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Correcting the Record

Essays on the History of American Anthropology

Lewis, H. S.
The critique of twentieth-century American anthropology often portrays anthropologists of the past as servants of colonialism who “extracted” information from indigenous peoples and published works causing them harm. Herbert S. Lewis recovers the reality of the first century of American anthropology as a vital scholarly discipline that rejected established ideas of race, insisted on the value of very different ways of life, and delivered irreplaceable ethnographic studies. This volume presents powerful refutations of the accumulated damaging myths about anthropology’s history.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Colonial History
Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 51
Understanding Business Offenders

A Comparative Analysis of Workplace Deviance, Convenience and Control

Gottschalk, P. & Hamerton, C.
Focusing on understanding business offenders through an exploration of workplace deviance and crime, this book closely examines a number of illustrative contemporary case studies and underpins the analysis of original comparative fieldwork, with an interdisciplinary approach, which informs, develops, and augments the existing literature on white-collar criminology. The book contends, inter alia, that the traditional centrality of the individual actor within narratives of white-collar offending has receded somewhat in recent years despite being a founding artifact within its late twentieth- century discourse, and that therefore a detailed reassessment is overdue.

Subjects: Sociology Theory and Methodology
(Un)Settling Place

Diverse and Divergent Place-Making of People on the Move

Winters, N., Drotbohm, H., & Guevara González, Y. (eds)
People who are “on the move,” particularly migrants and the displaced, often inhabit places that are considered temporary, peripheral, and remote. (Un)Settling Place recentralizes these “out-of-the-way” places as key sites in the shaping of people’s mobility and identities. Ranging from the surveillance and care that migrants experience to the re-creation of social ties and the re-claiming of space, this collection volume seeks to show how a critical approach to in-between place-making can challenge the idea of place as fixed, singular, or one-directional, offering new ways of understanding migrant trajectories.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Mobility Studies Anthropology (General)
Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 14
Haunting Futures

Crisis, Migration and Anticipation in Iceland

Pawlak, M.
The 2008 economic collapse in Iceland sent its residents into a destabilising crisis with far-reaching, temporal and affective consequences. Haunting Futures explores how the complex relationships of this unstable past and the anticipatory modes of the ongoing present keep Icelanders and the Polish migrant community in their midst alert to looming futures in crisis. It offers insights into timely crisis-ridden impacts and imaginings, migration processes and social understandings and practices. Through its attention to how people engage with crisis temporally and affectively, the book presents the crisis not simply as an isolated and distressing event but as a spectre embodied in time through ongoing anticipation.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology History: 20th Century to Present Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Northern Europe
Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations Volume 10
Family Beyond Family

The Varieties of Kinship Experience

Shipton, P. & Ito-Adler, J. P. (eds)
Arguably all humans invent or accept forms of family beyond those that are close biological kin. These fictive forms of kinship may vary across diverse cultures and serve different purposes. This book explores a wide variety of such kinship-forming, from expedient daylong pseudo-marriages to notions of deities as everlasting parents for humankind and life on earth. These range from the purely abstract to the bricks and mortar of college fraternities and sororities. Family Beyond Family observes and examines the principles and purposes of such fabricated connections.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology
Refugee Protection in Southeast Asia

Between Humanitarianism and Sovereignty

Kneebone, S., Mariñas, R., Missbach, A. & Walden, M. (eds)
Despite being long-term hosts to refugee populations, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia are not yet part of the 1951 Refugee Convention. In all three states, refugees are regulated as discretionary humanitarian exceptions to immigration legislation. With contributions from scholars within and outside the region, this book promotes new thinking on protection of refugees and on resolving tensions between states, actors and institutions in the region. It evaluates the key concepts of sovereignty, security and humanitarianism in this context, the different bases of protection by state and non-state actors and the meaning of responsibility and regionalism in Southeast Asia.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Asia
Series: Forced Migration Volume 51
Ritual, Rapture and Rebellion

The Making of Market, Mercy and Meaning Amongst the Gitanos of El Rastro

Brodersen, M. B.
The Gitanos of el Rastro carry an ‘ontology of simultaneity’ as self-employed traders and Pentecostal practitioners in Madrid. This makes the Spanish Romani be considered as both a part of and apart from mainstream society. This book is an anthropological account of a group of middle and upper-class Gitanos and their ways of creating a ‘society within society’ based upon distinct cultural, moral and ideological values, notions and practices. The study renders a comprehensive perspective on social processes of classification, stratification, ‘othering’ and the role of ‘strangers’ in society and how these processes unfold in the interface between social, ritual and economic life on a local to global scale.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Area: Southern Europe
Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations Volume 9
Becoming Good Women

Schooling, Aspirations and Imagining the Future Among Female Students in Sri Lanka

Batatota, L. S.
For female Sinhalese students attending a national school in the Central Province of Sri Lanka, the school serves as a significant base for cultural production, particularly in reproducing ethno-religious hegemony under the guise of ‘good’ Buddhist girls. It illustrates that tuition space acts as an important site for placemaking, where students play out their cosmopolitan aspirations whilst acquiring educational capital. Drawing on theories of social reproduction, the book examines young people’s aspirations of ‘figuring out’ their identity and visions of the future against the backdrop of nation-building processes within the school.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Educational Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Asia
Series: Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories Volume 7
Frontier Ethnographies

Deconstructing Research Experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Choudhury, N. & Schmeding, A. (eds)
Ethnography destabilizes the notion of the frontier as merely a geographic space and conveys its limitations—that lead researchers to reflect on their methodological approaches. Frontier Ethnographies explores the ethnographic edges of contemporary anthropological inquiry in Afghanistan and Pakistan by assembling voices of emerging scholars who have conducted field research within the region in the past two decades. Through examining moments of insecurity, vulnerability, doubt, fear, failure, and daydreaming, researchers reflect on their own experiences of field research and how—faced with frontiers—they have been forced to reimagine or reconstruct their understanding of the social world.

