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by Subject: Sociology

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• eBook available November 2019

  Access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies

  The Case of France and Belgium

  Merchant, J. (ed)

  Despite France and Belgium sharing and interacting constantly with similar culinary tastes, music and pop culture, access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies are strikingly different. Discrimination written into French law acutely contrasts with non-discriminatory access to ART in Belgium. The contributors of this volume are social scientists from France, Belgium, England and the United States, representing different disciplines: law, political science, philosophy, sociology and anthropology. Each author has attempted, through the prism of their specialties, to demonstrate and analyse how and why this striking difference in access to ART exists.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available December 2017

  Affective States

  Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions

  Laszczkowski, M. & Reeves, M. (eds)

  In recent years, political and social theory has been transformed by the heterogeneous approaches to feeling and emotion jointly referred to as ‘affect theory’. These range from psychological and social-constructivist approaches to emotion to feminist and post-human perspectives. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and ethnographic contexts—from engineering in the Andes to household rituals in rural China, from South African land restitution to migrant living in Moscow, and from elections in El Salvador to online and offline surveillance among political refugees from Uzbekistan and Eritrea—the chapters in this volume interrogate this ‘affective turn’ through the lens of fine-grained ethnographies of the state. The volume enhances the anthropological understanding of the various ways through which the state comes to be experienced as a visceral presence in social life.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available July 2012

  After The History of Sexuality

  German Genealogies with and Beyond Foucault

  Spector, S., Puff, H. & Herzog, D. (eds)

  Michel Foucault’s seminal The History of Sexuality (1976–1984) has since its publication provided a context for the emergence of critical historical studies of sexuality. This collection reassesses the state of the historiography on sexuality—a field in which the German case has been traditionally central. In many diverse ways, the Foucauldian intervention has governed the formation of questions in the field as well as the assumptions about how some of these questions should be answered. It can be argued, however, that some of these revolutionary insights have ossified into dogmas or truisms within the field. Yet, as these contributions meticulously reveal, those very truisms, when revisited with a fresh eye, can lead to new, unexpected insights into the history of sexuality, necessitating a return to and reinterpretation of Foucault’s richly complex work. This volume will be necessary reading for students of historical sexuality as well as for those readers in German history and German studies generally who have an interest in the history of sexuality.

  Subjects: History (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• eBook available July 2021

  After Corporate Paternalism

  Material Renovation and Social Change in Times of Ruination

  Straube, C.

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Sociology

• eBook available December 2016

  Against Exoticism

  Toward the Transcendence of Relativism and Universalism in Anthropology

  Kapferer, B. & Theodossopoulos, D. (eds)

  Anthropology begins in the encounter with the ‘exotic’: what stands outside of—and challenges—conventional or established understandings. This volume confronts the distortions of orientalism, ethnocentrism, and romantic nostalgia to expose exoticism, defined as the construction of false and unsubstantiated difference. Its aim is to re-found the importance of the exotic in the development of anthropological knowledge and to overcome methodological dualisms and dualistic approaches.


  Chapters look at the risk of exoticism in the perspectivist approach, the significant exotic corrective of Lévi-Strauss vis-à-vis an imperializing Eurocentrism, our nostalgic relationship with the ethnographic record, and the attempts of local communities to readapt previous exoticized referents, renegotiate their identity, and ‘counter-exoticize.’ This volume demonstrates a range of approaches that will be valuable for researchers and students seeking to effectively establish comparative methodological frameworks that transcend issues of relativism and universalism.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• eBook available June 2021

  The Age of Capitalism and Bureaucracy

  Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber

  Mommsen, W. J.

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

  Subjects: Sociology History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available July 2020

  Agency in Transnational Memory Politics

  Wüstenberg, J. & Sierp, A. (eds)

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

  Subjects: History (General) Sociology Memory Studies

• eBook available July 2021

  Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula

  An Anthropological Study of the Tapija Phenomenon in Northwest Croatia

  Matošević, A.

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available September 2019

  Ambiguous Childhoods

  Peer Socialisation, Schooling and Agency in a Zambian Village

  Clemensen, N.

  Growing up with social and economic upheaval in the peripheries of global neoliberalism, children in rural Zambia are presented with diverging social and moral protocols across homes, classrooms, church halls, and the streets. Mostly unmonitored by adults, they explore the ambiguities of adult life in playful interactions with their siblings and kin across gender and age. Drawing on rich linguistic-ethnographic details of such interactions combined with observations of school and household procedures, the author provides a rare insight into the lives, voices, and learning paths of children in a rural African setting.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Development Studies Educational Studies

• eBook available May 2012

  Ambiguous Pleasures

  Sexuality and Middle Class Self-Perceptions in Nairobi

  Spronk, R.

