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By Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology

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• eBook available May 2020

  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

• April 2023

  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

• eBook available April 2022

  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

• August 1996

  After Socialism

  Land Reform and Social Change in Eastern Europe

  Abrahams, R. (ed)

  The collapse of Soviet influence and the disillusionment with socialism in the early 1990s led to ambitious programs of economic reform throughout Eastern Europe. The papers in this volume, written by anthropologists and sociologists with detailed first-hand knowledge of the rural areas concerned, explore the situation in several countries; account is also taken of the differences between them. Not only are reform policies considered in the light of actual developments and reactions of villagers to changing circumstances; actual processes of land reform, the emergence of new family farms, and the creation of new forms of co-operative and joint stock company are described and examined well.

  Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies

• March 2020

  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)

• eBook available August 2018

  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

• eBook available September 2011

  The Allure of Capitalism

  An Ethnography of Management and the Global Economy in Crisis

  Røyrvik, E. A.

  The “managerial revolution,” or the rise of management as a distinct and vital group in industrial society, might be identified as a major development of the modernization processes, similar to the scientific and industrial revolutions. Studying “transnational” or “global” corporate management at the post-millennium moment provides a suitable focal point from which to investigate globalized (post)modernity and capitalism especially, and as such this book offers an anthropology of global capitalism at its moment of crisis. This study provides ethnographically rich descriptions of managerial practices in a set of international corporate investment projects. Drawing also on historical and statistical data, it renders a comprehensive perspective on management, corporations, and capitalism in the late modern globalized economy. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, the book spans the fields of organization, business, and management, and asserts that now, in this period of financial crisis, is the time for anthropology to yet again engage with political economy.

  Subjects: Applied Anthropology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available December 2016

  America Observed

  On an International Anthropology of the United States

  Dominguez, V. & Habib, J. (eds)

  There is surprisingly little fieldwork done on the United States by anthropologists from abroad. America Observed fills that gap by bringing into greater focus empirical as well as theoretical implications of this phenomenon. Edited by Virginia Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, the essays collected here offer a critique of such an absence, exploring its likely reasons while also illustrating the advantages of studying fieldwork-based anthropological projects conducted by colleagues from outside the U.S. This volume contains an introduction written by the editors and fieldwork-based essays written by Helena Wulff, Jasmin Habib, Limor Darash, Ulf Hannerz, and Moshe Shokeid, and reflections on the broad issue written by Geoffrey White, Keiko Ikeda, and Jane Desmond.  Suitable for introductory and mid-level anthropology courses, America Observed will also be useful for American Studies courses both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• September 2023

  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.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Memory Studies

• January 2007

  Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction

  Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State, 1898-1923

  Smith, A.

  The period from 1898 to 1923 was a particularly dramatic one in Spanish history; it culminated in the violent Barcelona “labor wars” and was only brought to a close with the coup d’état launched by the Barcelona Captain General, Miguel Primo de Rivera, in September 1923. In his detailed examination of the rise of the Catalan anarchist-syndicalist-led labor movement, the author blends social, cultural and political history in a novel way. He analyses the working class “from below” and the policies of the Spanish State towards labor “from above.” Based on an in-depth usage of primary sources, the authors provides an unrivalled account of Catalan labor and the Catalan anarchist-syndicalist movement and thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of early twentieth-century Spanish history.

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

• eBook available November 2012

  Anthropology and Political Science

  A Convergent Approach

  Aronoff, M. J. & Kubik, J.

  What can anthropology and political science learn from each other? The authors argue that collaboration, particularly in the area of concepts and methodologies, is tremendously beneficial for both disciplines, though they also deal with some troubling aspects of the relationship. Focusing on the influence of anthropology on political science, the book examines the basic assumptions the practitioners of each discipline make about the nature of social and political reality, compares some of the key concepts each field employs, and provides an extensive review of the basic methods of research that “bridge” both disciplines: ethnography and case study. Through ethnography (participant observation), reliance on extended case studies, and the use of “anthropological” concepts and sensibilities, a greater understanding of some of the most challenging issues of the day can be gained. For example, political anthropology challenges the illusion of the “autonomy of the political” assumed by political science to characterize so-called modern societies. Several chapters include a cross-disciplinary analysis of key concepts and issues: political culture, political ritual, the politics of collective identity, democratization in divided societies, conflict resolution, civil society, and the politics of post-Communist transformations.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available March 2023

  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

• October 2021

  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

• eBook available December 2019

  An Archaeology of Unchecked Capitalism

  From the American Rust Belt to the Developing World

  Shackel, P. A.

  The racialization of immigrant labor and the labor strife in the coal and textile communities in northeastern Pennsylvania appears to be an isolated incident in history. Rather this history can serve as a touchstone, connecting the history of the exploited laborers to today’s labor in the global economy. By drawing parallels between the past and present – for example, the coal mines of the nineteenth-century northeastern Pennsylvania and the sweatshops of the twenty-first century in Bangladesh – we can have difficult conversations about the past and advance our commitment to address social justice issues.

  Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• October 2023

  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 agri-food 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

• eBook available September 2018

  Barter and Social Regeneration in the Argentinean Andes

  Angé, O.

  Despite the pervasiveness of barter across societies, this mode of transaction has largely escaped the anthropologist’s gaze. Drawing on data from fairs in the Argentinean Andes, this book addresses a local modality of barter known as cambio. Bringing out its embeddedness within religious celebrations, it argues that cambio is practiced as a sacrifice to catholic figures and local ancestors, thereby challenging a widespread view of barter as a non-monetary form of commodity exchange. This ethnography of Andean barter considers processes of value creation, both economic and subjective, to further our understanding of how social groups create themselves through economic exchanges.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• June 2013

  Bedouin of Mount Sinai

  An Anthropological Study of their Political Economy

  Marx, E.

  The Sinai Peninsula links Asia and Africa and for millennia has been crossed by imperial armies from both the east and the west. Thus, its Bedouin inhabitants are by necessity involved in world affairs and maintain a complex, almost urban, economy. They make their home in arid mountains that provide limited pastures and lack arable soils and must derive much of their income from migrant labor and trade. Still, every household maintains, at considerable expense, a small orchard and a minute flock of goats and sheep. The orchards and flocks sustain them in times of need and become the core of a mutual assurance system. It is for this social security that Bedouin live in and retire to the mountains. Based on fieldwork over ten years, this book builds on the central theoretical understanding that the complex political economy of the Mount Sinai Bedouin is integrated into urban society and part of the modern global world.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• September 2023

  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)

• February 2015

  Beyond the Lens of Conservation

  Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another

  Keller, E.

  The global agenda of Nature conservation has led to the creation of the Masoala National Park in Madagascar and to an exhibit in its support at a Swiss zoo, the centerpiece of which is a mini-rainforest replica. Does such a cooperation also trigger a connection between ordinary people in these two far-flung places? The study investigates how the Malagasy farmers living at the edge of the park perceive the conservation enterprise and what people in Switzerland see when looking towards Madagascar through the lens of the zoo exhibit. It crystallizes that the stories told in either place have almost nothing in common: one focuses on power and history, the other on morality and progress. Thus, instead of building a bridge, Nature conservation widens the gap between people in the North and the South.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• August 2023

  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

• eBook available January 2020

  Big Capital in an Unequal World

  The Micropolitics of Wealth in Pakistan

  Armytage, R.

  Following the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of the elite in Pakistan. In doing so, it 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)

• eBook available August 2014

  Blood and Fire

  Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor

  Kasmir, S. & Carbonella, A. (eds)

  Based on long-term fieldwork, six vivid ethnographies from Colombia, India, Poland, Spain and the southern and northern U.S. address the dwindling importance of labor throughout the world. The contributors to this volume highlight the growing disconnect between labor struggles and the advancement of the greater common good, a phenomenon that has grown since the 1980s. The collection illustrates the defeat and unmaking of particular working classes, and it develops a comparative perspective on the uneven consequences of and reactions to this worldwide project. Blood and Fire charts a course within global anthropology to address the widespread precariousness and the prevalence of insecure and informal labor in the twenty-first century.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• August 2007

  Blood and Oranges

  Immigrant Labor and European Markets in Rural Greece

  Lawrence, C. M.

  A compelling account of the intersection of globalization and neo-racism in a rural Greek community, this book describes the contradictory political and economic development of the Greek countryside since its incorporation into the European Union, where increased prosperity and social liberalization have been accompanied by the creation of a vulnerable and marginalized class of immigrant laborers. The author analyzes the paradoxical resurgence of ethnic nationalism and neo-racism that has grown in the wake of European unification and addresses key issues of racism, neoliberalism and nationalism in contemporary anthropology.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology

• November 2009

  The Body in Asia

  Turner, B. & Yangwen, Z. (Eds.)

