alternative approach to understanding the process of urban transformation, but also a spatial genealogy of Muharram rituals that provides a platform for developing a fresh spatial approach to ritual studies.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Middle East & Israel
    Series: Articulating Journeys: Festivals, Memorials, and Homecomings Volume 2
  • Communities, Landscapes, and Interaction in Neolithic Greece

    Communities, Landscapes, and Interaction in Neolithic Greece

    Sarris, A., Kalogiropoulou, E., Kalayci, T., & Karimali, E. (eds)

    The last three decades have witnessed a period of growing archaeological activity in Greece that have enhanced our awareness of the diversity and variability of ancient communities. New sites offer rich datasets from many aspects of material culture that challenge traditional perceptions and suggest complex interpretations of the past. This volume provides a synthetic overview of recent developments in the study of Neolithic Greece and reconsiders the dynamics of human-environment interactions while recording the growing diversity in layers of social organization. It fills an essential lacuna in contemporary literature and enhances our understanding of the Neolithic communities in the Greek Peninsula.

    Subject: Archaeology
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: International Monographs in Prehistory: Archaeological Series Volume 20
  • Mirrors of Passing

    Mirrors of Passing

    Unlocking the Mysteries of Death, Materiality, and Time

    Seebach, S. & Willerslev, R. (eds)

    Without exception, all people are faced with the inevitability of death, a stark fact that has immeasurably shaped societies and individual consciousness for the whole of human history. Mirrors of Passing offers a powerful window into this oldest of human preoccupations by investigating the interrelationships of death, materiality, and temporality across far-flung times and places. Stretching as far back as Ancient Egypt and Greece and moving through present-day locales as diverse as Western Europe, Central Asia, and the Arctic, each of the richly illustrated essays collected here draw on a range of disciplinary insights to explore some of the most fundamental, universal questions that confront us.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion
  • Hierarchy and Value

    Hierarchy and Value

    Comparative Perspectives on Moral Order

    Hickel, J. & Haynes, N. (eds)

    Globalization promised to bring about a golden age of liberal individualism, breaking down hierarchies of kinship, caste, and gender around the world and freeing people to express their true, authentic agency. But in some places globalization has spurred the emergence of new forms of hierarchy—or the reemergence of old forms—as people try to reconstitute an imagined past of stable moral order. This is evident from the Islamic revival in the Middle East to visions of the 1950s family among conservatives in the United States. Why does this happen and how do we make sense of this phenomenon? Why do some communities see hierarchy as desireable? In this book, leading anthropologists draw on insightful ethnographic case studies from around the world to address these trends. Together, they develop a theory of hierarchy that treats it both as a relational form and a framework for organizing ideas about the social good.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 7
  • Australian Indigenous Diaspora, An

    An Australian Indigenous Diaspora

    Warlpiri Matriarchs and the Refashioning of Tradition

    Burke, P.

    Some indigenous people, while remaining attached to their traditional homelands, leave them to make a new life for themselves in white towns and cities, thus constituting an “indigenous diaspora”. This innovative book is the first ethnographic account of one such indigenous diaspora, the Warlpiri, whose traditional hunter-gatherer life has been transformed through their dispossession and involvement with ranchers, missionaries, and successive government projects of recognition. By following several Warlpiri matriarchs into their new locations, far from their home settlements, this book explores how they sustained their independent lives, and examines their changing relationship with the traditional culture they represent.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Global Fluids

    Global Fluids

    The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Waste and Value

    Kroløkke, C.

    In the fertility and cosmetics industries, women’s body products – such as urine, eggs, and placentas – have moved from being seen as waste to becoming valuable ingredients. Taking a sociological and anthropological perspective, the author focuses in particular on the role that countries like Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, and Japan play in the reproductive products industry, and discusses the moral limits of the cultural and rhetorical trajectories that turn women’s body products into internationally mobile substances.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 39
  • Refugee Resettlement

    Refugee Resettlement

    Power, Politics, and Humanitarian Governance

    Garnier, A., Jubilut, L. L., & Sandvik, K. B.

    Examining resettlement practices worldwide and drawing on contributions from anthropology, law, international relations, social work, political science, and numerous other disciplines, this ground-breaking volume highlights the conflicts between refugees’ needs and state practices, and assesses international, regional and national perspectives on resettlement, as well as the bureaucracies and ideologies involved. It offers a detailed understanding of resettlement, from the selection of refugees to their long-term integration in resettling states, and highlights the relevance of a lifespan approach to resettlement analysis.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 38
  • Momentous Mobilities

    Momentous Mobilities

    Anthropological Musings on the Meanings of Travel

    Salazar, N. B.

    Grounded in scholarly analysis and personal reflection, and drawing on a multi-sited and multi-method research design, Momentous Mobilities disentangles the meanings attached to temporary travels and stays abroad and offers empirical evidence as well as novel theoretical arguments to develop an anthropology of mobility. Both focusing specifically on how various societies and cultures imagine and value boundary-crossing mobilities “elsewhere” and drawing heavily on his own European lifeworld, the author examines momentous travels abroad in the context of education, work, and spiritual quests and the search for a better quality of life.

    Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism
    Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 4
  • Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space

    Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space

    Place-Making in the New Northern Ireland

    Komarova, M. & Svašek, M. (eds)

    Exploring the complex dynamics of twenty-first century spatial sociality, this volume provides a much-needed multi-dimensional perspective that undermines the dominant image of Northern Ireland as a conflict-ridden place. Despite touching on memories of “the Troubles” and continuing unionist-nationalist tensions, the volume refuses to consider people in the region as purely political beings, or to understand processes of placemaking solely through ethnic or national contestations and territoriality. Topics such as the significance of friendship, gender, and popular culture in spatial practices are considered, against the backdrop of the growing presence of migrants, refugees and diasporic groups.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Urban Studies Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Europe
    Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Volume 8
  • Living Under Austerity

    Living Under Austerity

    Greek Society in Crisis

    Doxiadis, E. & Placas, A. (eds)

    Since its sovereign debt crisis in 2009, Greece has been living under austerity, with no apparent end in sight. This volume explores the effects of policies pursued by the Greek state since then (under the direction of the Troika), and how Greek society has responded. In addition to charting the actual effects of the Greek crisis on politics, health care, education, media, and other areas, the book both examines and challenges the “crisis” era as the context for changing attitudes and developments within Greek society.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Southern Europe
  • Pilgrimage and Political Economy

    Pilgrimage and Political Economy

    Translating the Sacred

    Coleman, S. & Eade, J. (eds)

    Pilgrimage has always had a tendency to follow—and sometimes create—trade routes. This volume explores how wider factors behind transnational and global mobility have impacted on pilgrimage activity across the world, and examines the ways in which pilgrimage relates to migration, diaspora, and political cooperation or conflict across nation-states. Furthermore, it brings together case studies that explore forms of mobility where pilgrimage is juxtaposed, complements, or is in intimate association with other forms of movement.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Political and Economic Anthropology
  • Sense and Essence

    Sense and Essence

    Heritage and the Cultural Production of the Real

    Meyer, B. & van de Port, M. (eds)

    Contrary to popular perceptions, cultural heritage is not given, but constantly in the making: a construction subject to dynamic processes of (re)inventing culture within particular social formations and bound to particular forms of mediation. Yet the appeal of cultural heritage often rests on its denial of being a fabrication, its promise to provide an essential ground to social-cultural identities. Taking this paradoxical feature as a point of departure, and anchoring the discussion to two heuristic concepts—the "politics of authentication" and "aesthetics of persuasion"—the chapters herein explore how this tension is central to the dynamics of heritage formation worldwide.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Museum Studies
    Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Volume 9
  • Reconceiving Muslim Men

    Reconceiving Muslim Men

    Love and Marriage, Family and Care in Precarious Times

    Inhorn, M. C. & Naguib, N. (eds)

    This volume provides intimate anthropological accounts of Muslim men’s everyday lives in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and diasporic communities in the West. Amid increasing political turmoil and economic precarity, Muslim men around the world are enacting nurturing roles as husbands, sons, fathers, and community members, thereby challenging broader systems of patriarchy and oppression. By focusing on the ways in which Muslim men care for those they love, this volume challenges stereotypes and showcases Muslim men’s humanity.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 38
  • Archaeogaming

    Archaeogaming

    An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games

    Reinhard, A.

    A general introduction to archeogaming describing the intersection of archaeology and video games and applying archaeological method and theory into understanding game-spaces.

    “[T]he author’s clarity of style makes it accessible to all readers, with or without an archaeological background. Moreover, his personal anecdotes and gameplay experiences with different game titles, from which his ideas often develop, make it very enjoyable reading.”—Antiquity

    Video games exemplify contemporary material objects, resources, and spaces that people use to define their culture. Video games also serve as archaeological sites in the traditional sense as a place, in which evidence of past activity is preserved and has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology, and which represents a part of the archaeological record.

    From the introduction:
    Archaeogaming, broadly defined, is the archaeology both in and of digital games…  As will be described in the following chapters, digital games are archaeological sites,  landscapes, and artifacts, and the game-spaces held within those media can also be understood archaeologically as digital built environments containing their own material culture… Archaeogaming does not limit its study to those video games that are set in the past or that are treated as “historical games,” nor does it focus solely on the exploration and analysis of ruins or of other built environments that appear in the world of the game. Any video game—from Pac-Man to Super Meat Boy—can be studied archaeologically.

    Subjects: Archaeology Media Studies Heritage Studies Anthropology (General)
  • Frontiers of Civil Society

    Frontiers of Civil Society

    Government and Hegemony in Serbia

    Mikuš, M.

    In Serbia, as elsewhere in postsocialist Europe, the rise of “civil society” was expected to support a smooth transformation to Western models of liberal democracy and capitalism. More than twenty years after the Yugoslav wars, these expectations appear largely unmet. Frontiers of Civil Society asks why, exploring the roles of multiple civil society forces in a set of government “reforms” of society and individuals in the early 2010s, and examining them in the broader context of social struggles over neoliberal restructuring and transnational integration.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology History: 20th Century to Present
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Dislocations Volume 22
  • Who are 'We'?

    Who are 'We'?

    Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology

    Chua, L. & Mathur, N. (eds)

    Who do “we” anthropologists think “we” are? And how do forms and notions of collective disciplinary identity shape the way we think, write, and do anthropology? This volume explores how the anthropological “we” has been construed, transformed, and deployed across history and the global anthropological landscape. Drawing together both reflections and ethnographic case studies, it interrogates the critical—yet poorly studied—roles played by myriad anthropological “we” ss in generating and influencing anthropological theory, method, and analysis. In the process, new spaces are opened for reimagining who “we” are – and what “we,” and indeed anthropology, could become.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 34
  • Revolt of the Provinces, The

    The Revolt of the Provinces

    Anti-Gypsyism and Right-Wing Politics in Hungary

    Szombati, K.

    The first in-depth ethnographic monograph on the New Right in Central and Eastern Europe, The Revolt of the Provinces explores the making of right-wing hegemony in Hungary over the last decade. It explains the spread of racist sensibilities in depressed rural areas, shows how activists, intellectuals and politicians took advantage of popular racism to empower right-wing agendas and examines the new ruling party's success in stabilizing an 'illiberal regime'. To illuminate these important dynamics, the author proposes an innovative multi-scalar and relational framework, focusing on interaction between social antagonisms emerging on the local level and struggles waged within the political public sphere.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Dislocations Volume 23
  • Travelling with the Argonauts

    Travelling with the Argonauts

    Informal Networks Seen without a Vertical Lens

    Irek, M.

    Drawing on rich ethnographic materials from longitudinal fieldwork on informal trading routes across Europe, Travelling with the Argonauts offers a new perspective in the research of the social space, reflecting on how best to investigate amorphous social phenomena, such as informal networks. Breaking with much current theory, the approach detailed here – the ‘Restricted Verticality Perspective’ – examines the horizontal dimension of social relations, and understands informality not as marginal or substandard, but as life itself, as the real experience of ordinary people.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Mobility Studies
    Area: Europe
  • Worldwide Mobilizations

    Worldwide Mobilizations

    Class Struggles and Urban Commoning

    Kalb, D. & Mollona, M. (eds)

    The past decades have seen significant urban insurrections worldwide, and this volume analyzes some of them from an anthropological perspective; it argues that transformations of urban class relationships must be approached in a way that is both globally informed and deeply embedded in local and popular histories, and contends that every case of urban mobilization should be understood against its precise context in the global capitalist transformation. The book examines cases of mobilization across the globe, and employs a Marxian class framework, open to the diverse and multi-scalar dynamics of urban politics, especially struggles for spatial justice.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Urban Studies
    Series: Dislocations Volume 24
  • Capturing Quicksilver

    Capturing Quicksilver

    The Position, Power, and Plasticity of Chinese Medicine in Singapore

    Smith, A. A.

    Since the turn of the century Singapore has sustained a reputation for both austere governance and cutting-edge biomedical facilities and research. Seeking to emphasize Singapore’s capacity for “modern medicine” and strengthen their burgeoning biopharmaceutical industry, this image has explicitly excluded Chinese medicine – despite its tremendous popularity amongst Singaporeans from all walks of life, and particularly amongst Singapore’s ethnic Chinese majority. This book examines the use and practice of Chinese medicine in Singapore, especially in everyday life, and contributes to anthropological debates regarding the post-colonial intersection of knowledge, identity, and governmentality, and to transnational studies of Chinese medicine as a permeable, plural, and fluid practice.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Epistemologies of Healing Volume 17
  • Being-Here

    Being-Here

    Placemaking in a World of Movement

    Lems, A.

    Exploring the lifeworlds of Halima, Omar and Mohamed, three middle-aged Somalis living in Melbourne, Australia, the author discusses the interrelated meanings of emplacement and displacement as experienced in people’s everyday lives. Through their experiences of displacement and placemaking, Being-Here examines the figure of the refugee as a metaphor for societal alienation and estrangement, and moves anthropological theory towards a new understanding of the crucial existential links between Sein (Being) and Da (Here).

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies
    Series: EASA Series Volume 35
  • Intimate Mobilities

    Intimate Mobilities

    Sexual Economies, Marriage and Migration in a Disparate World

    Groes, C. & Fernandez, N. T. (eds)

    As globalization and transnational encounters intensify, people’s mobility is increasingly conditioned by intimacy, ranging from love, desire, and sexual liaisons to broader family, kinship, and conjugal matters. This book explores the entanglement of mobility and intimacy in various configurations throughout the world. It argues that rather than being distinct and unrelated phenomena, intimacy-related mobilities constitute variations of cross-border movements shaped by and deeply entwined with issues of gender, kinship, race, and sexuality, as well as local and global powers and border restrictions in a disparate world.

    Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 3
  • Care across Distance

    Care across Distance

    Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration

    Hromadžić, A. & Palmberger, M. (eds)

    World-wide migration has an unsettling effect on social structures, especially on aging populations and eldercare. This volume investigates how taken-for-granted roles are challenged, intergenerational relationships transformed, economic ties recalibrated, technological innovations utilized, and spiritual relations pursued and desired, and asks what it means to care at a distance and to age abroad. What it does show is that trans-nationalization of care produces unprecedented convergences of people, objects and spaces that challenge our assumptions about the who, how, and where of care.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies
    Series: Life Course, Culture and Aging: Global Transformations Volume 4
  • Dreams Made Small

    Dreams Made Small

    The Education of Papuan Highlanders in Indonesia

    Munro, J.

    For the last five decades, the Dani of the central highlands of West Papua, along with other Papuans, have struggled with the oppressive conditions of Indonesian rule. Formal education holds the promise of escape from stigmatization and violence. Dreams Made Small offers an in-depth, ethnographic look at journeys of education among young Dani men and women, asking us to think differently about education as a trajectory for transformation and belonging, and ultimately revealing how dreams of equality are shaped and reshaped in the face of multiple constraints.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Educational Studies Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology Volume 9
  • Searching for a Better Life

    Searching for a Better Life

    Growing Up in the Slums of Bangkok

    Mahony, S.

    Life in Bangkok for young people is marked by profound, interlocking changes and transitions. This book offers an ethnographic account of growing up in the city’s slums, struggling to get by in a rapidly developing and globalizing economy and trying to fulfil one’s dreams. At the same time, it reflects on the issue of agency, exploring its negative potential when exercised by young people living under severe structural constraint. It offers an antidote to neoliberal ideas around personal responsibility, and the assumed potential for individuals to break through structures of constraint in any sustained way.

    Subject: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Experience of Neoliberal Education, The

    The Experience of Neoliberal Education

    Urciuoli, B. (ed)

    The college experience is increasingly positioned to demonstrate its value as a worthwhile return on investment. Specific, definable activities, such as research experience, first-year experience, and experiential learning, are marketed as delivering precise skill sets in the form of an individual educational package.

    Through ethnography-based analysis, the contributors to this volume explore how these commodified "experiences" have turned students into consumers and given them the illusion that they are in control of their investment. They further reveal how the pressure to plan every move with a constant eye on a demonstrable return has supplanted traditional approaches to classroom education and profoundly altered the student experience.

    Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: North America
    Series: Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies Volume 4
  • In the Best Interests of the Child

    In the Best Interests of the Child

    Loss and Suffering in Adoption Proceedings

    Mass, M.

    Marshalling her experience as an expert witness in court proceedings on non-consensual, confidential adoption in Israel, Mass describes legal proceedings following the Israeli state petition that declares children eligible for adoption because of alleged parental incapability, and explores the politics of state intervention in the parent/child relationship. The selected case studies present the testimonies of the children, the parents, the designated adoptive parents, and the state’s representatives, as well as the author’s own testimony.

    Subject: Sociology
    Area: Middle East & Israel
  • Cutting Cosmos

    Cutting Cosmos

    Masculinity and Spectacular Events among the Bugkalot

    Mikkelsen, H. H.

    For the first time in over 30 years, a new ethnographic study emerges on the Bugkalot tribe, more widely known as the Ilongot of the northern Philippines. Exploring the notion of masculinity among the Bugkalot, Cutting Cosmos is not only an experimental, anthropological study of the paradoxes around which Bugkalot society revolves, but also a reflection on anthropological theory and writing. Focusing on the transgressive acts through which masculinity is performed, this book explores the idea of the cosmic cut, the ritual act that enables the Bugkalot man to momentarily hold still the chaotic flows of his world.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Ethnography, Theory, Experiment Volume 6
  • Creole Nation, A

    A Creole Nation

    National Integration in Guinea-Bissau

    Kohl, C.

    Despite high degrees of cultural and ethnic diversity as well as prevailing political instability, Guinea-Bissau’s population has developed a strong sense of national belonging. By examining both contemporary and historical perspectives, A Creole Nation explores how creole identity, culture, and political leaders have influenced postcolonial nation-building processes in Guinea-Bissau, and the ways in which the phenomenon of cultural creolization results in the emergence of new identities.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Africa
  • Waiting for Elijah

    Waiting for Elijah

    Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape

    HadžiMuhamedović, S.

    Waiting for Elijah is an intimate portrait of time-reckoning, syncretism, and proximity in one of the world’s most polarized landscapes, the Bosnian Field of Gacko. Centered on the shared harvest feast of Elijah’s Day, the once eagerly awaited pinnacle of the annual cycle, the book shows how the fractured postwar landscape beckoned the return of communal life that entails such waiting. This seemingly paradoxical situation—waiting to wait—becomes a starting point for a broader discussion on the complexity of time set between cosmology, nationalism, and embodied memories of proximity.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Articulating Journeys: Festivals, Memorials, and Homecomings Volume 1
  • Experimental Collaborations

    Experimental Collaborations

    Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices

    Estalella, A. & Sánchez Criado, T. (eds)

    In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration. Through creative interventions that unfold what we term as “fieldwork devices”—such as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms—anthropologists engage with their counterparts in the field in the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative of intervention, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with participant observation. Building on this, the book proposes the concept of “experimental collaborations” to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
    Series: EASA Series Volume 34
  • Animism beyond the Soul

    Animism beyond the Soul

    Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge

    Swancutt, K. & Mazard, M. (eds)

    How might we envision animism through the lens of the ‘anthropology of anthropology’? The contributors to this volume offer compelling case studies that demonstrate how indigenous animistic practices, concepts, traditions, and ontologies are co-authored in highly reflexive ways by anthropologists and their interlocutors. They explore how native epistemologies, which inform anthropological notions during fieldwork, underpin the dialogues between researchers and their participants. In doing so, the contributors reveal ways in which indigenous thinkers might be influenced by anthropological concepts of the soul and, equally, how they might subtly or dramatically then transform those same concepts within anthropological theory.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 6
  • Burgundy

    Burgundy

    The Global Story of Terroir

    Demossier, M.

    “Demossier’s engrossing analysis of Burgundy—the wine, the place, the brand—should be imbibed (pun intended!) on many levels—and slowly, for best appreciation.”—foodanthro.com

    Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork, this book explores the professional, social, and cultural world of Burgundy wines, the role of terroir (the environmental factors that affect a crop's character), and its transnational deployment in China, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand.

    It demystifies the terroir ideology by providing a unique long-term ethnographic analysis of what lies behind the concept. While the Burgundian model of terroir has gone global by acquiring UNESCO world heritage status, its very legitimacy is now being challenged amongst the vineyards where it first took root.

    From the introduction:
    Superficially then, Burgundy might appear to be simply acquiring recognition for its unchanging landscape, tradition and culture. Yet, for all the power of its rich local identity, folklore and culture which is broadcast to the world, there hides underneath the comforting blanket of this seamless place, untouched by change or conflict, a far more complex reality. Burgundy’s listing as a World Heritage landscape emphasises its international reputation as a traditional and historical site of wine production and opens a new chapter in the production and marketing of its quality, differentiation and authenticity. It is also about readjusting Burgundy and the grands crus in response to a changing global market and the shifting kaleidoscope of world wine values.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: France
    Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 43
  • Moral Anthropology

    Moral Anthropology

    A Critique

    Kapferer, B. & Gold, M. (eds)

    A development in anthropological theory, characterized as the 'moral turn', is gaining popularity and should be carefully considered. In examining the context, arguments, and discourse that surrounds this trend, this volume reconceptualizes the discipline of anthropology in a radical way. Contributions from anthropologists from around the world from different theoretical traditions and with expertise in a multiplicity of ethnographic areas makes this collection a provocative contribution to larger discussions not only in anthropology but the social sciences more broadly.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
    Series: Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis Volume 16
  • Heading for the Scene of the Crash

    Heading for the Scene of the Crash

    The Cultural Analysis of America

    Drummond, L.

    American anthropologists have long advocated cultural anthropology as a tool for cultural critique, yet seldom has that approach been employed in discussions of major events and cultural productions that impact the lives of tens of millions of Americans. This collection of essays aims to refashion cultural analysis into a hard-edged tool for the study of American society and culture, addressing topics including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, abortion, sports doping, and the Jonestown massacre-suicides. Grounded in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the essays advance an inquiry into the nature of culture in American society.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: North America
    Series: Loose Can(n)ons Volume 3
  • Money at the Margins

    Money at the Margins

    Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion, and Design

    Maurer, B., Musaraj, S., & Small, I. V. (eds)

    Mobile money, e-commerce, cash cards, retail credit cards, and moreas new monetary technologies become increasingly available, the global South has cautiously embraced these mediums as a potential solution to the issue of financial inclusion. How, if at all, do new forms of dematerialized money impact people’s everyday financial lives? In what way do technologies interact with financial repertoires and other socio-cultural institutions? How do these technologies of financial inclusion shape the global politics and geographies of difference and inequality? These questions are at the heart of Money at the Margins, a groundbreaking exploration of the uses and socio-cultural impact of new forms of money and financial services.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: The Human Economy Volume 6
  • Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism

    Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism

    Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject

    Hann, C. & Parry, J. (eds)

    Bringing together ethnographic case studies of industrial labor from different parts of the world, Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism explores the increasing casualization of workforces and the weakening power of organized labor. This division owes much to state policies and is reflected in local understandings of class. By exploring this relationship, these essays question the claim that neoliberal ideology has become the new ‘commonsense’ of our times and suggest various propositions about the conditions that create employment regimes based on flexible labor.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 4
  • Urban Dreams

    Urban Dreams

    Transformations of Family Life in Burkina Faso

    Roth, C.
    de Jong, W., Perlik, M., Steuer, N., & Znoj, H. (eds)

    Claudia Roth's work on Bobo-Dioulasso, a city of half a million residents in Burkina Faso, provides uniquely detailed insight into the evolving life-world of a West African urban population in one of the poorest countries in the world. Closely documenting the livelihood strategies of members of various neighbourhoods, Roth’s work calls into question established notions of “the African family” as a solidary network, documents changing marriage and kinship relations under the impact of a persistent economic crisis, and explores the increasingly precarious social status of young women and men.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Urban Studies
    Area: Africa
  • World Heritage Craze in China

    World Heritage Craze in China

    Universal Discourse, National Culture, and Local Memory

    Yan, H.

    There is a World Heritage Craze in China. China claims to have the longest continuous civilization in the world and is seeking recognition from UNESCO. This book explores three dimensions of the UNESCO World Heritage initiative with particular relevance for China: the universal agenda, the national practices, and the local responses. With a sociological lens, this book offers comprehensive insights into World Heritage, as well as China’s deep social, cultural, and political structures.