  Among both male and female young urban professionals in Nairobi, sexuality is a key to achieving a ‘modern’ identity. These young men and women see themselves as the avant garde of a new Africa, while they also express the recurring worry of how to combine an ‘African’ identity with the new lifestyles with which they are experimenting. By focusing on public debates and their preoccupations with issues of African heritage, gerontocratic power relations and conventional morality on the one hand, and personal sexual relationships, intimacy and self-perceptions on the other, this study works out the complexities of sexuality and culture in the context of modernity in an African society. It moves beyond an investigation of a health or development perspective of sexuality and instead examines desire, pleasure and eroticism, revealing new insights into the methodology and theory of the study of sexuality within the social sciences. Sexuality serves as a prism for analysing how social developments generate new notions of self in postcolonial Kenya and is a crucial component towards understanding the way people recognize and deal with modern changes in their personal lives.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• 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

• eBook available July 2019

  The Anti-Social Contract

  Injurious Talk and Dangerous Exchanges in Northern Mongolia

  Højer, L.

  Set in a remote district of villagers and nomadic pastoralists in the northernmost part of Mongolia, this book introduces a local world where social relationships are cast in witchcraft-like idioms of mistrust and suspicion. While the apparent social breakdown that followed the collapse of state socialism in Mongolia often implied a chaotic lack of social cohesion, this ethnography reveals an everyday universe where uncertain relations are as much internally cultivated in indigenous Mongolian perceptions of social relatedness, as they are externally confronted in postsocialist surroundings of unemployment and diminished social security.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available January 2018

  Archaeologies of Rules and Regulation

  Between Text and Practice

  Hausmair, B., Jervis, B., Nugent, R., & Williams, E. (eds)

  How can we study the impact of rules on the lives of past people using archaeological evidence? To answer this question, Archaeologies of Rules and Regulation presents case studies drawn from across Europe and the United States. Covering areas as diverse as the use of space in a nineteenth-century U.S. Army camp, the deposition of waste in medieval towns, the experiences of Swedish migrants to North America, the relationship between people and animals in Anglo-Saxon England, these case studies explore the use of archaeological evidence in understanding the relationship between rules, lived experience, and social identity.

  Subjects: Archaeology History: Medieval/Early Modern Sociology History (General)

• eBook available August 2018

  Being a Sperm Donor

  Masculinity, Sexuality, and Biosociality in Denmark

  Mohr, S.

  What does it mean to be a man in our biomedical day and age? Through ethnographic explorations of the everyday lives of Danish sperm donors, Being a Sperm Donor explores how masculinity and sexuality are reconfigured in a time in which the norms and logics of (reproductive) biomedicine have become ordinary. It investigates men’s moral reasoning regarding donation, their handling of transgressive experiences at the sperm bank, and their negotiations of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and relatedness, showing how the socio-cultural and political dimensions of (reproductive) biomedicine become intertwined with men’s intimate sense of self.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available December 2005

  Between Marx and Coca-Cola

  Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-1980

  Schildt, A. & Siegfried, D. (eds)

  In the 1960s and 1970s, Western Europe's "Golden Age" (Eric Hobsbawm), a new youth consciousness emerged, which gave this period its distinctive character. Offering rich and new material, this volume moves beyond the easy conflation of youth culture and "Americanization" and instead sets out to show, for the first time, how international developments fused with national traditions to produce specific youth cultures that became the leading trendsetters of emergent post-industrial Western societies. It presents a multi-faceted portrait of European youth cultures, colored by differences in gender, class, and education, and points out the tension between emerging consumerism and growing politicisation, succinctly expressed by Jean-Luc Godard in his 1967 pairing of "Marx and Coca-Cola."

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies Sociology

• eBook available July 2008

  Between Mass Death and Individual Loss

  The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany

  Confino, A., Betts, P. & Schumann, D. (eds)

  Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in the history of death. Increasing academic attention toward death as a historical subject in its own right is very much linked to its pre-eminent place in 20th-century history, and Germany, predictably, occupies a special place in these inquiries. This collection of essays explores how German mourning changed over the 20th century in different contexts, with a particular view to how death was linked to larger issues of social order and cultural self-understanding. It contributes to a history of death in 20th-century Germany that does not begin and end with the Third Reich.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• eBook available July 2020

  Beyond Filial Piety

  Rethinking Aging and Caregiving in Contemporary East Asian Societies

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

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available March 2019

  Beyond the Border

  Young Minorities in the Danish-German Borderlands, 1955-1971

  Wung-Sung, T. H.