  The past few decades have seen growing interest in the study of the body. However, the increasing number of exciting and influential publications has primarily, if not exclusively, focused on the body in Western cultures. The various works produced by Asian scholars remain largely unknown to Western academic debates even though Asia is home to a host of rich body cultures and religions. The peoples of Asia have experienced colonization, decolonization, and now globalization, all of which make the ‘body in Asia’ a rewarding field of research. This unique volume brings together a number of scholars who work on East, Southeast and South Asia and presents original and cutting edge research on the body in various Asian cultures.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available November 2019

  Brazilian Steel Town

  Machines, Land, Money and Commoning in the Making of the Working Class

  Mollona, M.

  Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getúlio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. The city’s economy, and consequently its citizen’s lives, revolves around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest industrial complex in Latin America. Although the glory days of the CSN have long passed, the company still controls life in Volta Redonda today, creating as much dispossession as wealth for the community. Brazilian Steel Town tells the story of the people tied to this ailing giant – of their fears, hopes, and everyday struggles.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• March 2015

  Bread from the Lion's Mouth

  Artisans Struggling for a Livelihood in Ottoman Cities

  Faroqhi, S. (ed)

  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.

  Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available December 2016

  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)

• August 2023

  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

• eBook available May 2022

  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

• eBook available May 2020

  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

• eBook available September 2018

  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

• eBook available January 2019

  The Changing Meanings of the Welfare State

  Histories of a Key Concept in the Nordic Countries

  Edling, N. (ed)

  In discussions of economics, governance, and society in the Nordic countries, “the welfare state” is a well-worn analytical concept. However, there has been much less scholarly energy devoted to historicizing this idea beyond its postwar emergence. In this volume, specialists from Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland chronicle the historical trajectory of “the welfare state,” tracing the variable ways in which it has been interpreted, valued, and challenged over time. Each case study generates valuable historical insights into not only the history of Northern Europe, but also the welfare state itself as both a phenomenon and a concept.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

• July 2012

  Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere

  Emden, C. J. & Midgley, D. (eds)

  Initially propounded by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas in 1962 in order to describe the realm of social discourse between the state on one hand, and the private sphere of the market and the family on the other, the concept of a bourgeois public sphere quickly became a central point of reference in the humanities and social sciences. This volume reassesses the validity and reach of Habermas’s concept beyond political theory by exploring concrete literary and cultural manifestations in early modern and modern Europe. The contributors ask whether, and in what forms, a social formation that rightfully can be called the “public sphere” really existed at particular historical junctures, and consider the senses in which the “public sphere” should rather be replaced by a multitude of interacting cultural and social “publics.” This volume offers insights into the current status of the “public sphere” within the disciplinary formation of the humanities and social sciences at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available March 2010

  China in Oceania

  Reshaping the Pacific?

  Wesley-Smith, T. & Porter, E. (eds)

  It is important to see China’s activities in the Pacific Islands, not just in terms of a specific set of interests, but in the context of Beijing’s recent efforts to develop a comprehensive and global foreign policy. China’s policy towards Oceania is part of a much larger outreach to the developing world, a major work in progress that involves similar initiatives in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. This groundbreaking study of China’s “soft power” initiatives in these countries offers, for the first time, the diverse perspectives of scholars and diplomats from Oceania, North American, China, and Japan. It explores such issues as regional competition for diplomatic and economic ties between Taiwan and China, the role of overseas Chinese in developing these relationships, and various analyses of the benefits and drawbacks of China’s growing presence in Oceania. In addition, the reader obtains a rare review of the Japanese response to China’s role in Oceania, presented by Japan’s leading scholar of the Pacific region.

  Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available June 2017

  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

• eBook available January 2021

  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

• eBook available August 2021

  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

• eBook available September 2017

  Contesting Deregulation

  Debates, Practices and Developments in the West since the 1970s

  Andresen, K. and Müller, S. (eds)

  Few would dispute that many Western industrial democracies undertook extensive deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet this narrative, in its most familiar form, depends upon several historiographical assumptions that bely the complexities and pitfalls of studying the recent past. Across thirteen case studies, the contributors to this volume investigate this “deregulatory moment” from a variety of historical perspectives, including transnational, comparative, pan-European, and national approaches. Collectively, they challenge an interpretive framework that treats individual decades in isolation and ignores broader trends that extend to the end of the Second World War.

  Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology History: 20th Century to Present

• February 2022

  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

• May 2023

  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

• eBook available February 2020

  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

• eBook available April 2018

  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

• eBook available April 2009

  Crisis of the State

  War and Social Upheaval

  Kapferer, B. & Bertelsen, B. E. (eds)

  Analyzing both historical contexts and geographical locations, this volume explores the continuous reformation of state power and its potential in situations of violent conflict. The state, otherwise understood as an abstract and transcendent concept in many works on globalization in political philosophy, is instead located and analyzed here as an embedded part of lived reality. This relationship to the state is exposed as an integral factor to the formation of the social – whether in Africa, the Middle East, South America or the United States. Through the examination of these particular empirical settings of war or war-like situations, the book further argues for the continued importance of the state in shifting social and political circumstances. In doing so, the authors provide a critical contribution to debates within a broad spectrum of fields that are concerned with the future of the state, the nature of sovereignty, and globalization.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• February 2006

  Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation

  Nowotny, H. (ed)

  Underlying the current dynamics of technological developments, their divergence or convergence and the abundance of options, promises and risks they contain, is the quest for innovation, the contributors to this volume argue. The seemingly insatiable demand for novelty coincides with the rise of modern science and the onset of modernity in Western societies. Never before has the Baconian dream been so close to becoming reality: wrapped into a globalizing capitalism that seeks ever expanding markets for new products, artifacts and designs and new processes that lead to gains in efficiency, productivity and profit. However, approaching these developments through a wider historical and cultural perspectives, means to raise questions about the plurality of cultures, the interaction between "hardware" and "software" and about the nature of the interfaces where technology meets with economic, social, legal, historical constraints and opportunities. The authors come to the conclusion that inside a seemingly homogenous package and a seemingly universal quest for innovation many differences remain.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available December 2018

  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

• eBook available October 2017

  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)

• May 2008

  Difficult Folk?

  A Political History of Social Anthropology

  Mills, D.

  How should we tell the histories of academic disciplines? All too often, the political and institutional dimensions of knowledge production are lost beneath the intellectual debates. This book redresses the balance. Written in a narrative style and drawing on archival sources and oral histories, it depicts the complex pattern of personal and administrative relationships that shape scholarly worlds.

  Focusing on the field of social anthropology in twentieth-century Britain, this book describes individual, departmental and institutional rivalries over funding and influence. It examines the efforts of scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Evans-Pritchard and Max Gluckman to further their own visions for social anthropology. Did the future lie with the humanities or the social sciences, with addressing social problems or developing scholarly autonomy? This new history situates the discipline's rise within the post-war expansion of British universities and the challenges created by the end of Empire.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology

• January 2007

  Disenchantment with Market Economics

  East Germans and Western Capitalism

  Müller, B.

  The life-worlds and personal experiences of workers and employees in three enterprises in East Berlin at the moment of political and economic upheaval stand at the centre of the book. It sets out in 1989 at the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall witnessing the confrontations with the market economy and examining the reinterpretations of the socialist past as the political and economic changes take place.

  Disenchantment with Market Economics captures a unique moment in history and unveils myths and promises of liberal market economy from the perspective of those who lived through the break down of the planned economy at their workplaces in East Berlin. While Western managers regarded the expansion of their businesses towards Eastern Europe as a civilising mission, the East German employees reacted with complex strategies of individual adaptation and resistance.

  Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available October 2022

  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

• eBook available July 2016

  Economic Citizenship

  Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment

  Sa'ar, A.

  With the spread of neoliberal projects, responsibility for the welfare of minority and poor citizens has shifted from states to local communities. Businesses, municipalities, grassroots activists, and state functionaries share in projects meant to help vulnerable populations become self-supportive. Ironically, such projects produce odd discursive blends of justice, solidarity, and wellbeing, and place the languages of feminist and minority rights side by side with the language of apolitical consumerism. Using theoretical concepts of economic citizenship and emotional capitalism, Economic Citizenship exposes the paradoxes that are deep within neoliberal interpretations of citizenship and analyzes the unexpected consequences of applying globally circulating notions to concrete local contexts.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available June 2009

  Economic Persuasions

  Gudeman, S. (ed)

  As the transition from socialism to a market economy gathered speed in the early 1990s, many people proclaimed the final success of capitalism as a practice and neoliberal economics as its accompanying science. But with the uneven achievements of the “transition”—the deepening problems of “development,” persistent unemployment, the widening of the wealth gap, and expressions of resistance—the discipline of economics is no longer seen as a mirror of reality or as a unified science. How should we understand economics and, more broadly, the organization and disorganization of material life? In this book, international scholars from anthropology and economics adopt a rhetorical perspective in order to make sense of material life and the theories about it. Re-examining central problems in the two fields and using ethnographic and historical examples, they explore the intersections between these disciplines, contrast their methods and epistemologies, and show how a rhetorical approach offers a new mode of analysis while drawing on established contributions.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology

• October 2015

  Economy for and Against Democracy

  Hart, K. (ed)

  Political constitutions alone do not guarantee democracy; a degree of economic equality is also essential. Yet contemporary economies, dominated as they are by global finance and political rent-seekers, often block the realization of democracy. The comparative essays and case studies of this volume examine the contradictory relationship between the economy and democracy and highlight the struggles and visions needed to make things more equitable. They explore how our collective aspirations for greater democracy might be informed by serious empirical research on the human economy today. If we want a better world, we must act on existing social realities.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2018

  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

• eBook available May 2008

  Economy's Tension

  The Dialectics of Community and Market

  Gudeman, S.