    Subjects: Heritage Studies Archaeology Sociology Travel and Tourism
    Areas: Asia Asia-Pacific
  • Southeast Asia Connection, The

    The Southeast Asia Connection

    Trade and Polities in the Eurasian World Economy, 500 BC–AD 500

    Chew, S. C.

    The contribution of Southeast Asia to the world economy (during the late prehistoric and early historic periods) has not received much attention. It has often been viewed as a region of peripheral entrepôts, especially in the early centuries of the current era. Recent archaeological evidence revealed the existence of established and productive polities in Southeast Asia in the early parts of the historic period and earlier. This book recalibrates these interactions of Southeast Asia with other parts of the world economy, and gives the region its due instead of treating it as little more than of marginal interest.

    Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Global Sustainability and Communities of Practice

    Global Sustainability and Communities of Practice

    Maida, C. A. & Beck, S, (eds)

    Collaboration between experts and the public is vital for effective community engagement aimed at improving the lives of the most vulnerable in society, whether at the local or global level. Using case-based and theoretical chapters that examine rural and urban communities of practice, this volume illustrates how participatory researchers and students, as well as policy and community leaders, find ways to engage with the broader public when it comes to global sustainability research and practice.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
  • Back to the Postindustrial Future

    Back to the Postindustrial Future

    An Ethnography of Germany's Fastest-Shrinking City

    Ringel, F.

    How does an urban community come to terms with the loss of its future? The former socialist model city of Hoyerswerda is an extreme case of a declining postindustrial city. Built to serve the GDR coal industry, it lost over half its population to outmigration after German reunification and the coal industry crisis, leading to the large-scale deconstruction of its cityscape. This book tells the story of its inhabitants, now forced to reconsider their futures. Building on recent theoretical work, it advances a new anthropological approach to time, allowing us to investigate the postindustrial era and the futures it has supposedly lost.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies
    Area: Germany
    Series: EASA Series Volume 33
  • Soup, Love, and a Helping Hand

    Soup, Love, and a Helping Hand

    Social Relations and Support in Guangzhou, China

    Fleischer, F.

    Despite growing affluence, a large number of urban Chinese have problems making ends meet. Based on ethnographic research among several different types of communities in Guangzhou, China, Soup, Love and a Helping Hand examines different modes and ideologies of help/support, as well as the related issues of reciprocity, relatedness (kinship), and changing state-society relations in contemporary China. With an emphasis on the subjective experience, Fleischer’s research carefully explores people’s ideas about moral obligations, social expectations, and visions of urban Chinese society.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Asian Anthropologies Volume 8
  • Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces

    Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces

    Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus

    Darieva, T., Mühlfried, F., & Tuite, K. (eds)

    Though long-associated with violence, the Caucasus is a region rich with religious conviviality. Based on fresh ethnographies in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Russian Federation, Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces discusses vanishing and emerging sacred places in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious post-Soviet Caucasus. In exploring the effects of de-secularization, growing institutional control over hybrid sacred sites, and attempts to review social boundaries between the religious and the secular, these essays give way to an emergent Caucasus viewed from the ground up: dynamic, continually remaking itself, within shifting and indefinite frontiers.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology
    Areas: Asia Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Space and Place Volume 17
  • After Difference

    After Difference

    Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory

    Heywood, P.

    Queer activism and anthropology are both fundamentally concerned with the concept of difference. Yet they are so in fundamentally different ways. The Italian queer activists in this book value difference as something that must be produced, in opposition to the identity politics they find around them. Conversely, anthropologists find difference in the world around them, and seek to produce an identity between anthropological theory and the ethnographic material it elucidates. This book describes problems faced by an activist "politics of difference," and issues concerning the identity of anthropological reflection itself—connecting two conceptions of difference whilst simultaneously holding them apart.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 6
  • Messy Europe

    Messy Europe

    Crisis, Race, and Nation-State in a Postcolonial World

    Loftsdóttir, K., Smith, A. L., & Hipfl, B. (eds)

    Using the economic crisis as a starting point, Messy Europe offers a critical new look at the issues of race, gender, and national understandings of self and other in contemporary Europe. It highlights and challenges historical associations of Europe with whiteness and modern civilization, and asks how these associations are re-envisioned, re-inscribed, or contested in an era characterized by crises of different kinds. This important collection provides a nuanced exploration of how racialized identities in various European regions are played out in the crisis context, and asks what work “crisis talk” does, considering how it motivates public feelings and shapes bodies, boundaries and communities.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Europe
    Series: EASA Series Volume 32
  • Parallel Lives Revisited

    Parallel Lives Revisited

    Mediterranean Guest Workers and their Families at Work and in the Neighbourhood, 1960-1980

    Bock, J. De

    Originally coined in 2001 in a report on racial tensions in the United Kingdom, the concept of “parallel lives” has become familiar in the European discourse on immigrant integration. There, it refers to what is perceived as the segregation of immigrant populations from the rest of society. However, the historical roots of this presumed segregation are rarely the focus of discussion. Combining quantitative analysis, archival research, and over one hundred oral history interviews, Parallel Lives Revisited explores the lives of immigrants from six Mediterranean countries in a postwar Belgian city to provide a fascinating account of how their experiences of integration have changed at work and in their neighborhoods across two decades.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies History: 20th Century to Present Sociology
    Area: Europe
  • Archaeologies of Rules and Regulations

    Archaeologies of Rules and Regulation

    Between Text and Practice

    Hausmair, B., Jervis, B., Nugent, R., & Williams, E. (eds)

    How can we study the impact of rules on the lives of past people using archaeological evidence? To answer this question, Archaeologies of Rules and Regulation presents case studies drawn from across Europe and the United States. Covering areas as diverse as the use of space in a nineteenth-century U.S. Army camp, the deposition of waste in medieval towns, the experiences of Swedish migrants to North America, the relationship between people and animals in Anglo-Saxon England, these case studies explore the use of archaeological evidence in understanding the relationship between rules, lived experience, and social identity.

    Subjects: Archaeology History: Medieval/Early Modern Sociology History (General)
  • Expeditionary Anthropology

    Expeditionary Anthropology

    Teamwork, Travel and the ''Science of Man''

    Thomas, M. & Harris, A. (eds)

    The origins of anthropology lie in expeditionary journeys. But since the rise of immersive fieldwork, usually by a sole investigator, the older tradition of team-based social research has been largely eclipsed. Expeditionary Anthropology argues that expeditions have much to tell us about anthropologists and the people they studied. The book charts the diversity of anthropological expeditions and analyzes the often passionate arguments they provoked. Drawing on recent developments in gender studies, indigenous studies, and the history of science, the book argues that even today, the ‘science of man’ is deeply inscribed by its connections with expeditionary travel.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General) Travel and Tourism
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 33
  • Partial Revolution, The

    The Partial Revolution

    Labour, Social Movements and the Invisible Hand of Mao in Western Nepal

    Hoffmann, M.

    Located in the far-western Tarai region of Nepal, Kailali has been the site of dynamic social and political change in recent history. The Partial Revolution examines Kailali in the aftermath of Nepal’s Maoist insurgency, critically examining the ways in which revolutionary political mobilization changes social relations—often unexpectedly clashing with the movement’s ideological goals. Focusing primarily on the end of Kailali’s feudal system of bonded labor, Hoffmann explores the connection between politics, labor, and Mao’s legacy, documenting the impact of changing political contexts on labor relations among former debt-bonded laborers.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Peace and Conflict Studies
    Area: Asia
    Series: Dislocations Volume 21
  • Island Historical Ecology

    Island Historical Ecology

    Socionatural Landscapes of the Eastern and Southern Caribbean

    Siegel, P. (ed)

    In the first book-length treatise on historical ecology of the West Indies, Island Historical Ecology addresses Caribbean island ecologies from the perspective of social and cultural interventions over approximately eight millennia of human occupations. Environmental coring carried out in carefully selected wetlands allowed for the reconstruction of pre-colonial and colonial landscapes on islands between Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Comparisons with well-documented patterns in the Mediterranean and Pacific islands place this case study into a larger context of island historical ecology.

    Subjects: Archaeology Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Contrarian Anthropology

    Contrarian Anthropology

    The Unwritten Rules of Academia

    Nader, L.

    Analyzing the workings of boundary maintenance in the areas of anthropology, energy, gender, and law, Nader contrasts dominant trends in academia with work that pushes the boundaries of acceptable methods and theories. Although the selections illustrate the history of one anthropologist’s work over half a century, the wider intent is to label a field as contrarian to reveal unwritten rules that sometimes hinder transformative thinking and to stimulate boundary crossing in others.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)
  • Staging Citizenship

    Staging Citizenship

    Roma, Performance and Belonging in EU Romania

    Szeman, I.

    Based on over a decade of fieldwork conducted with urban Roma, Staging Citizenship offers a powerful new perspective on one of the European Union’s most marginal and disenfranchised communities. Focusing on “performance” broadly conceived, it follows members of a squatter’s settlement in Transylvania as they navigate precarious circumstances in a postsocialist state. Through accounts of music and dance performances, media representations, activism, and interactions with both non-governmental organizations and state agencies, author Ioana Szeman grounds broad themes of political economy, citizenship, resistance, and neoliberalism in her subjects’ remarkably varied lives and experiences.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Performance Studies
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Dance and Performance Studies Volume 11
  • Affective States

    Affective States

    Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions

    Laszczkowski, M. & Reeves, M. (eds)

    In recent years, political and social theory has been transformed by the heterogeneous approaches to feeling and emotion jointly referred to as ‘affect theory’. These range from psychological and social-constructivist approaches to emotion to feminist and post-human perspectives. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and ethnographic contexts—from engineering in the Andes to household rituals in rural China, from South African land restitution to migrant living in Moscow, and from elections in El Salvador to online and offline surveillance among political refugees from Uzbekistan and Eritrea—the chapters in this volume interrogate this ‘affective turn’ through the lens of fine-grained ethnographies of the state. The volume enhances the anthropological understanding of the various ways through which the state comes to be experienced as a visceral presence in social life.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 5
  • Singing Ideas

    Singing Ideas

    Performance, Politics and Oral Poetry

    Ní Shíocháin, T.

    Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire (Yellow Mary O’Leary; 1774–1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song.  As an oral arts practitioner, Máire Bhuí composed songs whose ecstatic, radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenth-century Irish anti-colonial thought. This provocative and richly theorized study explores the re-creative, liminal aspect of song, treating it as a performative social process that cuts to the very root of identity and thought formation, thus re-imagining the history of ideas in society.

    Subjects: Performance Studies History: 18th/19th Century Anthropology (General) Literary Studies
    Area: Europe
    Series: Dance and Performance Studies Volume 12
  • Returning Life

    Returning Life

    Language, Life Force and History in Kilimanjaro

    Myhre, K. C.

    A group of Chagga-speaking men descend the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro to butcher animals and pour milk, beer, and blood on the ground, requesting rain for their continued existence. Returning Life explores how this event engages activities where life force is transferred and transformed to afford and affect beings of different kinds. Historical sources demonstrate how the phenomenon of life force encompasses coffee cash-cropping, Catholic Christianity, and colonial and post-colonial rule, and features in cognate languages from throughout the area. As this vivid ethnography explores how life projects through beings of different kinds, it brings to life concepts and practices that extend through time and space, transcending established analytics.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sociology
    Area: Africa
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 32
  • Seekers and Things

    Seekers and Things

    Spiritual Movements and Aesthetic Difference in Kinshasa

    Lambertz, P.

    Focusing on the intricate presence of a Japanese new religion (Sekai Kyûseikyô) in the densely populated and primarily Christian environment of Kinshasa (DR Congo), this ethnographic study offers a practitioner-orientated perspective to create a localized picture of religious globalization. Guided by an aesthetic approach to religion, the study moves beyond a focus limited to text and offers insights into the role of religious objects, spiritual technologies and aesthetic repertoires in the production and politics of difference. The boundaries between non-Christian religious minorities and the largely Christian public sphere involve fears and suspicion of "magic" and "occult sciences".

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Africa
  • Indigeneity on the Move

    Indigeneity on the Move

    Varying Manifestations of a Contested Concept

    Gerharz, E., Uddin, N., & Chakkarath, P. (eds)

    “Indigeneity” has become a prominent yet contested concept in national and international politics, as well as within the social sciences. This edited volume draws from authors representing different disciplines and perspectives, exploring the dependence of indigeneity on varying sociopolitical contexts, actors, and discourses with the ultimate goal of investigating the concept’s scientific and political potential.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)
  • Stategraphy

    Stategraphy

    Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State

    Thelen, T., Vetters, L., & Benda-Beckmann, K. von (eds)

    Stategraphy—the ethnographic exploration of relational modes, boundary work, and forms of embeddedness of actors—offers crucial analytical avenues for researching the state. By exploring interactions and negotiations of local actors in different institutional settings, the contributors explore state transformations in relation to social security in a variety of locations spanning from Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans to the United Kingdom and France. Fusing grounded empirical studies with rigorous theorizing, the volume provides new perspectives to broader related debates in social research and political analysis.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 4
  • From Clans to Co-ops

    From Clans to Co-ops

    Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily

    Rakopoulos, T.

    From Clans to Co-ops explores the social, political, and economic relations that enable the constitution of cooperatives operating on land confiscated from mafiosi in Sicily, a project that the state hails as arguably the greatest symbolic victory over the mafia in Italian history. Rakopoulos’s ethnographic focus is on access to resources, divisions of labor, ideologies of community and food, and the material changes that cooperatives bring to people’s lives in terms of kinship, work and land management. The book contributes to broader debates about cooperativism, how labor might be salvaged from market fundamentalism, and to emergent discourses about the ‘human’ economy.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Food & Nutrition
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: The Human Economy Volume 4
  • Cyprus and its Conflicts

    Cyprus and its Conflicts

    Representations, Materialities, and Cultures

    Doudaki, V. & Carpentier, N. (eds)

    The Mediterranean island of Cyprus is the site of enduring political, military, and economic conflict. This interdisciplinary collection takes Cyprus as a geographical, cultural and political point of reference for understanding how conflict is mediated, represented, reconstructed, experienced, and transformed. Through methodologically diverse case studies of a wide range of topics—including public art, urban spaces, and print, broadcast and digital media—it assembles an impressively multifaceted perspective, one that provides broad insights into the complex interplay of culture, conflict, and identity.

    Subjects: Media Studies Peace and Conflict Studies
    Area: Southern Europe
  • Peaceful Selves

    Peaceful Selves

    Personhood, Nationhood, and the Post-Conflict Moment in Rwanda

    Eramian, L.

    This ethnography of personhood in post-genocide Rwanda investigates how residents of a small town grapple with what kinds of persons they ought to become in the wake of violence. Based on fieldwork carried out over the course of a decade, it uncovers how conflicting moral demands emerge from the 1994 genocide, from cultural contradictions around “good” personhood, and from both state and popular visions for the future. What emerges is a profound dissonance in town residents’ selfhood. While they strive to be agents of change who can catalyze a new era of modern Rwandan nationhood, they are also devastated by the genocide and struggle to recover a sense of selfhood and belonging in the absence of kin, friends, and neighbors. In drawing out the contradictions at the heart of self-making and social life in contemporary Rwanda, this book asserts a novel argument about the ordinary lives caught in global post-conflict imperatives to remember and to forget, to mourn and to prosper.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies
    Area: Africa
  • Bishkek Boys

    Bishkek Boys

    Neighbourhood Youth and Urban Change in Kyrgyzstan’s Capital

    Schröder, P.

    In this pioneering ethnographic study of identity and integration, author Philipp Schröder explores urban change in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek from the vantage point of the male youth living in one neighbourhood. Touching on topics including authority, violence, social and imaginary geographies, interethnic relations, friendship, and competing notions of belonging to the city, Bishkek Boys offers unique insights into how post-Socialist economic liberalization, rural-urban migration and ethnic nationalism have reshaped social relations among young males who come of age in this Central Asian urban environment.

    Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Refugee and Migration Studies Urban Studies
    Area: Asia
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 17
  • Selfhood and Recognition

    Selfhood and Recognition

    Melanesian and Western Accounts of Relationality

    Galuschek, A. C.

    The disciplines of philosophy and cultural anthropology have one thing in common: human behavior. Yet surprisingly, dialogue between the two fields has remained largely silent until now. Selfhood and Recognition combines philosophical and cultural anthropological accounts of the perception of individual action, exploring the processes through which a person recognizes the self and the other. Touching on humanity as porous, fractal, dividual, and relational, the author sheds new light on the nature of selfhood, recognition, relationality, and human life.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Person, Space and Memory in the Contemporary Pacific Volume 7
  • Vital Diplomacy

    Vital Diplomacy

    The Ritual Everyday on a Dammed River in Amazonia

    Nahum-Claudel. C.

    In Brazil, where forest meets savanna, new towns, agribusiness and hydroelectric plants form a patchwork with the indigenous territories. Here, agricultural work, fishing, songs, feasts and exchanges occupy the Enawenê-nawê for eight months of each year during a season called Yankwa. Vital Diplomacy focuses on this major ceremonial cycle to shed new light on classic Amazonian themes such as kinship, gender, manioc cultivation and cuisine, relations with non-humans and foreigners, and the interplay of myth and practice, exploring how ritual contains and diverts the threat of violence by reconciling antagonistic spirits, coordinating social and gender divides, and channelling foreign relations and resources.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Ethnography, Theory, Experiment Volume 5
  • Difference and Sameness as Modes of Integration

    Difference and Sameness as Modes of Integration

    Anthropological Perspectives on Ethnicity and Religion

    Schlee, G. & Horstmann, A. (eds)

    What does it mean to “fit in?” In this volume of essays, editors Günther Schlee and Alexander Horstmann demystify the discourse on identity, challenging common assumptions about the role of sameness and difference as the basis for inclusion and exclusion. Armed with intimate knowledge of local systems, social relationships, and the negotiation of people’s positions in the everyday politics, these essays tease out the ways in which ethnicity, religion and nationalism are used for social integration.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Peace and Conflict Studies
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 16
  • Culture Change and Ex-Change

    Culture Change and Ex-Change

    Syncretism and Anti-Syncretism in Bena, Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea

    Knapp, R.

    How is cultural change perceived and performed by members of the Bena Bena language group, who live in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea? In her analysis, Knapp draws upon existing bodies of work on ‘culture change’, ‘exchange’ and ‘person’ in Melanesia but brings them together in a new way by conjoining traditional models with theoretical approaches of the new Melanesian ethnography and with collaborative, reflexive and reverse anthropology.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Person, Space and Memory in the Contemporary Pacific Volume 6
  • Foucault's Orient

    Foucault's Orient

    The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan

    Lazreg, M.

    Foucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the “Orient” constitute the “limit” of Western rationality. Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars in Tunisia, Japan and France, this book examines the philosophical sources, evolution as well as contradictions of Foucault’s experience with non-Western cultures.  Beyond tracing Foucault’s journey into the world of otherness, the book reveals the personal, political as well as methodological effects of a radical conception of cultural difference that extolled the local over the cosmopolitan.

    Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Areas: Asia-Pacific Africa
  • Children of the Camp

    Children of the Camp

    The Lives of Somali Youth Raised in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya

    Grayson, C.-L.

    Chronic violence has characterized Somalia for over two decades, forcing nearly two million people to flee. A significant number have settled in camps in neighboring countries, where children were born and raised. Based on in-depth fieldwork, this book explores the experience of Somalis who grew up in Kakuma refugee camp, in Kenya, and are now young adults. This original study carefully considers how young people perceive their living environment and how growing up in exile structures their view of the past and their country of origin, and the future and its possibilities.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology
    Area: Africa
  • Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters

    Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters

    Making Likenesses in Time, Trade, and Ritual Reconfigurations

    Mageo, J. & Hermann, E. (eds)

    How do images circulating in Pacific cultures and exchanged between them and their many visitors transform meanings for all involved? This fascinating collection explores how through mimesis, wayfarers and locales alike borrow images from one another to expand their cultural repertoire of meanings or borrow images from their own past to validate their identities.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology Volume 8
  • Voice of Prophecy, The

    The Voice of Prophecy

    And Other Essays

    Ardener, E.

    Edwin Ardener - a new expanded edition of the collected works of one of the most important social anthroplogists in Britian of his time. Ardener worked on social, economic, demographic and political problems, and was particularly influential in his sustained effort to bring together social anthropology and linguistics in a highly original attempt to reconcile scientific and humanistic approaches to the study of society. This volume offers a theoretically and conceptually coherent body of work by this innovative and profound thinker, which will continue to excite and stimulate new generations of students and researchers as it has in the past.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality
  • Growing Up in Transit

    Growing Up in Transit

    The Politics of Belonging at an International School

    Tanu, D.

    “[R]ecommended to anyone interested in multiculturalism and migration….[and] food for thought also for scholars studying migration in less privileged contexts.”—Social Anthropology

    In this compelling study of the children of serial migrants, Danau Tanu argues that the international schools they attend promote an ideology of being “international” that is Eurocentric. Despite the cosmopolitan rhetoric, hierarchies of race, culture and class shape popularity, friendships, and romance on campus.

    By going back to high school for a year, Tanu befriended transnational youth, often called “Third Culture Kids”, to present their struggles with identity, belonging and internalized racism in their own words. The result is the first engaging, anthropological critique of the way Western-style cosmopolitanism is institutionalized as cultural capital to reproduce global socio-cultural inequalities.

    From the introduction:
    When I first went back to high school at thirty-something, I wanted to write a book about people who live in multiple countries as children and grow up into adults addicted to migrating. I wanted to write about people like Anne-Sophie Bolon who are popularly referred to as “Third Culture Kids” or “global nomads.” … I wanted to probe the contradiction between the celebrated image of “global citizens” and the economic privilege that makes their mobile lifestyle possible. From a personal angle, I was interested in exploring the voices among this population that had yet to be heard (particularly the voices of those of Asian descent) by documenting the persistence of culture, race, and language in defining social relations even among self-proclaimed cosmopolitan youth.

    Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Educational Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Straying from the Straight Path

    Straying from the Straight Path

    How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion

    Beekers, D. & Kloos, D. (eds)

    If piety, faith, and conviction constitute one side of the religious coin, then imperfection, uncertainty, and ambivalence constitute the other. Yet, scholars tend to separate these two domains and place experiences of inadequacy in everyday religious life – such as a wavering commitment, religious negligence or weakness in faith – outside the domain of religion ‘proper.’

    Straying from the Straight Path breaks with this tendency by examining how self-perceived failure is, in many cases, part and parcel of religious practice and experience. Responding to the need for comparative approaches in the face of the largely separated fields of the anthropology of Islam and Christianity, this volume gives full attention to moral failure as a constitutive and potentially energizing force in the religious lives of both Muslims and Christians in different parts of the world.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 3
  • Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia

    Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia

    Transitioning to an Alternative World System

    Baer, H. A.

    As global economic and population growth continues to skyrocket, increasingly strained resources have made one thing clear: the desperate need for an alternative to capitalism. In Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia, Hans Baer outlines the urgent need to reevaluate historical definitions of socialism, commit to social equality and justice, and prioritize environmental sustainability. Democatic eco-socialism, as he terms it, is a system capable of mobilizing people around the world, albeit in different ways, to prevent on-going human socio-economic and environmental degradation, and anthropogenic climate change.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
  • Global Exchanges

    Global Exchanges

    Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World

    Tournès, L. & Scott-Smith, G. (eds)

    Exchanges between different cultures and institutions of learning have taken place for centuries, but it was only in the twentieth century that such efforts evolved into formal programs that received focused attention from nation-states, empires and international organizations. Global Exchanges provides a wide-ranging overview of this underresearched topic, examining the scope,  scale and evolution of organized exchanges around the globe through the twentieth century. In doing so it dramatically reveals the true extent of organized exchange and its essential contribution for knowledge transfer, cultural interchange, and the formation of global networks so often taken for granted today.

    Subjects: Mobility Studies History: 20th Century to Present Educational Studies
  • Gender in Georgia

    Gender in Georgia

    Feminist Perspectives on Culture, Nation, and History in the South Caucasus

    Barkaia, M. & Waterston, A. (eds)

    As Georgia seeks to reinvent itself as a nation-state in the post-Soviet period, Georgian women are maneuvering, adjusting, resisting and transforming the new economic, social and political order. In Gender in Georgia, editors Maia Barkaia and Alisse Waterston bring together an international group of feminist scholars to explore the socio-political and cultural conditions that have shaped gender dynamics in Georgia from the late 19th century to the present. In doing so, they provide the first-ever woman-centered collection of research on Georgia, offering a feminist critique of power in its many manifestations, and an assessment of women’s political agency in Georgia.

    Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
  • Moral Engines

    Moral Engines

    Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life

    Mattingly, C., Dyring, R., Louw, M., & Schwarz Wentzer, T. (eds)

    In the past fifteen years, there has been a virtual explosion of anthropological literature arguing that morality should be considered central to human practice. Out of this explosion new and invigorating conversations have emerged between anthropologists and philosophers. Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life includes essays from some of the foremost voices in the anthropology of morality, offering unique interdisciplinary conversations between anthropologists and philosophers about the moral engines of ethical life, addressing the question: What propels humans to act in light of ethical ideals?