  In the nineteenth century, the hotly disputed border region between Denmark and Germany was the focus of an intricate conflict that complicates questions of ethnic and national identity even today. Beyond the Border reconstructs the experiences of both Danish and German minority youths living in the area from the 1950s to the 1970s, a period in which relations remained tense amid the broader developments of Cold War geopolitics. Drawing on a remarkable variety of archival and oral sources, the author provides a rich and fine-grained analysis that encompasses political issues from the NATO alliance and European integration to everyday life and popular culture.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available November 2019

  Bourdieu and Social Space

  Mobilities, Trajectories, Emplacements

  Reed-Danahay, D.

  French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu’s relevance for studies of spatiality and mobility has received less attention than other aspects of his work. Here, Deborah Reed-Danahay argues that the concept of social space, central to Bourdieu’s ideas, addresses the structured inequalities that prevail in spatial choices and practices. She provides an ethnographically informed interpretation of social space that demonstrates its potential for new directions in studies of mobility, immobility, and emplacement.  This book traces the links between habitus and social space across the span of Bourdieu’s writings, and places his work in dialogue with historical and contemporary approaches to mobility.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Mobility Studies Sociology

• 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

• eBook available March 2019

  Categories in Context

  Gender and Work in France and Germany, 1900–Present

  Berrebi-Hoffmann, I., Giraud, O., Renard, L., & Wobbe, T. (eds)

  Despite the wealth of empirical research currently available on the interrelationships of gender and labor, we still know comparatively little about the forms of classification and categorization that have helped shape these social phenomena over time. Categories in Context seeks to enrich our understanding of how cognitive categories such as status, law, and rights have been produced, comprehended, appropriated, and eventually transformed by relevant actors. By focusing on specific developments in France and Germany through a transnational lens, this volume produces insights that can be applied to a wide variety of political, social, and historical contexts.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History (General) Sociology

• 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

• eBook available March 2010

  Changing the World, Changing Oneself

  Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s

  Davis, B., Mausbach, W., Klimke, M. & MacDougall, C. (eds)

  A captivating time, the 60s and 70s now draw more attention than ever. The first substantial work by historians has appeared only in the last few years, and this volume offers an important contribution. These meticulously researched essays offer new perspectives on the Cold War and global relations in the 1960s and 70s through the perspective of the youth movements that shook the U.S., Western Europe, and beyond. These movements led to the transformation of diplomatic relations and domestic political cultures, as well as ideas about democracy and who best understood and promoted it. Bringing together scholars of several countries and many disciplines, this volume also uniquely features the reflections of former activists.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available October 2017

  Children of the Camp

  The Lives of Somali Youth Raised in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya

  Grayson, C.-L.

  Chronic violence has characterized Somalia for over two decades, forcing nearly two million people to flee. A significant number have settled in camps in neighboring countries, where children were born and raised. Based on in-depth fieldwork, this book explores the experience of Somalis who grew up in Kakuma refugee camp, in Kenya, and are now young adults. This original study carefully considers how young people perceive their living environment and how growing up in exile structures their view of the past and their country of origin, and the future and its possibilities.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology

• eBook available November 2013

  Children of the Dictatorship

  Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the 'Long 1960s' in Greece

  Kornetis, K.

  Putting Greece back on the cultural and political map of the “Long 1960s,” this book traces the dissent and activism of anti-regime students during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967-74). It explores the cultural as well as ideological protest of Greek student activists, illustrating how these “children of the dictatorship” managed to re-appropriate indigenous folk tradition for their “progressive” purposes and how their transnational exchange molded a particular local protest culture. It examines how the students’ social and political practices became a major source of pressure on the Colonels’ regime, finding its apogee in the three day Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 which laid the foundations for a total reshaping of Greek political culture in the following decades. 