  Why are we obsessed with calculating our selections? The author argues that competitive trade nurtures calculative reason, which provides the ground for most discourses on economy. But market descriptions of economy are incomplete. Drawing on a range of materials from small ethnographic contexts to global financial markets, the author shows that economy is dialectically made up of two value realms, termed mutuality and impersonal trade. One or the other may be dominant; however, market reason usually cascades into and debases the mutuality on which it depends. Using this cross-cultural model, the author explores mystifications of economic life, and explains how capital and derivatives can control an economy. The book offers a different conception of economic welfare, development, and freedom; it presents an approach for dealing with environmental devastation, and explains the growing inequalities of wealth within and between nations.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available September 2018

  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

• July 2017

  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

• eBook available November 2008

  Enduring Socialism

  Explorations of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation

  West, H. G. & Raman, P. (eds)

  Against the historical backdrop of successive socialist and post-socialist claims to have completely remade society, the contributors to this volume explore the complex and often paradoxical continuities between diverse post-socialist presents and their corresponding socialist and pre-socialist pasts. The chapters focus on ways in which: pre-socialist economic, political, and cultural forms in fact endured an era of socialism and have found new life in the post-socialist present, notwithstanding revolutionary socialist claims; continuities with a pre-socialist past have been produced within the historical imaginary of post-socialism; and socialist economic, political, and cultural forms have in fact endured in a purportedly postsocialist era, despite the claims of neo-liberal reformers.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• November 2014

  Enhancing Democracy

  Public Policies and Citizen Participation in Chile

  Delamaza, G.

  Since the end of the Pinochet regime, Chilean public policy has sought to rebuild democratic governance in the country. This book examines the links between the state and civil society in Chile and the ways social policies have sought to ensure the inclusion of the poor in society and democracy. Although Chile has gained political stability and grown economically, the ability of social policies to expand democratic governance and participation has proved limited, and in fact such policies have become subordinate to an elitist model of democracy and resulted in a restrictive form of citizen participation.

  Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available October 2022

  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

• eBook available January 2022

  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

• eBook available March 2012

  Ethical Consumption

  Social Value and Economic Practice

  Carrier, J. G. & Luetchford, P. G. (eds)

  Increasingly, consumers in North America and Europe see their purchasing as a way to express to the commercial world their concerns about trade justice, the environment and similar issues. This ethical consumption has attracted growing attention in the press and among academics. Extending beyond the growing body of scholarly work on the topic in several ways, this volume focuses primarily on consumers rather than producers and commodity chains. It presents cases from a variety of European countries and is concerned with a wide range of objects and types of ethical consumption, not simply the usual tropical foodstuffs, trade justice and the system of fair trade. Contributors situate ethical consumption within different contexts, from common Western assumptions about economy and society, to the operation of ethical-consumption commerce, to the ways that people’s ethical consumption can affect and be affected by their social situation. By locating consumers and their practices in the social and economic contexts in which they exist and that their ethical consumption affects, this volume presents a compelling interrogation of the rhetoric and assumptions of ethical consumption.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available August 2022

  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

• April 2021

  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)

• August 2007

  The European Puzzle

  The Political Structuring of Cultural Identities at a Time of Transition

  Demossier, M. (ed)

  The twin concepts of “Culture” and “Identity” are inescapable in any discussion of European Integration and yet over the last ten years their meaning has become increasingly contested. By combining an anthropological and political perspective, the authors challenge the traditional boundaries within the issue of the construction of Europe. In the first part, historians and anthropologists from various national traditions discuss the process of the construction of Europe and its implications for cultural identities. The second section examines a number of topics at the core of the process of Europeanization and presents up-to-date information on each of these issues: political parties, regions, football, cities, the Euro, ethnicity, heritage and European cinema. Emphasis is be placed on the political structuring of cultural identities by contrasting top-down and bottom-up processes that define the tensions between the unity and diversity of the European Community.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology

• December 2018

  Europeanization in Sweden

  Opportunities and Challenges for Civil Society Organizations

  Meeuwisse, A. & Scaramuzzino, R. (eds)

  Notwithstanding its many successes since 1945, the project of European integration currently faces major difficulties, from financial crises and mass immigration to the departure of the UK from the European Union. At the same time, these challenges have spurred civil society organizations within and across Europe, revealing a shared public sphere in which citizens can mobilize around refugee rights, opposition to austerity policies, and other issues. Europeanization in Sweden assembles new empirical research on how these processes have played out in one of the continent’s wealthiest nations, providing insights into whether, and how, the “Swedish model” can guide European integration.

  Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available September 2015

  The Event of Charlie Hebdo

  Imaginaries of Freedom and Control

  Zagato, A. (ed)

  The January 2015 shooting at the headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and the subsequent attacks that took place in the Île-de-France region were staggeringly violent events. They sparked an enormous discussion among citizens and intellectuals from around Europe and beyond. By analyzing the effects the attacks have had in various spheres of social life, including the political, ideology, collective imaginaries, the media, and education, this collection of essays aims to serve as a contribution as well as a critical response to that discussion. The volume observes that the events being attributed to Charlie Hebdo go beyond sensationalist reports of the mainstream media, transcend the spatial confines of nation states, and lend themselves to an ever-expanding number of mutating discursive formations.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• May 2023

  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

• eBook available July 2021

  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

• eBook available September 2020

  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

• eBook available January 2020

  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)

• August 2015

  Figurations of the Future

  Forms and Temporalities of Left Radical Politics in Northern Europe

  Krøijer, S.

  Built around key events, from the eviction of a self-managed social centre in Copenhagen in 2007 to the Climate Summit protests in 2009, this book contributes to anthropological literature on contemporary Euro-American politics foreshadowing recent waves of public dissent. Stine Krøijer explores political forms among left radical and anarchist activists in Northern Europe focusing on how forms of action engender time. Drawing on anthropological literature from both Scandinavia and the Amazon, this ethnography recasts theoretical concerns about body politics, political intentionality, aesthetics, and time.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available August 2020

  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)

• March 2015

  Flexible Capitalism

  Exchange and Ambiguity at Work

  Kjaerulff, J. (ed)

  Approaching “work” as at heart a practice of exchange, this volume explores sociality in work environments marked by the kind of structural changes that have come to define contemporary “flexible” capitalism. It introduces anthropological exchange theory to a wider readership, and shows how the perspective offers new ways to enquire about the flexible capitalism’s social dimensions. The essays contribute to a trans-disciplinary scholarship on contemporary economic practice and change by documenting how, across diverse settings, “gift-like” socialities proliferate, and even sustain the intensified flexible commoditization that more commonly is touted as tearing social relations apart. By interrogating a keenly debated contemporary work regime through an approach to sociality rooted in a rich and distinct anthropological legacy, the volume also makes a novel contribution to the anthropological literature on work and on exchange.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• October 2023

  Foreigners in Their Own Country

  Identity and Rejection in France

  Martin, L. M.

  Based on dozens of intensive interviews with people living in France who trace their origins to non-European countries, Foreigners in Their Own Country reports on the experience of being seen as different from those who are considered unquestionably “French” because of one’s physical appearance. Paying close attention to how people speak about themselves and their acceptance and rejection by others, 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

• April 2010

  Forging Political Identity

  Silk and Metal Workers in Lyon, France 1900-1939

  Mann, K.

  Escaping the traditional focus on Paris, the author examines the divergent political identities of two occupational groups in Lyon, metal and silk workers, who, despite having lived and worked in the same city, developed different patterns of political practices and bore distinct political identities. This book also examines in detail the way that gender relations influenced industrial change, skill, and political identity. Combining empirical data collected in French archives with social science theory and methods, this study argues that political identities were shaped by the intersection of the prevailing political climate with the social relations surrounding work in specific industrial settings.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• January 2003

  French Women in Politics: Writing Power

  Paternal Legitimization and Maternal Legacies

  Ramsay, R. L.

  Although more women in France have entered political life than ever before, the fact remains that there are fewer women representatives in the French parliament than there were after the Second World War. In a new and original approach, the author presents an overview and analysis of the emerging body of text by or on women who have held high political office in France. The argument is that writing about women and politics has not just described or reflected women's slow but now substantial entry into political life; it has played a major part in shaping the parity debate and its outcomes. Interviews with political women, such as Huguette Bouchardeau, Simone Veil or Edith Cresson, inserted in the text, demonstrate the emergence and circulation of a new common discourse focused on the issue of whether women in politics make or should make a difference. A close reading of the various texts examined in this book and their connection to new public counter-discourses in France suggest that a re-writing of power is indeed occurring.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology

• November 2017

  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

• eBook available September 2016

  From Craftsmen to Capitalists

  German Artisans from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic, 1939-1953

  McKitrick, F. L.