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 5
  • Anthropology of the Fetus, The

    The Anthropology of the Fetus

    Biology, Culture, and Society

    Han, S., Betsinger, T. K., & Scott, A. B. (eds)

    As a biological, cultural, and social entity, the human fetus is a multifaceted subject which calls for equally diverse perspectives to fully understand. Anthropology of the Fetus seeks to achieve this by bringing together specialists in biological anthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. Contributors draw on research in prehistoric, historic, and contemporary sites in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and North America to explore the biological and cultural phenomenon of the fetus, raising methodological and theoretical concerns with the ultimate goal of developing a holistic anthropology of the fetus.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 37
  • Silenced Communities

    Silenced Communities

    Legacies of Militarization and Militarism in a Rural Guatemalan Town

    Esparza, M.

    Although the Guatemalan Civil War ended more than two decades ago, its bloody legacy continues to resonate even today. In Silenced Communities, author Marcia Esparza offers an ethnographic account of the failed demilitarization of the rural militia in the town of Santo Tomás Chichicastenango following the conflict. Combining insights from postcolonialism, subaltern studies, and theories of internal colonialism, Esparza explores the remarkable resilience of ideologies and practices engendered in the context of the Cold War, demonstrating how the lingering effects of grassroots militarization affect indigenous communities that continue to struggle with inequality and marginalization.

    Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies History: 20th Century to Present
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Power in Practice

    Power in Practice

    The Pragmatic Anthropology of Afro-Brazilian Capoeira

    González Varela, S.

    Considering the concept of power in capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian ritual art form, Varela describes ethnographically the importance that capoeira leaders (mestres) have in the social configuration of a style called Angola in Bahia, Brazil. He analyzes how individual power is essential for an understanding of the modern history of capoeira, and for the themes of embodiment, play, cosmology, and ritual action. The book also emphasizes the great significance that creativity and aesthetic expression have for capoeira’s practice and performance.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Performance Studies
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Fertility, Conjuncture, Difference

    Fertility, Conjuncture, Difference

    Anthropological Approaches to the Heterogeneity of Modern Fertility Declines

    Kreager, P. & Bochow, A. (eds)

    In the last forty years anthropologists have made major contributions to understanding the heterogeneity of reproductive trends and processes underlying them. Fertility transition, rather than the story of the triumphant spread of Western birth control rationality, reveals a diversity of reproductive means and ends continuing before, during, and after transition. This collection brings together anthropological case studies, placing them in a comparative framework of compositional demography and conjunctural action.  The volume addresses major issues of inequality and distribution which shape population and social structures, and in which fertility trends and the formation and size of families are not decided solely or primarily by reproduction.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 36
  • House of the Waterlily

    House of the Waterlily

    A Novel of the Ancient Maya World

    Carmean, K.

    Set in the Maya civilization’s Late Classic Period House of the Waterlily is a historical novel centered on Lady Winik, a young Maya royal. Through tribulations that mirror the political calamities of the Late Classic world, Winik’s personal story immerses the reader not only in her daily life, but also in the difficult decisions Maya men and women must have faced as they tried to navigate a rapidly changing world. Kelli Carmean’s novel brings to life a people and an era remote from our own, yet recognizably human all the same.

    Subjects: Archaeology Literary Studies Memory Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Gender, Violence, Refugees

    Gender, Violence, Refugees

    Buckley-Zistel, S. & Krause, U. (eds)

    Providing nuanced accounts of how the social identities of men and women, the context of displacement and the experience or manifestation of violence interact, this collection offers conceptual analyses and in-depth case studies to illustrate how gender relations are affected by displacement, encampment and return. The essays show how these factors lead to various forms of direct, indirect and structural violence. This ranges from discussions of norms reflected in policy documents and practise, the relationship between relief structures and living conditions in camps, to forced military recruitment and forced return, and covers countries in Africa, Asia and Europe.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Peace and Conflict Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 37
  • Images from Paradise

    Images from Paradise

    The Visual Communication of the European Union's Federalist Utopia

    Salgó, E.

    Drawing upon the disciplines of politics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and cinema studies, Salgó presents a new way of looking at the “art of European unification.” The official visual narratives of the European Union constitute the main object of inquiry – the iconography of the new series of euro banknotes and the videos through which the supranational elite seek to generate “collective effervescence,” allow for a European carnival to take place, and prompt citizens to pledge allegiance to the sacred dogma of the “ever closer union,” thereby strengthening the mythical sources of the organization’s legitimacy. The author seeks to illustrate how and why the federalist utopia turned into a political soteriology after the outbreak of the 2008 crisis.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Media Studies
    Area: Europe
  • Goddess in Motion, A

    A Goddess in Motion

    Visual Creativity in the Cult of María Lionza

    Canals, R.

    The current practice of the cult of María Lionza is one of the most important and yet unexplored religious practices in Venezuela. Based on long-term fieldwork, this book explores the role of images and visual culture within the cult. By adopting a relational approach, A Goddess in Motion shows how the innumerable images of this goddess—represented as an Indian, white or mestizo woman—move constantly from objects to bodies, from bodies to dreams, and from the religion domain to the art world. In short, this book is a fascinating study that sheds light on the role of visual creativity in contemporary religious manifestations.

    Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 42
  • Living Before Dying

    Living Before Dying

    Imagining and Remembering Home

    Davies, J.

    This in-depth description of life in a nursing/care home for 70 residents and 40 staff highlights the daily care of frail or ill residents between 80 and 100 years of age, including people suffering with dementia. How residents interact with care assistants is emphasised, as are the different behaviours of men and women observed during a year of daily conversations between the author, patients and staff, who share their stories of the pressures of the work. Living Before Dying shows a world where, in extreme old age, people have to learn how to cope with living communally.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 41
  • European Anthropologies

    European Anthropologies

    Barrera-González, A., Heintz, M. & Horolets, A. (eds)

    In what ways did Europeans interact with the diversity of people they encountered on other continents in the context of colonial expansion, and with the peasant or ethnic ‘Other’ at home? How did anthropologists and ethnologists make sense of the mosaic of people and societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when their disciplines were progressively being established in academia? By assessing the diversity of European intellectual histories within sociocultural anthropology, this volume aims to sketch its intellectual and institutional portrait. It will be a useful reading for the students of anthropology, ethnology, history and philosophy of science, research and science policy makers.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Colonial History
    Area: Europe
    Series: Anthropology of Europe Volume 2
  • Travel and Representation

    Travel and Representation

    Lean, G., Staiff, R., & Waterton, E. (eds)

    Travel and Representation is a timely volume of essays that explores and re-examines the various convergences between literature, art, photography, television, cinema and travel. The essays do so in a way that appreciates the entanglement of representations and travel at a juncture in theoretical work that recognizes the limits of representation, things that lie outside of representation and the continuing power of representation. The emphasis is on the myriad ways travelers/scholars employ representation in their writing/analyses as they re-think the intersections between travelers, fields of representation, imagination, emotions and corporeal experiences in the past, the present and the future.

    Subjects: Heritage Studies Travel and Tourism Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies
  • Managing Ambiguity

    Managing Ambiguity

    How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina

    Brković, Č.

    Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival, nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead, favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart of the organization of welfare.

    Managing Ambiguity follows how neoliberal insistence on local community, flexibility, and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back, and how this fostered a specific mode of power.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies History: 20th Century to Present
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: EASA Series Volume 31
  • Emptiness and Fullness

    Emptiness and Fullness

    Ethnographies of Lack and Desire in Contemporary China

    Bregnbæk, S. & Bunkenborg, M. (eds)

    As critical voices question the quality, authenticity, and value of people, goods, and words in post-Mao China, accusations of emptiness render things open to new investments of meaning, substance, and value. Exploring the production of lack and desire through fine-grained ethnography, this volume examines how diagnoses of emptiness operate in a range of very different domains in contemporary China: In the ostensibly meritocratic exam system and the rhetoric of officials, in underground churches, housing bubbles, and nationalist fantasies, in bodies possessed by spirits and evaluations of jade, there is a pervasive concern with states of lack and emptiness and the contributions suggest that this play of emptiness and fullness is crucial to ongoing constructions of quality, value, and subjectivity in China.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 2
  • Transborder Media Spaces

    Transborder Media Spaces

    Ayuujk Videomaking between Mexico and the US

    Kummels, I.

    Transborder Media Spaces offers a new perspective on how media forms like photography, video, radio, television, and the Internet have been appropriated by Mexican indigenous people in the light of transnational migration and ethnopolitical movements. In producing and consuming self-determined media genres, actors in Tamazulapam Mixe and its diaspora community in Los Angeles open up media spaces and seek to forge more equal relations both within Mexico and beyond its borders. It is within these spaces that Ayuujk people carve out their own, at times conflicting, visions of development, modernity, gender, and what it means to be indigenous in the twenty-first century.

    Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Anthropology of Media Volume 7
  • Civil Society Revisited

    Civil Society Revisited

    Lessons from Poland

    Jacobsson, K. & Korolczuk, E. (eds)

    In much social scientific literature, Polish civil society has been portrayed as weak and passive. This volume offers a much-needed corrective, challenging this characterization on both theoretical and empirical grounds and suggesting new ways of conceptualizing civil society to better account for events on the ground as well as global trends such as neoliberalism, migration, and the renewal of nationalist ideologies. Focusing on forms of collective action that researchers have tended to overlook, the studies gathered here show how public discourse legitimizes certain claims and political actions as “true” civil society, while others are too often dismissed. Taken together, they critique a model of civil society that is ‘made from above’.

    Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Studies on Civil Society Volume 9
  • Footprints in Paradise

    Footprints in Paradise

    Ecotourism, Local Knowledge, and Nature Therapies in Okinawa

    Murray, A. E.

    The economic imperative of sustainable tourism development frequently shapes life on small subtropical islands. In Okinawa, ecotourism promises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride. Footprints in Paradise explores the transformation in community and sense of place as Okinawans come to view themselves through the lens of the visiting tourist consumer, and as their language, landscapes, and wildlife are reconstituted as treasured and vulnerable resources. The rediscovery and revaluing of local ecological knowledge strengthens Okinawan or Uchinaa cultural heritage, despite the controversial presence of US military bases amidst a hegemonic Japanese state.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 40
  • Myth of Self-Reliance, The

    The Myth of Self-Reliance

    Economic Lives Inside a Liberian Refugee Camp

    Omata, N.

    For many refugees, economic survival in refugee camps is extraordinarily difficult. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative research , this volume challenges the reputation of a ‘self-reliant’ model given to Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana and sheds light on considerable economic inequality between refugee households.By following the same refugee households over several years, The Myth of Self-Reliance also provides valuable insights into refugees’ experiences of repatriation to Liberia after protracted exile and their responses to the ending of refugee status for remaining refugees in Ghana.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Africa
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 36
  • Dance of Nurture, The

    The Dance of Nurture

    Negotiating Infant Feeding

    Van Esterik, P. & O'Connor, R. A.

    Breastfeeding and child feeding at the center of nurturing practices, yet the work of nurture has escaped the scrutiny of medical and social scientists. Anthropology offers a powerful biocultural approach that examines how custom and culture interact to support nurturing practices. Our framework shows how the unique constitutions of mothers and infants regulate each other. The Dance of Nurture integrates ethnography, biology and the political economy of infant feeding into a holistic framework guided by the metaphor of dance. It includes a critique of efforts to improve infant feeding practices globally by UN agencies and advocacy groups concerned with solving global nutrition and health problems.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Series: Food, Nutrition, and Culture Volume 6
  • Money in a Human Economy

    Money in a Human Economy

    Hart, K. (eds)

    A human economy puts people first in emergent world society. Money is a human universal and now takes the divisive form of capitalism. This book addresses how to think about money (from Aristotle to the daily news and the sexual economy of luxury goods); its contemporary evolution (banking the unbanked and remittances in the South, cross-border investment in China, the payments industry and the politics of bitcoin); and cases from 19th century India and Southern Africa to contemporary Haiti and Argentina. Money is one idea with diverse forms. As national monopoly currencies give way to regional and global federalism, money is a key to achieving economic democracy.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: The Human Economy Volume 5
  • Mary Douglas

    Mary Douglas

    Understanding Social Thought and Conflict

    6, P. & Richards, P.

    Mary Douglas’s innovative explanations for styles of human thought and for the dynamics of institutional change have furnished a distinctive and powerful theory of how conflicts are managed, yet her work remains astonishingly poorly appreciated in social science disciplines. This volume introduces Douglas’s theories, and outlines the ways in which her work is of continuing importance for the future of the social sciences. Mary Douglas: Understanding Human Thought and Conflict shows how Douglas laid out the agenda for revitalizing social science by reworking Durkheim’s legacy for today, and reviews the growing body of research across the social sciences which has used, tested or developed her approach.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology
  • Indigeneity and the Sacred

    Indigeneity and the Sacred

    Indigenous Revival and the Conservation of Sacred Natural Sites in the Americas

    Sarmiento, F. & Hitchner, S. (eds)

    This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies
    Areas: North America Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 22
  • Ethics of Knowledge Creation, The

    The Ethics of Knowledge Creation

    Transactions, Relations, and Persons

    Josephides, L. & Grønseth, A. S. (eds)

    Anthropology lies at the heart of the human sciences, tackling questions having to do with the foundations, ethics, and deployment of the knowledge crucial to human lives. The Ethics of Knowledge Creation focuses on how knowledge is relationally created, how local knowledge can be transmuted into ‘universal knowledge’, and how the transaction and consumption of knowledge also monitors its subsequent production. This volume examines the ethical implications of various kinds of relations that are created in the process of ‘transacting knowledge’ and investigates how these transactions are also situated according to broader contradictions or synergies between ethical, epistemological, and political concerns.

    Subjects: Applied Anthropology Theory and Methodology
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 31
  • Indigenist Mobilization

    Indigenist Mobilization

    Confronting Electoral Communism and Precarious Livelihoods in Post-Reform Kerala

    Steur, L.

    In Kerala, political activists with a background in Communism are now instead asserting political demands on the basis of indigenous identity. Why did a notion of indigenous belonging come to replace the discourse of class in subaltern struggles? Indigenist Mobilization answers this question through a detailed ethnographic study of the dynamics between the Communist party and indigenist activists, and the subtle ways in which global capitalist restructuring leads to a resonance of indigenist visions in the changing everyday working lives of subaltern groups in Kerala.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Asia
    Series: Dislocations Volume 20
  • Redescribing Relations

    Redescribing Relations

    Strathernian Conversations on Ethnography, Knowledge and Politics

    Lebner, A. (ed)

    Marilyn Strathern is among the most creative and celebrated contemporary anthropologists, and her work draws interest from across the humanities and social sciences. Redescribing Relations brings some of Strathern’s most committed and renowned readers into conversation in her honour – especially on themes she has rarely engaged. The volume not only deepens our understanding of Strathern’s work, it also offers models of how to extend her relational insights to new terrains. With a comprehensive introduction, a complete list of Strathern's publications and a historic interview published in English for the first time, this is an invaluable resource for Strathern’s old and new interlocutors alike.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)
  • Wolf Conflicts

    Wolf Conflicts

    A Sociological Study

    Skogen, K., Krange, O., & Figari, H.

    Wolf populations have recently made a comeback in Northern Europe and North America. These large carnivores can cause predictable conflicts by preying on livestock, and competing with hunters for game. But their arrivals often become deeply embedded in more general societal tensions, which arise alongside processes of social change that put considerable pressure on rural communities and on the rural working class in particular. Based on research and case studies conducted in Norway, Wolf Conflicts discusses various aspects of this complex picture, including conflicts over land use and conservation, and more general patterns of hegemony and resistance in modern societies.

    Subjects: Sociology Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Northern Europe
    Series: Interspecies Encounters Volume 1
  • Grace after Genocide

    Grace after Genocide

    Cambodians in the United States

    Mortland, C. A.

    Grace after Genocide is the first comprehensive ethnography of Cambodian refugees, charting their struggle to transition from life in agrarian Cambodia to survival in post-industrial America, while maintaining their identities as Cambodians. The ethnography contrasts the lives of refugees who arrived in America after 1975, with their focus on Khmer traditions, values, and relations, with those of their children who, as descendants of the Khmer Rouge catastrophe, have struggled to become Americans in a society that defines them as different. The ethnography explores America’s mid-twentieth-century involvement in Southeast Asia and its enormous consequences on multiple generations of Khmer refugees.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
    Areas: North America Asia
  • Understanding Conflicts about Wildlife

    Understanding Conflicts about Wildlife

    A Biosocial Approach

    Hill, C. M., Webber, A. D. & Priston, N. E. C. (eds)

    Conflicts about wildlife are usually portrayed and understood as resulting from the negative impacts of wildlife on human livelihoods or property. However, a greater depth of analysis reveals that many instances of human-wildlife conflict are often better understood as people-people conflict, wherein there is a clash of values between different human groups. Understanding Conflicts About Wildlife unites academics and practitioners from across the globe to develop a holistic view of these interactions. It considers the political and social dimensions of ‘human-wildlife conflicts’ alongside effective methodological approaches, and will be of value to academics, conservationists and policy makers.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Series: Rethinking Biosocial Anthropology Volume 9
  • Methodologies of Mobility

    Methodologies of Mobility

    Ethnography and Experiment

    Elliot, A., Norum, R., & Salazar, N. B. (eds)

    Research into mobility is an exciting challenge for the social sciences that raises novel social, cultural, spatial and ethical questions. At the heart of these empirical and theoretical complexities lies the question of methodology: how can we best capture and understand a planet in flux? Methodologies of Mobility speaks beyond disciplinary boundaries to the methodological challenges and possibilities of engaging with a world on the move. With scholars continuing to face different forms and scales of mobility, this volume strategically traces innovative ways of designing, applying and reflecting on both established and cutting-edge methodologies of mobility.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies Theory and Methodology
    Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 2
  • Good Holiday, The

    The Good Holiday

    Development, Tourism and the Politics of Benevolence in Mozambique

    Baptista, J. A.

    Drawing on ethnographic research in the village of Canhane, which is host to the first community tourism project in Mozambique, The Good Holiday explores the confluence of two powerful industries: tourism and development, and explains when, how and why tourism becomes development and development, tourism. The volume further explores the social and material consequences of this merging, presenting the confluence of tourism and development as a major vehicle for the exercise of ethics, and non-state governance in contemporary life.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Travel and Tourism
    Area: Africa
    Series: EASA Series Volume 30
  • Death of the Public University?

    Death of the Public University?

    Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy

    Wright, S. & Shore, C. (eds)

    Universities have been subjected to continuous government reforms since the 1980s, to make them ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘efficient’ and aligned to the predicted needs and challenges of a global knowledge economy. Under increasing pressure to pursue ‘excellence’ and ‘innovation’, many universities are struggling to maintain their traditional mission to be inclusive, improve social mobility and equality and act as the ‘critic and conscience’ of society. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary research project, University Reform, Globalisation and Europeanisation (URGE), this collection analyses the new landscapes of public universities emerging across Europe and the Asia-Pacific, and the different ways that academics are engaging with them.

    Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)
    Areas: Europe Asia-Pacific
    Series: Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies Volume 3
  • Being Godless

    Being Godless

    Ethnographies of Atheism and Non-Religion

    Blanes, R. L. & Oustinova-Stjepanovic, G. (eds)

    Drawing on ethnographic inquiry and the anthropological literature on doubt and atheism, this volume explores people's reluctance to pursue religion. The contributors capture the experiences of godless people and examine their perspectives on the role of religion in their personal and public lives. In doing so, the volume contributes to a critical understanding of the processes of disengagement from religion and reveals the challenges and paradoxes that godless people face.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Series: Studies in Social Analysis Volume 1
  • On Retaliation

    On Retaliation

    Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of a Basic Human Condition

    Turner, B. & Schlee, G. (eds)

    Retaliation is associated with all forms of social and political organization, and retaliatory logics inform many different conflict resolution procedures from consensual settlement to compensation to violent escalations. This book derives a concept of retaliation from the overall notion of reciprocity, defining retaliation as the human disposition to strive for a reactive balancing of conflicts and injustices. On Retaliation presents a synthesized approach to both the violence-generating and violence-avoiding potentials of retaliation. Contributors to this volume touch upon the interaction between retaliation and violence, the state’s monopoly on legitimate punishment and the factors of socio-political frameworks, religious interpretations and economic processes.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 15
  • Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance

    Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance

    Anthropologies of Sound and Movement

    Chrysagis, E. & Karampampas, P. (eds)

    Across spatial, bodily, and ethical domains, music and dance both emerge from and give rise to intimate collaboration. This theoretically rich collection takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the collective dimension of sound and movement in everyday life, drawing on genres and practices in contexts as diverse as Japanese shakuhachi playing, Peruvian huayno, and the Greek goth scene. Highlighting the sheer physicality of the ethnographic encounter, as well as the forms of sociality that gradually emerge between self and other, each contribution demonstrates how dance and music open up pathways and give shape to life trajectories that are neither predetermined nor teleological, but generative.

    Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)
    Series: Dance and Performance Studies Volume 10
  • When Things Become Property

    When Things Become Property

    Land Reform, Authority and Value in Postsocialist Europe and Asia

    Sikor, T., Dorondel, S., Stahl, J. & Xuan To, P.

    Governments have conferred ownership titles to many citizens throughout the world in an effort to turn things into property. Almost all elements of nature have become the target of property laws, from the classic preoccupation with land to more ephemeral material, such as air and genetic resources. When Things Become Property interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, and finds that property reforms are no longer, if they ever were, miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Areas: Europe Asia
    Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 3
  • Theoreticial Scholarship and Applied Practice

    Theoretical Scholarship and Applied Practice

    Pink, S., Fors, V., & O'Dell, T. (eds)

    Academics across the globe are being urged by universities and research councils to do research that impacts the world beyond academia. Yet to date there has been very little reflection amongst scholars and practitioners in these fields concerning the relationship between the theoretical and engaged practices that emerge through such forms of scholarship. Theoretical Scholarship and Applied Practice investigates the ways in which theoretical research has been incorporated into recent applied practices across the social sciences and humanities. This collection advances our understanding of the ethics, values, opportunities and challenges that emerge in the making of engaged and interdisciplinary scholarship.

    Subject: Applied Anthropology
    Areas: Europe North America
    Series: Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology Volume 11
  • Starry Nights

    Starry Nights

    Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology

    Reyna, S. P.

    Starry Nights: Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology offers nothing less than a reinventing of the discipline of anthropology. In these six essays – four published here for the first time – Stephen Reyna critiques the postmodern tenets of anthropology, while devising a new strategy for conducting research. Combative and clear, Starry Nights provides an important critique of mainstream anthropology as represented by Geertz and the postmodern legacy, and envisions a mode of anthropological research that addresses social, cultural and biological questions with techniques that are theoretically rigorous and practically useful.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
    Series: Loose Can(n)ons Volume 1
  • Border Aesthetics

    Border Aesthetics

    Concepts and Intersections

    Schimanski, J. & Wolfe, S. F. (eds)

    Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.

    Subjects: Literary Studies Mobility Studies Anthropology (General)
    Series: Time and the World: Interdisciplinary Studies in Cultural Transformations Volume 3
  • Food Culture

    Food Culture

    Anthropology, Linguistics and Food Studies

    Chrzan, J. & Brett, J. (eds)

    This volume offers a comprehensive guide to methods used in the sociocultural, linguistic and historical research of food use. This volume is unique in offering food-related research methods from multiple academic disciplines, and includes methods that bridge disciplines to provide a thorough review of best practices. In each chapter, a case study from the author's own work is to illustrate why the methods were adopted in that particular case along with abundant additional resources to further develop and explore the methods.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition
    Series: Research Methods for Anthropological Studies of Food and Nutrition Volume 2
  • Food Health

    Food Health

    Nutrition, Technology, and Public Health

    Chrzan, J. & Brett, J. (eds)

    Nutritional Anthropology and public health research and programming have employed similar methodologies for decades; many anthropologists are public health practitioners while many public health practitioners have been trained as medical or biological anthropologists. Recognizing such professional connections, this volume provides in-depth analysis and comprehensive review of methods necessary to design, plan, implement and analyze public health programming using anthropological best practices. To illustrates the rationale for use of particular methods, each chapter elaborates a case study from the author's own work, showing why particular methods were adopted in each case.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition
    Series: Research Methods for Anthropological Studies of Food and Nutrition Volume 3
  • Shaping Taxpayers

    Shaping Taxpayers

    Values in Action at the Swedish Tax Agency

    Björklund Larsen, L.

    How do you make taxpayers comply? This ethnography offers a vivid, yet nuanced account of knowledge making at one of Sweden’s most esteemed bureaucracies – the Swedish Tax Agency. In its aim to collect taxes and minimize tax faults, the Agency mediates the application of tax law to ensure compliance and maintain legitimacy in society. This volume follows one risk assessment project’s passage through the Agency, from its inception, through the research phase, in discussions with management to its final abandonment. With its fiscal anthropological approach, Shaping Taxpayers reveals how diverse knowledge claims – legal, economic, cultural – compete to shape taxpayer behaviour.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Northern Europe
  • Anthropology and Public Service

    Anthropology and Public Service

    The UK Experience

    MacClancy, J. (ed)

    These days an increasing number of social anthropologists do not find employment within academia. Rather, many find jobs with commercial organizations or in government, where they run research teams and create policy. These scholars provide a much-needed social dimension to government thinking and practice. Anthropology and Public Service shows how anthropologists can set new agendas, and revise old ones in the public sector. Written for scholars and students of various social sciences, these chapters include discussions of anthropologists’ work with the Department for International Development, the Ministry of Defence, the UK Border Agency, and the Cabinet Office, and their contributions to prison governance.