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• 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 September 2011

  Civilizations Beyond Earth

  Extraterrestrial Life and Society

  Vakoch, D. A. & Harrison, A. A. (eds)

  Astronomers around the world are pointing their telescopes toward the heavens, searching for signs of intelligent life. If they make contact with an advanced alien civilization, how will humankind respond? In thinking about first contact, the contributors to this volume present new empirical and theoretical research on the societal dimensions of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Archaeologists and astronomers explore the likelihood that extraterrestrial intelligence exists, using scientific insights to estimate such elusive factors as the longevity of technological societies. Sociologists present the latest findings of novel surveys, tapping into the public’s attitudes about life beyond Earth to show how religion and education influence beliefs about extraterrestrials. Scholars from such diverse disciplines as mathematics, chemistry, journalism, and religious studies offer innovative solutions for bridging the cultural gap between human and extraterrestrial civilizations, while recognizing the tremendous challenges of communicating at interstellar distances. At a time when new planets are being discovered around other stars at an unprecedented rate, this collection provides a much needed guide to the human impact of discovering we are not alone in the universe.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Archaeology

• eBook available May 2016

  Coming of Age

  Constructing and Controlling Youth in Munich, 1942-1973

  Kalb, M.

  In the lean and anxious years following World War II, Munich society became obsessed with the moral condition of its youth. Initially born of the economic and social disruption of the war years, a preoccupation with juvenile delinquency progressed into a full-blown panic over the hypothetical threat that young men and women posed to postwar stability. As Martin Kalb shows in this fascinating study, constructs like the rowdy young boy and the sexually deviant girl served as proxies for the diffuse fears of adult society, while allowing authorities ranging from local institutions to the U.S. military government to strengthen forms of social control.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available December 2007

  Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty

  Blatterer, H.

  Adulthood is taken for granted. It connotes the end of childhood, the resolution to the “storm and stress” period of adolescence. This conception is strongly entrenched in the sociology of youth and the sociology of the life course as well as in the policy arena. At the same time, adulthood itself remains unarticulated; journey’s end remains conceptually fixed and theoretically uncontested. Adulthood, then, is both central to the social imagination and neglected as an area of sociological investigation, something that has been noted by sociologists over the last four decades. Going beyond the overwhelmingly psychological literature, this book draws on original qualitative research and theories of social recognition and thus presents a first step towards filling an important gap in our understanding of the meaning of adulthood.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available June 2019

  The Configuration of the Spanish Public Sphere

  From the Enlightenment to the Indignados

  Jiménez Torres, D. & Villamediana González, L. (eds)

  Since the explosion of the indignados movement beginning in 2011, there has been a renewed interest in the concept of the “public sphere” in a Spanish context: how it relates to society and to political power, and how it has evolved over the centuries. The Configuration of the Spanish Public Sphere brings together contributions from leading scholars in Hispanic studies, across a wide range of disciplines, to investigate various aspects of these processes, offering a long-term, panoramic view that touches on one of the most urgent issues for contemporary European societies.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available August 2016

  Constitutional Courts in Comparison

  The US Supreme Court and the German Federal Constitutional Court

  Rogowski, R. & Gawron T. (eds)

  Constitutional litigation in general attracts two distinct types of conflict: disputes of a highly politicized or culturally controversial nature and requests from citizens claiming a violation of a fundamental constitutional right. The side-by-side comparison between the U.S. Supreme Court and the German Federal Constitutional Court provides a novel socio-legal approach in studying constitutional litigation, focusing on conditions of mobilisation, decision-making and implementation.

  This updated and revised second edition includes a number of new contributions on the political status of the courts in their democratic political cultures.

  Subject: Sociology

• eBook available November 2016

  Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy

  Action Research in Higher Education

  Levin, M. & Greenwood, D. J.

  Public universities are in crisis, waning in their role as central institutions within democratic societies. Denunciations are abundant, but analyses of the causes and proposals to re-create public universities are not. Based on extensive experience with Action Research-based organizational change in universities and private sector organizations, Levin and Greenwood analyze the wreckage created by neoliberal academic administrators and policymakers. The authors argue that public universities must be democratically organized to perform their educational and societal functions. The book closes by laying out Action Research processes that can transform public universities back into institutions that promote academic freedom, integrity, and democracy.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Educational Studies Sociology

• 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 June 2019

  Crossing Histories and Ethnographies

  Following Colonial Historicities in Timor-Leste

  Roque, R. & Traube, E. G. (eds)

  The key question for many anthropologists and historians today is not whether to cross the boundary between their disciplines, but whether the idea of a disciplinary boundary should be sustained. Reinterpreting the dynamic interplay between archive and field, these essays propose a method for mutually productive crossings between historical and ethnographic research. It engages critically with the colonial pasts of indigenous societies and examines how fieldwork and archival studies together lead to fruitful insights into the making of different colonial historicities. Timor-Leste’s unusually long and in some ways unique colonial history is explored as a compelling case for these crossings.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Sociology

• eBook available February 2012

  The Cult and Science of Public Health

  A Sociological Investigation

  Dew, K.