  Politically adrift, alienated from Weimar society, and fearful of competition from industrial elites and the working class alike, the independent artisans of interwar Germany were a particularly receptive audience for National Socialist ideology. As Hitler consolidated power, they emerged as an important Nazi constituency, drawn by the party’s rejection of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Yet, in the years after 1945, the artisan class became one of the pillars of postwar stability, thoroughly integrated into German society. From Craftsmen to Capitalists gives the first account of this astonishing transformation, exploring how skilled tradesmen recast their historical traditions and forged alliances with former antagonists to help realize German democratization and recovery.

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

• eBook available October 2017

  From Eastern Bloc to European Union

  Comparative Processes of Transformation since 1990

  Heydemann, G. & Vodička, K. (eds)

  More than 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, European integration remains a work in progress, especially in those Eastern European nations most dramatically reshaped by democratization and economic liberalization. This volume assembles detailed, empirically grounded studies of eleven states—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and the former East Germany—that went on to join the European Union. Each chapter analyzes the political, economic, and social transformations that have taken place in these nations, using a comparative approach to identify structural similarities and assess outcomes relative to one another as well as the rest of the EU.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Political and Economic Anthropology

• August 2006

  From Tax Populism to Ethnic Nationalism

  Radical Right-wing Populism in Sweden

  Rydgren, J.

  During the last 15-20 years a new party family of radical right-wing populism (RRP) has emerged in Western Europe, consisting of parties such as the French Front National and the Austrian Freedom's Party, among many others. Contrary to the situation in the other Scandinavian countries, such parties have been largely unsuccessful in Sweden. Although Sweden saw the emergence of the populist party New Democracy - which partly can be classified as a RRP party - in the early 1990s, it collapsed in 1994, and no party has so far been successful enough to take its place. Most of the literature on populism and right-wing extremism deals with successful cases; this book takes the opposite direction and asks how one can explain the failure of Swedish radical right-wing populism.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available June 2018

  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

• eBook available September 2008

  Gender Politics in the Expanding European Union

  Mobilization, Inclusion, Exclusion

  Roth, S. (ed)

  In May 2004, after bringing their legislation into accordance with EU regulations, ten more countries joined the European Union. The contributors to this volume assess the impact of this historical development on gender relations in the new and old EU member states. Instead of focusing on either western or eastern Europe, this book investigates the similarities and differences in diverse parts of Europe. Although initially limited, gender equality was part of the original framework of the European Union, an organization often more open than national governments to feminist demands, as this volume illustrates with case studies from eastern and western Europe. The enlargement process thus provides some important policy instruments for increasing equality between men and women.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available September 2013

  The Gift of European Thought and the Cost of Living

  Argyrou, V.

  European thought is often said to be a gift to the rest of the world, but what if there is no gift as such? What if there is only an economy where every giving is also a taking, and every taking is also a giving? This book extends the question of economies by making a case for an “economy of thought” and a “political economy.” It argues that all thinking and doing presupposes taking, and therefore giving, as the price to pay for taking; or that there exists a “cost of living,” which renders the idea of free thinking and living untenable. The argument is developed against the Enlightenment directive to think for oneself as the means of becoming autonomous and shows that this “light,” given to the rest of the world as a gift, turns out to be nothing.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available June 2018

  The Global Life of Austerity

  Comparing Beyond Europe

  Rakopoulos, T. (ed)

  Austerity and structural adjustment programs are just the latest forms of neoliberal policy to have a profoundly damaging impact on the targeted populations. Yet, as the contributors to this collection argue, the recent austerity-related European crisis is not a breach of erstwhile development schemes, but a continuation of economic policies. Using historical analysis and ethnographically-grounded research, this volume shows the similarities of the European conundrum with realities outside Europe, seeing austerity in a non-Eurocentric fashion. In doing so, it offers novel insights as to how economic crises are experienced at a global level.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• November 2015

  Gypsy Economy

  Romani Livelihoods and Notions of Worth in the 21st Century

  Brazzabeni, M., Ivone Cunha, M., & Fotta, M. (eds)

  Economic arrangements of Romanies are complexly related to their social position. The authors of this volume explore these complexities, including how economic exchanges forge key social relationships of gender and ethnicity, how economic opportunities are constructed and seized, and how economic success and failure are transformed into attributes of social persons. They explore how, despite — or perhaps because of — their unstable and ambiguous position within the market economy, shared today with a growing number of people facing precarity and informalisation, Roma and Gypsy communities continuously re-create more or less viable economic strategies. The ethnographically based chapters share accounts of socially and economically vulnerable populations that face their situation with self-determination and creativity.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• April 1998

  Haunted by History

  Myths in International Relations

  Buffet, C. & Heuser, B. (eds)

  Europe is a continent weighed down by the shadows of its past, its wars, the traditional enmities, the suspicions of neighbours fuelled by historical memories. This has immediate consequences for the understanding and representation of the past: journalists, politicians, historians often apply simplistic, pre-conceived patterns, i.e., myths, to current events, resulting in distorted and misleading analyses. This volume exposes the way some historical myths, such as Balance of Power, Rapallo, the Special Relationship, the Franco-German Couple, the Peril of Islam, are used to blur, not to clarify our understanding of international affairs, even to manipulate contemporary politics.

  Subjects: History (General) Memory Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• September 2011

  Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class

  Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe

  Kalb, D. & Halmai, G. (eds)

  Since 1989 neo-nationalism has grown as a volatile political force in almost all European societies in tandem with the formation of a neoliberal European Union and wider capitalist globalizations. Focusing on working classes situated in long-run localized processes of social change, including processes of dispossession and disenfranchisement, this volume investigates how the experiences, histories, and relationships of social class are a necessary ingredient for explaining the re-emergence and dynamics of populist nationalism in both Eastern and Western Europe. Featuring in-depth urban and regional case studies from Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Italy and Scotland this volume reclaims class for anthropological research and lays out a new interdisciplinary agenda for studying identity politics in the intensifying neoliberal conjuncture.

  Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology

• April 2015

  The History of Labour Intermediation

  Institutions and Finding Employment in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

  Wadauer, S., Buchner, T., & Mejstrik, A. (eds)

  Searching for a job has been an everyday affair in both modern and past societies, and employment a concern for both individuals and institutions. The case studies in this volume investigate job search and placement practices in European countries, Australia, and India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors explore how looking for work becomes a means by which participants (individuals, placement agents, trade unions, municipalities, administrations, state authorities, and schools) articulated specific interests, perspectives, and agendas. Taking an exploratory approach, the chapters illustrate different approaches to the history of employment and job searching, ranging from organizational and regulatory histories to the analysis of practices and autobiographical accounts. In the process, they uncover the interrelations of search practices and attempts to arrange placement services.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available August 2017

  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

• eBook available July 2011

  Imagining the Post-Apartheid State

  An Ethnographic Account of Namibia

  Friedman, J. T.

  In northwest Namibia, people’s political imagination offers a powerful insight into the post-apartheid state. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this book focuses on the former South African apartheid regime and the present democratic government; it compares the perceptions and practices of state and customary forms of judicial administration, reflects upon the historical trajectory of a chieftaincy dispute in relation to the rooting of state power and examines everyday forms of belonging in the independent Namibian State. By elucidating the State through a focus on the social, historical and cultural processes that help constitute it, this study helps chart new territory for anthropology, and it contributes an ethnographic perspective to a wider set of interdisciplinary debates on the State and state processes.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available October 2018

  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

• eBook available May 2017

  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

• eBook available October 2008

  Indigenous Peoples, Civil Society, and the Neo-liberal State in Latin America

  Fischer, E. F. (ed)

  In recent years the concept and study of “civil society” has received a lot of attention from political scientists, economists, and sociologists, but less so from anthropologists. A ground-breaking ethnographic approach to civil society as it is formed in indigenous communities in Latin America, this volume explores the multiple potentialities of civil society’s growth and critically assesses the potential for sustained change. Much recent literature has focused on the remarkable gains made by civil society and the chapters in this volume reinforce this trend while also showing the complexity of civil society - that civil society can itself sometimes be uncivil. In doing so, these insightful contributions speak not only to Latin American area studies but also to the changing shape of global systems of political economy in general.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available March 2018

  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

• eBook available January 2020

  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)

• April 2023

  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

• eBook available May 2014

  Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics

  Essays in Historical Realism

  Smith, G.

  Contemporary forms of capitalism and the state require close analytic attention to reveal the conditions of possibility for effective counter-politics. On the other hand the practice of collective politics needs to be studied through historical ethnography if we are to understand what might make people’s actions effective. This book suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. Gavin Smith opens and closes this series of interlinked essays by proposing a concise framework for untangling what he calls “the society of capital” and subsequently a potentially controversial way of seeing its contemporary features. This book tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• December 2012

  Karl Marx

  An Intellectual Biography

  Hosfeld, R.