    Subject: Applied Anthropology
    Area: Europe
  • Food Research

    Food Research

    Nutritional Anthropology and Archaeological Methods

    Chrzan, J. & Brett, J. (eds)

    Biocultural and archaeological research on food, past and present, often relies on very specific, precise, methods for data collection and analysis. These are presented here in a broad-based review. Individual chapters provide opportunities to think through the adoption of methods by reviewing the history of their use along with a discussion of research conducted using those methods. A case study from the author's own work is included in each chapter to illustrate why the methods were adopted in that particular case along with abundant additional resources to further develop and explore those methods.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition Archaeology
    Series: Research Methods for Anthropological Studies of Food and Nutrition Volume 1
  • Romance of Crossing Borders, The

    The Romance of Crossing Borders

    Studying and Volunteering Abroad

    Doerr, N. M. & Davis Taïeb, H. (eds)

    What draws people to study abroad or volunteer in far-off communities? Often the answer is romance – the romance of landscapes, people, languages, the very sense of border-crossing – and longing for liberation, attraction to the unknown, yearning to make a difference. This volume explores the complicated and often fraught desires to study and volunteer abroad. In doing so, the book sheds light on how affect is managed by educators and mobilized by students and volunteers themselves, and how these structures of feeling relate to broader social and economic forces.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism Educational Studies
  • Patient Multiple, The

    The Patient Multiple

    An Ethnography of Healthcare and Decision-Making in Bhutan

    Taee, J.

    In the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, medical patients engage a variety of healing practices to seek cures for their ailments. Patients use the expanding biomedical network and a growing number of traditional healthcare units, while also seeking alternative practices, such as shamanism and other religious healing, or even more provocative practices. The Patient Multiple delves into this healthcare complexity in the context of patients’ daily lives and decision-making processes, showing how these unique mountain cultures are finding new paths to good health among a changing and multifaceted medical topography.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Asia
    Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 4
  • Imbalance of Power, The

    The Imbalance of Power

    Leadership, Masculinity and Wealth in the Amazon

    Brightman, M

    Amerindian societies have an iconic status in classical political thought. For Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Rousseau, the native American ‘state of nature’ operates as a foil for the European polity. Challenging this tradition, The Imbalance of Power demonstrates ethnographically that the Carib speaking indigenous societies of the Guiana region of Amazonia do not fit conventional characterizations of ‘simple’ political units with ‘egalitarian’ political ideologies and ‘harmonious’ relationships with nature. Marc Brightman builds a persuasive and original theory of Amerindian politics: far from balanced and egalitarian, Carib societies are rife with tension and difference; but this imbalance conditions social dynamism and a distinctive mode of cohesion. The Imbalance of Power is based on the author’s fieldwork in partnership with Vanessa Grotti, who is working on a companion volume entitled Living with the Enemy: First Contacts and the Making of Christian Bodies in Amazonia.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Death, Materiality and Mediation

    Death, Materiality and Mediation

    An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland

    Graham, B.

    In Death, Materiality and Mediation, Barbara Graham analyzes a diverse range of objects associated with remembrance in both the public and private arenas through ethnography of communities on both sides of the Irish border. In doing so, she explores the materially mediated interactions between the living and the dead, revealing the physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual roles of the dead in contemporary communities. Through this study, Graham expands the concept of materiality to include narrative, song, senses, emotions, ephemera and embodied experience. She also examines how modern practices are informed by older beliefs and folk religion.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Europe
    Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Volume 7
  • Narratives in the Making

    Narratives in the Making

    Writing the East German Past in the Democratic Present

    Gallinat, A.

    Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author Anselma Gallinat shows, such memory work—initially undertaken after fundamental regime change—inevitably shapes citizenship and democracy in the present.

    Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Anthropology (General) Memory Studies
    Area: Germany
  • Sustaining Russia's Arctic Cities

    Sustaining Russia's Arctic Cities

    Resource Politics, Migration, and Climate Change

    Orttung, R. (ed)

    Urban areas in Arctic Russia are experiencing unprecedented social and ecological change. This collection outlines the key challenges that city managers will face in navigating this shifting political, economic, social, and environmental terrain. In particular, the volume examines how energy production drives a boom-bust cycle in the Arctic economy, explores how migrants from Muslim cultures are reshaping the social fabric of northern cities, and provides a detailed analysis of climate change and its impact on urban and industrial infrastructure.

    Subjects: Urban Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies
    Areas: Central/Eastern Europe Asia-Pacific Circumpolar
    Series: Studies in the Circumpolar North Volume 2
  • Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy

    Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy

    Action Research in Higher Education

    Levin, M. & Greenwood, D. J.

    Public universities are in crisis, waning in their role as central institutions within democratic societies. Denunciations are abundant, but analyses of the causes and proposals to re-create public universities are not. Based on extensive experience with Action Research-based organizational change in universities and private sector organizations, Levin and Greenwood analyze the wreckage created by neoliberal academic administrators and policymakers. The authors argue that public universities must be democratically organized to perform their educational and societal functions. The book closes by laying out Action Research processes that can transform public universities back into institutions that promote academic freedom, integrity, and democracy.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Educational Studies Sociology
    Series: Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies Volume 2
  • Biomedical Entanglements

    Biomedical Entanglements

    Conceptions of Personhood in a Papua New Guinea Society

    Herbst, F. A.

    Biomedical Entanglements is an ethnographic study of the Giri people of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the indigenous population’s interaction with modern medicine. In her fieldwork, Franziska A. Herbst follows the Giri people as they circulate within and around ethnographic sites that include a rural health center and an urban hospital. The study bridges medical anthropology and global health, exploring how the ‘biomedical’ is imbued with social meaning and how biomedicine affects Giri ways of life.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Person, Space and Memory in the Contemporary Pacific Volume 5
  • Honour & Violence

    Honour and Violence

    Gender, Power and Law in Southern Pakistan

    Shah, N.

    The practice of karo kari allows family, especially fathers, brothers and sons, to take the lives of their daughters, sisters and mothers if they are accused of adultery. This volume examines the central position of karo kari in the social, political and juridical structures in Upper Sindh, Pakistan. Drawing connections between local contests over marriage and resources, Nafisa Shah unearths deep historical processes and power relations. In particular, she explores how the state justice system and informal mediations inform each other in state responses to karo kari, and how modern law is implicated in this seemingly ancient cultural practice.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Asia
    Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 39
  • Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness

    Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness

    An Ethnography of the Degraded in Postsocialist Poland

    Rakowski, T.

    The socio-economic transformations of the 1990s have forced many people in Poland into impoverishment. Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness gives a dramatic account of life after this degradation, tracking the experiences of unemployed miners, scrap collectors, and poverty-stricken village residents. Contrary to the images of passivity, resignation, and helplessness that have become powerful tropes in Polish journalism and academic writing, Tomasz Rakowski traces the ways in which people actively reconfigure their lives. As it turns out, the initial sense of degradation and helplessness often gives way to images of resourcefulness that reveal unusual hunting-and-gathering skills.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: European Anthropology in Translation Volume 6
  • Trees, Knots, and Outriggers

    Trees, Knots, and Outriggers

    Environmental Knowledge in the Northeast Kula Ring

    Damon, F. H.

    Trees, Knots and Outriggers (Kaynen Muyuw) is the culmination of twenty-five years of work by Frederick H. Damon and his attention to cultural adaptations to the environment in Melanesia. Damon details the intricacies of indigenous knowledge and practice in his sweeping synthesis of symbolic and structuralist anthropology with recent developments in historical ecology. This book is a long conversation between the author’s many Papua New Guinea informants, teachers and friends, and scientists in Australia, Europe and the United States, in which a spirit of adventure and discovery is palpable.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 21
  • Heritage Arena, The

    The Heritage Arena

    Reinventing Cheese in the Italian Alps

    Grasseni, C.

    In Europe a number of production and communication strategies have long tried to establish local products as resources for local development. At the foot of the Alps, this scenario appears in all its contradictions, especially in relation to cheese production. The Heritage Arena focuses on the saga of Strachitunt, a cheese that has been designated an EU Protected Designation of Origin after years of negotiation and competition involving cheese-makers, merchants, and Slow Food activists. The book explores how the reinvention of cheese as a form of heritage is an ongoing and dynamic process rife with conflict and drama.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: Food, Nutrition, and Culture Volume 5
  • Leaving Footprints in the Taiga

    Leaving Footprints in the Taiga

    Luck, Spirits and Ambivalence among the Siberian Orochen Reindeer Herders and Hunters

    Brandišauskas, D.

    Nowhere have recent environmental and social changes been more pronounced than in post-Soviet Siberia. Donatas Brandišauskas probes the strategies that Orochen reindeer herders of southeastern Siberia have developed to navigate these changes. “Catching luck” is one such strategy that plays a central role in Orochen cosmology -- luck implies a vernacular theory of causality based on active interactions of humans, non-humans, material objects, and places.  Brandišauskas describes in rich details the skills, knowledge, ritual practices, storytelling, and movements that enable the Orochen to “catch luck” (or not, sometimes), to navigate times of change and upheaval.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Studies in the Circumpolar North Volume 1
  • Life as a Hunt

    Life as a Hunt

    Thresholds of Identities and Illusions on an African Landscape

    Marks, S. A.

    The "extensive wilderness" of Zambia’s central Luangwa Valley is the homeland of the Valley Bisa whose cultural practices have enriched this environment for centuries. Beginning with the intrusions of warlords and later British colonials, successive generations have experienced the callousness and challenges of colonialism. Their homeland, a slender corridor surrounded by three national parks and an escarpment, is a microcosm of the political, economic and cultural battlefields surrounding most African protected areas today. The story of the Valley Bisa diverges from the myths that conservationists, administrators, and philanthropists, tell about Africa’s environmental and wildlife crises.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Africa
  • Moving Places

    Moving Places

    Relations, Return and Belonging

    Gregorič Bon, N. & Repič, J. (eds)

    Moving Places draws together contributions from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, exploring practices and experiences of movement, non-movement, and place-making. The book centers on “moving places”: places with locations that are not fixed but relative. Locations appearing to be reasonably stable, such as home and homeland, are in fact always subject to practices, imaginaries, and politics of movement. Bringing together original ethnographic contributions with a clear theoretical focus, this volume spans the fields of anthropology, human geography, migration, and border studies, and serves as teaching material in related programs.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Mobility Studies Environmental Studies (General)
    Series: EASA Series Volume 29
  • Health and Difference

    Health and Difference

    Rendering Human Variation in Colonial Engagements

    Widmer, A. & Lipphardt, V. (eds)

    Human variation represented a central research topic for life scientists and posed challenging administrative issues for colonial bureaucrats in the first half of the 20th century. By following scientists’ and administrators’ interests in innovating styles and tools for making and circulating documents, in reshaping landscapes and environments, and in fixing distances between humans, the book advances new understandings of the materiality of colonial institutional life and governance.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Colonial History
    Series: Rethinking Biosocial Anthropology Volume 8
  • Reluctant Intimacies

    Reluctant Intimacies

    Japanese Eldercare in Indonesian Hands

    Świtek, B.

    Based on seventeen months of ethnographic research among Indonesian eldercare workers in Japan and Indonesia, this book is the first ethnography to research Indonesian care workers’ relationships with the cared-for elderly, their Japanese colleagues, and their employers. Through the notion of intimacy, the book brings together sociological and anthropological scholarship on the body, migration, demographic change, and eldercare in a vivid account of societal transformation. Placed against the background of mass media representations, the Indonesian workers’ experiences serve as a basis for discussion of the role of bodily experience in shaping the image of a national “other” in Japan.

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Contextualizing Disaster

    Contextualizing Disaster

    Button, G. V. & Schuller, M. (eds)

    Contextualizing Disaster offers a comparative analysis of six recent "highly visible" disasters and several slow-burning, "hidden," crises that include typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, chemical spills, and the unfolding consequences of rising seas and climate change. The book argues that, while disasters are increasingly represented by the media as unique, exceptional, newsworthy events, it is a mistake to think of disasters as isolated or discrete occurrences. Rather, building on insights developed by political ecologists, this book makes a compelling argument for understanding disasters as transnational and global phenomena.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology
    Series: Catastrophes in Context Volume 1
  • Online World of Surrogacy, The

    The Online World of Surrogacy

    Berend, Z.

    Zsuzsa Berend presents a methodologically innovative ethnography of SurroMomsOnline.com, the largest surrogacy support website in the United States. Surrogates’ views emerge from the stories, debates, and discussions that unfold online. The Online World of Surrogacy documents these collective meaning-making practices and explores their practical, emotional, and moral implications. In doing so, the book works through themes of interest across the social sciences, including definitions of parenthood, the symbolic role of money, reproductive loss, altruism, and the moral valuation of relationships.

    Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 35
  • War Magic

    War Magic

    Religion, Sorcery, and Performance

    Farrer, D. S. (ed)

    This compelling volume explores how war magic and warrior religion unleash the power of the gods, demons, ghosts, and the dead. Documenting war magic and warrior religion as they are performed in diverse cultures and across historical time periods, this volume foregrounds embodiment, practice, and performance in anthropological approaches to magic, sorcery, shamanism, and religion. The authors go beyond what magic ‘represents’ to consider what magic does. From Chinese exorcists, Javanese spirit siblings, and black magic in Sumatra to Tamil Tiger suicide bombers, Chamorro spiritual re-enchantment, tantric Buddhist war magic, and Yanomami dark shamans, religion and magic are re-evaluated not just from the practitioner’s perspective but through the victim’s lived experience. These original investigations reveal a nuanced approach to understanding social action, innovation, and the revitalization of tradition in colonial and post-colonial societies undergoing rapid social transformation.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Performance Studies
  • Conceptions

    Conceptions

    Infertility and Procreative Technologies in India

    Bharadwaj, A.

    Infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in India lie at the confluence of multiple cultural conceptions. These ‘conceptions’ are key to understanding the burgeoning spread of assisted reproductive technologies and the social implications of infertility and childlessness in India. This longitudinal study is situated in a number of diverse locales which, when taken together, unravel the complex nature of infertility and assisted conception in contemporary India.

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Area: Asia
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 34
  • 'City of the Future'

    'City of the Future'

    Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana

    Laszczkowski, M.

    Astana, the capital city of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan, has often been admired for the design and planning of its futuristic cityscape. This anthropological study of the development of the city focuses on every-day practices, official ideologies and representations alongside the memories and dreams of the city’s longstanding residents and recent migrants. Critically examining a range of approaches to place and space in anthropology, geography and other disciplines, the book argues for an understanding of space as inextricably material-and-imaginary, and unceasingly dynamic – allowing for a plurality of incompatible pasts and futures materialized in spatial form.

    Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General) Geography
    Areas: Europe Asia
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 14
  • Deadly Contradictions

    Deadly Contradictions

    The New American Empire and Global Warring

    Reyna, S. P.

    As US imperialism continues to dictate foreign policy, Deadly Contradictions is a compelling account of the American empire. Stephen P. Reyna argues that contemporary forms of violence exercised by American elites in the colonies, client state, and regions of interest have deferred imperial problems, but not without raising their own set of deadly contradictions. This book can be read many ways: as a polemic against geopolitics, as a classic social anthropological text, or as a seminal analysis of twenty-four US global wars during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras.
     

    Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)
  • Staying at Home

    Staying at Home

    Identities, Memories and Social Networks of Kazakhstani Germans

    Sanders, R.

    Despite economic growth in Kazakhstan, more than 80 per cent of Kazakhstan’s ethnic Germans have emigrated to Germany to date. Disappointing experiences of the migrants, along with other aspects of life in Germany, have been transmitted through transnational networks to ethnic Germans still living in Kazakhstan. Consequently, Germans in Kazakhstan today feel more alienated than ever from their ‘historic homeland’. This book explores the interplay of those memories, social networks and state policies, which play a role in the ‘construction’ of a Kazakhstani German identity.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)
    Areas: Europe Asia
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 13
  • France of the Little-Middles

    The France of the Little-Middles

    A Suburban Housing Development in Greater Paris

    Cartier, M., Coutant, I., Masclet, O., & Siblot, Y.

    The Poplars housing development in suburban Paris is home to what one resident called the “Little-Middles” – a social group on the tenuous border between the working- and middle- classes. In the 1960s The Poplars was a site of upward social mobility, which fostered an egalitarian sense of community among residents. This feeling of collective flourishing was challenged when some residents moved away, selling their homes to a new generation of upwardly mobile neighbors from predominantly immigrant backgrounds. This volume explores the strained reception of these migrants, arguing that this is less a product of racism and xenophobia than of anxiety about social class and the loss of a sense of community that reigned before.

    Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Urban Studies
    Area: France
    Series: Anthropology of Europe Volume 1
  • Violent Becomings

    Violent Becomings

    State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique

    Bertelsen, B. E.

    Violent Becomings conceptualizes the Mozambican state not as the bureaucratically ordered polity of the nation-state, but as a continuously emergent and violently challenged mode of ordering. In doing so, this book addresses the question of why colonial and postcolonial state formation has involved violent articulations with so-called ‘traditional’ forms of sociality. The scope and dynamic nature of such violent becomings is explored through an array of contexts that include colonial regimes of forced labor and pacification, liberation war struggles and civil war, the social engineering of the post-independence state, and the popular appropriation of sovereign violence in riots and lynchings.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Colonial History
    Area: Africa
    Series: Ethnography, Theory, Experiment Volume 4
  • Patient-Centred IVF

    Patient-Centred IVF

    Bioethics and Care in a Dutch Clinic

    Gerrits, T.

    Contemporary Dutch policy and legislation facilitate the use of high quality, accessible and affordable assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) to all citizens in need of them, while at the same time setting some strict boundaries on their use in daily clinical practices. Through the ethnographic study of a single clinic in this national context, Patient-Centred IVF examines how this particular form of medicine, aiming to empower its patients, co-shapes the experiences, views and decisions of those using these technologies. Gerrits contends that to understand the use of reproductive technologies in practice and the complexity of processes of medicalization, we need to go beyond ‘easy assumptions’ about the hegemony of biomedicine and the expected impact of patient-centredness.

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Area: Northern Europe
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 33
  • Made in Egypt

    Made In Egypt

    Gendered Identity and Aspiration on the Globalised Shop Floor

    Chakravarti, L. Z.

    This ground-breaking ethnography of an export-orientated garment assembly factory in Egypt examines the dynamic relationships between its managers – emergent Mubarak-bizniz (business) elites who are caught in an intensely competitive globalized supply chain – and the local daily-life realities of their young, educated, and mixed-gender labour force. Constructions of power and resistance, as well as individual aspirations and identities, are explored through articulations of class, gender and religion in both management discourses and shop floor practices. Leila Chakravarti’s compelling study also moves beyond the confines of the factory, examining the interplay with the wider world around it.

    Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Middle East & Israel
  • Economic Citizenship

    Economic Citizenship

    Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment

    Sa'ar, A.

    With the spread of neoliberal projects, responsibility for the welfare of minority and poor citizens has shifted from states to local communities. Businesses, municipalities, grassroots activists, and state functionaries share in projects meant to help vulnerable populations become self-supportive. Ironically, such projects produce odd discursive blends of justice, solidarity, and wellbeing, and place the languages of feminist and minority rights side by side with the language of apolitical consumerism. Using theoretical concepts of economic citizenship and emotional capitalism, Economic Citizenship exposes the paradoxes that are deep within neoliberal interpretations of citizenship and analyzes the unexpected consequences of applying globally circulating notions to concrete local contexts.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Middle East & Israel
  • Living on Thin Ice

    Living on Thin Ice

    The Gwich'in Natives of Alaska

    Dinero, S. C.

    The Gwich’in Natives of Arctic Village, Alaska, have experienced intense social and economic changes for more than a century. In the late 20th century, new transportation and communication technologies introduced radically new value systems; while some of these changes may be seen as socially beneficial, others suggest a weakening of what was once a strong and vibrant Native community. Using quantitative and qualitative data gathered since the turn of the millennium, this volume offers an interdisciplinary evaluation of the developments that have occurred in the community over the past several decades.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Urban Studies
    Areas: North America Circumpolar
  • Creativity in Transitions

    Creativity in Transition

    Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe

    Svašek, M. & Meyer, B. (eds)

    In an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity, the dynamics of cultural production and the very notion of creativity are in transition. Exploring creative practices in various settings, the book does not only call attention to the spread of modernist discourses of creativity, from the colonial era to the current obsession with ‘innovation’ in neo-liberal capitalist cultural politics, but also to the less visible practices of copying, recycling and reproduction that occur as part and parcel of creative improvization.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Volume 6
  • State We're In, The

    The State We're In

    Reflecting on Democracy's Troubles

    Cook, J., Long, N. J., & Moore, H. L. (eds)

    What makes people lose faith in democratic statecraft? The question seems an urgent one. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, citizens across the world have grown increasingly disillusioned with what was once a cherished ideal. Setting out an original theoretical model that explores the relations between democracy, subjectivity and sociality, and exploring its relevance to countries ranging from Kenya to Peru, The State We’re In is a must-read for all political theorists, scholars of democracy, and readers concerned for the future of the democratic ideal.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 3
  • Cosmos, Gods and Madmen

    Cosmos, Gods and Madmen

    Frameworks in the Anthropologies of Medicine

    Littlewood, R. & Lynch, R. (eds)

    The social anthropology of sickness and health has always been concerned with religious cosmologies: how societies make sense of such issues as prediction and control of misfortune and fate; the malevolence of others; the benevolence (or otherwise) of the mystical world; local understanding and explanations of the natural and ultra-human worlds. This volume presents differing categorizations and conflicts that occur as people seek to make sense of suffering and their experiences. Cosmologies, whether incorporating the divine or as purely secular, lead us to interpret human action and the human constitution, its ills and its healing and, in particular, ways which determine and limit our very possibilities.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
  • Keywords of Mobility

    Keywords of Mobility

    Critical Engagements

    Salazar, N. B. & Jayaram, K. (eds)

    Scholars from various disciplines have used key concepts to grasp mobilities, but as of yet, a working vocabulary of these has not been fully developed. Given this context and inspired in part by Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976), this edited volume presents contributions that critically analyze mobility-related keywords: capital, cosmopolitanism, freedom, gender, immobility, infrastructure, motility, and regime. Each chapter provides an historical context, a critical analysis of how the keyword has been used in relation to mobility, and a conclusion that proposes future usage or research.

    Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism
    Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 1
  • Mortuary Dialogues

    Mortuary Dialogues

    Death Ritual and the Reproduction of Moral Community in Pacific Modernities

    Lipset, D. & Silverman, E. K. (eds)

    Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through a set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity and its enormous transformations. The book’s key concept, “mortuary dialogue,” describes the different genres of talk and expressive culture through which people struggle to restore individual and collective order in the aftermath of death in the contemporary Pacific.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology Volume 7
  • Migration by Boat

    Migration by Boat

    Discourses of Trauma, Exclusion and Survival

    Mannik, L. (ed)

    At a time when thousands of refugees risk their lives undertaking perilous journeys by boat across the Mediterranean, this multidisciplinary volume could not be more pertinent. It offers various contemporary case studies of boat migrations undertaken by asylum seekers and refugees around the globe and shows that boats not only move people and cultural capital between places, but also fuel cultural fantasies, dreams of adventure and hope, along with fears of invasion and terrorism. The ambiguous nature of memories, media representations and popular culture productions are highlighted throughout in order to address negative stereotypes and conversely, humanize the individuals involved.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology Transport Studies
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 35
  • Ownership and Nurture

    Ownership and Nurture

    Studies in Native Amazonian Property Relations

    Brightman, M., Fausto, C. & Grotti, V. (eds)

    The first book to address the classic anthropological theme of property through the ethnography of Amazonia, Ownership and Nurture sets new and challenging terms for anthropological debates about the region and about property in general. Property and ownership have special significance and carry specific meanings in Amazonia, which has been portrayed as the antithesis of Western, property-based, civilization. Through carefully constructed studies of land ownership, slavery, shamanism, spirit mastery, aesthetics, and intellectual property, this volume demonstrates that property relations are of central importance in Amazonia, and that the ownership of persons plays an especially significant role in native cosmology.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Being & Becoming

    Being and Becoming

    Embodiment and Experience among the Orang Rimba of Sumatra

    Elkholy, R.

    For the Orang Rimba of Sumatra – and tropical foragers in general – life in the forest engenders a kind of “connectedness” that is contingent not only on harmonious relations between people, but also between people and the non-human environment, including those supernatural agencies of the forest that people depend on for their spiritual and emotional wellbeing. Exploring this world, anthropologist Ramsey Elkholy treats embodied action and perception as the basis of shared experience and shows how various forms of embodied experience constitute the very foundations of human culture. In a unique methodological contribution, Elkholy adopts a set of body-centered approaches that reflect and capture the day-to-day, moment-to-moment ways in which people engage with the world. Being and Becoming is an important contribution to phenomenological anthropology, hunter-gatherer studies, and to Southeast Asian ethnography more generally.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Having & Belonging

    Having and Belonging

    Homes and Museums in Israel

    Jaffe-Schagen, J.