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology
Area: Asia
Radcliffe-Brown

Journeys Through Colonial Worlds, 1881-1955

Niehaus, I.
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) is widely renowned as a founder of modern social anthropology. This biography challenges popular stereotypes of him as a misplaced positivist and colonial conservative. It shows Radcliffe-Brown to be a thoroughly cosmopolitan scholar, a committed fieldworker and a sharp critic of colonialism. Radcliffe-Brown engaged strategically with colonial authorities to further the interests of his discipline and invoked scientific credentials to critique central aspects of colonial rule. His struggle for intellectual autonomy and advocacy of a comparative sociological approach speaks to many contemporary concerns.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology
Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 50
The Hidden Minority

Perceptions of Belonging and Otherness in the Finnish – Russian Borderland

Jerman, H.
Looking at the Finnish–Russian borderland as a transnational space and claiming that there is a need to understand the long-term effects of migration – a continuing process spanning several generations – The Hidden Minority takes a multi-temporal perspective on mobility and belonging. The focus of this ethnographic study is the Russian minority in Finland, which is socially, economically, politically and culturally heterogeneous.The Russian minority in Finland is imbued with ’being hidden‘ or ’hiding oneself‘. The book explores informants’ reflections, together with the author, on the mental and physical crossing of national borders. Perceptions of belonging and/or Otherness and lived experience reveal a complex relationship of embodied memory, history, time and a multi-national social space.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Area: Northern Europe
Series: EASA Series Volume 52
Beyond Ethics and Pragmatism

Evocative Moments in Doing Ethnography

Shokeid, M.
Based on several long-term fieldwork projects in Israel and the Unted States, this book brings together a repertoire of subjective and professional experiences of an anthropologist who attended various theoretical and methodological tutoring settings. That varied panorama of research milieus, ethnographic field sites, and diverse personal engagements, has offered a wide perspective on the complex craft of anthropology. Moreover, it sometimes placed the author in unexpected situations that challenged some habitually accepted modes of personal conduct as well as ethnographic research norms and paradigms, expanding the arena and terms of the anthropological assignments and the record of ethnographic works.

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)
Areas: North America Middle East & Israel
Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 47
An Ethnographic Chiefdom

Epistemic Arrest and Knowledge Production in Czechoslovak Ethnography (1969–1989)

Balaš, N.
The Czechoslovak academic discipline called ‘Ethnography and Folklore Studies’ was impacted and influenced by the daily realities of state socialism in 1969–1989. This book examines the role of the planned economy, Marxist–Leninist ideology, disciplinary hierarchies and clientelist networks, ultimately showing how state socialist features together brought about the discipline’s epistemic stalling. It offers a fresh perspective on the long-standing debates purporting to capture the differences between the Central and Eastern European tradition of ethnology and Western sociocultural anthropology.

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)
Area: Central/Eastern Europe
Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 49
Calibrated Engagement

Chronicles of Local Politics in the Heartland of Myanmar

Huard, S.
For decades, the heartland of Myanmar has been configured as a pacified space under military surveillance. A closer look reveals how politics is enacted at distance with the state. Calibrated Engagement weaves together ethnography and history to chronicle the transformation of rural politics in Anya, the dry lands of central Myanmar. The book presents situations as varied as local elections, inheritance transmissions, land conflicts and ceremonies, to show that politics is about how people calibrate the way they engage with each other.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies
Area: Asia
Series: Asian Anthropologies Volume 17
Tactical Citizenships

Encounters with Everyday State in the Republic of Cyprus

Kouros, T.
The idea of citizenship is formed through a dynamic and flexible set of relationships that go beyond a sequence of formal rights and duties. It is recurring in everyday social contexts—in practices that play out in the real world, in the everyday exercises or refusals of citizenship rights, in the purposeful defiance of norms, and in the tactical evasion of duties. This book explores the troubled relationship between a state and its citizens across four different kinds of social spaces in Limassol, Cyprus. Tactical Citizenships is a testament to the tenacity and resourcefulness of citizens of unfair states in directing their relations with the government.

Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
Area: Southern Europe
Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations Volume 8
Playing the Hand We Are Dealt

The Counterpoint of Fate and Freewill in Literature and Life

Jackson, M.
The relationship between literature and life can be construed as a counterpoint of fate and freewill. Rather than equating fate to the ‘hand we are dealt’ which is reducible to the social or familial environments into which we are born, this book explores the idea of fate through the books that shape our lives and under whose influence we write. Writing in this sense is seen as beyond its utility of making meaning. It is a way of recovering agency in the face of overwhelming experiences. In juxtaposing factuality and fiction, the author makes a case for a radically empirical approach to human experience.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Literary Studies Cultural Studies (General)
Voices in the Dark

The Energy Lives of Refugees

Rosenberg-Jansen, S.
Humanitarianism is in crisis: refugee numbers increase every year and humanitarian agencies are struggling to meet the needs of displaced people. In refugee camps all over the world, refugees are forced to secure their own access to energy and are provided with limited cooking resources and minimal electricity. Voices in the Dark draws upon a decade of original research to provide evidence on the energy lives of refugees. Focusing on refugee camps in Rwanda and Kenya, the book identifies that urgent change is required within humanitarian responses to forced migration and the climate crisis to ensure that future energy provision in displacement settings is sustainable, reliable and affordable for refugees.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
Series: Forced Migration Volume 50
Subjectivity at Latin America's Urban Margins

Kopper, M. & Richmond, M. A. (eds)
Extreme inequalities, uneven planning, and unruly environments have long shaped individual and collective subjectivities at Latin America’s urban margins. Yet these same margins have frequently given rise to new forms of community organization, cultural practice, and social mobilization. This volumeframes the urban margins as complex and multi-layered sites where ongoing translocal histories of exploitation and marginalization meet distinctly local and interpersonal forms of sociability, subjective belonging, and political agency. Through nuanced ethnographic work and cross-disciplinary theoretical insights, Subjectivity at Latin America’s Urban Margins unpacks this complexity, investigating how margins are upheld, negotiated, and challenged.

Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
Series: Urban Anthropology Unbound Volume 2
Subject Lessons

Life Histories as Reciprocal Empowerment

Forrest, J.
Life histories are a class of oral data distinct from memoirs, autobiography, and conventional history in multiple ways. It is a way to lay out the felt experience of events in people’s everyday lives and not simply the statement of historical facts. As narrated pieces, life histories possess the unique voice of the individuals. Collecting data through life histories enables the interviewer-interviewee to develop a special bond that has the capacity to empower both in different ways. Subject Lessons examines the use of and value in using one’s life history as research within the social sciences.

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)
Immigrant Industry

Building Postwar Australia

Pieris, A., Lozanovska, M., Dellios, A., Saniga, A., & Beynon, D.
After the end of the Second World War, migrants were critical to the spatial making of modern Australia. Major federally funded industries driving postwar nation-building programs depended on the employment of large numbers of people who had been displaced by the war. Directed to remote, rural and urban industrial sites, migrant labor and resettlement altered the nation’s physical landscape, providing Australia with its contemporary economic base. While the immigrant contribution to nation-building in cultural terms is well-known, its everyday spatial, architectural and landscape transformations remain unexamined. This book aims to bring to the foreground postwar industry and immigration to comprehensively document a uniquely Australian shaping of the built environment.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Area: Asia-Pacific
Care in a Time of Humanitarianism

Stories of Refuge, Aid, and Repair in the Global South

Osanloo, A. & deBergh Robinson, C. (eds)
The vast majority of forced migrants & refugees seek shelter and respite in countries of the Global South, where humanitarian spaces and practices of care are no exceptions to international humanitarianism but rather part of a project founded on hybrid forms of care that include local and vernacular practices. Care in a Time of Humanitarianism presents complex histories of forced migration and humanitarianism in an accessible way. It applies a comparative approach to highlight the diverse cultural and religious traditions of care that are adopted across the Global South for the “distant others”.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
Areas: Asia Africa
Series: Humanitarianism and Security Volume 5
Oscar Lewis in Cuba

La Partida Final

Rigdon, S. M.
American anthropologist Oscar Lewis secured permission from Fidel Castro to undertake three years of field research on cultural and economic change in Cuba in the decade after the victory of Castro’s M-26 Movement. This book delves into Lewis’ research goals, methods, the training and composition of his field team, and the difficulties of executing the plan in the political climate in Cuba at the time. The government’s reasons for early termination of the research agreement are enumerated and their many discrepancies and inconsistencies evaluated. The experience of Project Cuba offers lessons on the difficulties of doing social science research in any highly surveilled, politically controlled environment however sympathetic the principal investigator.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology History: 20th Century to Present Theory and Methodology
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
Governing Migration Through Paperwork

Legitimation Practices, Exclusive Inclusion and Differentiation

Andreetta, S. & Borrelli, L. M. (eds)
To better understand migration governance and the concrete, daily practices of civil servants tasked with enforcing state laws and policies, it is important to focus on documents, which are core artefacts of bureaucratic work. These can include certificates, letters, reports, case files, decisions, internal guidelines and judgements in both digital and paper form. Based on ethnographic studies in various geographical and bureaucratic contexts, this collection shows how civil servants produce statehood, restrict migrants’ movements and engage with migrants’ strategies to make themselves legible. It contributes to the study of the state as documentary practice and highlights the role of paperwork as a powerful practice of migration control.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories Volume 6
The State Otherwise

Green Space, Citizenship and Advocating for the Public in Beirut

Stefanelli, A.
The city of Beirut is increasingly congested, polluted and suffocating. Its already limited green public spaces are under growing threat of privatisation and redevelopment. The State Otherwise examines the difficult predicament of Beirut’s public green spaces from the vantage point of the civic campaign to reopen Horsh al Sanawbar, the city’s largest public park. Analysing the relationship between neoliberal sectarianism, private interest and political action, the book asks questions about the nature of privatisation of public property, civic society’s potential to mobilise individuals and the role of public authorities in promoting the public good.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Middle East & Israel
The Potential for Anthropology and Urban Community Engagement

Lessons Learned from Twenty-Five Years in Milwaukee

Lackey, J. F. & Petrie, R.
The relationship between anthropology departments and their surrounding urban communities has been traditional limited by a number of factors. The Potential for Anthropology and Urban Community Engagement pushes past these limitations, developing a firm foundation from which applied anthropology can support grassroots research and lasting community programs. Using two partnering Milwaukee organizations as examples, this volume explores the need in urban neighborhoods for practicing anthropologists, how a high volume of asset-building programs can be developed by practicing anthropologists, and the potential efficacy of anthropology departments in partnering with urban neighborhoods.

Subjects: Applied Anthropology Urban Studies
Area: North America
Migration, Dislocation and Movement on Screen

Trandafoiu, R. (ed)
Contemporary screen industries such as film and television have become primary sites for visualizing borders, migration, maps, and travel as processes of separation and dislocation, but also connection. Migration, Dislocation and Movement on Screen pulls case studies in film and television industries from throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia to interrogate the nature of movement via moving images. By combining theoretical, interdisciplinary engagements with empirical research, this volume offers a new way to look at screen media's representations of our contemporary world's transnational and cosmopolitan imaginaries.

Subjects: Film and Television Studies Refugee and Migration Studies History: 20th Century to Present
Area: Europe
Two Against the Tide

The shared career and lost legacy of Brenda and Charles Seligman

Lazarsfeld-Jensen, A.
When Charles Seligman invited his wife, Brenda, to share his tent in 1907, he sanctioned a professional place for female fieldworkers in anthropology. Seligman was a groundbreaking pioneer of ethnographic work in Oceania and Africa. He treated shellshocked soldiers, he amassed museum collections and he fathered a generation of exceptional students. Brenda, his first student, became a scholar in her own right. Eighty years after his death, the Seligman legacy was deleted from the institution he began. Two Against the Tide explores how as wealthy Anglo-Jews, Charles and Brenda Seligman built a shared career through secret benevolence and silent endurance of hardship.