  In contemporary manifestations of public health rituals and events, people are being increasingly united around what they hold in common—their material being and humanity. As a cult of humanity, public health provides a moral force in society that replaces ‘traditional’ religions in times of great diversity or heterogeneity of peoples, activities and desires. This is in contrast to public health’s foundation in science, particularly the science of epidemiology. The rigid rules of ‘scientific evidence’ used to determine the cause of illness and disease can work against the most vulnerable in society by putting sectors of the population, such as underrepresented workers, at a disadvantage. This study focuses on this tension between traditional science and the changing vision articulated within public health (and across many disciplines) that calls for a collective response to uncontrolled capitalism and unremitting globalization, and to the way in which health inequalities and their association with social inequalities provides a political rhetoric that calls for a new redistributive social programme. Drawing on decades of research, the author argues that public health is both a cult and a science of contemporary society.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Medical Anthropology

• eBook available June 2012

  Cultures of Colour

  Visual, Material, Textual

  Horrocks, C. (ed)

  Colour permeates contemporary visual and material culture and affects our senses beyond the superficial encounter by infiltrating our perceptions and memories and becoming deeply rooted in thought processes that categorise and divide along culturally constructed lines. Colour exists as a cultural as well as psycho-physical phenomenon and acquires a multitude of meanings within differing historical and cultural contexts. The contributors examine how colour becomes imbued with specific symbolic and material meanings that tint our constructions of race, gender, ideal bodies, the relationship of the self to others and of the self to technology and the built environment. By highlighting the relationship of colour across media and material culture, this volume reveals the complex interplay of cultural connotations, discursive practices and socio-psychological dynamics of colour in an international context.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History (General) Sociology

• eBook available April 2018

  Cutting Cosmos

  Masculinity and Spectacular Events among the Bugkalot

  Mikkelsen, H. H.

  For the first time in over 30 years, a new ethnographic study emerges on the Bugkalot tribe, more widely known as the Ilongot of the northern Philippines. Exploring the notion of masculinity among the Bugkalot, Cutting Cosmos is not only an experimental, anthropological study of the paradoxes around which Bugkalot society revolves, but also a reflection on anthropological theory and writing. Focusing on the transgressive acts through which masculinity is performed, this book explores the idea of the cosmic cut, the ritual act that enables the Bugkalot man to momentarily hold still the chaotic flows of his world.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available April 2019

  Cyborg Mind

  What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

  MacKellar, C.

  With the development of new direct interfaces between the human brain and computer systems, the time has come for an in-depth ethical examination of the way these neuronal interfaces may support an interaction between the mind and cyberspace.

  In so doing, this book does not hesitate to blend disciplines including neurobiology, philosophy, anthropology and politics. It also invites society, as a whole, to seek a path in the use of these interfaces enabling humanity to prosper while avoiding the relevant risks. As such, the volume is the first extensive study in cyberneuroethics, a subject matter which is certain to have a significant impact in the 21st century and beyond.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available June 2021

  Delta Life

  Exploring Dynamic Environments where Rivers Meet the Sea

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

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

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available January 2020

  The Devil is Disorder

  Bodies, Spirits and Misfortune in a Trinidadian Village

  Lynch, R.

  What role might the Devil have in health and illness? The Devil is Disorder explores constructions of the body, health, illness and wider misfortune in a Trinidadian village where evangelical Christianity is growing in popularity. Based on long-term ethnography and locating the village in historical and global context, the book takes a nuanced cosmological approach to situate evangelical Christian understandings as shaping and being shaped by their context and, in the process, shaping individuals themselves. As people move from local to global subjects, health here stretches beyond being a matter of individual bodies and is connected to worldwide flows and networks, spirit entities, and expansive moral orders.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion Sociology

• eBook available January 2003

  Disputed Territories

  The Transnational Dynamics of Ethnic Conflict Settlement

  Wolff, S.

  Ethnic conflicts have shaped the 20th century in significant ways. While the legacy of the last century is primarily one of many unresolved conflicts, the author contends that Western Europe has a track record in containing and settling ethnic conflicts which provides valuable lessons for conflict management elsewhere. Focusing on ethno-territorial crossborder conflicts in Alsace, the Saarland, South Tyrol, and Northern Ireland, Andorra and the New Hebrides, the author develops a four-dimensional analytical framework that synthesizes the distinct factors that influence the complex relationship between host-state, kin-state, actors in the disputed territory, and in the international context.

