We are delighted to present a selection of our newly published March 2015 titles from our core subjects of Anthropology, Colonialism, Education, Global Health, History, Medical Anthropology, Politics, Theory & Methodology in Anthropology, and Urban Studies, along with a selection of our New in Paperback titles.
We are especially excited to announce the publication of the paperback edition of CIVILIZING NATURE edited by Bernhard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler and Patrick Kupper.
“This book makes a unique contribution to the conservation literature by enhancing one’s understanding and appreciation of the cultural meaning of nature conservation through the lens of national park development. […] Highly recommended.” · Choice
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NIMBY IS BEAUTIFUL
Cases of Local Activism and Environmental Innovation Around the World
Edited by Carol Hager and Mary Alice Haddad
NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) protests are often criticized as parochial and short-lived, generating no lasting influence on broader processes related to environmental politics. This volume offers a different perspective. Drawing on cases from around the globe, it demonstrates that NIMBY protests, although always arising from a local concern in a particular community, often result in broader political, social, and technological change. Chapters include cases from Europe, North America, and Asia, engaging with the full political spectrum from established democracies to non-democratic countries. Regardless of political setting, NIMBY movements can have a positive and proactive role in generating innovative solutions to local as well as transnational environmental issues. Furthermore, those solutions are now serving as models for communities and countries around the world.
URBAN VIOLENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Changing Cityscapes in the Transition from Empire to Nation State
Edited by Ulrike Freitag, Nelida Fuccaro, Claudia Ghrawi, and Nora Lafi
Volume 14, Space and Place
Covering a period from the late eighteenth century to today, this volume explores the phenomenon of urban violence in order to unveil general developments and historical specificities in a variety of Middle Eastern contexts. By situating incidents in particular processes and conflicts, the case studies seek to counter notions of a violent Middle East in order to foster a new understanding of violence beyond that of a meaningless and destructive social and political act. Contributions explore processes sparked by the transition from empires — Ottoman and Qajar, but also European — to the formation of nation states, and the resulting changes in cityscapes throughout the region.
BREAD FROM THE LION’S MOUTH
Artisans Struggling for a Livelihood in Ottoman Cities
Edited by Suraiya Faroqhi
Volume 25, International Studies in Social History
The newly awakened interest in the lives of craftspeople in Turkey is highlighted in this collection, which uses archival documents to follow Ottoman artisans from the late 15th century to the beginning of the 20th. The authors examine historical changes in the lives of artisans, focusing on the craft organizations (or guilds) that underwent substantial changes over the centuries. The guilds transformed and eventually dissolved as they were increasingly co-opted by modernization and state-building projects, and by the movement of manufacturing to the countryside. In consequence by the 20th century, many artisans had to confront the forces of capitalism and world trade without significant protection, just as the Ottoman Empire was itself in the process of dissolution.
AT HOME IN POSTWAR FRANCE
Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort
Nicole C. Rudolph
Volume 14, Berghahn Monographs in French Studies
After World War II, France embarked on a project of modernization, which included the development of the modern mass home. At Home in Postwar France examines key groups of actors — state officials, architects, sociologists and tastemakers — arguing that modernizers looked to the home as a site for social engineering and nation-building; designers and advocates of the modern home contributed to the democratization of French society; and the French home of the Trente Glorieuses, as it was built and inhabited, was a hybrid product of architects’, planners’, and residents’ understandings of modernity. This volume identifies the “right to comfort” as an invention of the postwar period and suggests that the modern mass home played a vital role in shaping new expectations for well-being and happiness.
SEX AND CONTROL
Venereal Disease, Colonial Physicians, and Indigenous Agency in German Colonialism, 1884-1914
Daniel J. Walther
Volume 36, Monographs in German History
In responding to the perceived threat posed by venereal diseases in Germany’s colonies, doctors took a biopolitical approach that employed medical and bourgeois discourses of modernization, health, productivity, and morality. Their goal was to change the behavior of targeted groups, or at least to isolate infected individuals from the healthy population. However, the Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Asians they administered to were not passive recipients of these strategies. Rather, their behavior strongly influenced the efficacy and nature of these public health measures. While an apparent degree of compliance was achieved, over time physicians increasingly relied on disciplinary measures beyond what was possible in Germany in order to enforce their policies. Ultimately, through their discourses and actions they contributed to the justification for and the maintenance of German colonialism.
LEARNING UNDER NEOLIBERALISM
Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education
Edited by Susan Brin Hyatt, Boone W. Shear, and Susan Wright
Volume 1, Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies
As part of the neoliberal trends toward public-private partnerships, universities all over the world have forged more intimate relationships with corporate interests and more closely resemble for-profit corporations in both structure and practice. These transformations, accompanied by new forms of governance, produce new subject-positions among faculty and students and enable new approaches to teaching, curricula, research, and everyday practices. The contributors to this volume use ethnographic methods to investigate the multi-faceted impacts of neoliberal restructuring, while reporting on their own pedagogical responses, at universities in the United States, Europe, and New Zealand.
FLEXIBLE CAPITALISM
Exchange and Ambiguity at Work
Edited by Jens Kjaerulff
Afterword by Keir Martin
Volume 25, EASA Series
Approaching “work” as at heart a practice of exchange, this volume explores sociality in work environments marked by the kind of structural changes that have come to define contemporary “flexible” capitalism. It introduces anthropological exchange theory to a wider readership, and shows how the perspective offers new ways to enquire about the flexible capitalism’s social dimensions. The essays contribute to a trans-disciplinary scholarship on contemporary economic practice and change by documenting how, across diverse settings, “gift-like” socialities proliferate, and even sustain the intensified flexible commoditization that more commonly is touted as tearing social relations apart. By interrogating a keenly debated contemporary work regime through an approach to sociality rooted in a rich and distinct anthropological legacy, the volume also makes a novel contribution to the anthropological literature on work and on exchange.