    The home and the museum are typically understood as divergent, even oppositional, social realms: whereas one evokes privacy and familial intimacy, the other is conceived of as a public institution oriented around various forms of civic identity. This meticulous, insightful book draws striking connections between both spheres, which play similar roles by housing objects and generating social narratives. Through fascinating explorations of the museums and domestic spaces of eight representative Israeli communities—Chabad, Moroccan, Iraqi, Ethiopian, Russian, Religious-Zionist, Christian Arab, and Muslim Arab—it gives a powerful account of museums’ role in state formation, proposing a new approach to collecting and categorizing particularly well-suited to societies in conflict.

    Subjects: Museum Studies Heritage Studies Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Middle East & Israel
    Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Volume 5
  • Parenthood between Generations

    Parenthood between Generations

    Transforming Reproductive Cultures

    Pooley, S. & Qureshi, K. (eds)

    Recent literature has identified modern “parenting” as an expert-led practice—one which begins with pre-pregnancy decisions, entails distinct types of intimate relationships, places intense burdens on mothers and increasingly on fathers too. Exploring within diverse historical and global contexts how men and women make—and break—relations between generations when becoming parents, this volume brings together innovative qualitative research by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists. The chapters focus tightly on inter-generational transmission and demonstrate its importance for understanding how people become parents and rear children.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 32
  • Witches & Demons

    Witches and Demons

    A Comparative Perspective on Witchcraft and Satanism

    La Fontaine, J.

    Devil worship, black magic, and witchcraft have long captivated anthropologists as well as the general public. In this volume, Jean La Fontaine explores the intersection of expert and lay understandings of evil and the cultural forms that evil assumes. The chapters touch on public scares about devil-worship, misconceptions about human sacrifice and the use of body parts in healing practices, and mistaken accusations of children practicing witchcraft. Together, these cases demonstrate that comparison is a powerful method of cultural understanding, but warns of the dangers and mistaken conclusions that untrained ideas about other ways of life can lead to.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Europe
    Series: Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology Volume 10
  • Humour, Comedy and Laughter

    Humour, Comedy and Laughter

    Obscenities, Paradoxes, Insights and the Renewal of Life

    Sciama, L.D. (ed)

    Anthropological writings on humor are not very numerous or extensive, but they do contain a great deal of insight into the diverse mental and social processes that underlie joking and laughter. On the basis of a wide range of ethnographic and textual materials, the chapters examine the cognitive, social, and moral aspects of humor and its potential to bring about a sense of amity and mutual understanding, even among different and possibly hostile people. Unfortunately, though, cartoons, jokes, and parodies can cause irremediable distress and offence. Nevertheless, contributors’ cross-cultural evidence confirms that the positive aspects of humor far outweigh the danger of deepening divisions and fueling hostilities

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies
    Series: Volume 8
  • World Heritage on the Ground

    World Heritage on the Ground

    Ethnographic Perspectives

    Brumann, C. & Berliner, D. (eds)

    The UNESCO World Heritage Convention of 1972 set the contemporary standard for cultural and natural conservation. Today, a place on the World Heritage List is much sought after for tourism promotion, development funding, and national prestige. Presenting case studies from across the globe, particularly from Africa and Asia, anthropologists with situated expertise in specific World Heritage sites explore the consequences of the World Heritage framework and the global spread of the UNESCO heritage regime. This book shows how local and national circumstances interact with the global institutional framework in complex and unexpected ways. Often, the communities around World Heritage sites are constrained by these heritage regimes rather than empowered by them.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Archaeology Museum Studies
    Series: EASA Series Volume 28
  • Trusting and its Tribulations

    Trusting and its Tribulations

    Interdisciplinary Engagements with Intimacy, Sociality and Trust

    Broch-Due, V. & Ystanes, M. (eds)

    Despite its immense significance and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the complex workings of trust are poorly understood and theorized. This volume explores trust and mistrust amidst locally situated scenes of sociality and intimacy. Because intimacy has often been taken for granted as the foundation of trust relations, the ethnographies presented here challenge us to think about dangerous intimacies, marked by mistrust, as well as forms of trust that cohere through non-intimate forms of sociality.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
  • Our Common Denominator

    Our Common Denominator

    Human Universals Revisited

    Antweiler, C.

    Since the politicization of anthropology in the 1970s, most anthropologists have been reluctant to approach the topic of universals—that is, phenomena that occur regularly in all known human societies. In this volume, Christoph Antweiler reasserts the importance of these cross-cultural commonalities for anthropological research and for life and co-existence beyond the academy. The question presented here is how anthropology can help us approach humanity in its entirety, understanding the world less as a globe, with an emphasis on differences, but as a planet, from a vantage point open to commonalities.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
  • Protest Cultures

    Protest Cultures

    A Companion

    Fahlenbrach, K., Klimke, M., & Scharloth, J. (eds)

    Protest is a ubiquitous and richly varied social phenomenon, one that finds expression not only in modern social movements and political organizations but also in grassroots initiatives, individual action, and creative works. It constitutes a distinct cultural domain, one whose symbolic content is regularly deployed by media and advertisers, among other actors. Yet within social movement scholarship, such cultural considerations have been comparatively neglected. Protest Cultures: A Companion dramatically expands the analytical perspective on protest beyond its political and sociological aspects. It combines cutting-edge synthetic essays with concise, accessible case studies on a remarkable array of protest cultures, outlining key literature and future lines of inquiry.

    Subjects: Sociology History: 20th Century to Present
    Series: Protest, Culture & Society Volume 17
  • Reflecting on Reflexivity

    Reflecting on Reflexivity

    The Human Condition as an Ontological Surprise

    Evens, T. M. S., Handelman, D. & Roberts, C. (eds)

    Humanness supposes innate and profound reflexivity. This volume approaches the concept of reflexivity on two different yet related analytical planes. Whether implicitly or explicitly, both planes of thought bear critically on reflexivity in relation to the nature of selfhood and the very idea of the autonomous individual, ethics, and humanness, science as such and social science, ontological dualism and fundamental ambiguity. On the one plane, a collection of original and innovative ethnographically based essays is offered, each of which is devoted to ways in which reflexivity plays a fundamental role in human social life and the study of it; on the other—anthropo-philosophical and developed in the volume’s Preface, Introduction, and Postscript—it is argued that reflexivity distinguishes—definitively, albeit relatively—the being and becoming of the human.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
  • Anthropologist as Writer, The

    The Anthropologist as Writer

    Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century

    Wullf, H. (ed)

    Writing is crucial to anthropology, but which genres are anthropologists expected to master in the 21st century? This book explores how anthropological writing shapes the intellectual content of the discipline and academic careers. First, chapters identify the different writing genres and contexts anthropologists actually engage with. Second, this book argues for the usefulness and necessity of taking seriously the idea of writing as a craft and of writing across and within genres in new ways. Although academic writing is an anthropologist’s primary genre, they also write in many others, from drafting administrative texts and filing reports to composing ethnographically inspired journalism and fiction.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
  • Enduring Uncertainty

    Enduring Uncertainty

    Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life

    Hasselberg, I.

    Focusing on the lived experience of immigration policy and processes, this volume provides fascinating insights into the deportation process as it is felt and understood by those subjected to it. The author presents a rich and innovative ethnography of deportation and deportability experienced by migrants convicted of criminal offenses in England and Wales. The unique perspectives developed here – on due process in immigration appeals, migrant surveillance and control, social relations and sense of self, and compliance and resistance – are important for broader understandings of border control policy and human rights.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Europe
    Series: Dislocations Volume 17
  • Choreographies of Landscape

    Choreographies of Landscape

    Signs of Performance in Yosemite National Park

    Ness, S. A.

    As an international ecotourism destination, Yosemite National Park welcomes millions of climbers, sightseers, and other visitors from around the world annually, all of whom are afforded dramatic experiences of the natural world. This original and cross-disciplinary book offers an ethnographic and performative study of Yosemite visitors in order to understand human connection with and within natural landscapes. By grounding a novel “eco-semiotic” analysis in the lived reality of parkgoers, it forges surprising connections, assembling a collective account that will be of interest to disciplines ranging from performance studies to cultural geography.

    Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: North America
    Series: Dance and Performance Studies Volume 8
  • Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility, The

    The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility

    Dolan, C. & Rajak, D. (eds)

    The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility explores the meanings, practices, and impact of corporate social and environmental responsibility across a range of transnational corporations and geographical locations (Bangladesh, Cameroon, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, India, Peru, South Africa, the UK, and the USA). The contributors examine the expectations, frictions and contradictions the CSR movement is generating and addressing key issues such as  the introduction of new forms of management, control, and discipline through ethical and environmental governance or the extent to which corporate responsibility challenges existing patterns of inequality rather than generating new geographies of inclusion and exclusion.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Series: Dislocations Volume 18
  • Post-Ottoman Coexistence

    Post-Ottoman Coexistence

    Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict

    Bryant, R. (ed)

    In Southeast Europe, the Balkans, and Middle East, scholars often refer to the “peaceful coexistence” of various religious and ethnic groups under the Ottoman Empire before ethnonationalist conflicts dissolved that shared space and created legacies of division. Post-Ottoman Coexistence interrogates ways of living together and asks what practices enabled centuries of cooperation and sharing, as well as how and when such sharing was disrupted. Contributors discuss both historical and contemporary practices of coexistence within the context of ethno-national conflict and its aftermath.
     

    Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology
    Areas: Europe Middle East & Israel
    Series: Space and Place Volume 16
  • Cutting and Connecting

    Cutting and Connecting

    'Afrinesian' Perspectives on Networks, Relationality, and Exchange

    Myhre, K. C. (ed)

    Questions regarding the origins, mobility, and effects of analytical concepts continue to emerge as anthropology endeavors to describe similarities and differences in social life around the world. Cutting and Connecting rethinks this comparative enterprise by calling in a conceptual debt that theoretical innovations from Melanesian anthropology owe to network analysis originally developed in African contexts. On this basis, the contributors adopt and employ concepts from recent studies of Melanesia to analyze contemporary life on the African continent and to explore how this exchange influences the borrowed anthropological perspectives. By focusing on ways in which networks are cut and connections are made, these empirical investigations show how particular relationships are created in today’s Africa. In addition, the volume aims for an approach that recasts relationships between theory and place and concepts and ethnography, in a manner that destabilizes the distinction between fieldwork and writing.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
    Areas: Africa Asia-Pacific
  • Who Knows Tomorrow?

    Who Knows Tomorrow?

    Uncertainty in North-Eastern Sudan

    Calkins, S.

    Although uncertainty is intertwined with all human activity, plans, and aspirations, it is experienced differently: at times it is obsessed over and at times it is ignored. This ethnography shows how Rashaida in north-eastern Sudan deal with unknowns from day-to-day unpredictability to life-threatening dangers. It argues that the amplification of uncertainty in some cases and its extenuation in others can be better understood by focusing on forms that can either hold the world together or invite doubt. Uncertainty, then, need not be seen solely as a debilitating problem, but also as an opportunity to create other futures.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
    Area: Africa
  • Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective, The

    The Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective

    Knörr, J. & Kohl, C. (eds)

    For centuries, Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast region has been the site of regional and global interactions, with societies from different parts of the African continent and beyond engaging in economic trade, cultural exchange and various forms of conflict. This book provides a wide-ranging look at how such encounters have continued into the present day, identifying the disruptions and continuities in religion, language, economics and various other social phenomena. These accounts show a region that, while still grappling with the legacies of colonialism and the slave trade, is both shaped by and an important actor within ever-denser global networks, exhibiting consistent transformation and creative adaptation.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) History (General) Colonial History
    Area: Africa
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 12
  • Trust Us

    Trust Us

    Reproducing the Nation and the Scandinavian Nationalist Populist Parties

    Hellström, A.

    In Scandinavia, there is separation in the electorate between those who embrace diversity and those who wish for tighter bonds between people and nation. This book focuses on three nationalist populist parties in Scandinavia—the Sweden Democrats, the Progress Party in Norway, and the Danish People’s Party. In order to affect domestic politics by addressing this conflict of diversity versus homogeneity, these parties must enter the national parliament while earning the nation’s trust. Of the three, the Sweden Democrats have yet to earn the trust of the mainstream, leading to polarized and emotionally driven public debate that raises the question of national identity and what is understood as the common man.

    Subjects: Sociology History: 20th Century to Present
    Area: Northern Europe
  • Girlhood and the Politics of Place

    Girlhood and the Politics of Place

    Mitchell, C. & Rentschler, C. (eds)

    Examining context-specific conditions in which girls live, learn, work, play, and organize deepens the understanding of place-making practices of girls and young women worldwide. Focusing on place across health, literary and historical studies, art history, communications, media studies, sociology, and education allows for investigations of how girlhood is positioned in relation to interdisciplinary and transnational research methodologies, media environments, geographic locations, history, and social spaces. This book offers a comprehensive reading on how girlhood scholars construct and deploy research frameworks that directly engage girls in the research process.

    Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)
  • Tourism & Informal Encounters in Cuba

    Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba

    Simoni, V.

    Based on a detailed ethnography, this book explores the promises and expectations of tourism in Cuba, drawing attention to the challenges that tourists and local people face in establishing meaningful connections with each other. Notions of informal encounter and relational idiom illuminate ambiguous experiences of tourism harassment, economic transactions, hospitality, friendship, and festive and sexual relationships. Comparing these various connections, the author shows the potential of touristic encounters to redefine their moral foundations, power dynamics, and implications, offering new insights into how contemporary relationships across difference and inequality are imagined and understood.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 38
  • Engaging with Strangers

    Engaging with Strangers

    Love and Violence in the Rural Solomon Islands

    McDougall, D.

    The civil conflict in Solomon Islands (1998-2003) is often blamed on the failure of the nation-state to encompass culturally diverse and politically fragmented communities. Writing of Ranongga Island, the author tracks engagements with strangers across many realms of life—pre-colonial warfare, Christian conversion, logging and conservation, even post-conflict state building. She describes startling reversals in which strangers become attached to local places, even as kinspeople are estranged from one another and from their homes. Against stereotypes of rural insularity, she argues that a distinctive cosmopolitan openness to others is evident in the rural Solomons in times of war and peace.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology Volume 6
  • In Search of Legitimacy

    In Search of Legitimacy

    How Outsiders Become Part of the Afro-Brazilian Capoeira Tradition

    Griffith, L. M.

    Every year, countless young adults from affluent, Western nations travel to Brazil to train in capoeira, the dance/martial art form that is one of the most visible strands of the Afro-Brazilian cultural tradition. In Search of Legitimacy explores why “first world” men and women leave behind their jobs, families, and friends to pursue a strenuous training regimen in a historically disparaged and marginalized practice. Using the concept of apprenticeship pilgrimage—studying with a local master at a historical point of origin—the author examines how non-Brazilian capoeiristas learn their art and claim legitimacy while navigating the complexities of wealth disparity, racial discrimination, and cultural appropriation.

    Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: Dance and Performance Studies Volume 7
  • Ecological Migrants

    Ecological Migrants

    The Relocation of China's Ewenki Reindeer Herders

    Xie, Y.

    Reindeer-herding Ewenki hunters have lived in the forests of China’s Greater Khingan Range for over three hundred years. They have sustained their livelihoods by collecting plants and herbs, hunting animals and herding reindeer. This ethnography details changing Ewenki ways of life brought first by China’s modernization and development policies and more recently by ecological policies that aim to preserve and restore the badly damaged ecologies of western China. Xie reflects on modernization and urbanization in China through this study of ecological migration policies and their effects on relocated Aoluguya Ewenki hunters.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Ultimate Ambiguities

    Ultimate Ambiguities

    Investigating Death and Liminality

    Berger, P. & Kroesen, J. (eds)

    Periods of transition are often symbolically associated with death, making the latter the paradigm of liminality. Yet, many volumes on death in the social sciences and humanities do not specifically address liminality. This book investigates these “ultimate ambiguities,” assuming they can pose a threat to social relationships because of the disintegrating forces of death, but they are also crucial periods of creativity, change, and emergent aspects of social and religious life. Contributors explore death and liminality from an interdisciplinary perspective and present a global range of historical and contemporary case studies outlining emotional, cognitive, artistic, social, and political implications.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
  • Waterworlds

    Waterworlds

    Anthropology in Fluid Environments

    Hastrup, K. & Hastrup. F. (eds)

    In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people’s lives, practices, and stories. Contributors’ detailed ethnographic work analyzes the union and mutual shaping of water and social lives. This volume discusses current ecological disturbances and engages in a world where unbounded relationalities and unsettled frames of orientation mark the lives of all, anthropologists included. Water emerges as a fluid object in more senses than one, challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their objects of study and to responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Series: Ethnography, Theory, Experiment Volume 3
  • Language & Identity Politics

    Language and Identity Politics

    A Cross-Atlantic Perspective

    Späti, C. (ed)

    In an increasingly multicultural world, the relationship between language and identity remains a complicated and often fraught subject for most societies. The growing political salience of questions relating to language is evident not only in the expanded implementation of new policies and legislation, but also in heated public debates about national unity, collective identities, and the rights of linguistic minorities. By taking a comprehensive approach that considers both the inclusive and exclusive dimensions of linguistic identity across Europe and North America, the studies assembled here provide a sophisticated look at one of the global era’s defining political dynamics.

    Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General)
    Areas: Europe North America
  • Gypsy Economy

    Gypsy Economy

    Romani Livelihoods and Notions of Worth in the 21st Century

    Brazzabeni, M., Ivone Cunha, M., & Fotta, M. (eds)

    Economic arrangements of Romanies are complexly related to their social position. The authors of this volume explore these complexities, including how economic exchanges forge key social relationships of gender and ethnicity, how economic opportunities are constructed and seized, and how economic success and failure are transformed into attributes of social persons. They explore how, despite — or perhaps because of — their unstable and ambiguous position within the market economy, shared today with a growing number of people facing precarity and informalisation, Roma and Gypsy communities continuously re-create more or less viable economic strategies. The ethnographically based chapters share accounts of socially and economically vulnerable populations that face their situation with self-determination and creativity.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: The Human Economy Volume 3
  • Museum Websites & Social Media

    Museum Websites and Social Media

    Issues of Participation, Sustainability, Trust and Diversity

    Sánchez Laws, A. L.

    Online activities present a unique challenge for museums as they harness the potential of digital technology for sustainable development, trust building, and representations of diversity. This volume offers a holistic picture of museum online activities that can serve as a starting point for cross-disciplinary discussion. It is a resource for museum staff, students, designers, and researchers working at the intersection of cultural institutions and digital technologies. The aim is to provide insight into the issues behind designing and implementing web pages and social media to serve the broadest range of museum stakeholders.

    Subjects: Museum Studies Media Studies
    Series: Museums and Collections Volume 8
  • Transatlantic Parallaxes

    Transatlantic Parallaxes

    Toward Reciprocal Anthropology

    Raulin, A. & Rogers, S. C. (eds)

    Anthropological inquiry developed around the study of the exotic. Now that we live in a world that seems increasingly familiar, putatively marked by a spreading sameness, anthropology must re-envision itself. The emergence of diverse national traditions in the discipline offers one intriguing path. This volume, the product of a novel encounter of American anthropologists of France and French anthropologists of the United States, explores the possibilities of that path through an experiment in the reciprocal production of knowledge. Simultaneously native subjects, foreign experts, and colleagues, these scholars offer novel insights into each other’s societies, juxtaposing glimpses of ourselves and a familiar “others” to productively unsettle and enrich our understanding of both.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Areas: France North America
  • Indigenous Medicine among the Bedouin in the Middle East

    Indigenous Medicine Among the Bedouin in the Middle East

    Abu-Rabia, A.

    Modern medicine has penetrated Bedouin tribes in the course of rapid urbanization and education, but when serious illnesses strike, particularly in the case of incurable diseases, even educated people turn to traditional medicine for a remedy. Over the course of 30 years, the author gathered data on traditional Bedouin medicine among pastoral-nomadic, semi-nomadic, and settled tribes. Based on interviews with healers, clients, and other active participants in treatments, this book will contribute to renewed thinking about a synthesis between traditional and modern medicine — to their reciprocal enrichment.

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Area: Middle East & Israel
  • Economy for & against Democracy

    Economy for and Against Democracy

    Hart, K. (ed)

    Political constitutions alone do not guarantee democracy; a degree of economic equality is also essential. Yet contemporary economies, dominated as they are by global finance and political rent-seekers, often block the realization of democracy. The comparative essays and case studies of this volume examine the contradictory relationship between the economy and democracy and highlight the struggles and visions needed to make things more equitable. They explore how our collective aspirations for greater democracy might be informed by serious empirical research on the human economy today. If we want a better world, we must act on existing social realities.

    Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
    Series: The Human Economy Volume 2
  • Regimes of Ignorance

    Regimes of Ignorance

    Anthropological Perspectives on the Production and Reproduction of Non-Knowledge

    Dilley, R. & Kirsch, T. G. (eds)

    Non-knowledge should not be simply regarded as the opposite of knowledge, but as complementary to it: each derives its character and meaning from the other and from their interaction. Knowledge does not colonize the space of ignorance in the progressive march of science; rather, knowledge and ignorance are mutually shaped in social and political domains of partial, shifting, and temporal relationships. This volume’s ethnographic analyses provide a theoretical frame through which to consider the production and reproduction of ignorance, non-knowledge, and secrecy, as well as the wider implications these ideas have for anthropology and related disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 29
  • Making <i>Ubumwe</I>

    Making Ubumwe

    Power, State and Camps in Rwanda's Unity-Building Project

    Purdeková, A.

    Since the end of the Rwandan genocide, the new political elite has been challenged with building a unified nation. Reaching beyond the better-studied topics of post-conflict justice and memory, the book investigates the project of civic education, the upsurge of state-led neo-traditional institutions and activities, and the use of camps and retreats shape the “ideal” Rwandan citizen. Rwanda’s ingando camps offer unique insights into the uses of dislocation and liminality in an attempt to anchor identities and desired political roles, to practically orient and symbolically place individuals in the new Rwandan order, and, ultimately, to create additional platforms for the reproduction of political power itself.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Development Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 34
  • Media, Anthropology & Public Engagement

    Media, Anthropology and Public Engagement

    Pink, S. & Abram, S. (eds)

    Contemporary anthropology is done in a world where social and digital media are playing an increasingly significant role, where anthropological and arts practices are often intertwined in museum and public intervention contexts, and where anthropologists are encouraged to engage with mass media. Because anthropologists are often expected and inspired to ensure their work engages with public issues, these opportunities to disseminate work in new ways and to new publics simultaneously create challenges as anthropologists move their practice into unfamiliar collaborative domains and expose their research to new forms of scrutiny. In this volume, contributors question whether a fresh public anthropology is emerging through these new practices.

    Subjects: Applied Anthropology Media Studies
    Series: Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology Volume 9
  • Street Vending in the Neoliberal City

    Street Vending in the Neoliberal City

    A Global Perspective on the Practices and Policies of a Marginalized Economy

    Graaff, K. & Ha, N. (eds)

    Examining street vending as a global, urban, and informalized practice found both in the Global North and Global South, this volume presents contributions from international scholars working in cities as diverse as Berlin, Dhaka, New York City, Los Angeles, Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City. The aim of this global approach is to repudiate the assumption that street vending is usually carried out in the Southern hemisphere and to reveal how it also represents an essential—and constantly growing—economic practice in urban centers of the Global North. Although street vending activities vary due to local specificities, this anthology illustrates how these urban practices can also reveal global ties and developments.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
  • What We Now Know About Race and Ethnicity

    What We Now Know About Race and Ethnicity

    Banton, M.

    Attempts of nineteenth-century writers to establish “race” as a biological concept failed after Charles Darwin opened the door to a new world of knowledge. Yet this word already had a place in the organization of everyday life and in ordinary English language usage. This book explains how the idea of race became so important in the USA, generating conceptual confusion that can now be clarified. Developing an international approach, it reviews references to “race,” “racism,” and “ethnicity” in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and comparative politics and identifies promising lines of research that may make it possible to supersede misleading notions of race in the social sciences.

    Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General)
  • Culture, Catastrophe, and Rhetoric

    Culture, Catastrophe, and Rhetoric

    The Texture of Political Action

    Hariman, R. & Cintron, R. (eds)

    This volume explores political culture, especially the catastrophic elements of the global social order emerging in the twenty-first century. By emphasizing the texture of political action, the book theorizes how social context becomes evident on the surface of events and analyzes the performative dimensions of political experience. The attention to catastrophe allows for an understanding of how ordinary people contend with normal system operation once it is indistinguishable from system breakdown. Through an array of case studies, the book provides an account of change as it is experienced, negotiated, and resisted in specific settings that define a society’s capacity for political action.

    Subjects: Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)
    Series: Studies in Rhetoric and Culture Volume 7
  • In the Absence of the Gift

    In the Absence of the Gift

    New Forms of Value and Personhood in a Papua New Guinea Community

    Rasmussen, A. E.

    By adopting ideas like “development,” members of a Papua New Guinean community find themselves continuously negotiating what can be expected of a relative or a community member. Nearly half the people born on the remote Mbuke Islands become teachers, businessmen, or bureaucrats in urban centers, while those who stay at home ask migrant relatives “What about me?” This detailed ethnography sheds light on remittance motivations and documents how terms like “community” can be useful in places otherwise permeated by kinship. As the state withdraws, Mbuke people explore what social ends might be reached through involvement with the cash economy.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Sociology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists Volume 5
  • Agendas of Tibetan Refugees, The

    The Agendas of Tibetan Refugees

    Survival Strategies of a Government-in-Exile in a World of International Organizations

    Kauffmann, T.