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology

• eBook available March 2014

  Domesticating Youth

  Youth Bulges and their Socio-political Implications in Tajikistan

  Roche, S.

  Most of the Muslim societies of the world have entered a demographic transition from high to low fertility, and this process is accompanied by an increase in youth vis-à-vis other age groups. Political scientists and historians have debated whether such a “youth bulge” increases the potential for conflict or whether it represents a chance to accumulate wealth and push forward social and technological developments. This book introduces the discussion about youth bulge into social anthropology using Tajikistan, a post-Soviet country that experienced civil war in the 1990s, which is in the middle of such a demographic transition. Sophie Roche develops a social anthropological approach to analyze demographic and political dynamics, and suggests a new way of thinking about social change in youth bulge societies.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available November 2013

  Durkheim in Dialogue

  A Centenary Celebration of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

  Hausner, S. L. (ed)

  One hundred years after the publication of the great sociological treatise, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, this new volume shows how aptly Durkheim¹s theories still resonate with the study of contemporary and historical religious societies. The volume applies the Durkheimian model to multiple cases, probing its resilience, wondering where it might be tweaked, and asking which aspects have best stood the test of time. A dialogue between theory and ethnography, this book shows how Durkheimian sociology has become a mainstay of social thought and theory, pointing to multiple ways in which Durkheim¹s work on religion remains relevant to our thinking about culture.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available August 2013

  Durkheim, the Durkheimians, and the Arts

  Riley, A.T., Pickering, W.S.F., & Watts Miller, W. (eds)

  Using a broad definition of the Durkheimian tradition, this book offers the first systematic attempt to explore the Durkheimians’ engagement with art. It focuses on both Durkheim and his contemporaries as well as later thinkers influenced by his work. The first five chapters consider Durkheim’s own exploration of art; the remaining six look at other Durkheimian thinkers, including Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, Maurice Halbwachs, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Leiris, and Georges Bataille. The contributors—scholars from a range of theoretical orientations and disciplinary perspectives—are known for having already produced significant contributions to the study of Durkheim. This book will interest not only scholars of Durkheim and his tradition but also those concerned with aesthetic theory and the sociology and history of art.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available August 2012

  A Durkheimian Quest

  Solidarity and the Sacred

  Watts Miller, W.

  Durkheim, in his very role as a ‘founding father’ of a new social science, sociology, has become like a figure in an old religious painting, enshrouded in myth and encrusted in layers of thick, impenetrable varnish. This book undertakes detailed, up-to-date investigations of Durkheim’s work in an effort to restore its freshness and reveal it as originally created. These investigations explore his particular ideas, within an overall narrative of his initial problematic search for solidarity, how it became a quest for the sacred and how, at the end of his life, he embarked on a project for a new great work on ethics. A theme running through this is his concern with a modern world in crisis and his hope in social and moral reform. Accordingly, the book concludes with a set of essays on modern times and on a crisis that Durkheim thought would pass but which now seems here to stay.

  Subjects: Sociology Theory and Methodology

• 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 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 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

• eBook available June 2021

  Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience

  New Phenomenological and Cognitivist Perspectives

  Sinnerbrink, R. (ed)

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

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Media Studies Sociology

• eBook available April 2019

  The Engaged Historian

  Perspectives on the Intersections of Politics, Activism and the Historical Profession

  Berger, S. (ed)

  On the surface, historical scholarship might seem thoroughly incompatible with political engagement: the ideal historian, many imagine, is a disinterested observer focused exclusively on the past. In truth, however, political action and historical research have been deeply intertwined for as long as the historical profession has existed. In this insightful collection, practicing historians analyze, reflect on, and share their experiences of this complex relationship. From the influence of historical scholarship on world political leaders to the present-day participation of researchers in post-conflict societies and the Occupy movement, these studies afford distinctive, humane, and stimulating views on historical practice and practitioners

  Subjects: History (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology

• eBook available May 2019

  Engaging Evil

  A Moral Anthropology

  Olsen, W. C. & Csordas, T. J. (eds)

  Anthropologists have expressed wariness about the concept of evil even in discussions of morality and ethics, in part because the concept carries its own cultural baggage and theological implications in Euro-American societies. Addressing the problem of evil as a distinctly human phenomenon and a category of ethnographic analysis, this volume shows the usefulness of engaging evil as a descriptor of empirical reality where concepts such as violence, criminality, and hatred fall short of capturing the darkest side of human existence.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology Anthropology of Religion