  Is the Grand Old Man re-emerging? More than twenty years after the collapse of Communism, and in the midst of the crisis of Capitalism, Karl Marx’s ideas, at least in part, are back in vogue. He is often invoked, yet often misunderstood. In this award-winning biography Rolf Hosfeld offers a new, transparent, and critical view of Marx’s turbulent life. Linking the contradictory politician and revolutionary to his work—his errors and misjudgments as well as his pioneering ideas—Hosfeld presents a vivid account of Marx’s life between Trier and London. At the same time, he renders accessible Marx’s complex work, one of the world’s most important contributions to the history of ideas.

  Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available September 2017

  Laborers and Enslaved Workers

  Experiences in Common in the Making of Rio de Janeiro's Working Class, 1850-1920

  Badaró Mattos, M.

  From the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1888 abolition of slavery in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro was home to the largest urban population of enslaved workers anywhere in the Americas. It was also the site of an incipient working-class consciousness that expressed itself across seemingly distinct social categories. In this volume, Marcelo Badaró Mattos demonstrates that these two historical phenomena cannot be understood in isolation. Drawing on a wide range of historical sources, Badaró Mattos reveals the diverse labor arrangements and associative life of Rio’s working class, from which emerged the many strategies that workers both free and unfree pursued in their struggles against oppression.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available May 2017

  Labour, Unions and Politics under the North Star

  The Nordic Countries, 1700-2000

  Hilson, M., Neunsinger, S., & Vyff, I. (eds)

  Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden today all enjoy a reputation for strong labour movements, which in turn are widely seen as part of a distinctive regional approach to politics, collective bargaining and welfare. But as this volume demonstrates, narratives of the so-called “Nordic model” can obscure the fact that experiences of work and the fortunes of organized labour have varied widely throughout the region and across different historical periods. Together, the essays collected here represent an ambitious intervention in labour historiography and European history, exploring themes such as work, unions, politics and migration from the early modern period to the twenty-first century.

  Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available February 2022

  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)

• May 2006

  Languages of Civil Society

  Wagner, P. (ed)

  The past two decades have witnessed a revival of the concept of ‘civil society’. From East Central Europe to Latin America and East Asia to the recent calls for a ‘European civil society’ and a ‘global civil society’, the concept signifies the need for national and supra–national forms of civic commitment against both unjustified state domination and neo–liberal marketization. Reviewing the long history of the concept, its use in various regional contexts and its place in critical political theory, this book takes comprehensive stock of these debates and asks about the potential of the concept of civil society in guiding political transformations towards fuller understandings of liberty and democracy.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available August 2021

  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

• August 2006

  Le Malaise Creole

  Ethnic Identity in Mauritius

  Boswell, R.

  How does one explain the poverty and marginalization of a group that lives in a remarkably successful economy and peaceful society? A native anthropologist, the author provides critical insight into the dynamics of contemporary Mauritian society. In her meticulously researched study of ethnic, gender and racial discrimination in Mauritius, she addresses debates carried out in many developing societies on subaltern identities, ethnicity, poverty and social injustice. The book therefore also offers important empirical material for scholars interested in the wider Indian Ocean region and beyond.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available December 2011

  Legends of People, Myths of State

  Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia

  Kapferer, B.

  The civil war in Sri Lanka and the part that nationalism seemed to play in it inspired the writing of this book some twenty-three years ago. The argument was developed through a comparative analysis of nationalism in Sri Lanka with the author’s native Australia. At the time this constituted an innovative approach to comparison in anthropology, as well as to nationalism and its possibilities. It was not based on differences but on the way in which perspectives from within the two nationalisms, when seen side-by-side, could present an understanding of their implication in producing the violence of war, racism, and social exclusion. The book has lost none of its importance and urgency as proven by the chapters in the Appendix, written by top scholars working in Sri Lanka and in Australia. These contributions bring together new material and critically explore the book’s themes and their continued relevance to the various trajectories in nationalist processes since the first publication of the book.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available July 2018

  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

• March 2009

  Made in Sheffield

  An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics

  Mollona, M.

  In 1900, Sheffield was the tenth largest city in the world. Cutlery “made in Sheffield” was used across the globe, and the city built armored plate for the navy in the run-up to the First World War. Today, however, Sheffield’s derelict Victorian shop floors and industrial buildings are hidden behind new leisure developments and shopping centers.

  Based on an extended period of research in two local steel factories, this book combines a lively, descriptive account with a wide-ranging critique of post-industrial capitalism. Its central argument is that recent government attempts to engineer Britain’s transition to a post-industrial and classless society have instead created volatile post-industrial spaces marked by informal labor, industrial sweatshops and levels of risk and deprivation that divide citizens along lines of gender, age, and class. The author discovers a link between production and reproduction, and demonstrates the centrality of kinship relations, child and female labor, and intra-household exchanges to the economic process of de-industrialization. Paradoxically, government policies have reinvigorated working-class militancy, spawned local industrial clusters and re-embedded the economy in the spatial and social structure of the neighborhood.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available June 2019

  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

• eBook available May 2019

  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

• eBook available July 2009

  Markets and Civil Society

  The European Experience in Comparative Perspective

  Perez-Diaz, V. (ed)

  The nature of the currently emerging European society, which includes the economic and social transformation of Eastern and Central European countries, has been hotly debated. At its center is the relationship between markets and civil society within political and social contexts. The contributors to this volume offer perspectives from various disciplines (the social sciences, conceptual history, law, economics) and from several European countries in order to explore the ways in which markets influence various forms of civil society, such as individual freedom, social cohesion, economic effectiveness and democratic governance, and influence the construction of a civil society in a broader sense.

  Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available April 2021

  Merchant Kings

  Corporate Governmentality in the Dutch Colonial Empire, 1815–1870

  Schrauwers, A.

  In the nineteenth century, the Netherlands and its colonial holdings in Java were the sites of dramatically increased industrialization. Led by a group of “merchant kings” who exemplified gentlemanly capitalism, this ambitious trading project transformed the small, economically moribund Netherlands into a global power. Merchant Kings offers a fascinating interdisciplinary exploration of this episode and reveals not only the distinctive nature of the Dutch state, but the surprising extent to which its nascent corporate innovations were rooted in early welfare initiatives. By placing colony and metropole into a single analytical frame, this book offers a bracing new approach to understanding the development of modern corporations.

  Subjects: Colonial History History: 18th/19th Century Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available February 2018

  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

• July 2023

  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

• August 2006

  Modernity and Secession

  The Social Sciences and the Political Discourse of the lega nord in Italy

  Huysseune, M.

  The northern Italian, ‘Padanian’ identity, fostered by the Lega Nord, is rooted in the long-standing tradition, in political and scholarly discourse, of casting regional differences within Italy in terms of a North-South geographic divide. Trying to come to terms, in the late 1980s and 1990s, with Italy’s (real or presumed) inadequacies – such as inefficient government, corruption, and organized crime – this imagined geography acquired political centrality in that the North became associated with the virtues of modernity and the South with the vices of un-modernity. It was not only politicians but also social scientists, who fostered and perpetuated this conceptualization of the North-South divide, thus imposing a normative hierarchy between the two parts of the country.

  In response to this discourse many scholars, both in Italy and abroad, have started to question this perception of the South as a “backward” and implicitly inferior society. Starting from this critical tradition, Michel Huysseune provides a new, systematic, and interdisciplinary approach that re-interprets the premises behind Italy’s imagined geography of modernity. He moves beyond an understanding of the South as a “backward” and implicitly inferior society and problematizes normative notions of modernity, thus offering a new perspective on the North-South divide, which has a significance well beyond the case of Italy.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Peace and Conflict Studies

• eBook available March 2018

  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)

• eBook available January 2020

  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

• eBook available June 2019

  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)

• eBook available June 2017

  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

• October 2021

  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

• eBook available September 2022

  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

• January 2001

  Morals of Legitimacy

  Between Agency and the System

  Pardo, I. (ed)

  With the growing fragmentation of western societies and disillusionment with the political process, the question of legitimacy has become one of the key issues of contemporary politics and is examined in this volume in depth for the first time. Drawing on ethnographic material from the U.S., Europe, India, Japan, and Africa, anthropologists and legal scholars investigate the morally diversified definitions of legitimacy that co-exist in any one society. Aware of the tensions between state morality and community morality, they offer reflections on the relationship between agency - individual and collective - and the legal and political systems. In a situation in which politics has only too often degenerated into vacuous rhetoric, this volume demonstrates how critical the relationship between trust and legitimacy is for the authoritative exercise of power in democratic societies.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available August 2018

  Nation Branding in Modern History

  Viktorin, C., Gienow-Hecht, J. C. E., Estner, A., & Will, M. K. (eds)

  A recent coinage within international relations, “nation branding” designates the process of highlighting a country’s positive characteristics for promotional purposes, using techniques similar to those employed in marketing and public relations. Nation Branding in Modern History takes an innovative approach to illuminating this contested concept, drawing on fascinating case studies in the United States, China, Poland, Suriname, and many other countries, from the nineteenth century to the present. It supplements these empirical contributions with a series of historiographical essays and analyses of key primary documents, making for a rich and multivalent investigation into the nexus of cultural marketing, self-representation, and political power.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Political and Economic Anthropology Media Studies

• eBook available February 2015

  The Neoliberal Landscape and the Rise of Islamist Capital in Turkey

  Balkan, N., Balkan, E. & Öncü, A. (eds)

  Islamist capital accumulation has split the Turkish bourgeoisie and polarized Turkish society into secular and religious social groupings, giving rise to conflicts between the state and political Islam. By providing a long-term historical perspective on Turkey's economy and its relationship to Islamism, this volume explores how Islamism as a political ideology has been utilized by the conservative bourgeoisie in Turkey, and elsewhere, to establish hegemony over labor. The contributors analyze the relationship between neoliberalism and the political fortunes of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), and examine the similarities and differences amongst new factions in the secular and Islamic middle class that have benefited economically, socially, and culturally during the AKP's reign. The articles also investigate the impact of the Gülen Movement and the role of the media in shaping the contours of intra-class struggle within contemporary Turkish political and social life.

  Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology

• October 2023

  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 case studies from the likes of the US, Japan, India, 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)

• eBook available April 2018

  Oil and Sovereignty

  Petro-Knowledge and Energy Policy in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s

  Graf, R.

  In the decades that followed World War II, cheap and plentiful oil helped to fuel rapid economic growth, ensure political stability, and reinforce the legitimacy of liberal democracies. Yet waves of price increases and the use of the so-called “oil weapon” by a group of Arab oil-producing countries in the early 1970s demonstrated the West’s dependence on this vital resource and its vulnerability to economic volatility and political conflicts. Oil and Sovereignty analyzes the national and international strategies that American and European governments formulated to restructure the world of oil and deal with the era’s disruptions. It shows how a variety of different actors combined diplomacy, knowledge creation, economic restructuring, and public relations in their attempts to impose stability and reassert national sovereignty.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available November 2018

  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

• eBook available January 2018

  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

• eBook available March 2019

  Party Responses to Social Movements

  Challenges and Opportunities

  Piccio, D. R.

  Across the West, the explosion of social movement activity since the late 1960s has constituted a “participatory revolution” that has posed profound challenges for formal political parties. Through an analysis of new interviews, institutional documents, and a host of other largely unexploited sources, Daniela R. Piccio provides a rich and empirically grounded exploration of the wide-ranging responses to these movements. Focusing on Italy and the Netherlands since the 1970s, Party Responses to Social Movements demonstrates how political parties have incorporated the demands of movements to a surprising extent, even as both have grappled with fundamental and inevitable tensions between their respective roles and aims.

  Subjects: Sociology Peace and Conflict Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available October 2014

  People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis

  Perspectives from the Global South

  Hart, K. & Sharp, J. (eds)

  The Cold War was fought between “state socialism” and “the free market.” That fluctuating relationship between public power and private money continues today, unfolding in new and unforeseen ways during the economic crisis. Nine case studies -- from Southern Africa, South Asia, Brazil, and Atlantic Africa – examine economic life from the perspective of ordinary people in places that are normally marginal to global discourse, covering a range of class positions from the bottom to the top of society. The authors of these case studies examine people’s concrete economic activities and aspirations. By looking at how people insert themselves into the actual, unequal economy, they seek to reflect human unity and diversity more fully than the narrow vision of conventional economics.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available July 2018

  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

• eBook available April 2019

  Planning Labour

  Time and the Foundations of Industrial Socialism in Romania

  Cucu, A.-S.

  Impoverished, indebted, and underdeveloped at the close of World War II, Romania underwent dramatic changes as part of its transition to a centrally planned economy. As with the Soviet experience, it pursued a policy of “primitive socialist accumulation” whereby the state appropriated agricultural surplus and restricted workers’ consumption in support of industrial growth. Focusing on the daily operations of planning in the ethnically mixed city of Cluj from 1945 to 1955, this book argues that socialist accumulation was deeply contradictory: it not only inherited some of the classical tensions of capital accumulation, but also generated its own, which derived from the multivocal nature of the state socialist worker as a creator of value, as living labour, and as a subject of emancipatory politics.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Political and Economic Anthropology

• August 2001

  Political Demography, Demographic Engineering

  Weiner, M, & Teitelbaum, M.

  "Over the past decade, the impacts of demographic trends on international security and on peaceful relations between and within states have come to the fore in ways not seen since the aftermath of World War II. An evolving and more complex set of changes in the size, distribution, and composition of populations has become the basis for a new look at the security effects of changes in the size, distribution, and composition of populations. This book is an attempt to lay out the new look, to take issue with some of the prevailing views on the political consequences of population change and to suggest where the concerns are realistic and where they are not." (From the Preface)

  This book not only offers a magisterial analysis of the political effects of the dramatic population changes that are taking place in countries all around the world, it also represents the testimony of one of the most distinguished scholars in the field of migration and population studies.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available January 2015

  The Political Economy of Border Drawing

  Arranging Legality in European Labor Migration Policies

  Paul, R.

  The conditions for non-EU migrant workers to gain legal entry to Britain, France, and Germany are at the same time similar and quite different. To explain this variation this book compares the fine-grained legal categories for migrant workers in each country, and examines the interaction of economic, social, and cultural rationales in determining migrant legality. Rather than investigating the failure of borders to keep unauthorized migrants out, the author highlights the different policies of each country as “border-drawing” actions. Policymakers draw lines between different migrant groups, and between migrants and citizens, through considerations of both their economic utility and skills, but also their places of origin and prospects for social integration. Overall, migrant worker legality is arranged against the backdrop of the specific vision each country has of itself in an economically competitive, globalized world with rapidly changing welfare and citizenship models.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available May 2019

  Political Networks and Social Movements

  Bolivian State–Society Relations under Evo Morales, 2006–2016

  Valdivia Rivera, S.

  After a landslide electoral victory in 2006, Evo Morales became the first indigenous President of Bolivia. Morales’s stunning ascent was mirrored by the rising fortunes of his political party, the leftist Movimiento al Socialismo, which today continues to challenge the status quo in Bolivian politics and implement ambitious social reforms. This study examines how the state and social movements have impacted democratization in Bolivia, along with other sectors such as NGOs and the media. Soledad Valdivia Rivera’s analysis helps us to understand how the movement's relationships have come to transform the Bolivian political process as we know it.

  Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology History (General)

• eBook available June 2008

  Political Theory and Australian Multiculturalism

  Levey, G. B. (ed)

  Multiculturalism has been one of the dominant concerns in political theory over the last decade. To date, this inquiry has been mostly informed by, or applied to, the Canadian, American, and increasingly, the European contexts. This volume explores for the first time how the Australian experience both relates and contributes to political thought on multiculturalism. Focusing on whether a multicultural regime undermines political integration, social solidarity, and national identity, the authors draw on the Australian case to critically examine the challenges, possibilities, and limits of multiculturalism as a governing idea in liberal democracies. These essays by distinguished Australian scholars variously treat the relation between liberalism and diversity, democracy and diversity, culture and rights, and evaluate whether Australia’s thirty-year experiment in liberal multiculturalism should be viewed as a successful model.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available December 2022

  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)

• August 2008

  Politics of Time

  Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland

  Koczanowicz, L.

  What has really happened in Poland since the election of 2005? After such spectacular events as the practice of lustration and the questioning of solidarity with the European Union, one has to ask: what is the nature of this newly emerging society? As with many of the recent developments in former communist countries that seem to be mysterious and irrational, the situation and ensuing problems are complex and the answers neither trivial nor easy. This book, by the distinguished Polish philosopher, addresses these complexities through the role of the communist past in post-communist Poland. It describes the events that led to the collapse of the Solidarity program and the growing influence of the nationalistic and religious parties in the government. The author investigates the nature of social and political temporality and develops a theoretical framework that allows him to apply his conclusions not only to Poland but also to other formerly communist countries.

  Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• October 2023

  Poverty Archaeology

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

  Fennelly, K. & Newman, C.

  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

• December 1994

  The Power of the Story

  Fiction and Political Change

  Hanne, M.

  Can a novel cause riots, start a war, free serfs or slaves, break up marriages, drive readers to suicide, close factories, bring about law change, swing an election, or serve as a weapon in a national or international struggle? The author explores this question in the form of a theoretical essay on narrative and power, followed by five detailed case studies of works by Turgenev, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ignazio Silone, Solzhenitsyn and Salman Rushdie, each of which had or was said to have had a major impact on the political events in its time. Forcefully argued and written with a minimum of jargon, this book no doubt appeals to a wide readership well beyond that of the specialist in literature.