    Since the arrival of the first Tibetans in exile in 1959, a vast and continuous wave of international – especially Western – support has permitted these refugees to survive and even to flourish in their temporary places of residence. Today, these Tibetan refugees continue to attract assistance from Western governments, organizations and individuals, while other refugee populations are largely forgotten in the international agenda. This book shows and discusses how Tibetan refugees continue to attract resources, due, notably, to the dissemination of their political and religious agendas, as well as how a movement of Western supporters, born in very different conditions, guaranteed a unique relationship with these refugees.

    Subject: Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Forced Migration Volume 33
  • Living Ancestors, The

    The Living Ancestors

    Shamanism, Cosmos and Cultural Change among the Yanomami of the Upper Orinoco

    Jokic, Z.

    This phenomenologically oriented ethnography focuses on experiential aspects of Yanomami shamanism, including shamanistic activities in the context of cultural change. The author interweaves ethnographic material with theoretical components of a holographic principle, or the idea that the “part is equal to the whole,” which is embedded in the nature of the Yanomami macrocosm, human dwelling, multiple-soul components, and shamans’ relationships with embodied spirit-helpers. This book fills an important gap in the regional study of Yanomami people, and, on a broader scale, enriches understanding of this ancient phenomenon by focusing on the consciousness involved in shamanism through firsthand experiential involvement.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
  • European Products

    European Products

    Making and Unmaking Heritage in Cyprus

    Welz, G.

    On the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, rural villages, traditional artefacts, even atmospheres and experiences are considered heritage. Heritage making not only protects, but also produces, things, people, and places. Since the Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, heritage making and Europeanization are increasingly intertwined in Greek-Cypriot society. Against the backdrop of a long-term ethnographic engagement, the author argues that heritage emerges as an increasingly standardized economic resource, a “European product.” Implemented in historic preservation, rural tourism, culinary traditions, nature protection, and urban restoration projects, heritage policy has become infused with transnational market regulations and neoliberal property regimes.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Museum Studies Heritage Studies
    Area: Southern Europe
  • Narrating the City

    Narrating the City

    Histories, Space and the Everyday

    Fischer-Nebmaier, W., Berg, M. P., & Christou, A. (eds)

    In recent decades, the insight that narration shapes our perception of reality has inspired and influenced the most innovative historical accounts. Focusing on new research, this volume explores the history of non-elite populations in cities from Caracas to Vienna, and Paris to Belgrade. Narration is central to the theme of each contribution, whether as a means of description, a methodological approach, or basic story telling. This book brings together research that both asks classical socio-historical questions and takes narration seriously, engaging with novels, films, local history accounts, petitions to municipal authorities, and interviews with alternative cinema activists.

    Subjects: Urban Studies History (General) Sociology
    Series: Space and Place Volume 15
  • Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the Third Phase

    Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the Third Phase

    Global Encounters and Emerging Moral Worlds

    Hampshire, K. & Simpson, B. (eds)

    Following the birth of the first “test-tube baby” in 1978, Assisted Reproductive Technologies became available to a small number of people in high-income countries able to afford the cost of private treatment, a period seen as the “First Phase” of ARTs. In the “Second Phase,” these treatments became increasingly available to cosmopolitan global elites. Today, this picture is changing — albeit slowly and unevenly — as ARTs are becoming more widely available. While, for many, accessing infertility treatments remains a dream, these are beginning to be viewed as a standard part of reproductive healthcare and family planning. This volume highlights this “Third Phase” — the opening up of ARTs to new constituencies in terms of ethnicity, geography, education, and class.

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 31
  • Developmentality

    Developmentality

    An Ethnography of the World Bank-Uganda Partnership

    Sande Lie, J. H.

    Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within the World Bank and a Ugandan ministry, this book critically examines how the new aid architecture recasts aid relations as a partnership. While intended to alter an asymmetrical relationship by fostering greater recipient participation and ownership, this book demonstrates how donors still seek to retain control through other indirect and informal means. The concept of developmentality shows how the World Bank’s ability to steer a client’s behavior is disguised by the underlying ideas of partnership, ownership, and participation, which come with other instruments through which the Bank manipulates the aid recipient into aligning with its own policies and practices.

    Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Africa
  • Where Are All Our Sheep?

    Where Are All Our Sheep?

    Kyrgyzstan, A Global Political Arena

    Petric, B.

    After the collapse of the USSR, Kyrgyzstan chose a path of economic and political liberalization. Only a few years later, however, the country ceased producing anything of worth and developed a dependence on the outside world, particularly on international aid. Its principal industry, sheep breeding, was decimated by reforms suggested by international institutions providing assistance. Virtually annihilated by privatization of the economy and deserted by Moscow, the Kyrgyz have turned this economic “opening up” into a subtle strategy to capture all manner of resources from abroad. In this study, the author describes the encounters, sometimes comical and tinged with incomprehension, between the local population and the well-meaning foreigners who came to reform them.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
    Area: Asia
    Series: Dislocations Volume 16
  • Event of <em>Charlie Hebdo</em>, The

    The Event of Charlie Hebdo

    Imaginaries of Freedom and Control

    Zagato, A. (ed)

    The January 2015 shooting at the headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and the subsequent attacks that took place in the Île-de-France region were staggeringly violent events. They sparked an enormous discussion among citizens and intellectuals from around Europe and beyond. By analyzing the effects the attacks have had in various spheres of social life, including the political, ideology, collective imaginaries, the media, and education, this collection of essays aims to serve as a contribution as well as a critical response to that discussion. The volume observes that the events being attributed to Charlie Hebdo go beyond sensationalist reports of the mainstream media, transcend the spatial confines of nation states, and lend themselves to an ever-expanding number of mutating discursive formations.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: France
    Series: Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis Volume 15
  • Figurations of the Future

    Figurations of the Future

    Forms and Temporalities of Left Radical Politics in Northern Europe

    Krøijer, S.

    Built around key events, from the eviction of a self-managed social centre in Copenhagen in 2007 to the Climate Summit protests in 2009, this book contributes to anthropological literature on contemporary Euro-American politics foreshadowing recent waves of public dissent. Stine Krøijer explores political forms among left radical and anarchist activists in Northern Europe focusing on how forms of action engender time. Drawing on anthropological literature from both Scandinavia and the Amazon, this ethnography recasts theoretical concerns about body politics, political intentionality, aesthetics, and time.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Northern Europe
    Series: Ethnography, Theory, Experiment Volume 2
  • Bush Bound

    Bush Bound

    Young Men and Rural Permanence in Migrant West Africa

    Gaibazzi, P.

    Whereas most studies of migration focus on movement, this book examines the experience of staying put. It looks at young men living in a Soninke-speaking village in Gambia who, although eager to travel abroad for money and experience, settle as farmers, heads of families, businessmen, civic activists, or, alternatively, as unemployed, demoted youth. Those who stay do so not only because of financial and legal limitations, but also because of pressures to maintain family and social bases in the Gambia valley. ‘Stayers’ thus enable migrants to migrate, while ensuring the activities and values attached to rural life are passed on to the future generations.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Africa
  • At Home in the Okavango

    At Home in the Okavango

    White Batswana Narratives of Emplacement and Belonging

    Gressier, C.

    An ethnographic portrayal of the lives of white citizens of the Okavango Delta, Botswana, this book examines their relationships with the natural and social environments of the region. In response to the insecurity of their position as a European-descended minority in a postcolonial African state, Gressier argues that white Batswana have developed cultural values and practices that have allowed them to attain high levels of belonging. Adventure is common for this frontier community, and the book follows their safari lifestyles as they construct and perform localized identities in their interactions with dangerous wildlife, the broader African community, and the global elite via their work in the nature-tourism industry.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Area: Africa
  • Witchcraft, Witches, & Violence in Ghana

    Witchcraft, Witches, and Violence in Ghana

    Adinkrah, M.

    Witchcraft violence is a feature of many contemporary African societies. In Ghana, belief in witchcraft and the malignant activities of putative witches is prevalent. Purported witches are blamed for all manner of adversities including inexplicable illnesses and untimely deaths. As in other historical periods and other societies, in contemporary Ghana, alleged witches are typically female, elderly, poor, and marginalized. Childhood socialization in homes and schools, exposure to mass media, and other institutional mechanisms ensure that witchcraft beliefs are transmitted across generations and entrenched over time. This book provides a detailed account of Ghanaian witchcraft beliefs and practices and their role in fueling violent attacks on alleged witches by aggrieved individuals and vigilante groups.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Africa
  • Social Bonds as Freedom

    Social Bonds as Freedom

    Revisiting the Dichotomy of the Universal and the Particular

    Dumouchel, P. & Gotoh, R. (eds)

    Central to discussions of multiculturalism and minority rights in modern liberal societies is the idea that the particular demands of minority groups contradict the requirements of equality, anonymity, and universality for citizenship and belonging. The contributors to this volume question the significance of this dichotomy between the universal and the particular, arguing that it reflects how the modern state has instituted the basic rights and obligations of its members and that these institutions are undergoing fundamental transformations under the pressure of globalization. They show that the social bonds uniting groups constitute the means of our freedom, rather than obstacles to achieving the universal.

    Subject: Sociology
  • State & the Grassroots, The

    The State and the Grassroots

    Immigrant Transnational Organizations in Four Continents

    Portes, A. & Fernández-Kelly, P. (eds)

    Whereas most of the literature on migration focuses on individuals and their families, this book studies the organizations created by immigrants to protect themselves in their receiving states. Comparing eighteen of these grassroots organizations formed across the world, from India to Colombia to Vietnam to the Congo, researchers from the United States, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Spain focus their studies on the internal structure and activities of these organizations as they relate to developmental initiatives. The book outlines the principal positions in the migration and development debate and discusses the concept of transnationalism as a means of resolving these controversies.

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Development Studies
  • Figuration Work

    Figuration Work

    Student Participation, Democracy and University Reform in a Global Knowledge Economy

    Nielsen, G. B.

    What role should students take in shaping their education, their university, and the wider society? These questions have assumed new importance in recent years as universities are reformed to become more competitive in the “global knowledge economy.” With Denmark as the prism, this book shows how negotiations over student participation — influenced by demands for efficiency, flexibility, and student-centered education — reflect broader concerns about democracy and citizen participation in increasingly neoliberalised states. Combining anthropological and historical research, Gritt B. Nielsen develops a novel approach to the study of policy processes and opens a timely discussion about the kinds of future citizens who will emerge from current reforms.

    Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Europe
    Series: EASA Series Volume 27
  • Masks and Staffs

    Masks and Staffs

    Identity Politics in the Cameroon Grassfields

    Pelican, Michaela

    The Cameroon Grassfields, home to three ethnic groups – Grassfields societies, Mbororo, and Hausa – provide a valuable case study for the anthropological examination of identity politics and interethnic relations. In the midst of the political liberalization of Cameroon in the late 1990s and 2000s, local responses to political and legal changes took the form of a series of performative and discursive expressions of ethnicity. Confrontational encounters stimulated by economic and political rivalry, as well as socially integrative processes, transformed collective self-understanding in Cameroon in conjunction with recent global discourses on human, minority, and indigenous rights. The book provides a vital contribution to the study of ethnicity, conflict, and social change in the anthropology of Africa.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Area: Africa
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 11
  • Public Anthropology in a Borderless World

    Public Anthropology in a Borderless World

    Beck, S. & Maida, C. A. (eds)

    Anthropologists have acted as experts and educators on the nature and ways of life of people worldwide, working to understand the human condition in broad comparative perspective. As a discipline, anthropology has often advocated — and even defended — the cultural integrity, authenticity, and autonomy of societies across the globe. Public anthropology today carries out the discipline’s original purpose, grounding theories in lived experience and placing empirical knowledge in deeper historical and comparative frameworks. This is a vitally important kind of anthropology that has the goal of improving the modern human condition by actively engaging with people to make changes through research, education, and political action.

    Subject: Applied Anthropology
    Series: Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology Volume 8
  • Thai <i>in Vitro</i>

    Thai in Vitro

    Gender, Culture and Assisted Reproduction

    Whittaker, A.

    In Thailand, infertility remains a source of stigma for those couples that combine a range of religious, traditional and high-tech interventions in their quest for a child. This book explores this experience of infertility and the pursuit and use of assisted reproductive technologies by Thai couples. Though using assisted reproductive technologies is becoming more acceptable in Thai society, access to and choices about such technologies are mediated by differences in class position. These stories of women and men in private and public infertility clinics reveal how local social and moral sensitivities influence the practices and meanings of treatment.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Asia
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 30
  • Aging & the Digital Life Course

    Aging and the Digital Life Course

    Prendergast, D. & Garattini, C. (eds)

    Across the life course, new forms of community, ways of keeping in contact, and practices for engaging in work, healthcare, retail, learning and leisure are evolving rapidly. Breaking new ground in the study of technology and aging, this book examines how developments in smart phones, the internet, cloud computing, and online social networking are redefining experiences and expectations around growing older in the twenty-first century. Drawing on contributions from leading commentators and researchers across the world, this book explores key themes such as caregiving, the use of social media, robotics, chronic disease and dementia management, gaming, migration, and data inheritance, to name a few.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology
    Series: Life Course, Culture and Aging: Global Transformations Volume 3
  • Achieving Procreation

    Achieving Procreation

    Childlessness and IVF in Turkey

    Demircioğlu Göknar, M.

    Managing social relationships for childless couples in pro-natalist societies can be a difficult art to master, and may even become an issue of belonging for both men and women. With ethnographic research gathered from two IVF clinics and in two villages in northwestern Turkey, this book explores infertility and assisted reproductive technologies within a secular Muslim population. Göknar investigates the experience of infertility through various perspectives, such as the importance of having a child for women, the mediating role of religion, the power dynamics in same-gender relationships, and the impact of manhood ideologies on the decision for — or against — having IVF.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Areas: Middle East & Israel Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 29
  • Contemporary Pagan & Native Faith Movements in Europe

    Contemporary Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Europe

    Colonialist and Nationalist Impulses

    Rountree, K. (ed)

    Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners’ beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism—especially in post-Soviet societies—and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Europe
    Series: EASA Series Volume 26
  • Faithfully Urban

    Faithfully Urban

    Pious Muslims in a German City

    Kuppinger, P.

    In the southern German city of Stuttgart lives a pious Muslim population that has merged with the local population to create a meaningful shared existence. In this ethnographic account, the author introduces and examines the lives of ordinary residents, neighborhoods, and mosque communities to analyze moments and spaces where Muslims and non-Muslims engage with each other and accommodate their respective needs. These accounts show that even in the face of resentment and discrimination, this pious population has indeed become an integral part of the urban community.

    Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Germany
  • Yearnings in the Meantime

    Yearnings in the Meantime

    'Normal Lives' and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex

    Jansen, S.

    Shortly after the book’s protagonists moved into their apartment complex in Sarajevo, they, like many others, were overcome by the 1992-1995 war and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia More than a decade later, in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, they felt they were collectively stuck in a time warp where nothing seemed to be as it should be. Starting from everyday concerns, this book paints a compassionate yet critical portrait of people’s sense that they were in limbo, trapped in a seemingly endless “Meantime.” Ethnographically investigating yearnings for “normal lives” in the European semi-periphery, it proposes fresh analytical tools to explore how the time and place in which we are caught shape our hopes and fears.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Dislocations Volume 15
  • Oikos & Market

    Oikos and Market

    Explorations in Self-Sufficiency after Socialism

    Gudeman, S. & Hann, C. (eds)

    Self-sufficiency of the house is practiced in many parts of the world but ignored in economic theory, just as socialist collectivization is assumed to have brought household self-sufficiency to an end. The ideals of self-sufficiency, however, continue to shape economic activity in a wide range of postsocialist settings. This volume’s six comparative studies of postsocialist villages in Eastern Europe and Asia illuminate the enduring importance of the house economy, which is based not on the market but on the order of the house. These formations show that economies depend not only on the macro institutions of markets and states but also on the micro institutions of families, communities, and house economies, often in an uneasy relationship.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 2
  • Housing & Belonging in Latin America

    Housing and Belonging in Latin America

    Klaufus, C. & Ouweneel, A. (eds)

    The intricacies of living in contemporary Latin American cities include cases of both empowerment and restriction. In Lima, residents built their own homes and formed community organizations, while in Rio de Janeiro inhabitants of the favelas needed to be “pacified” in anticipation of international sporting events. Aspirations to “get ahead in life” abound in the region, but so do multiple limitations to realizing the dream of upward mobility. This volume captures the paradoxical histories and experiences of urban life in Latin America, offering new empirical and theoretical insights to scholars.

    Subjects: Urban Studies Sociology
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: CEDLA Latin America Studies Volume 105
  • Breaking Boundaries

    Breaking Boundaries

    Varieties of Liminality

    Horvath, A., Thomassen, B., & Wydra, H. (eds)

    Liminality has the potential to be a leading paradigm for understanding transformation in a globalizing world. As a fundamental human experience, liminality transmits cultural practices, codes, rituals, and meanings in situations that fall between defined structures and have uncertain outcomes. Based on case studies of some of the most important crises in history, society, and politics, this volume explores the methodological range and applicability of the concept to a variety of concrete social and political problems.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
  • Fault Lines

    Fault Lines

    Earthquakes and Urbanism in Modern Italy

    Parrinello, G.

    Earth’s fractured geology is visible in its fault lines. It is along these lines that earthquakes occur, sometimes with disastrous effects. These disturbances can significantly influence urban development, as seen in the aftermath of two earthquakes in Messina, Italy, in 1908 and in the Belice Valley, Sicily, in 1968. Following the history of these places before and after their destruction, this book explores plans and developments that preceded the disasters and the urbanism that emerged from the ruins. These stories explore fault lines between “rural” and “urban,” “backwardness” and “development,” and “before” and “after,” shedding light on the role of environmental forces in the history of human habitats.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: Environment in History: International Perspectives Volume 6
  • In the Event

    In the Event

    Toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments

    Meinert, L. & Kapferer, B. (eds)

    Events are “generative moments” in at least three senses: events are created by and condense larger-scale social structures; as moments, they spark and give rise to new social processes; in themselves, events may also serve to analyze social situations and relationships. Based on ethnographic studies from around the world—varying from rituals and meetings over protests and conflicts to natural disasters and management—this volume analyzes generative moments through events that hold the key to understanding larger social situations. These events—including the Ashura ritual in Bahrain, social cleavages in South Africa, a Buddhist cave in Nepal, drought in Burkina Faso, an earthquake in Pakistan, the cartoon crisis in Denmark, corporate management at Bang & Olufsen, protest meetings in Europe, and flooding and urban citizenship in Mozambique—are not simply destructive disasters, crises, and conflicts, but also generative and constitutive of the social.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
  • Multidimensional Change in Sudan (1989–2011)

    Multidimensional Change in Sudan (1989–2011)

    Reshaping Livelihoods, Conflicts and Identities

    Casciarri, B., Assal, M.A.M. & Ireton, F. (eds)

    Based on fieldwork largely collected during the CPA interim period by Sudanese and European researchers, this volume sheds light on the dynamics of change and the relationship between microscale and macroscale processes which took place in Sudan between the 1980s and the independence of South Sudan in 2011. Contributors’ various disciplinary approaches—socio-anthropological, geographical, political, historical, linguistic—focus on the general issue of “access to resources.” The book analyzes major transformations which affected Sudan in the framework of globalization, including land and urban issues; water management; “new” actors and “new conflicts”; and language, identity, and ideology.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
    Area: Africa
  • Reclaiming the Forest

    Reclaiming the Forest

    The Ewenki Reindeer Herders of Aoluguya

    Kolås, Å. & Xie, Y. (eds)

    The reindeer herders of Aoluguya, China, are a group of former hunters who today see themselves as “keepers of reindeer” as they engage in ethnic tourism and exchange experiences with their Ewenki neighbors in Russian Siberia. Though to some their future seems problematic, this book focuses on the present, challenging the pessimistic outlook, reviewing current issues, and describing the efforts of the Ewenki to reclaim their forest lifestyle and develop new forest livelihoods. Both academic and literary contributions balance the volume written by authors who are either indigenous to the region or have carried out fieldwork among the Aoluguya Ewenki since the late 1990s.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Living Kinship in the Pacific

    Living Kinship in the Pacific

    Toren, C. & Pauwels, S. (eds)

    Unaisi Nabobo-Baba observed that for the various peoples of the Pacific, kinship is generally understood as “knowledge that counts.” It is with this observation that this volume begins, and it continues with a straightforward objective to provide case studies of Pacific kinship. In doing so, contributors share an understanding of kinship as a lived and living dimension of contemporary human lives, in an area where deep historical links provide for close and useful comparison. The ethnographic focus is on transformation and continuity over time in Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa with the addition of three instructive cases from Tokelau, Papua New Guinea, and Taiwan. The book ends with an account of how kinship is constituted in day-to-day ritual and ritualized behavior.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists Volume 4
  • What is Existential Anthropology?

    What Is Existential Anthropology?

    Jackson, M. & Piette, A. (eds)

    What is existential anthropology, and how would you define it? What has been gained by using existential perspectives in your fieldwork and writing? Editors Michael Jackson and Albert Piette each invited anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic to address these questions and explore how various approaches to the human condition might be brought together on the levels of method and of theory. Both editors also bring their own perspective: while Jackson has drawn on phenomenology, deploying the concepts of intersubjectivity, lifeworld, experience, existential mobility, and event, Piette has drawn on Heidegger’s Dasein-analysis, and developed a phenomenographical method for the observation and description of human beings in their singularity and ever-changing situations.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
  • Franco-Mauritian Elite, The

    The Franco-Mauritian Elite

    Power and Anxiety in the Face of Change

    Salverda, T.

    Mauritian independence in 1968 marked the end of a regime favorable to the Franco-Mauritians, the island’s white colonial elite. Now, in postcolonial Mauritius, this group is faced with a much more diverse power constellation and often feels in competition with others vying for their privileges. Though this is a clear departure from the colonial heydays, Franco-Mauritians have been able to continue their elite position into the early twenty-first century. This book focuses on the power of white elites still lingering on in postcolonial realities, and with regards to elites and power in general, addresses anew how an elite group aims to prolong its position over time.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
    Area: Africa
    Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 37
  • Ritual Retellings

    Ritual Retellings

    Luangan Healing Performances through Practice

    Herrmans, I.

    Belian is an exceptionally lively tradition of shamanistic curing rituals performed by the Luangans, a politically marginalized population of Indonesian Borneo. This volume explores the significance of these rituals in practice and asks what belian rituals do – socially, politically, and existentially – for particular people in particular circumstances. Departing from the conception that rituals exist as ethereal, liminal or insulated traditional domains, this volume demonstrates the importance of understanding rituals as emergent within their specific historical and social settings. It offers an analysis of a number of concrete ritual performances, exemplifying a diversity of ritual genres, stylistic modalities and sensual ambiences, from low-key, habitual affairs to drawn-out, crowd-seizing community rituals and innovative, montage-like cultural experiments.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Epistemologies of Healing Volume 16
  • NIMBY is Beautiful

    Nimby Is Beautiful

    Cases of Local Activism and Environmental Innovation around the World

    Hager, C. & Haddad, M. A. (eds)

    NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) protests are often criticized as parochial and short-lived, generating no lasting influence on broader processes related to environmental politics.  This volume offers a different perspective.  Drawing on cases from around the globe, it demonstrates that NIMBY protests, although always arising from a local concern in a particular community, often result in broader political, social, and technological change. Chapters include cases from Europe, North America, and Asia, engaging with the full political spectrum from established democracies to non-democratic countries. Regardless of political setting, NIMBY movements can have a positive and proactive role in generating innovative solutions to local as well as transnational environmental issues. Furthermore, those solutions are now serving as models for communities and countries around the world.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Sociology
  • Extraordinary Encounters

    Extraordinary Encounters

    Authenticity and the Interview

    Smith, K., Staples, J. & Rapport, N. (eds)

    Given the anthropological focus on ethnography as a kind of deep immersion, the interview poses theoretical and methodological challenges for the discipline. This volume explores those challenges and argues that the interview should be seen as a special, productive site of ethnographic encounter, a site of a very particular and important kind of knowing. In a range of social contexts and cultural settings, contributors show how the interview is experienced and imagined as a kind of space within which personal, biographic and social cues and norms can be explored and interrogated. The interview possesses its own authenticity, therefore—true to the persons involved and true to their moment of interaction—whilst at the same time providing information on human capacities and proclivities that is generalizable beyond particular social and cultural contexts.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
    Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 28
  • Flexible Capitalism

    Flexible Capitalism

    Exchange and Ambiguity at Work

    Kjaerulff, J. (ed)

    Approaching “work” as at heart a practice of exchange, this volume explores sociality in work environments marked by the kind of structural changes that have come to define contemporary “flexible” capitalism. It introduces anthropological exchange theory to a wider readership, and shows how the perspective offers new ways to enquire about the flexible capitalism’s social dimensions. The essays contribute to a trans-disciplinary scholarship on contemporary economic practice and change by documenting how, across diverse settings, “gift-like” socialities proliferate, and even sustain the intensified flexible commoditization that more commonly is touted as tearing social relations apart. By interrogating a keenly debated contemporary work regime through an approach to sociality rooted in a rich and distinct anthropological legacy, the volume also makes a novel contribution to the anthropological literature on work and on exchange.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: EASA Series Volume 25
  • Learning under Neoliberalism

    Learning Under Neoliberalism

    Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education

    Hyatt, S. B., Shear, B. W., & Wright, S. (eds)

    As part of the neoliberal trends toward public-private partnerships, universities all over the world have forged more intimate relationships with corporate interests and more closely resemble for-profit corporations in both structure and practice.  These transformations, accompanied by new forms of governance, produce new subject-positions among faculty and students and enable new approaches to teaching, curricula, research, and everyday practices. The contributors to this volume use ethnographic methods to investigate the multi-faceted impacts of neoliberal restructuring, while reporting on their own pedagogical responses, at universities in the United States, Europe, and New Zealand.

    Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)
    Series: Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies Volume 1
  • From Virtue to Vice

    From Virtue to Vice

    Negotiating Anorexia

    O' Connor, R. A. & Esterik, P. van

    The recovered possess the key to overcoming anorexia. Although individual sufferers do not know how the affliction takes hold, piecing their stories together reveals two accidental afflictions. One is that activity disorders—dieting, exercising, healthy eating—start as virtuous practices, but become addictive obsessions. The other affliction is a developmental disorder, which also starts with the virtuous—those eager for challenge and change. But these overachievers who seek self-improvement get a distorted life instead. Knowing anorexia from inside, the recovered offer two watchwords on helping those who suffer. One is "negotiate," to encourage compromise, which can aid recovery where coercion fails. The other is "balance," for the ill to pursue mind-with-body activities to defuse mind-over-body battles.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Food & Nutrition
    Area: North America
    Series: Food, Nutrition, and Culture Volume 4
  • Objects & Imagination

    Objects and Imagination

    Perspectives on Materialization and Meaning

    Fuglerud, Ø. & Wainwright, L. (eds)

    Despite the wide interest in material culture, art, and aesthetics, few studies have considered them in light of the importance of the social imagination - the complex ways in which we conceptualize our social surroundings. This collection engages the “material turn” in the arts, humanities, and social sciences through a range of original contributions on creativity in diverse global and contemporary social settings. The authors engage with everyday objects, art, rituals, and ethnographic exhibitions to analyze the relationship between material culture and the social imagination. What results is a better understanding of how the material embodies and influences our idea of the social world.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Museum Studies
    Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Volume 3
  • Healing Roots

    Healing Roots

    Anthropology in Life and Medicine

    Laplante, J.

    Umhlonyane, also known as Artemisia afra, is one of the oldest and best-documented indigenous medicines in South Africa. This bush, which grows wild throughout the sub-Saharan region, smells and tastes like “medicine,” thus easily making its way into people’s lives and becoming the choice of everyday healing for Xhosa healer-diviners and Rastafarian herbalists. This “natural” remedy has recently sparked curiosity as scientists search for new molecules against a tuberculosis pandemic while hoping to recognize indigenous medicine. Laplante follows umhlonyane on its trails and trials of becoming a biopharmaceutical — from the “open air” to controlled environments — learning from the plant and from the people who use it with hopes in healing.
     

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Area: Africa
    Series: Epistemologies of Healing Volume 15
  • Beyond the Lens of Conservation

    Beyond the Lens of Conservation

    Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another

    Keller, E.

    The global agenda of Nature conservation has led to the creation of the Masoala National Park in Madagascar and to an exhibit in its support at a Swiss zoo, the centerpiece of which is a mini-rainforest replica. Does such a cooperation also trigger a connection between ordinary people in these two far-flung places? The study investigates how the Malagasy farmers living at the edge of the park perceive the conservation enterprise and what people in Switzerland see when looking towards Madagascar through the lens of the zoo exhibit. It crystallizes that the stories told in either place have almost nothing in common: one focuses on power and history, the other on morality and progress. Thus, instead of building a bridge, Nature conservation widens the gap between people in the North and the South.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
    Areas: Africa Europe
    Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 20
  • Re-Orienting Cuisine

    Re-orienting Cuisine

    East Asian Foodways in the Twenty-First Century

    Kim, K. O. (ed)

    Foods are changed not only by those who produce and supply them, but also by those who consume them. Analyzing food without considering changes over time and across space is less meaningful than analyzing it in a global context where tastes, lifestyles, and imaginations cross boundaries and blend with each other, challenging the idea of authenticity. A dish that originated in Beijing and is recreated in New York is not necessarily the same, because although authenticity is often claimed, the form, ingredients, or taste may have changed. The contributors of this volume have expanded the discussion of food to include its social and cultural meanings and functions, thereby using it as a way to explain a culture and its changes.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Food, Nutrition, and Culture Volume 3
  • Economy & Ritual

    Economy and Ritual

    Studies of Postsocialist Transformations

    Gudeman, S. & Hann, C. (eds)

    According to accepted wisdom, rational practices and ritual action are opposed. Rituals drain wealth from capital investment and draw on a mode of thought different from practical ideas. The studies in this volume contest this view. Comparative, historical, and contemporary, the six ethnographies extend from Macedonia to Kyrgyzstan. Each one illuminates the economic and ritual changes in an area as it emerged from socialism and (re-)entered market society. Cutting against the idea that economy only means markets and that market action exhausts the meaning of economy, the studies show that much of what is critical for a people’s economic life takes place outside markets and hinges on ritual, understood as the negation of the everyday world of economising.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 1
  • Thinking through Sociality

    Thinking Through Sociality

    An Anthropological Interrogation of Key Concepts

    Amit, V. (ed)

    As issues and circumstances investigated by anthropologists are becoming ever more diverse, the need to address social affiliation in contemporary situations of mobility, urbanity, transnational connections, individuation, media, and capital flows, has never been greater. Thinking Through Sociality combines a review of classical theories with recent theoretical innovations across a wide range of issues, locales, situations and domains. In this book, an international group of contributors train attention on the concepts of disjuncture, field, social space, sociability, organizations and network, mid-range concepts that are “good to think with.” Neither too narrowly defined nor too sweeping, these concepts can be used to think through a myriad of ethnographic situations.

    Subject: Theory and Methodology
  • Trapped in the Gap

    Trapped in the Gap

    Doing Good in Indigenous Australia

    Kowal, E.

    In Australia, a ‘tribe’ of white, middle-class, progressive professionals is actively working to improve the lives of Indigenous people. This book explores what happens when well-meaning people, supported by the state, attempt to help without harming. ‘White anti-racists’ find themselves trapped by endless ambiguities, contradictions, and double binds — a microcosm of the broader dilemmas of postcolonial societies. These dilemmas are fueled by tension between the twin desires of equality and difference: to make Indigenous people statistically the same as non-Indigenous people (to 'close the gap') while simultaneously maintaining their ‘cultural’ distinctiveness. This tension lies at the heart of failed development efforts in Indigenous communities, ethnic minority populations and the global South. This book explains why doing good is so hard, and how it could be done differently. 

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Great Reimagining, The

    The Great Reimagining

    Public Art, Urban Space, and the Symbolic Landscapes of a 'New' Northern Ireland

    Hocking, B. T.

    While sectarian violence has greatly diminished on the streets of Belfast and Derry, proxy battles over the right to define Northern Ireland’s identity through its new symbolic landscapes continue. Offering a detailed ethnographic account of Northern Ireland’s post-conflict visual transformation, this book examines the official effort to produce new civic images against a backdrop of ongoing political and social struggle. Interviews with politicians, policymakers, community leaders, cultural workers, and residents shed light on the deeply contested nature of seemingly harmonized urban landscapes in societies undergoing radical structural change. Here, the public art process serves as a vital means to understanding the wider politics of a transforming public sphere in an age of globalization and transnational connectivity.

    Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Europe
    Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Volume 4
  • Neoliberal Landscape & the Rise of Islamist Capital in Turkey, The

    The Neoliberal Landscape and the Rise of Islamist Capital in Turkey

    Balkan, N., Balkan, E. & Öncü, A. (eds)

    Islamist capital accumulation has split the Turkish bourgeoisie and polarized Turkish society into secular and religious social groupings, giving rise to conflicts between the state and political Islam. By providing a long-term historical perspective on Turkey's economy and its relationship to Islamism, this volume explores how Islamism as a political ideology has been utilized by the conservative bourgeoisie in Turkey, and elsewhere, to establish hegemony over labor. The contributors analyze the relationship between neoliberalism and the political fortunes of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), and examine the similarities and differences amongst new factions in the secular and Islamic middle class that have benefited economically, socially, and culturally during the AKP's reign. The articles also investigate the impact of the Gülen Movement and the role of the media in shaping the contours of intra-class struggle within contemporary Turkish political and social life.

    Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Middle East & Israel
    Series: Dislocations Volume 14
  • Cousin Marriages

    Cousin Marriages

    Between Tradition, Genetic Risk and Cultural Change

    Shaw, A. & Raz, A. (eds)

    Juxtaposing contributions from geneticists and anthropologists, this volume provides a contemporary overview of cousin marriage and what is happening at the interface of public policy, the management of genetic risk and changing cultural practices in the Middle East and in multi-ethnic Europe. It offers a cross-cultural exploration of practices of cousin marriage in the light of new genetic understanding of consanguineous marriage and its possible health risks. Overall, the volume presents a reflective, interdisciplinary analysis of the social and ethical issues raised by both the discourse of risk in cousin marriage, as well as existing and potential interventions to promote “healthy consanguinity” via new genetic technologies.
     

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 28
  • Religion & Science as Forms of Life

    Religion and Science as Forms of Life

    Anthropological Insights into Reason and Unreason

    Salazar, C. & Bestard, J. (eds)

    The relationships between science and religion are about to enter a new phase in our contemporary world, as scientific knowledge has become increasingly relevant in ordinary life, beyond the institutional public spaces where it traditionally developed. The purpose of this volume is to analyze the relationships, possible articulations and contradictions between religion and science as forms of life: ways of engaging human experience that originate in particular social and cultural formations. Contributions use this theoretical and ethnographic research to explore different scientific and religious cultures in the contemporary world.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
  • Making a Difference?

    Making a Difference?

    Social Assessment Policy and Praxis and its Emergence in China

    Price, S. & Robinson, K. (eds)

    Social assessment for projects in China is an important emerging field. This collection of essays — from authors whose formative work has influenced the policies that shape practice in development-affected communities — locates recent Chinese experience of the development of social assessment practices (including in displacement and resettlement) in a historical and comparative perspective. Contributors — social scientists employed by international development banks, national government agencies, and sub-contracting groups — examine projects from a practitioner’s perspective. Real-life experiences are presented as case-specific praxis, theoretically informed insight, and pragmatic lessons-learned, grounded in the history of this field of development practice. They reflect on work where economic determinism reigns supreme, yet project failure or success often hinges upon sociopolitical and cultural factors.

    Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Asia-Pacific Studies: Past and Present Volume 6
  • Anthropology & Philosophy

    Anthropology & Philosophy

    Dialogues on Trust and Hope

    Liisberg, S., Pedersen, E. O., Dalsgård, A. L. (eds)

    The present book is no ordinary anthology, but rather a workroom in which anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope, two important topics for both fields of study. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark. Thus, besides bringing the two disciplines in dialogue, it also cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style. The interdisciplinary efforts of the contributors demonstrate how such a collaboration can result in new and challenging ways of thinking about trust and hope. Reading the dialogues may, therefore, also inspire others to work in the productive intersection between anthropology and philosophy.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
    Series: Anthropology & ... Volume 4
  • Protests, Land Rights, & Riots

    Protests, Land Rights, and Riots

    Postcolonial Struggles in Australia in the 1980s

    Morris, B.

    The 1970s saw the Aboriginal people of Australia struggle for recognition of their postcolonial rights. Rural communities, where large Aboriginal populations lived, were provoked as a consequence of social fragmentation, unparalleled unemployment, and other major economic and political changes. The ensuing riots, protests, and law-and-order campaigns in New South Wales captured the tense relations that existed between indigenous people, the police, and the criminal justice system. In Protests, Land Rights, and Riots, Barry Morris shows how neoliberal policies in Australia targeted those who were least integrated socially and culturally, and who enjoyed fewer legitimate economic opportunities. Amidst intense political debate, struggle, and conflict, new forces were unleashed as a post-settler colonial state grappled with its past. Morris provides a social analysis of the ensuing effects of neoliberal policy and the way indigenous rights were subsequently undermined by this emerging new political orthodoxy in the 1990s.
     

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Asia-Pacific
  • Bloom & Bust

    Bloom and Bust

    Urban Landscapes in the East since German Reunification

    Cliver, G. & Smith-Prei, C. (eds)

    More than two decades of deconstruction, renovation, and reconstruction have left the urban environments in the former German Democratic Republic completely transformed. This volume considers the changing urban landscapes in the former East — and how the filling of previous absences and the absence of previous presence — creates the cultural landscape of modern unified Germany. This broadens our understanding of this transformation by examining often-neglected cities, spaces, or structures, and historical narration and preservation.
     

    Subjects: Urban Studies Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Germany
    Series: Space and Place Volume 13
  • Enhancing Democracy

    Enhancing Democracy

    Public Policies and Citizen Participation in Chile

    Delamaza, G.

    Since the end of the Pinochet regime, Chilean public policy has sought to rebuild democratic governance in the country. This book examines the links between the state and civil society in Chile and the ways social policies have sought to ensure the inclusion of the poor in society and democracy. Although Chile has gained political stability and grown economically, the ability of social policies to expand democratic governance and participation has proved limited, and in fact such policies have become subordinate to an elitist model of democracy and resulted in a restrictive form of citizen participation.

    Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: CEDLA Latin America Studies Volume 104
  • Cultural Politics of Reproduction

    The Cultural Politics of Reproduction

    Migration, Health and Family Making

    Unnithan-Kumar, M. & Khanna, S. K. (eds)

    Charting the experiences of internally or externally migrant communities, the volume examines social transformation through the dynamic relationship between movement, reproduction, and health. The chapters examine how healthcare experiences of migrants are not only embedded in their own unique health worldviews, but also influenced by the history, policy, and politics of the wider state systems. The research among migrant communities an understanding of how ideas of reproduction and “cultures of health” travel, how healing, birth and care practices become a result of movement, and how health-related perceptions and reproductive experiences can define migrant belonging and identity.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality
  • Power of Death, The

    The Power of Death

    Contemporary Reflections on Death in Western Society

    Blanco, M.-J. & Vidal, R. (eds)

    The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a“dying party” in the Netherlands; examinations of the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives.

    Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Sociology Literary Studies
  • Hunters, Predators & Prey

    Hunters, Predators and Prey

    Inuit Perceptions of Animals

    Laugrand, F. & Oosten, J.

    Inuit hunting traditions are rich in perceptions, practices and stories relating to animals and human beings. The authors examine key figures such as the raven, an animal that has a central place in Inuit culture as a creator and a trickster, and qupirruit, a category consisting of insects and other small life forms. After these non-social and inedible animals, they discuss the dog, the companion of the hunter, and the fellow hunter, the bear, considered to resemble a human being. A discussion of the renewal of whale hunting accompanies the chapters about animals considered ‘prey par excellence’: the caribou, the seals and the whale, symbol of the whole. By giving precedence to Inuit categories such as ‘inua’ (owner) and ‘tarniq’ (shade) over European concepts such as ‘spirit ‘and ‘soul’, the book compares and contrasts human beings and animals to provide a better understanding of human-animal relationships in a hunting society.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
    Areas: North America Circumpolar
  • Nighttime Breastfeeding

    Nighttime Breastfeeding

    An American Cultural Dilemma

    Tomori, C.

    Nighttime for many new parents in the United States is fraught with the intense challenges of learning to breastfeed and helping their babies sleep so they can get rest themselves. Through careful ethnographic study of the dilemmas raised by nighttime breastfeeding, and their examination in the context of anthropological, historical, and feminist studies, this volume unravels the cultural tensions that underlie these difficulties. As parents negotiate these dilemmas, they not only confront conflicting medical guidelines about breastfeeding and solitary infant sleep, but also larger questions about cultural and moral expectations for children and parents, and their relationship with one another.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: North America
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 26
  • Globalized Fatherhood

    Globalized Fatherhood

    Inhorn, M. C., Chavkin, W. & Navarro, J.-A. (eds)

    Using an entirely new conceptual vocabulary through which to understand men’s experiences and expectations at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this path-breaking volume focuses on fatherhood around the globe, including transformations in fathering, fatherhood, and family life. It includes new work by anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural geographers, working in settings from Peru to India to Vietnam. Each chapter suggests that men are responding to globalization as fathers in creative and unprecedented ways, not only in the West, but also in numerous global locations.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 27
  • Anthropology & Nostalgia

    Anthropology and Nostalgia

    Angé, O. & Berliner, D. (eds)

    Nostalgia is intimately connected to the history of the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular, though finely grained ethnographies of nostalgia and loss are still scarce. Today, anthropologists have realized that nostalgia constitutes a fascinating object of study for exploring contemporary issues of the formation of identity in politics and history. Contributors to this volume consider the fabric of nostalgia in the fields of heritage and tourism, exile and diasporas, postcolonialism and postsocialism, business and economic exchange, social, ecological and religious movements, and nation building. They contribute to a better understanding of how individuals and groups commemorate their pasts, and how nostalgia plays a role in the process of remembering.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Theory and Methodology
  • Anthropology Now & Next

    Anthropology Now and Next

    Essays in Honor of Ulf Hannerz

    Eriksen, T. H., Garsten, C. & Randeria, S. (eds)

    The scholarship of Ulf Hannerz is characterized by its extraordinary breadth and visionary nature. He has contributed to the understanding of urban life and transnational networks, and the role of media, paradoxes of identity and new forms of community, suggesting to see culture in terms of flows rather than as bounded entities. Contributions honor Hannerz’ legacy by addressing theoretical, epistemological, ethical and methodological challenges facing anthropological inquiry on topics from cultural diversity policies in Europe to transnational networks in Yemen, and from pottery and literature to multinational corporations.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)
  • People, Money & Power in the Economic Crisis

    People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis

    Perspectives from the Global South

    Hart, K. & Sharp, J. (eds)

    The Cold War was fought between “state socialism” and “the free market.” That fluctuating relationship between public power and private money continues today, unfolding in new and unforeseen ways during the economic crisis. Nine case studies -- from Southern Africa, South Asia, Brazil, and Atlantic Africa – examine economic life from the perspective of ordinary people in places that are normally marginal to global discourse, covering a range of class positions from the bottom to the top of society. The authors of these case studies examine people’s concrete economic activities and aspirations. By looking at how people insert themselves into the actual, unequal economy, they seek to reflect human unity and diversity more fully than the narrow vision of conventional economics.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: The Human Economy Volume 1
  • Whose Cosmopolitanism?

    Whose Cosmopolitanism?

    Critical Perspectives, Relationalities and Discontents

    Glick Schiller, N. & Irving, A. (eds)

    The term cosmopolitan is increasingly used within different social, cultural and political settings, including academia, popular media and national politics. However those who invoke the cosmopolitan project rarely ask whose experience, understanding, or vision of cosmopolitanism is being described and for whose purposes? In response, this volume assembles contributors from different disciplines and theoretical backgrounds to examine cosmopolitanism’s possibilities, aspirations and applications—as well as its tensions, contradictions, and discontents—so as to offer a critical commentary on the vital but often neglected question: whose cosmopolitanism? The book investigates when, where, and how cosmopolitanism emerges as a contemporary social process, global aspiration or emancipatory political project and asks whether it can serve as a political or methodological framework for action in a world of conflict and difference.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
  • Polynesian Iconoclasm, The

    The Polynesian Iconoclasm

    Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power

    Sissons, J.

    Within little more than ten years in the early nineteenth century, inhabitants of Tahiti, Hawaii and fifteen other closely related societies destroyed or desecrated all of their temples and most of their god-images. In the aftermath of the explosive event, which Sissons terms the Polynesian Iconoclasm, hundreds of architecturally innovative churches — one the size of two football fields — were constructed. At the same time, Christian leaders introduced oppressive laws and courts, which the youth resisted through seasonal displays of revelry and tattooing. Seeking an answer to why this event occurred in the way that it did, this book introduces and demonstrates an alternative “practice history” that draws on the work of Marshall Sahlins and employs Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, improvisation and practical logic.

    Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology Volume 5
  • Food in Zones of Conflict

    Food in Zones of Conflict

    Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

    Collinson, P. and Macbeth, H. (eds)

    The availability of food is an especially significant issue in zones of conflict because conflict nearly always impinges on the production and the distribution of food, and causes increased competition for food, land and resources Controlling the production of and access to food can also be used as a weapon by protagonists in conflict. The logistics of supply of food to military personnel operating in conflict zones is another important issue. These themes unite this collection, the chapters of which span different geographic areas. This volume will appeal to scholars in a number of different disciplines, including anthropology, nutrition, political science, development studies and international relations, as well as practitioners working in the private and public sectors, who are currently concerned with food-related issues in the field.

    Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)
    Series: Anthropology of Food & Nutrition Volume 8
  • Women and the City, Women in the City

    Women and the City, Women in the City

    A Gendered Perspective on Ottoman Urban History

    Maksudyan, N. (ed)

    An attempt to reveal, recover and reconsider the roles, positions, and actions of Ottoman women, this volume reconsiders the negotiations, alliances, and agency of women in asserting themselves in the public domain in late- and post-Ottoman cities. Drawing on diverse theoretical backgrounds and a variety of source materials, from court records to memoirs to interviews, the contributors to the volume reconstruct the lives of these women within the urban sphere. With a fairly wide geographical span, from Aleppo to Sofia, from Jeddah to Istanbul, the chapters offer a wide panorama of the Ottoman urban geography, with a specific concern for gender roles.

    Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Urban Studies History (General)
    Area: Middle East & Israel
  • Belonging in Oceania

    Belonging in Oceania

    Movement, Place-Making and Multiple Identifications

    Hermann, E., Kempf, W. & Meijl, T. van (eds)

    Ethnographic case studies explore what it means to “belong” in Oceania, as contributors consider ongoing formations of place, self and community in connection with travelling, internal and international migration. The chapters apply the multi-dimensional concepts of movement, place-making and cultural identifications to explain contemporary life in Oceanic societies. The volume closes by suggesting that constructions of multiple belongings—and, with these, the relevant forms of mobility, place-making and identifications—are being recontextualized and modified by emerging discourses of climate change and sea-level rise.
     

    Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Mobility Studies Cultural Studies (General)
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists Volume 3
  • Blood & Fire

    Blood and Fire

    Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor

    Kasmir, S. & Carbonella, A. (eds)

    Based on long-term fieldwork, six vivid ethnographies from Colombia, India, Poland, Spain and the southern and northern U.S. address the dwindling importance of labor throughout the world. The contributors to this volume highlight the growing disconnect between labor struggles and the advancement of the greater common good, a phenomenon that has grown since the 1980s. The collection illustrates the defeat and unmaking of particular working classes, and it develops a comparative perspective on the uneven consequences of and reactions to this worldwide project. Blood and Fire charts a course within global anthropology to address the widespread precariousness and the prevalence of insecure and informal labor in the twenty-first century.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Series: Dislocations Volume 13
  • Sustainable Development

    Sustainable Development

    An Appraisal from the Gulf Region

    Sillitoe, P. (ed)

    With growing evidence of unsustainable use of the world’s resources, such as hydrocarbon reserves, and related environmental pollution, as in alarming climate change predictions, sustainable development is arguably the prominent issue of the 21st century.  This volume gives a wide ranging introduction focusing on the arid Gulf region, where the challenges of sustainable development are starkly evident. The Gulf relies on non-renewable oil and gas exports to supply the world’s insatiable CO2 emitting energy demands, and has built unsustainable conurbations with water supplies dependent on energy hungry desalination plants and deep aquifers pumped beyond natural replenishment rates. Sustainable Development has an interdisciplinary focus, bringing together university faculty and government personnel from the Gulf, Europe, and North America -- including social and natural scientists, environmentalists and economists, architects and planners -- to discuss topics such as sustainable natural resource use and urbanization, industrial and technological development, economy and politics, history and geography. 

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Geography
    Area: Middle East & Israel
    Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 19
  • Talking Stones

    Talking Stones

    The Politics of Memorialization in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland

    Viggiani, E.

    If memory was simply about past events, public authorities would never put their ever-shrinking budgets at its service. Rather, memory is actually about the present moment, as Pierre Nora puts it: “Through the past, we venerate above all ourselves.” This book examines how collective memory and material culture are used to support present political and ideological needs in contemporary society. Using the memorialization of the Troubles in contemporary Northern Ireland as a case study, this book investigates how non-state, often proscribed, organizations have filled a societal vacuum in the creation of public memorials. In particular, these groups have sifted through the past to propose “official” collective narratives of national identification, historical legitimation, and moral justifications for violence.