• 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 March 2021

  Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls

  Transnational Approaches

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

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

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available March 2014

  The Ethics of the New Eugenics

  MacKellar, C. & Bechtel, C. (eds)

  Strategies or decisions aimed at affecting, in a manner considered to be positive, the genetic heritage of a child in the context of human reproduction are increasingly being accepted in contemporary society. As a result, unnerving similarities between earlier selection ideology so central to the discredited eugenic regimes of the 20th century and those now on offer suggest that a new era of eugenics has dawned. The time is ripe, therefore, for considering and evaluating from an ethical perspective both current and future selection practices. This inter-disciplinary volume blends research from embryology, genetics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and history. In so doing, it constructs a thorough picture of the procedures emerging from today’s reproductive developments, including a rigorous ethical argumentation concerning the possible advantages and risks related to the new eugenics.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available July 2018

  Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space

  Place-Making in the New Northern Ireland

  Komarova, M. & Svašek, M. (eds)

  Exploring the complex dynamics of twenty-first century spatial sociality, this volume provides a much-needed multi-dimensional perspective that undermines the dominant image of Northern Ireland as a conflict-ridden place. Despite touching on memories of “the Troubles” and continuing unionist-nationalist tensions, the volume refuses to consider people in the region as purely political beings, or to understand processes of placemaking solely through ethnic or national contestations and territoriality. Topics such as the significance of friendship, gender, and popular culture in spatial practices are considered, against the backdrop of the growing presence of migrants, refugees and diasporic groups.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Urban Studies Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available April 2021

  Ethnography in the Raw

  Life in a Luzon Village

  Moeran, B.

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available June 2012

  European Foundations of the Welfare State

  Kaufmann, F.-X.

  While social welfare programs, often inspired by international organizations, are spreading throughout the world, the more far-reaching notion of governmental responsibility for the basic well-being of all members of a political society is not, although it remains a feature of Europe and the former British Commonwealth. The welfare state in the European sense is not simply an administrative arrangement of various measures of social protection but a political project embedded in distinct cultural traditions. Offering the first accessible account in English of the historical development of the European idea of the welfare state, this book reviews the intellectual foundations which underpinned the road towards the European welfare state, formulates some basic concepts for its understanding, and highlights the differences in the underlying structural and philosophical conditions between continental Europe and the English-speaking world.

  Subjects: History (General) Sociology

• eBook available 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 impending 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 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 May 2007

  Explorations in Psychoanalytic Ethnography

  Mimica, J. (ed)

  Whereas most anthropological research is grounded in social, cultural and biological analysis of the human condition, this volume opens up a different approach: its concerns are the psychic depths of human cultural life-worlds as explored through psycho-analytic practice and/or the psychoanalytically framed ethnographic project. In fact, some contributors here argue that the anthropological interpretation of human existence is not sustainable without psychoanalysis; others take a less extreme radical stance but still maintain that the unconscious matrix of the human psyche and of the intersubjective (social) reality of any given cultural life-world is a vital domain of anthropological and sociological inquiry and understanding.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology 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 October 2017

  Foucault's Orient

  The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan

  Lazreg, M.

  Foucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the “Orient” constitute the “limit” of Western rationality. Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars in Tunisia, Japan and France, this book examines the philosophical sources, evolution as well as contradictions of Foucault’s experience with non-Western cultures.  Beyond tracing Foucault’s journey into the world of otherness, the book reveals the personal, political as well as methodological effects of a radical conception of cultural difference that extolled the local over the cosmopolitan.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available June 2011

  France in the Age of Organization

  Factory, Home and Nation from the 1920s to Vichy

  Clarke, J.

  In interwar France, there was a growing sense that ‘organization’ was the solution to the nation’s perceived social, economic and political ills. This book examines the roots of this idea in the industrial rationalization movement and its manifestations in areas as diverse as domestic organization and economic planning. In doing so, it shows how experts in fields ranging from engineering to the biological sciences shaped visions of a rational socio-economic order from the 1920s to Vichy and beyond.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available August 2016

  The France of the Little-Middles

  A Suburban Housing Development in Greater Paris

  Cartier, M., Coutant, I., Masclet, O., & Siblot, Y.

  The Poplars housing development in suburban Paris is home to what one resident called the “Little-Middles” – a social group on the tenuous border between the working- and middle- classes. In the 1960s The Poplars was a site of upward social mobility, which fostered an egalitarian sense of community among residents. This feeling of collective flourishing was challenged when some residents moved away, selling their homes to a new generation of upwardly mobile neighbors from predominantly immigrant backgrounds. This volume explores the strained reception of these migrants, arguing that this is less a product of racism and xenophobia than of anxiety about social class and the loss of a sense of community that reigned before.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Urban Studies

• eBook available March 2020

  Friendship without Borders

  Women's Stories of Power, Politics, and Everyday Life across East and West Germany

  Leask, P.