  Subjects: Literary Studies History (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• April 2023

  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

• June 2001

  Powers of Good and Evil

  Social Transformation and Popular Belief

  Clough, P. & Mitchell, J. (eds)

  A key theme in the anthropology of beliefs is the relationship between socio-economic change and changes in the belief system. It has been widely argued that rapid economic change, particularly the introduction of capitalism, leads to an increase in beliefs in, and representations of, evil and the devil. These beliefs, it is argued, constitute forms of resistance to, or rejection of, "modernity." This volume builds on these arguments, suggesting that rather than an indigenous resistance to capitalism, such representations signal a profound moral ambivalence towards the socio-economic process inherent in capitalist economy. Using a range of examples, from Surinamese zombies to American horror films, it demonstrates the extent to which evil imagery is linked to a fear of excess, particularly in situations where people find themselves, or perceive themselves, to be peripheral to the centers of political, economic, and cultural power.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available April 2020

  Protest, Youth and Precariousness

  The Unfinished Fight against Austerity in Portugal

  Carmo, R. M. & Vasconcelos Simões, J. A. (eds)

  After over a decade of the austerity measures that followed the 2008 financial crisis—entailing severe, unpopular policies that have galvanized opposition and frayed social ties—what lies next for European societies? Portugal offers an interesting case for exploring this question, as a nation that was among the hardest hit by austerity and is now seeking a fresh path forward. This collection brings together sociologists, social movement specialists, political scientists, and other scholars to look specifically at how Portuguese youth have navigated this politically and economically difficult period, negotiating uncertain social circumstances as they channel their discontent into protest and collective action.

  Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology History (General)

• eBook available August 2020

  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

• November 2003

  Radical Ethnic Movements in Contemporary Europe

  Daftary, F. & Troebst, S. (eds)

  Nation states and minorities resort more and more to violence when safeguarding their political interests. Although the violence in the Middle East has been dominating world politics for some time now, European governments have had their share of ethnic violence to contend with as this volume demonstrates. And as the case studies show, ranging as they do from the Basque Country to Chechnya, from Northern Ireland to Bosnia-Herzegovina, this applies to western Europe as much as to eastern Europe. However, in contrast to other parts of the world, instances where political struggles for power and social inclusion between minorities and majorities lead to full-fledged inter-ethnic warfare are still the exception; in the majority of cases conflicts are successfully de-escalated and even resolved. In a comprehensive conclusion, the volume offers a theoretical framework for the development of strategies to deal with violent ethnic conflict.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available August 2018

  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

• February 2022

  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

• eBook available January 2019

  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

• eBook available October 2019

  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)

• eBook available February 2009

  Reproducing Class

  Education, Neoliberalism, and the Rise of the New Middle Class in Istanbul

  Rutz, H. J. & Balkan, E. M.

  Middle classes are by definition ambiguous, raising all sorts of paradoxical questions, perceived and real, about their power and place relative to those above and below them in a class-structured society. Focusing on families of the new middle class in Istanbul, the authors of this study address questions about the social construction of middle-class reality in the context of the rapid changes that have come about through recent economic growth in global markets and the global diffusion of information technology. After 1980, Turkey saw a structural transformation from state-owned and managed industry, banking, and media and communications to privatization and open markets. The idea of being middle class and the reality of middle-class practices became open for negotiation and interpretation. This study therefore offers a particularly interesting case study of an emergent global phenomenon known as the transnational middle class, characterized by their location of work in globalizing cities, development of transnational social networks, sumptuary consumption habits, and residences in gated communities. As the authors show, this new middle class associates quality education, followed by property and lifestyle issues, with the concept of a comfortable life.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

• February 2023

  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)

• October 2023

  Resisting Radicalisation?

  Understanding Young Peoples Journeys through Radicalising Milieus

  Pilkington, H. (ed)

  This landmark volume of extensive empirical research across Europe explains how young people become vulnerable to radicalisation and 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 have not crossed the threshold into violent extremism. It brings together contributions conducted as part of a cross-European (including France, Germany, 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 and shaped by multiple social interactions, which not only facilitate but also constrain radicalisation.

  From the Introduction:
  The DARE research project, and the contributions to this volume that draw on its findings, start from an understanding of radicalisation as a societal phenomenon whose processes can, and should, be studied empirically not only through retrospectively constructed narratives of those who have reached its ‘endpoint’ (manifest in support for or participation in political violence) but through engagement with individuals at different points in their journeys via social settings where radical(ising) messages and agents are encountered.

  Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available March 2019

  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

• eBook available November 2021

  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

• eBook available October 2020

  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

• eBook available June 2018

  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

• April 2005

  Revolution and Counterrevolution

  Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory

  Murphy, K.

  Why did the most unruly proletariat of the Twentieth Century come to tolerate the ascendancy of a political and economic system that, by every conceivable measure, proved antagonistic to working-class interests? Revolution and Counterrevolution is at the center of the ongoing discussion about class identities, the Russian Revolution, and early Soviet industrial relations. Based on exhaustive research in four factory-specific archives, it is unquestionably the most thorough investigation to date on working-class life during the revolutionary era. Focusing on class conflict and workers' frequently changing response to management and state labor policies, the study also meticulously reconstructs everyday life: from leisure activities to domestic issues, the changing role of women, and popular religious belief. Its unparalleled immersion in an exceptional variety of sources at the factory level and its direct engagement with the major interpretive questions about the formation of the Stalinist system will force scholars to re-evaluate long-held assumptions about early Soviet society.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available August 2018

  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

• eBook available February 2020

  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

• eBook available August 2006

  The Romani Movement

  Minority Politics and Ethnic Mobilization in Contemporary Central Europe

  Vermeersch, P.

  The collapse of communism and the process of state building that ensued in the 1990s have highlighted the existence of significant minorities in many European states, particularly in Central Europe. In this context, the growing plight of Europe’s biggest minority, the Roma (Gypsies), has been particularly salient. Traditionally dispersed, possessing few resources and devoid of a common “kin state” to protect their interests, the Roma have often suffered from widespread exclusion and institutionalized discrimination. Politically underrepresented and lacking popular support amongst the wider populations of their host countries, the Roma have consequently become one of Europe’s greatest “losers” in the transition towards democracy.

  Against this background, the author examines the recent attempts of the Roma in Central Europe and their supporters to form a political movement and to influence domestic and international politics. On the basis of first-hand observation and interviews with activists and politicians in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, he analyzes connections between the evolving state policies towards the Roma and the recent history of Romani mobilization. In order to reach a better understanding of the movement’s dynamics at work, the author explores a number of theories commonly applied to the study of social movements and collective action.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology

• March 2000

  Rural Property and Economy in Post-communist Albania

  Lemel. H. W. (ed)

  For nearly half a century, Albania had been one of the most isolated and enigmatic countries in the world, where the confiscation of private property was more thoroughly accomplished than anywhere else in Europe. In an abrupt and radical turnaround beginning in 1991, the bulk of the country's land and assets were distributed to its citizens. This book explores issues and challenges emerging in this new context, focusing specifically on rural areas, and examines the question of how secure current landholders seem to be about their property and what this implies for future investment and land market prospects. What does emerge quite clearly from the author's findings is the important role of historical and regional factors in the economic activities of the rural population. The volume is particularly concerned with some key challenges resulting from the new farm property structure, including land fragmentation, formal credit access, and intra-family property rights issues. This in-depth study at the micro level leads to the conclusion that, in Albania's case, privatization of property does certainly not have the far-reaching salutary effects that western reformers had expected.

  Contributors: H. Lemel, R. Wheeler, S. Lastarria-Cornhiel, P. Bloch, A. Dubali.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• November 2022

  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

• July 1996

  A Sentimental Economy

  Commodity and Community in Rural Ireland

  Salazar, C.

  On the fringe of western Europe, yet fully integrated into the capitalist market, the rural economy of the west of Ireland seems to provide a fascinating object of analysis to the student of European folk cultures. This book concentrates on a particular aspect of that rural economy: the social organization and cultural construction of work in a community of family farms. The concept of work, which is primarily farm work, is taken here as a very elementary set of ideas, images and experiences that enable us to penetrate in the different cultural spheres that intersect life on an Irish family farm. Work, the author concludes, is to this farming community what the Kula ring is to the Trobriand islanders - a kind of Maussian "total social fact" the analysis of which incorporates a comprehensive description of a particular social system.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available March 2023

  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

• February 1996

  Sexual Politics and the European Union

  The New Feminist Challenge

  Elman, R. A.

  Just as feminist scholars began to develop an analysis of "the state" and women in Europe gained access to its political, legal and bureaucratic arenas, increased attention and reliance on European institutions have begun to take precedence over the more parochial concerns of the nation state. With the creation of the European super-state, feminist scholars will have to enhance their understanding of the European Union while activists will increasingly focus their efforts upon its institutions. This volume provides a comprehensive examination of EU policy implications for some of the most burning issues concerning women. This is the first book to transcend the emphasis on economics, the conventional basis for EU public policy discussions, thus providing a basis upon which one can begin to assess the politics of European integration from a feminist perspective.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available February 2017

  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

• January 2001

  Social Identities and Political Cultures in Italy

  Catholic, Communist, and 'Leghist' Communities between Civicness and Localism

  Cento Bull, A.