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)
Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 48
Egalitarian Dynamics

Liminality, and Victor Turner’s Contribution to the Understanding of Socio-historical Process

Kapferer, B. & Gold, M. (eds)
Liminality: the state of being ‘betwixt and between’ is one of anthropology’s most influential concepts. This volume reconsiders Victor Turner’s innovative extension of Arnold Van Gennep’s concept of liminality from within the Manchester tradition of Social Anthropology established by Max Gluckman. Turner’s work was grounded in ethnography and engaged with philosophical perspectives in varied socio-historical contexts, extending well-beyond the confines of the anthropology that initially inspired much of his work. Liminality has therefore become a concept with broad interdisciplinary reach. Engaging with topical issues across the globe – from neuroscience to open access publishing and refugee experiences in Europe – this volume launches Turner’s fundamental work into the future.

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)
Series: Egalitarianism Volume 2
The Global Life of Mines

Mining and Post-Mining in Comparative Perspective

Pusceddu, A. M. & Zerilli, F. M. (eds)
Resource extraction exists in diverse settings across the world and is carried out through different practices. The Global Life of Mines provides a comprehensive framework examining the spatial and temporal relationships between mining and postmining as interrelated and coexisting features within the global minescape. The book brings together scholars from various fields, such as anthropology, geography, sociology and political science, examining ethnographic case studies throughout the Americas (Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, USA), Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Europe (Italy, Arctic Norway and Spain).

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Development Studies
Series: Dislocations Volume 37
Reconstructing Homes

Affective Materiality and Atmospheres of Belonging

Koskinen-Koivisto, E., Korjonen-Kuusipuro, K., Čeginskas, V. L. A., Kajander, A., & De Nardi, H. (eds)
In the practice of constructing the idea of home and the emotions surrounding it, sensory experiences and materiality intertwine to form layers of memory and affective atmospheres. People in different life stages and situations create continuity and a sense of home by engaging with materiality and objects in their own unique way. Reconstructing Homes takes on a multidisciplinary approach of sensory ethnography, visual methods and autoethnography methodologies to explore affective engagements with materiality in the context of home and the idea of belonging.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Volume 15
The Politics of Relations

How Self-Government, Infrastructures, and Care Transform the State in Serbia

Thiemann, A.
Rethinking the contributions of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology for political ethnography, the Politics of Relations elaborates its relational approach to the state along four interlaced axes of research – embeddedness, boundary work, modalities and strategic selectivity – that enable thick comparisons across spatio-temporal scales of power.
In Serbia local experiences of self-government, infrastructure and care motivate its citizens to “become the state” while cursing it heartily. While both officials and citizens strive for a state that enables a “normal life,” they navigate the increasingly illiberal politics enacted by national parties and which are tolerated by trans-national donors.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Area: Central/Eastern Europe
Series: EASA Series Volume 49
Culture Figures

A Rhetorical Reading of Anthropology

Mokrzan, M.
Ethnographic research, anthropological theory, and the understanding of the objects of inquiry, are co-created through figuration (using tropes and rhetorical figures) and techniques of persuasion. Delving into descriptive ethnography and theoretical texts spanning across classical monographs and recent texts in cultural anthropology, Culture Figures places rhetoric and rhetoricity as central to the discipline’s self-understanding. It focuses on how understandings of ‘culture’ and social life are shaped and conveyed in cultural anthropology through textual rhetoric. The book demonstrates how processes of using tropes and modes of persuasion underlie the creation of meanings or misunderstandings in society.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sociology
Series: Studies in Rhetoric and Culture Volume 10
One Hundred Years of Argonauts

Malinowski, Ethnography and Economic Anthropology

Hann, C. & James, D. (eds)
Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific was a major contribution to anthropological theory and method, while simultaneously establishing the sub-field of economic anthropology. Even a century after its publication, Malinowski’s pioneering work remains critical for anthropology in a postcolonial age. This volume uses ethnographic studies from around the world to contextualize the work politically and intellectually, examining its gestation and influence from multiple perspectives. It critically explores the meaning of “economy” for Malinowski from his formation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to his path-breaking fieldwork in Melanesia and ensuing career in London.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)
Area: Asia-Pacific
Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 13
Beyond Pain

The Anthropology of Body Suspensions

Manfredi, F.
The practice of body suspension — piercing one’s own flesh with metal hooks and hanging from them — and its uniquely sprawling community challenge our cultural understanding of pain. The suspendees experience physical suffering to trigger altered states of consciousness that help them define and create an enhanced version of the self. Through experimental and practice-based methodology, Beyond Pain combines thirteen years of intermittent ethnographical fieldwork during suspension festivals and private events in Italy, Portugal, and Norway, along with online sites such as Facebook groups, to uncover the often silenced and misunderstood voices of the people who undertake this practice.

Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
Area: Europe
Practical Archaeogaming

Reinhard, A.
As a sequel to Archaeogaming: an Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games, the author focuses on the practical and applied side of the discipline, collecting recent digital fieldwork together in one place for the first time to share new methods in treating interactive digital built environments as sites for archaeological investigation. Fully executed examples of practical and applied archaeogaming include the necessity of a rapid archaeology of digital built environments, the creation of a Harris matrix for software stratigraphy, the ethnographic work behind a human civilization trapped in an unstable digital landscape, how to conduct photogrammetry and GIS mapping in procedurally generated space, and how to transform digital artifacts into printed three-dimensional objects. Additionally, the results of the 2014 Atari excavation in Alamogordo, New Mexico are summarized for the first time.