RITUAL RETELLINGS
Luangan Healing Performances through Practice
Isabell Herrmans
Volume 16, Epistemologies of Healing
Belianis an exceptionally lively tradition of shamanistic curing rituals performed by the Luangans, a politically marginalized population of Indonesian Borneo. This volume explores the significance of these rituals in practice and asks what belian rituals do – socially, politically, and existentially – for particular people in particular circumstances. Departing from the conception that rituals exist as ethereal, liminal or insulated traditional domains, this volume demonstrates the importance of understanding rituals as emergent within their specific historical and social settings. It offers an analysis of a number of concrete ritual performances, exemplifying a diversity of ritual genres, stylistic modalities and sensual ambiences, from low-key, habitual affairs to drawn-out, crowd-seizing community rituals and innovative, montage-like cultural experiments.
FROM VIRTUE TO VICE
Negotiating Anorexia
Richard A. O’ Connor and Penny van Esterik
Volume 4, Food, Nutrition, and Culture
The recovered possess the key to overcoming anorexia. Although individual sufferers do not know how the affliction takes hold, piecing their stories together reveals two accidental afflictions. One is that activity disorders—dieting, exercising, healthy eating—start as virtuous practices, but become addictive obsessions. The other affliction is a developmental disorder, which also starts with the virtuous—those eager for challenge and change. But these overachievers who seek self-improvement get a distorted life instead. Knowing anorexia from inside, the recovered offer two watchwords on helping those who suffer. One is “negotiate,” to encourage compromise, which can aid recovery where coercion fails. The other is “balance,” for the ill to pursue mind-with-body activities to defuse mind-over-body battles.
EXTRAORDINARY ENCOUNTERS
Authenticity and the Interview
Edited by Katherine Smith, James Staples and Nigel Rapport
Volume 28, Methodology & History in Anthropology
Given the anthropological focus on ethnography as a kind of deep immersion, the interview poses theoretical and methodological challenges for the discipline. This volume explores those challenges and argues that the interview should be seen as a special, productive site of ethnographic encounter, a site of a very particular and important kind of knowing. In a range of social contexts and cultural settings, contributors show how the interview is experienced and imagined as a kind of space within which personal, biographic and social cues and norms can be explored and interrogated. The interview possesses its own authenticity, therefore—true to the persons involved and true to their moment of interaction—whilst at the same time providing information on human capacities and proclivities that is generalizable beyond particular social and cultural contexts.
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New in Paperback!
DISTRIBUTED OBJECTS
Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell
Edited by Liana Chua and Mark Elliott
“…profound scholarly reflections on the distributed effects of Alfred Gell’s endeavor to identify an anthropological theory of …a captivating pendant piece to Gell’s original publication. Itis not meant as a guidebook to understanding Gell’s work; rather it is a collection of complex studies that capture distinct engagements with Gell’s ideas around an anthropology of art.“ · Material World
COMMUNITIES OF COMPLICITY
Everyday Ethics in Rural China
Hans Steinmüller
Volume 10, Dislocations
“Hans Steinmüller’s ‘Communities of Complicity’ is a shining example of ethnography’s relevance to contemporary understandings of China…[His] careful combination of rich ethnographic writing, eloquent theory, and clearly outlined methodology also makes it an excellent reading for students. His ethnography stands testament to the depth of insight possible through a more classical anthropological project. With the anthropology of China increasingly engaging with urbanization, mobility, and wider macro forces, Steinmüller’s village ethnography is a refreshing reminder of the importance of the rural in understanding contemporary China.” · Anthropos
CIVILIZING NATURE
National Parks in Global Historical Perspective
Edited by Bernhard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler and Patrick Kupper
Volume 1, Environment in History: International Perspectives
“For those fascinated by the notion and practice of national parks, it is probably best to start with the abstracts to the thirteen chapters…[that] convey the truly global scope of the present volume… The editors are to be congratulated for their strong cast of contributors and the‘fine essays that represent the fruits of cutting-edge research.” · Environment and History
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF WATER
Edited by John Richard Wagner
“This book fills an important niche on water related issues in anthropology by focusing on social and cultural manifestations of water management, use, and conflict… The organization is appropriate and effective.” · Benedict J. Colombi, American Indian Studies Program, University of Arizona
LANDSCAPES BEYOND LAND
Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives
Edited by Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst and Andrew Whitehouse
Volume 19, EASA Series
“This thoughtful collection of essays on landscapes is largely inspired by the recent writings of Chris Tilley and Tim Ingold, whose own contributions bookend the other papers in the volume…What this volume does is open up some space for further imaginative wanderings and questions about the precise manner in which both residents and scholars are socially disciplined or culturally conditioned to read different landscapes.” · The Australian Journal of Anthropology
DEBATING AUTHENTICITY
Concepts of Modernity in Anthropological Perspective
Edited by Thomas Fillitz and A. Jamie Saris
“Debating Authenticity presents the reader with a rich collection of ethnographic case studies, unpacking the complexity of the concept in various social settings across the globe.” · The Australian Journal of Anthropology
TUFF CITY
Urban Change and Contested Space in Central Naples
Nick Dines
“Nick Dines draws on over a decade of intensive interdisciplinary research—history, politics, cultural studies, social geography, and anthropology— …[and] does a fine job of weaving together the competing narratives to offer a penetrating analysis of the contestation over public space embedded in discourses about civility and citizenship. He…also addresses global questions about citizenship, urban renewal, the inequality of zoning, and the securitization of public space. As such, this book could serve as a model for the analysis, critique, and comparison of other urban renewal projects in cities around the global north because Dines methodically and subtlely makes the local speak to global questions.” · American Anthropologist