  Since the demise of the First Republic, Italy's social and political developments have appeared both intriguing and contradictory to the outside world, resulting in controversial interpretations of the current changes. Based on a study of two northern areas characterized until recently by a proletarian/communist subculture and an interclassist/Catholic one, this book offers important perspectives as a result of new research. Political change has often been spectacular. However, the author argues, it has been accompanied by a high degree of continuity in the sphere of kinship and social networks, thus remaining embedded in unchanging social structures. She arrived at her findings by going beyond traditional methods of analyzing political change and addressing the more fundamental question of the underlying behavior and attitudes in family and social relations, moral and religious beliefs and values, and forms of political socialization and identity. By examining the concepts such as "social capital" and "civicness," recently popularized and applied to Italy by Robert Putnam, and the role of subculture, she comes to the conclusion that Italian "civicness" is inextricably bound up with cultural and political localism and that the linear development from collective, socially-embedded political behaviour towards pluralism and individuals, as envisaged by many political commentators, does not hold in the light of thorough research; the relationship between pluralistic and collectivist behaviour is much more complex than has been generally believed so far.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available March 2018

  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

• eBook available June 2021

  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

• eBook available May 2009

  State Collapse and Reconstruction in the Periphery

  Political Economy, Ethnicity and Development in Yugoslavia, Serbia and Kosovo

  Sörensen, J. S.

  In the 1990s, Yugoslavia, which had once been a role model for development, became a symbol for state collapse, external intervention and post-war reconstruction. Today the region has two international protectorates, contested states and borders, severe ethnic polarization and minority concerns. In this first in-depth critical analysis of international administration, aid and reconstruction policies in Kosovo, Jens Stilhoff Sörensen argues that the region must be analyzed as a whole, and that the process of state collapse and recent changes in aid policy must be interpreted in connection to the wider transformation of the global political economy and world order. He examines the shifting inter- and intracommunity relations, the emergence of a "political economy" of conflict, and of informal clientelist arrangements in Serbia and Kosovo and provides a framework for interpreting the collapse of the Yugoslav state, the emergence of ethnic conflict and shadow economies, and the character of western aid and intervention. Western governments and agencies have built policies on conceptions and assumptions for which there is no genuine historical or contemporary economic, social or political basis in the region. As the author persuasively argues, this discrepancy has exacerbated and cemented problems in the region and provided further complications that are likely to remain for years to come.

  Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available January 2013

  State Practices and Zionist Images

  Shaping Economic Development in Arab Towns in Israel

  Wesley, D.A.

  Although the Israeli state subscribes to the principles of administrative fairness and equality for Jews and Arabs before the law, the reality looks very different. Focusing on Arab land loss inside Israel proper and the struggle over development resources, this study explores the interaction between Arab local authorities, their Jewish neighbors, and the agencies of the national government in regard to developing local and regional industrial areas. The author avoids reduction to simple models of binary domination, revealing instead a complex, multi-dimensional field of relations and ever-shifting lines of political maneuver and confrontation. He examines the prevailing concept of ethnic traditionalism and argues that the image of Arab traditionalism erects imaginary boundaries around the Arab localities, making government incursion disappear from view, while underpinning and rationalizing the exclusion of the Arab towns from development planning. Moreover, he shows how images of environmental protection mesh with and support such exclusion. The study includes a chronology of events, tables, maps, and photographs.

  This revised paperback edition with a new epilogue brings accounts of Arab land loss and struggles for economic development up to date. The author also deals with the challenges of life and research in Israel and examines the possibilities of sharing the land as the homeland of both Jews and Palestinians.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available July 2016

  The State We're In

  Reflecting on Democracy's Troubles

  Cook, J., Long, N. J., & Moore, H. L. (eds)

  What makes people lose faith in democratic statecraft? The question seems an urgent one. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, citizens across the world have grown increasingly disillusioned with what was once a cherished ideal. Setting out an original theoretical model that explores the relations between democracy, subjectivity and sociality, and exploring its relevance to countries ranging from Kenya to Peru, The State We’re In is a must-read for all political theorists, scholars of democracy, and readers concerned for the future of the democratic ideal.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available November 2017

  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

• June 2020

  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

• eBook available October 2015

  Street Vending in the Neoliberal City

  A Global Perspective on the Practices and Policies of a Marginalized Economy

  Graaff, K. & Ha, N. (eds)

  Examining street vending as a global, urban, and informalized practice found both in the Global North and Global South, this volume presents contributions from international scholars working in cities as diverse as Berlin, Dhaka, New York City, Los Angeles, Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City. The aim of this global approach is to repudiate the assumption that street vending is usually carried out in the Southern hemisphere and to reveal how it also represents an essential—and constantly growing—economic practice in urban centers of the Global North. Although street vending activities vary due to local specificities, this anthology illustrates how these urban practices can also reveal global ties and developments.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• October 2023

  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

• November 2016

  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

• eBook available December 2022

  Taking Our Water for the City

  The Archaeology of New York City’s Watershed Communities

  Beisaw, A. M.

  Tap water enables the development of cities in locations with insufficient natural resources to support such populations. For the last 200 years, New York City has obtained water through a network of nineteen reservoirs and controlled lakes, some as far as 125-miles away. Engineering this water system required the demolition of rural communities, removal of cemeteries, and rerouting of roadways and waterways. The ruination is ongoing. This archaeological examination of the New York City watershed reveals the cultural costs of urban water systems. Urban water systems do more than reroute water from one place to another. At best, they redefine communities. At worst, they erase them.

  Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• February 2023

  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

• June 2023

  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. 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

• September 2023

  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

• January 2023

  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

• eBook available April 2022

  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

• January 1995

  Toward a Global Civil Society

  Walzer, M. (ed)

  The demise of Communism has not only affected Eastern Europe but also the countries of the West where a far-reaching examination of political and economic systems has begun. This collection of essays by internationally renowned scholars of political theory from Europe and the United States explores both the concept and the reality of civil society and its institutions.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• November 2014

  U.S. Foreign Policy and the Other

  Cullinane, M. P. & Ryan, D. (eds)

  John Quincy Adams warned Americans not to search abroad for monsters to destroy, yet such figures have frequently habituated the discourses of U.S. foreign policy.  This collection of essays focuses on counter-identities in American consciousness to explain how foreign policies and the discourse surrounding them develop.  Whether it is the seemingly ubiquitous evil of Hitler during World War II or the more complicated perceptions of communism throughout the Cold War, these essays illuminate the cultural contexts that constructed rival identities.  The authors challenge our understanding of “others,” looking at early applications of the concept in the eighteenth century to recent twenty-first century conflicts, establishing how this phenomenon is central to decision making through centuries of conflict.

  Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available September 2019

  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

• eBook available April 2017

  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

• June 2023

  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, the latter 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

• January 2004

  Who Owns the Past?

  The Politics of Time in a 'Model' Bulgarian Village

  Kaneff, D.

  In the decades since the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe, time has been a central resource under negotiation. Focusing on a local community that was considered a "model" in the socialist period, the author explores a variety of state-sponsored and unofficial pasts - history, folklore, and tradition - and shows how they "fit" together in everyday life. During the socialist period, the past was a central dimension of local politics and village identity. Post-socialist development has demanded a revaluation of temporality - as well as public and private space. This has led to fundamental changes in social life and political relations, reduced local resources, threatened village identity and transformed political activity through the emergence of new political elites.

  While the full implications of this process are still being played out, this study underlines some of the fundamental processes prevalent across eastern Europe that help explain widespread ambiguity vis-B-vis post-socialist reform.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• August 2012

  Who Owns the Stock?

  Collective and Multiple Property Rights in Animals

  Khazanov, A. M. & Schlee, G. (eds)

  The issue of collective and multiple property rights in animals, such as cattle, camels or reindeers, among pastoralists has never been a subject of special cross-cultural and comparative study. Focusing on pastoralist societies in East and West Africa, the Far North and Siberia, and the Eurasian steppes, this volume addresses the issue of property rights and the changes these societies have undergone due to the direct or indirect influence of modernization and globalization processes. The contributors also investigate the interplay of older sets of rights and modern marketing policies; political, ecological and economic effects of collectivization and de-collectivization; the existence of collective and private property in the Soviet Union and its successor states; state taxation and destocking measures in African dry lands; and the effects of quarantine, as well as import and export regulations. The rich and well-researched ethnographic, historical, and economic data in these chapters provides new theoretical insights into the matter of property rights in animals.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

• August 2020

  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)

• eBook available May 2022

  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

• eBook available September 2021

  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

• eBook available June 2018

  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

• June 2015

  Yearnings in the Meantime

  'Normal Lives' and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex

  Jansen, S.

  Shortly after the book’s protagonists moved into their apartment complex in Sarajevo, they, like many others, were overcome by the 1992-1995 war and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia More than a decade later, in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, they felt they were collectively stuck in a time warp where nothing seemed to be as it should be. Starting from everyday concerns, this book paints a compassionate yet critical portrait of people’s sense that they were in limbo, trapped in a seemingly endless “Meantime.” Ethnographically investigating yearnings for “normal lives” in the European semi-periphery, it proposes fresh analytical tools to explore how the time and place in which we are caught shape our hopes and fears.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Political and Economic Anthropology