Subjects: Archaeology Media Studies Anthropology (General)
Religious Sensibilities in Pursuit of Sexual Well-Being

African Diasporic Communities in the Netherlands

Bakuri, A. Z.
The self-identifying Ghanaian-Dutch and Somali-Dutch communities residing in the Randstad area of the Netherlands are deeply impacted by religious beliefs and cultural factors in their approach towards sexual health practices, well-being and pleasure. This book shows how religious sensibilities shape the physical activities, beauty practices, and gendered roles that are adopted into the daily lives of these communities in pursuit of their sexual and general well-being. Through an ethnographic account, it explores and challenges the assumptions held around the complex relationship between religion and sexuality.

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
Area: Northern Europe
Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 55
Asian Lives in Anthropological Perspective

Essays on Morality, Achievement and Modernity

Bayly, S.
Contemporary Asian societies bear the imprint of the experience and afterlives of colonialism, revolutionary socialism and religious and secular nationalism in dramatically contrasting ways. Asian Lives in Anthropological Perspective draws together essays that demonstrate the role of these far-reaching transformations in the shaping of two Asian settings in particular – India and Vietnam. It traces historical and contemporary realities through a variety of compelling topics including the lived experience of India’s caste system and the ethical challenges faced by Vietnamese working women.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Theory and Methodology
Area: Asia
Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 16
Boaters of London

Alternative Living on the Water

Bowles, B. O. L.
London and the Southeast of England is home to an alternative community of people called 'boaters': individuals and families who live on narrowboats, cruisers and barges, along a network of canals and rivers. Many of these people move from place to place every two weeks due to mooring rules and form itinerant communities in the heart of some of the UK’s most built-up and expensive urban spaces. Boaters of London is an ethnography that delves into the process of becoming a boater, adopting an alternative lifestyle on the water and the political impact that this travelling population has on the state.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Urban Studies
Area: Europe
Series: Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories Volume 5
State Intimacies

Sterilization, Care and Reproductive Chronicity in Rural North India

Fiks, E.
The public healthcare system in rural India is chronically under-resourced. It embodies and often perpetuates the wider politics of the Indian state towards its rural communities with provisions of care that are deeply entangled with violence and disgust. For rural women, such care deepens reproductive chronicity while providing temporary relief. Grounded in women’s everyday realities and experiences in sterilization camps and other healthcare settings in rural Rajasthan, State Intimacies examines the mundane workings, ambiguities and fragilities of care in post-colonial rural North India.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Asia
Series: Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories Volume 4
Difference and Sameness in Schools

Perspectives from the European Anthropology of Education

Gilliam, L. & Markom, C. (eds)
Presenting European Anthropology of Education through eleven studies of European schools, this volume explores the constructing and handling of difference and sameness in the central institutions of schools. Based on ethnographic studies of schools in Greece, England, Norway, Italy, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Spain, Austria, Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, it illustrates how anthropological studies of schools provide a window to larger society. It thus offers insights into cultural lessons taught to children through policies, institutional structures and everyday interactions, as well as into schools’ entanglement in state projects, cultural processes, societal histories and conflicts, and hence into contemporary Europe.

Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Europe
Series: EASA Series Volume 48
Humanism Revisited

An Anthropological Perspective

Pinxten, R.
The West emancipated itself from the old humanism long ago and in doing so distanced itself from ‘heteronomy’: it declared that man, and not a non-human power, should be the first reference to approach people and nature. Today, as heirs of this tradition, we are still stuck in Eurocentrism (and often racism), and now even threaten to ruin nature by destroying biodiversity and causing the climate to warm up dangerously. Applied through an anthropological perspective, this book calls for a NEED-humanism: Not-Eurocentric, Ecological and (economically) Durable approach that can help promote inclusion and pluralism.

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
‘I am Here’, Abraham Said

Emmanuel Levinas and Anthropological Science

Rapport, N.
Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical work on ‘the Other’ offers a challenge to the discipline of anthropology that claims knowledge of the human. For Levinas, the ‘secrecy’ of subjectivity – a fundamental facet of the human condition – demands an ethics of ignorance and not-knowing; the mystery of otherness is only to be approached through ‘inspiration’. Can anthropology meet a Levinasian challenge if it would define itself as a science as well as a humanistic documentation of social life? This book endeavours to take Levinasian and anthropological precepts equally seriously and offers a radical conclusion.

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)
Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 47
Food and Families in the Making

Knowledge Reproduction and Political Economy of Cooking in Morocco

Graf, K.
Even in the context of rapid material and social change in urban Morocco, women, and especially those from low-income households, continue to invest a lot of work in preparing good food for their families. Through the lens of domestic food preparation, this book looks at knowledge reproduction, how we know cooking and its role in the making of everyday family life. It also examines a political economy of cooking that situates Marrakchi women’s lived experiences in the broader context of persisting poverty and food insecurity in Morocco.

Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
Series: Food, Nutrition, and Culture Volume 8
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

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

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
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
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

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

Syria's Refugees in the Middle East

Knudsen, A. J. & Tobin, S. A. (eds)
Syria’s massive displacement (from 2012 onwards) 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 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 experts in the field of forced migration studies and displacement in the Middle East and presents a range of in-depth ethnographic data, cross-sectional surveys and policy analyses.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Middle East & Israel
Series: Forced Migration Volume 48
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

Materiality, Morality and Global Commodity Chains in Andean Commerce

Müller, J.
Addressing the infrastructural, social and legal complexities of a global commodity chain, this book uses an ethnographic analysis of the encounter between multinational corporations and popular traders in the Bolivian Andes. It offers a situated account of the everyday work of chain (un)making, and practices of translation, accommodation and contention. It highlights traders’ collective action, understanding of economic concepts and regulatory principles, and traces the circulation of goods and money beyond market exchange. All in all, it aims to comprehend the reproduction of the native trading system amid global connections, and to humanize our understanding of the economy by grounding it in everyday life, bottom-up socio-material infrastructures 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

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) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Southern Europe
Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 32
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
Series: Epistemologies of Healing Volume 22
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

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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
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

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 of Religion Refugee and Migration Studies
Area: Germany
Series: Epistemologies of Healing Volume 21
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Dislocations Volume 35
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

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

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
Resisting Radicalisation?