    Subjects: Memory Studies Heritage Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Europe
  • Vehicles

    Vehicles

    Cars, Canoes, and Other Metaphors of Moral Imagination

    Lipset, D. & Handler, R. (eds)

    Metaphor, as an act of human fancy, combines ideas in improbable ways to sharpen meanings of life and experience. Theoretically, this arises from an association between a sign—for example, a cattle car—and its referent, the Holocaust. These “sign-vehicles” serve as modes of semiotic transportation through conceptual space. Likewise, on-the-ground vehicles can be rich metaphors for the moral imagination. Following on this insight, Vehicles presents a collection of ethnographic essays on the metaphoric significance of vehicles in different cultures. Analyses include canoes in Papua New Guinea, pedestrians and airplanes in North America, lowriders among Mexican-Americans, and cars in contemporary China, Japan, and Eastern Europe, as well as among African-Americans in the South. Vehicles not only “carry people around,” but also “carry” how they are understood in relation to the dynamics of culture, politics and history.

    Subjects: Transport Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
  • Up, Down, and Sideways

    Up, Down, and Sideways

    Anthropologists Trace the Pathways of Power

    Stryker, R. & González, R. (eds)

    Using a “vertical slice” approach, anthropologists critically analyze the relationship between undemocratic uses and abuses of power and the survival of the human species. The contributors scrutinize modern institutions in a variety of regions—from Russia and Mexico to South Korea and the U.S. Up, Down, and Sideways is an ethnographic examination of such phenomena as debtculture, global financial crises, food insecurity, indigenous land and resource appropriation, the mismanagement of health care, andcorporate surrogacy within family life. With a preface by Laura Nader, this isessential reading for anyone seeking solid theories and concrete methods to inform activist scholarship.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Applied Anthropology
    Series: Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology Volume 7
  • Unforgotten

    Unforgotten

    Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India

    Brijnath, B.

    As life expectancy increases in India, the number of people living with dementia will also rise. Yet little is known about how people in India cope with dementia, how relationships and identities change through illness and loss. In addressing this question, this book offers a rich ethnographic account of how middle-class families in urban India care for their relatives with dementia. From the husband who wakes up at 3 am to feed his wife ice-cream to the daughters who gave up employment for seven years to care for their mother with dementia, this book illuminates the local idioms on dementia and aging, the personal experience of care-giving, the functioning of stigma in daily life, and the social and cultural barriers in accessing support.

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Area: Asia
    Series: Life Course, Culture and Aging: Global Transformations Volume 2
  • Pacific Futures

    Pacific Futures

    Projects, Politics and Interests

    Rollason, W. (ed)

    The Pacific region presents a huge diversity of cultural forms, which have fuelled some of the most challenging ethnographic work undertaken in the discipline. But this challenge has come at a cost. Culture, often reconfigured as ‘custom’, has often served to trap the people of the Pacific in the past of cultural reproduction, where everything is what it has always been, or worse—outdated, outmoded and destined for modernization.

    Pacific Futures asks how our understanding of social life in the Pacific would be different if we approached it from the perspective of the futures which Pacific people dream of, predict or struggle to achieve, not the reproduction of cultural tradition. From Christianity to gambling, marriage to cargo cult, military coups to reflections on childhood fishing trips, the contributors to this volume show how Pacific people are actively shaping their lives with the future in mind.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists Volume 2
  • Americans in Tuscany

    Americans in Tuscany

    Charity, Compassion, and Belonging

    Trundle, C.

    Since the time of the Grand Tour, the Italian region of Tuscany has sustained a highly visible American and Anglo migrant community. Today American women continue to migrate there, many in order to marry Italian men. Confronted with experiences of social exclusion, unfamiliar family relations, and new cultural terrain, many women struggle to build local lives. In the first ethnographic monograph of Americans in Italy, Catherine Trundle argues that charity and philanthropy are the central means by which many American women negotiate a sense of migrant belonging in Italy. This book traces women’s daily acts of charity as they gave food to the poor, fundraised among the wealthy, monitored untrustworthy recipients, assessed the needy, and reflected on the emotional work that charity required. In exploring the often-ignored role of charitable action in migrant community formation, Trundle contributes to anthropological theories of gift giving, compassion, and reflexivity.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 36
  • Morality & Economic Growth in Rural West Africa

    Morality and Economic Growth in Rural West Africa

    Indigenous Accumulation in Hausaland

    Clough, P.

    The land, labor, credit, and trading institutions of Marmara village, in Hausaland, northern Nigeria, are detailed in this study through fieldwork conducted in two national economic cycles - the petroleum-boom prosperity (in 1977-1979), and the macro-economic decline (in 1985, 1996 and 1998). The book unveils a new paradigm of economic change in the West African savannah, demonstrating how rural accumulation in a polygynous society actually limits the extent of inequality while at the same time promoting technical change.  A uniquely African non-capitalist trajectory of accumulation subordinates the acquisition of capital to the expansion of polygynous families, clientage networks, and circles of trading friends.  The whole trajectory is driven by an indigenous ethics of personal responsibility. This model disputes the validity of both Marxian theories of capitalist transformation in Africa and the New Institutional Economics.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Area: Africa
  • Dignity for the Voiceless

    Dignity for the Voiceless

    Willem Assies's Anthropological Work in Context

    Salman, T., Marti i Puig, S., & Haar, G. van der (eds)

    Willem Assies died in 2010 at the age of 55. The various stages of his career as a political anthropologist of Latin American illustrate how astute a researcher he was. He had a keen eye for the contradictions he observed during his fieldwork but also enjoyed theoretical debate. A distrust of power led him not only to attempt to understand “people without voice” but to work alongside them so they could discover and find their own voice. Willem Assies explored the messy, often untidy daily lives of people, with their inconsistencies, irrationalities, and passions, but also with their hopes, sense of beauty, solidarity, and quest for dignity. This collection brings together some of Willem Assies’s best, most fascinating, and still highly relevant writings.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
    Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
    Series: CEDLA Latin America Studies Volume 103
  • Weary Warriors

    Weary Warriors

    Power, Knowledge, and the Invisible Wounds of Soldiers

    Moss, P. & Prince, M. J.

    As seen in military documents, medical journals, novels, films, television shows, and memoirs, soldiers’ invisible wounds are not innate cracks in individual psyches that break under the stress of war. Instead, the generation of weary warriors is caught up in wider social and political networks and institutions—families, activist groups, government bureaucracies, welfare state programs—mediated through a military hierarchy, psychiatry rooted in mind-body sciences, and various cultural constructs of masculinity. This book offers a history of military psychiatry from the American Civil War to the latest Afghanistan conflict. The authors trace the effects of power and knowledge in relation to the emotional and psychological trauma that shapes soldiers’ bodies, minds, and souls, developing an extensive account of the emergence, diagnosis, and treatment of soldiers’ invisible wounds.

    Subjects: Sociology History (General) Peace and Conflict Studies
    Areas: North America Europe
  • Tourism Imaginaries

    Tourism Imaginaries

    Anthropological Approaches

    Salazar, N. B. & Graburn, N. H. H. (eds)

    It is hard to imagine tourism without the creative use of seductive, as well as restrictive, imaginaries about peoples and places. These socially shared assemblages are collaboratively produced and consumed by a diverse range of actors around the globe. As a nexus of social practices through which individuals and groups establish places and peoples as credible objects of tourism, “tourism imaginaries” have yet to be fully explored. Presenting innovative conceptual approaches, this volume advances ethnographic research methods and critical scholarship regarding tourism and the imaginaries that drive it. The various authors contribute methodologically as well as conceptually to anthropology’s grasp of the images, forces, and encounters of the contemporary world.

    Subjects: Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)
  • Ethnographic Experiment, The

    The Ethnographic Experiment

    A.M. Hocart and W.H.R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908

    Hviding, E. & Berg, C. (eds)

    In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers’ later work in psychiatry and psychology, and Hocart’s work as a comparativist, for which both would largely be remembered despite the novelty of that independent fieldwork on remote Pacific islands in the early years of the 20th Century. Contributors to this volume—who have all carried out fieldwork in those Melanesian locations where Hocart and Rivers worked—give a critical examination of the research that took place in 1908, situating those efforts in the broadest possible contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History
    Area: Asia-Pacific
    Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists Volume 1
  • Living Translation

    Living Translation

    Language and the Search for Resonance in U.S. Chinese Medicine

    Pritzker, S. E.

    Integrating theoretical perspectives with carefully grounded ethnographic analyses of everyday interaction and experience, Living Translation examines the worlds of international translators as well as U.S. teachers and students of Chinese medicine, focusing on the transformations that occur as participants engage in a “search for resonance” with foreign terms and concepts. Based on a close examination of heated international debates as well as specific texts, classroom discussions, and interviews with publishers, authors, teachers, and students, Sonya Pritzker demonstrates the “living translation” of Chinese medicine as a process unfolding through interaction, inscription, embodied experience, and clinical practice. By documenting the stream of conversations that together constitute this process, the book thus traces the translation of Chinese medicine from text to practice with an eye towards the social, political, historical, moral, and even personal dimensions involved in the transnational production of knowledge about health, illness, and the body.

    Subject: Medical Anthropology
    Areas: Asia-Pacific North America
  • Negotiating Identity in Scandinavia

    Negotiating Identity in Scandinavia

    Women, Migration, and the Diaspora

    Akman, H. (ed)

    Gender has a profound impact on the discourse on migration as well as various aspects of integration, social and political life, public debate, and art. This volume focuses on immigration and the concept of diaspora through the experiences of women living in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Through a variety of case studies, the authors approach the multifaceted nature of interactions between these women and their adopted countries, considering both the local and the global. The text examines the “making of the Scandinavian” and the novel ways in which diasporic communities create gendered forms of belonging that transcend the nation state.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Refugee and Migration Studies
    Area: Northern Europe
  • Prophetic Trajectory, A

    A Prophetic Trajectory

    Ideologies of Place, Time and Belonging in an Angolan Religious Movement

    Blanes, R. L.

    Combining ethnographic and historical research conducted in Angola, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, A Prophetic Trajectory tells the story of Simão Toko, the founder and leader of one of the most important contemporary Angolan religious movements. The book explains the historical, ethnic, spiritual, and identity transformations observed within the movement, and debates the politics of remembrance and heritage left behind after Toko’s passing in 1984. Ultimately, it questions the categories of prophetism and charisma, as well as the intersections between mobility, memory, and belonging in the Atlantic Lusophone sphere.

    Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
    Area: Africa
  • Asymmetrical Conversations

    Asymmetrical Conversations

    Contestations, Circumventions, and the Blurring of Therapeutic Boundaries

    Naraindas, H., Quack, J., & Sax, W. S. (eds)

    Ideas about health are reinforced by institutions and their corresponding practices, such as donning a patient's gown in a hospital or prostrating before a healing shrine. Even though we are socialized into regarding such ideologies as "natural" and unproblematic, we sometimes seek to bypass, circumvent, or even transcend the dominant ideologies of our cultures as they are manifested in the institutions of health care. The contributors to this volume describe such contestations and circumventions of health ideologies, and the blurring of therapeutic boundaries, on the basis of case studies from India, the South Asian Diaspora, and Europe, focusing on relations between body, mind, and spirit in a variety of situations. The result is not always the "live and let live" medical pluralism that is described in the literature.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
    Areas: Asia Europe
    Series: Epistemologies of Healing Volume 14
  • Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics

    Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics

    Essays in Historical Realism

    Smith, G.

    Contemporary forms of capitalism and the state require close analytic attention to reveal the conditions of possibility for effective counter-politics. On the other hand the practice of collective politics needs to be studied through historical ethnography if we are to understand what might make people’s actions effective. This book suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. Gavin Smith opens and closes this series of interlinked essays by proposing a concise framework for untangling what he calls “the society of capital” and subsequently a potentially controversial way of seeing its contemporary features. This book tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
    Areas: Latin America and the Caribbean Southern Europe
    Series: Dislocations Volume 12
  • Friendship, Descent and Alliance in Africa

    Friendship, Descent and Alliance in Africa

    Anthropological Perspectives

    Guichard, M., Grätz, T., & Diallo, Y. (eds)

    Friendship, descent and alliance are basic forms of relatedness that have received unequal attention in social anthropology. Offering new insights into the ways in which friendship is conceptualized and realized in various sub-Saharan African settings, the contributions to this volume depart from the recent tendency to study friendship in isolation from kinship. In drawing attention to the complexity of the interactions between these two kinds of social relationships, the book suggests that analyses of friendship in Western societies would also benefit from research that explores more systematically friendship in conjunction with kinship.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Area: Africa
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 10
  • Being a State & States of Being in Highland Georgia

    Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia

    Mühlfried, F.

    The highland region of the republic of Georgia, one of the former Soviet Socialist Republics, has long been legendary for its beauty. It is often assumed that the state has only made partial inroads into this region, and is mostly perceived as alien. Taking a fresh look at the Georgian highlands allows the author to consider perennial questions of citizenship, belonging, and mobility in a context that has otherwise been known only for its folkloric dimensions. Scrutinizing forms of identification with the state at its margins, as well as local encounters with the erratic Soviet and post-Soviet state, the author argues that citizenship is both a sought-after means of entitlement and a way of guarding against the state. This book not only challenges theories in the study of citizenship but also the axioms of integration in Western social sciences in general.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies Development Studies
    Area: Central/Eastern Europe
    Series: EASA Series Volume 24
  • Narrating Victimhood

    Narrating Victimhood

    Gender, Religion and the Making of Place in Post-War Croatia

    Schäuble, M.

    Mythologies and narratives of victimization pervade contemporary Croatia, set against the backdrop of militarized notions of masculinity and the political mobilization of religion and nationhood. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in rural Dalmatia in the Croatian-Bosnian border region, this book provides a unique account of the politics of ambiguous Europeanness from the perspective of those living at Europe’s margins. Examining phenomena such as Marian apparitions, a historic knights tournament, the symbolic re-signification of a massacre site, and the desolate social situation of Croatian war veterans, Narrating Victimhood traces the complex mechanisms of political radicalization in a post-war scenario. This book provides a new perspective for understanding the ongoing processes of transformation in Southeastern Europe and the Balkans.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Southern Europe
    Series: Space and Place Volume 11
  • Culture, Suicide, and the Human Condition

    Culture, Suicide, and the Human Condition

    Honkasalo, M.-L. & Tuominen, M. (eds)

    Suicide is a puzzling phenomenon. Not only is its demarcation problematic but it also eludes simple explanation. The cultures in which suicide mortality is high do not necessarily have much else in common, and neither is a single mental illness such as depression sufficient to lead a person to suicide. In a word, despite its statistical regularity, suicide is unpredictable on the individual level. The main argument emerging from this collection is that suicide should not be understood as a separate realm of pathological behavior but as a form of human action. As such it is always dependent on the decision that the individual makes in a cultural, ethical and socio-economic context, but the context never completely determines the decision. This book also argues that cultural narratives concerning suicide have a problematic double function: in addition to enabling the community to make sense of self-inflicted death, they also constitute a blueprint depicting suicide as a solution to common human problems.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
  • We the Cosmopolitans

    We the Cosmopolitans

    Moral and Existential Conditions of Being Human

    Josephides, L. & Hall, A. (eds)

    The provocative title of this book is deliberately and challengingly universalist, matching the theoretically experimental essays, where contributors try different ideas to answer distinct concerns regarding cosmopolitanism. Leading anthropologists explore what cosmopolitanism means in the context of everyday life, variously viewing it as an aspect of kindness and empathy, as tolerance, hospitality and openness, and as a defining feature of pan-human individuality. The chapters thus advance an existential critique of abstract globalization discourse. The book enriches interdisciplinary debates about hitherto neglected aspects of contemporary cosmopolitanism as a political and moral project, examining the form of its lived effects and offering new ideas and case studies to work with.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
  • Chiasmus & Culture

    Chiasmus and Culture

    Wiseman, B. & Paul, A. (eds)

    Anyone who has heard of chiasmus is likely to think of it as no more than a piece of rhetorical playfulness, at times challenging, though useful for supplying a memorable sententious note or for performing a pirouette of syntax and thought. Going beyond traditional rhetoric, this volume is concerned with the possibility of using the figure of chiasmus to model a broad array of phenomena, from human relations to artistic creation. In the process, it provides the first book-length study not of chiasmus, the rhetorical figure, but of chiastic thought. The contributors are concerned with chiastic inversion and its place in social interactions, cultural creation, and more generally human thought and experience.They explore from a variety of angles what the unsettling logic of chiasmus (from the Greek meaning “cross-wise”), has to tell us about the world, human relations, cultural patterns, psychology, and artistic and poetic creation.

    Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies
    Series: Studies in Rhetoric and Culture Volume 6
  • Ethics of the New Eugenics, The

    The Ethics of the New Eugenics

    MacKellar, C. & Bechtel, C. (eds)

    Strategies or decisions aimed at affecting, in a manner considered to be positive, the genetic heritage of a child in the context of human reproduction are increasingly being accepted in contemporary society. As a result, unnerving similarities between earlier selection ideology so central to the discredited eugenic regimes of the 20th century and those now on offer suggest that a new era of eugenics has dawned. The time is ripe, therefore, for considering and evaluating from an ethical perspective both current and future selection practices. This inter-disciplinary volume blends research from embryology, genetics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and history. In so doing, it constructs a thorough picture of the procedures emerging from today’s reproductive developments, including a rigorous ethical argumentation concerning the possible advantages and risks related to the new eugenics.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology
  • Domesticating Youth

    Domesticating Youth

    Youth Bulges and their Socio-political Implications in Tajikistan

    Roche, S.

    Most of the Muslim societies of the world have entered a demographic transition from high to low fertility, and this process is accompanied by an increase in youth vis-à-vis other age groups. Political scientists and historians have debated whether such a “youth bulge” increases the potential for conflict or whether it represents a chance to accumulate wealth and push forward social and technological developments. This book introduces the discussion about youth bulge into social anthropology using Tajikistan, a post-Soviet country that experienced civil war in the 1990s, which is in the middle of such a demographic transition. Sophie Roche develops a social anthropological approach to analyze demographic and political dynamics, and suggests a new way of thinking about social change in youth bulge societies.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
    Area: Asia
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 8
  • Creole Identity in Postcolonial Indonesia

    Creole Identity in Postcolonial Indonesia

    Knörr, J.

    Contributing to identity formation in ethnically and religiously diverse postcolonial societies, this book examines the role played by creole identity in Indonesia, and in particular its capital, Jakarta. While, on the one hand, it facilitates transethnic integration and promotes a specifically postcolonial sense of common nationhood due to its heterogeneous origins, creole groups of people are often perceived ambivalently in the wake of colonialism and its demise, on the other. In this book, Jacqueline Knörr analyzes the social, historical, and political contexts of creoleness both at the grassroots and the State level, showing how different sections of society engage with creole identity in order to promote collective identification transcending ethnic and religious boundaries, as well as for reasons of self-interest and ideological projects.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History
    Area: Asia
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 9
  • Arab Spring

    Arab Spring

    Uprisings, Powers, Interventions

    Fosshagen, K. (ed)

    The events of the Arab Spring presented a dramatic reconstitution of politics and the public sphere through their aesthetic and performative uses of public space. Mass demonstrations have become a new global political form, grounded in the localization of globalizing processes, institutions, and relationships. This volume delves beneath the seemingly chaotic nature of events to explore the structural dynamics underpinning popular resistance and their support or suppression. It moves beyond what has usually been defined as Arab Spring nations to include critical views on Bahrain, the Palestinian territories, and Turkey. The research and analysis presented explores not just the immediate protests, but also the historical realization, appropriation, and even institutionalization of these critical voices, as well as the role of international criminal law and legal exceptionalism in authorizing humanitarian interventions. Above all, it questions whether the revolutions have since been hijacked and the broad popular uprisings already overrun, suppressed, or usurped by the upper classes.

    Subject: Anthropology (General)
    Area: Middle East & Israel
    Series: Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis Volume 14
  • Variations on Uzbek Identity

    Variations on Uzbek Identity

    Strategic Choices, Cognitive Schemas and Political Constraints in Identification Processes

    Finke, P.

    Throughout its history the concept of “Uzbekness,” or more generally of a Turkic-speaking sedentary population, has continuously attracted members of other groups to join, as being Uzbek promises opportunities to enlarge ones social network. Accession is comparatively easy, as Uzbekness is grounded in a cultural model of territoriality, rather than genealogy, as the basis for social attachments. It acknowledges regional variation and the possibility of membership by voluntary decision. Therefore, the boundaries of being Uzbek vary almost by definition, incorporating elements of local languages, cultural patterns and social organization. This book combines an historical analysis with thorough ethnographic field research, looking at differences in the conceptualization of group boundaries and the social practices they entail. It does so by analysing decision-making processes by Uzbeks on the individual as well as cognitive level and the political configurations that surround them.

    Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General) Sociology
    Area: Asia
    Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 7
  • Learning Senegalese Sabar

    Learning Senegalese Sabar

    Dancers and Embodiment in New York and Dakar

    Bizas, E.

    Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in New York and Dakar, this book explores the Senegalese dance-rhythms Sabar from the research position of a dance student. It features a comparative analysis of the pedagogical techniques used in dance classes in New York and Dakar, which in turn shed light on different aesthetics and understandings of dance, as well as different ways of learning, in each context. Pointing to a loose network of teachers and students who travel between New York and Dakar around the practice of West African dance forms, the author discusses how this movement is maintained, what role the imagination plays in mobilizing participants and how the ‘cultural flow’ of the dances is ‘punctuated’ by national borders and socio-economic relationships. She explores the different meanings articulated around Sabar’s transatlantic movement and examines how the dance floor provides the grounds for contested understandings, socio-economic relationships and broader discourses to be re-choreographed in each setting.

    Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)
    Series: Dance and Performance Studies Volume 6
  • Borders of Belonging

    Borders of Belonging

    Experiencing History, War and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site

    Daugbjerg, M.

    In an era cross-cut with various agendas and expressions of national belonging and global awareness, “the nation” as a collective reference point and experienced entity stands at the center of complex identity struggles. This book explores how such struggles unfold in practice at a highly symbolic battlefield site in the Danish/German borderland. Comprised of an ethnography of two profoundly different institutions – a conventional museum and an experience-based heritage center – it analyses the ways in which staff and visitors interfere with, relate to, and literally “make sense” of the war heritage and its national connotations. Borders of Belonging offers a comparative, in-depth analysis of the practices and negotiations through which history is made and manifested at two houses devoted to the interpretation of one event: the decisive battle of the 1864 war in which Otto von Bismarck, on his way to uniting the new German Empire, led the Prussian army to victory over the Danish. Working through his empirical material to engage with and challenge established theoretical positions in the study of museums, modernity, and tourism, Mads Daugbjerg demonstrates that national belonging is still a key cultural concern, even as it asserts itself in novel, muted, and increasingly experiential ways.

    Subjects: Heritage Studies Travel and Tourism Museum Studies Memory Studies
    Area: Northern Europe
    Series: Museums and Collections Volume 5
  • Powerless Science?

    Powerless Science?

    Science and Politics in a Toxic World

    Boudia, S. & Jas, N. (eds)

    In spite of decades of research on toxicants, along with the growing role of scientific expertise in public policy and the unprecedented rise in the number of national and international institutions dealing with environmental health issues, problems surrounding contaminants and their effects on health have never appeared so important, sometimes to the point of appearing insurmountable. This calls for a reconsideration of the roles of scientific knowledge and expertise in the definition and management of toxic issues, which this book seeks to do. It looks at complex historical, social, and political dynamics, made up of public controversies, environmental and health crises, economic interests, and political responses, and demonstrates how and to what extent scientific knowledge about toxicants has been caught between scientific, economic, and political imperatives.

    Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Medical Anthropology
    Series: Environment in History: International Perspectives Volume 2
  • Hindi is Our Ground, English is Our Sky

    Hindi Is Our Ground, English Is Our Sky

    Education, Language, and Social Class in Contemporary India

    LaDousa, C.

    A sea change has occurred in the Indian economy in the last three decades, spurring the desire to learn English. Most scholars and media venues have focused on English exclusively for its ties to processes of globalization and the rise of new employment opportunities.  The pursuit of class mobility, however, involves Hindi as much as English in the vast Hindi-Belt of northern India.  Schools are institutions on which class mobility depends, and they are divided by Hindi and English in the rubric of “medium,” the primary language of pedagogy. This book demonstrates that the school division allows for different visions of what it means to belong to the nation and what is central and peripheral in the nation. It also shows how the language-medium division reverberates unevenly and unequally through the nation, and that schools illustrate the tensions brought on by economic liberalization and middle-class status.

    Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)
    Area: Asia
  • Impotent Warriors

    Impotent Warriors

    Perspectives on Gulf War Syndrome, Vulnerability and Masculinity

    Kilshaw, S.

    From September 1990 to June 1991, the UK deployed 53,462 military personnel in the Gulf War. After the end of the conflict anecdotal reports of various disorders affecting troops who fought in the Gulf began to surface. This mysterious illness was given the name “Gulf War Syndrome” (GWS). This book is an investigation into this recently emergent illness, particularly relevant given ongoing UK deployments to Iraq, describing how the illness became a potent symbol for a plethora of issues, anxieties, and concerns. At present, the debate about GWS is polarized along two lines: there are those who think it is a unique, organic condition caused by Gulf War toxins and those who argue that it is probably a psychological condition that can be seen as part of a larger group of illnesses. Using the methods and perspective of anthropology, with its focus on nuances and subtleties, the author provides a new approach to understanding GWS, one that makes sense of the cultural circumstances, specific and general, which gave rise to the illness.

    Subjects: Medical Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality
    Area: Middle East & Israel