Understanding Young People's Journeys through Radicalising Milieus

Pilkington, H. (ed)
This landmark volume of extensive empirical research conducted across Europe explains how, and why, young people become engaged in radical(ising) milieus but also resist radicalisation into violent extremism.

Offering a critical perspective on the concept of radicalisation, this volume views it from the perspective of social actors who engage in radicalising milieus but for the most part have not crossed the threshold into violent extremism. It brings together contributions conducted as part of a cross-European (including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, Russia, Turkey, the UK, and beyond) study of young people's engagement in ‘extreme right’ and ‘Islamist’ milieus.

It argues that radicalisation is best understood as a relational concept reflecting a social process rooted in relational inequalities but also shaped by interactional and situational dynamics, which not only facilitate but also constrain radicalisation.

Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Area: Europe
Other Borders

History, Mobility and Migration of Rudari Families between Romania and Italy

Tosi Cambini, S.
Rudari Lingurari families, one of many significant minority groups in Southeastern Europe, have been characterized by mobility since the end of the nineteenth century, from voluntary border crossings to deportations and forced relocations. Other Borders draws from participatory, multi-site ethnographic research to explore rudari families' cultural and relational frames of mobility through their social and economic organization. Sabrina Tosi Cambini develops the concept of 'moving gaze' to more effectively explore rudari migration paths across multiple countries, their occupation of unoccupied buildings in Italy, their housing practices in both Italy and Romania, and the movement of their objects, ideas and imaginaries.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Cultural Studies (General) Theory and Methodology
Areas: Southern Europe Central/Eastern Europe
Children are Everywhere

Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin

Joshi, M.
Children are Everywhere engages with how demographic anxieties and reproductive regimes emerge as forms of social inclusion and exclusion in a low fertility Western European context. This book explores everyday experiences of parenting and childlessness of ‘ethnic’ Germans in Berlin, who came of age around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and brings them into conversation with theories on parenting, waithood, non-biological intimacies, and masculinities. This is the first ethnographic work by a South Asian author on demographic anxieties and reproduction in Germany and reverses the anthropological gaze to study Europe as the ‘Other.’

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality
Area: Germany
Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 53
The UNHCR and the Afghan Crisis

The Making of the International Refugee Regime

Scalettaris, G.
Today the UNHCR is present in more than 130 countries and takes care of some 90 million people. This book looks at how it is deployed and who its agents are. By taking the reader through the offices in charge of the Afghan refugee crisis during the 2000s, in Geneva and in Kabul, the book shows the internal functioning of this international organization. It provides analysis of Afghan refugee policies from an original position, with the author being both agency official and anthropologist, and articulates multiple levels of analysis: the micropolitics of practices as much as the institution and the multi-scalar power relations that shape its environment.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies
Area: Asia
Series: Humanitarianism and Security Volume 3
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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Asia-Pacific
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
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
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

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

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

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

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) Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Urban Anthropology Unbound Volume 1
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
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
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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Asia
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) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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)
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

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

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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: The Anthropology of Obstetrics and Obstetricians: The Practice, Maintenance, and Reproduction of a Biomedical Profession Volume 3
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: The Anthropology of Obstetrics and Obstetricians: The Practice, Maintenance, and Reproduction of a Biomedical Profession Volume 1
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

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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Asia
Series: Dislocations Volume 34
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

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

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
Servants of Culture

Paternalism, Policing, and Identity Politics in Vienna, 1700-1914

Natarajan, A.
In nineteenth century Cisleithanian Austria, poor, working-class women underwent mass migrations from the countryside to urban centers for menial or unskilled labor jobs. Through legal provisions on women’s work in the Habsburg Empire, there was an increase in the policing and surveillance of what was previously a gender-neutral career, turning it into one dominated by thousands of female rural migrants. Servants of Culture provides an account of Habsburg servant law since the eighteenth century and uncovers the paternalistic and maternalistic assumptions and anxieties which turned the interest of socio-political players in improving poor living and working conditions into practices that created restrictive gender and class hierarchies. Through pioneering analysis of the agendas of medical experts, police, socialists, feminists, legal reformers, and even serial killers, this volume puts forth a neglected history of the state of domestic service discourse at the turn of the 19th century and how it shaped and continues to shape the surveillance of women.

Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Refugee and Migration Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality
Area: Central/Eastern Europe
Series: Austrian and Habsburg Studies Volume 34
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Northern Europe
Series: Dislocations Volume 33
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

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
The Girl in the Pandemic

Transnational Perspectives

Mitchell, C. & Smith, A. (eds)
As seen in previous pandemics, girls and young women are particularly vulnerable as social issues such as homelessness, mental healthcare, access to education, and child labor are often exacerbated. The Girl in the Pandemic considers what academics, community activists, and those working in local, national, and global NGOs are learning about the lives of girls and young women during pandemics. Drawing from a range of responses during the pandemic including first person narratives, community ethnographies, and participatory action research, this collection offers a picture of how the COVID-19 pandemic played out in eight different countries.

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Development Studies Sociology Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Transnational Girlhoods Volume 5
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

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

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

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
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

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

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?

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Central/Eastern Europe
Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations Volume 6
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

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

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)
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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Europe
Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 13
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 52
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
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

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

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

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

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

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
The Marseille Mosaic

A Mediterranean City at the Crossroads of Cultures

Ingram, M. & Kleppinger, K. (eds)
Formerly the gateway to the French empire, the city of Marseille exemplifies a postcolonial Europe reshaped by immigrants, refugees, and repatriates. The Marseille Mosaic addresses the city’s past and present, exploring the relationship between Marseille and the rest of France, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Proposing new models for the study of place by integrating approaches from the humanities and social sciences, this volume offers an idiosyncratic “mosaic,” which vividly details the challenges facing other French and European cities and the ways residents are developing alternative perspectives and charting new urban futures.

Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present Sociology Urban Studies
Areas: France Europe
Series: Space and Place Volume 21
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

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

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

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

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
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

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)
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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 31
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

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

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

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

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

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

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) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 30
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

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) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Europe
Series: Anthropology of Europe Volume 7
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

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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Circumpolar
Series: Studies in the Circumpolar North Volume 6
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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: EASA Series Volume 45
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
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 communities. This book takes as its starting point the surprising increase in polyandry in Panam valley from the 1980s.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality
Area: Asia
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

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

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?

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Asia
Series: Catastrophes in Context Volume 5
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

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

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

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) Sustainable Development Goals
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Rethinking Biosocial Anthropology Volume 10
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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
Series: Anthropology of Food & Nutrition Volume 10
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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: France
Series: WYSE Series in Social Anthropology Volume 11
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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Middle East & Israel
Series: Dislocations Volume 31
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 Sustainable Development Goals
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Europe
Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 29
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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Germany
Series: Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association Volume 23
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Circumpolar
Series: Studies in the Circumpolar North Volume 5
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

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

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
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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
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

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
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

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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Epistemologies of Healing Volume 19
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Central/Eastern Europe
Series: Forced Migration Volume 45
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies Volume 5
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Central/Eastern Europe
Series: Forced Migration Volume 44
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Europe
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

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

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

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?

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
Entrepreneurs of Identity

The Islamic State’s Symbolic Repertoire

Günther, C.
Describing the Islamic State’s ideologues as ‘entrepreneurs of identity’, this book explores how the group defined categories of social identity and used them as tools of communicative and cognitive structuring. Based on a wide dossier of original texts, speeches, images, and videos, the book examines how these ideologues have built a symbolic repertoire around the black flag as well as ideas and social practices such as the dictum to command good and forbid wrong, the supervision of public behaviour, and the oath of allegiance to the Caliph.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies
Area: Middle East & Israel
Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 25
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Middle East & Israel
Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 11
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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Middle East & Israel
Series: Forced Migration Volume 43
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

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

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
Rethinking Internal Displacement

Geo-political Games, Fragile States and the Relief Industry

Laker, F.
Internal displacement has become one of the most pressing geo-political concerns of the twenty-first century. There are currently over 45 million internally displaced people worldwide due to conflict, state collapse and natural disaster in such high profile cases as Syria, Yemen and Iraq. To tackle such vast human suffering, in the last twenty years a global United Nations regime has emerged that seeks to replicate the long-established order of refugee protection by applying international law and humanitarian assistance to citizens within their own borders. This book looks at the origins, structure and impact of this new UN regime and whether it is fit for purpose.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies
Series: Humanitarianism and Security Volume 1
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
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

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

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?

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

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
Outsiders

Memories of Migration to and from North Korea

Bell, M.
In this unique and insightful book, Markus Bell explores the hidden histories of the men, women, and children who traveled from Japan to the world’s most secretive state—North Korea. Through vivid ethnographic details and interviews with North Korean escapees, Outsiders: Memories of Migration to and from North Korea reveals the driving forces that propelled thousands of ordinary people to risk it all in Kim Il-Sung’s “Worker’s Paradise”, only to escape back to Japan half a century later.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)
Area: Asia
Series: Forced Migration Volume 42
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Life Course, Culture and Aging: Global Transformations Volume 8
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 Sustainable Development Goals
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

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

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

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?

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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
Series: Forced Migration Volume 41
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) Sustainable Development Goals
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) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Europe
Series: Transnational Girlhoods Volume 3
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

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
Constructing Risk

Disaster, Development, and the Built Environment

Bender, S. O.
Reviewing current policies and practices, the book assesses the financial, economic and physical risk of building in hazardous areas, and looks at how societies approach economic development while trying to create a more resilient built environment in spite of the dangers. It examines the vulnerability of economic and social infrastructure to natural hazard events, looks at policies which imperil infrastructure, and proposes new development approaches to be undertaken by sovereign states, international development banks, NGOs, and bilateral aid agencies.

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Catastrophes in Context Volume 4
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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
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

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

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

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

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

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)
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

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

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

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

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
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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
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

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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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
Authenticity and Authorship in Pacific Island Encounters

New Lives of Old Imaginaries

Mageo, J. & Knauft, B. (eds)
The insular Pacific is a region saturated with great cultural diversity and poignant memories of colonial and Christian intrusion. Considering authenticity and authorship in the area, this book looks at how these ideas have manifested themselves in Pacific peoples and cultures. Through six rich complementary case studies, a theoretical introduction, and a critical afterword, this volume explores authenticity and authorship as “traveling concepts.” The book reveals diverse and surprising outcomes which shed light on how Pacific identity has changed from the past to the present.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies
Area: Asia-Pacific
Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology Volume 11
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) Sustainable Development Goals
Series: EASA Series Volume 42
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

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

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

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) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Asia
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Transnational Girlhoods Volume 2
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

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
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
Deconstructing Dolls

Girlhoods and the Meanings of Play

Forman-Brunell, M. (ed)
In recent decades, emerging scholarship in the field of girlhood studies has led to a particular interest in dolls as sources of documentary evidence. Deconstructing Dolls pushes the boundaries of doll studies by expanding the definition of dolls, ages of doll players, sites of play, research methods, and application of theory. By utilizing a variety of new approaches, this collected volume seeks to understand the historical and contemporary significance of dolls and girlhood play, particularly as they relate to social meanings in the lives of girls and young women across race, age, time, and culture.

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General)
Religion and Pride

Hindus in Search of Recognition in La Réunion

Lang, N.
Seeking recognition presents an important driving force in the making of religious minorities, as is shown in this study that examines current debates on religion, globalization, diaspora, and secularism through the lens of Hindus living in the French overseas department of La Réunion. Through the examination of religious practices and public performance, the author offers a compelling study of how the Hindus of the island assert pride in their religion as a means of gaining recognition, self-esteem, and social status.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
Area: Africa
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

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) Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Protest, Culture & Society Volume 28
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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Environment in History: International Perspectives Volume 21
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: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Mobility Studies Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 23
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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: EASA Series Volume 41
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

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

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

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

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
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

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
Ecological Nostalgias

Memory, Affect and Creativity in Times of Ecological Upheavals

Angé, O. & Berliner, D. (eds)
Introducing the study of econostalgias through a variety of rich ethnographic cases, this volume argues that a strictly human centered approach does not account for contemporary longings triggered by ecosystem upheavals. In this time of climate change, this book explores how nostalgia for fading ecologies unfolds into the interstitial spaces between the biological, the political and the social, regret and hope, the past, the present and the future.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Cultural Studies (General) Memory Studies
Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 26
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

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

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

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

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
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

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

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)
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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Asia-Pacific
Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists Volume 8
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
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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
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?

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Life Course, Culture and Aging: Global Transformations Volume 7
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

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

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

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

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

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 Applied Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Catastrophes in Context Volume 3
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

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

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

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

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

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

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) Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 6
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

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

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

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?

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) Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis Volume 19
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) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Southern Europe
Series: Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Volume 25
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Circumpolar
Series: Studies in the Circumpolar North Volume 3
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Europe
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

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

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?

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?

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Forced Migration Volume 39
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) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Europe
Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 7
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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 45
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
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

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

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

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. Lives 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

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

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
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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Central/Eastern Europe
Series: EASA Series Volume 38
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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
Series: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives Volume 44
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: Political and Economic Anthropology Urban Studies Sociology Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
Series: Dislocations Volume 27
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
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
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

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
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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
Series: Epistemologies of Healing Volume 18
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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 20
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

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

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

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

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

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

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) Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Anthropology of Food & Nutrition Volume 9
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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Asia-Pacific
Series: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Volume 5
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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
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

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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
Series: Integration and Conflict Studies Volume 19
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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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

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

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

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
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

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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'?

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” as 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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 more—as 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

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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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

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 Sustainable Development Goals
Series: Forced Migration Volume 37
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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Asia-Pacific
Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 40
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
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

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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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?

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

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

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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
Breaking Rocks

Music, Ideology and Economic Collapse, from Paris to Kinshasa

Trapido, J.
Based on fieldwork in Kinshasa and Paris, Breaking Rocks examines patronage payments within Congolese popular music, where a love song dedication can cost 6,000 dollars and a simple name check can trade for 500 or 600 dollars. Tracing this system of prestige through networks of musicians and patrons – who include gangsters based in Europe, kleptocratic politicians in Congo, and lawless diamond dealers in northern Angola – this book offers insights into ideologies of power and value in central Africa’s troubled post-colonial political economy, as well as a glimpse into the economic flows that make up the hidden side of the globalization.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General)
Areas: Africa France
Series: Dislocations Volume 19
Human Origins

Contributions from Social Anthropology

Power, C., Finnegan, M. & Callan, H. (eds)
Human Origins brings together new thinking by social anthropologists and other scholars on the evolution of human culture and society. No other discipline has more relevant expertise to consider the emergence of humans as the symbolic species. Yet, social anthropologists have been conspicuously absent from debates about the origins of modern humans. These contributions explore why that is, and how social anthropology can shed light on early kinship and economic relations, gender politics, ritual, cosmology, ethnobiology, medicine, and the evolution of language.

Subject: Anthropology (General)
Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 30
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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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
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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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

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

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 S

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Correcting the Record

Essays on the History of American Anthropology

Lewis, H. S.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Colonial History

Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 51

Understanding Business Offenders

A Comparative Analysis of Workplace Deviance, Convenience and Control

Gottschalk, P. & Hamerton, C.

Subjects: Sociology Theory and Methodology

(Un)Settling Place

Diverse and Divergent Place-Making of People on the Move

Winters, N., Drotbohm, H., & Guevara González, Y. (eds)

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Mobility Studies Anthropology (General)

Series: Worlds in Motion Volume 14

Haunting Futures

Crisis, Migration and Anticipation in Iceland

Pawlak, M.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology History: 20th Century to Present Sustainable Development Goals

Area: Northern Europe

Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations Volume 10

Family Beyond Family

The Varieties of Kinship Experience

Shipton, P. & Ito-Adler, J. P. (eds)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

Refugee Protection in Southeast Asia

Between Humanitarianism and Sovereignty

Kneebone, S., Mariñas, R., Missbach, A. & Walden, M. (eds)

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals

Area: Asia

Series: Forced Migration Volume 51

Ritual, Rapture and Rebellion

The Making of Market, Mercy and Meaning Amongst the Gitanos of El Rastro

Brodersen, M. B.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

Area: Southern Europe

Series: New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations Volume 9

Becoming Good Women

Schooling, Aspirations and Imagining the Future Among Female Students in Sri Lanka

Batatota, L. S.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Educational Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality Sustainable Development Goals

Area: Asia

Series: Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories Volume 7

Frontier Ethnographies

Deconstructing Research Experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Choudhury, N. & Schmeding, A. (eds)

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology

Area: Asia

Radcliffe-Brown

Journeys Through Colonial Worlds, 1881-1955

Niehaus, I.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology

Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 50

The Hidden Minority

Perceptions of Belonging and Otherness in the Finnish – Russian Borderland

Jerman, H.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

Area: Northern Europe

Series: EASA Series Volume 52

Beyond Ethics and Pragmatism

Evocative Moments in Doing Ethnography

Shokeid, M.

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)

Areas: North America Middle East & Israel

Series: New Directions in Anthropology Volume 47

An Ethnographic Chiefdom

Epistemic Arrest and Knowledge Production in Czechoslovak Ethnography (1969–1989)

Balaš, N.

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)

Area: Central/Eastern Europe

Series: Methodology & History in Anthropology Volume 49

Calibrated Engagement

Chronicles of Local Politics in the Heartland of Myanmar

Huard, S.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies

Area: Asia