  Across half a century, from the division of Germany through the end of the Cold War, a cohort of thirty women from the small German town of Schönebeck in what used to be the GDR circulated among themselves a remarkable collective archive of their lives: a Rundbrief, or bulletin, containing hundreds of letters and photographs. This book draws on that unprecedented resource, complemented by a set of interviews, to paint a rich portrait of “ordinary” life in postwar Germany. It shows how these women—whether reflecting on their experiences as Nazi-era schoolchildren or witnessing reunification—were united by their complex interactions with official power and their commitment to sustaining a shared German identity as they made the most of their everyday lives in both the GDR and the Federal Republic.

  Subjects: History (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• 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 April 2019

  Gendering Post-1945 German History

  Entanglements

  Hagemann, K., & Harsch, D., & Brühöfner, F. (eds)

  Although “entanglement” has become a keyword in recent German history scholarship, entangled studies of the postwar era have largely limited their scope to politics and economics across the two Germanys while giving short shrift to social and cultural phenomena like gender. At the same time, historians of gender in Germany have tended to treat East and West Germany in isolation, with little attention paid to intersections and interrelationships between the two countries. This groundbreaking collection synthesizes the perspectives of entangled history and gender studies, bringing together established as well as upcoming scholars to investigate the ways in which East and West German gender relations were culturally, socially, and politically intertwined.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• 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 July 2019

  The Girl in the Text

  Smith, A. (ed)

  How are girls represented in written and graphic texts, and how do these representations inform our understanding of girlhood? In this volume, contributors examine the girl in the text in order to explore a range of perspectives on girlhood across borders and in relation to their positionality. In literary and transactional texts, girls are presented as heroes who empower themselves and others with lasting effect, as figures of liberating pedagogical practice and educational activism, and as catalysts for discussions of the relationship between desire and ethics. In these varied chapters, a new notion of transnationalism emerges, one rooted not only in the process through which borders between nation-states become more porous, but through which cultural and ethnic imperatives become permeable.

  Subjects: Literary Studies Sociology Media Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available October 2018

  The Global Age-Friendly Community Movement

  A Critical Appraisal

  Staffored, P. B. (ed)

  The age-friendly community movement is a global phenomenon, currently growing with the support of the WHO and multiple international and national organizations in the field of aging. Drawing on an extensive collection of international case studies, this volume provides an introduction to the movement. The contributors – both researchers and practitioners – touch on a number of current tensions and issues in the movement and offer a wide-ranging set of recommendations for advancing age-friendly community development. The book concludes with a call for a radical transformation of a medical and lifestyle model of aging into a relational model of health and social/individual wellbeing.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available July 2018

  Global Fluids

  The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Waste and Value

  Kroløkke, C.

  In the fertility and cosmetics industries, women’s body products – such as urine, eggs, and placentas – have moved from being seen as waste to becoming valuable ingredients. Taking a sociological and anthropological perspective, the author focuses in particular on the role that countries like Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, and Japan play in the reproductive products industry, and discusses the moral limits of the cultural and rhetorical trajectories that turn women’s body products into internationally mobile substances.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available April 2010

  Godless Intellectuals?

  The Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred Reinvented

  Riley, A. T.

  The Durkheimians have traditionally been understood as positivist, secular thinkers, fully within the Enlightenment project of limitless reason and progress. In a radical revision of this view, this book persuasively argues that the core members of the Durkheimian circle (Durkheim himself, Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert and Robert Hertz) are significantly more complicated than this. Through his extensive analysis of large volumes of correspondence as well as historical and macro-sociological mappings of the intellectual and social worlds in which the Durkheimian project emerged, the author shows the Durkheimian project to have constituted a quasi-religious quest in ways much deeper than most interpreters have thought. Their fascination, both personal and intellectual, with the sacred is the basis on which the author reconstructs some important components of modern French intellectual history, connecting Durkheimian thought to key representatives of French poststructuralism and postmodernism: Bataille, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Deleuze.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available May 2017

  Hairy Hippies and Bloody Butchers

  The Greenpeace Anti-Whaling Campaign in Norway

  Riese, J.

  In the popular imagination, no issue has been more closely linked with the environmental group Greenpeace than whaling. Opposition to commercial whaling has inspired many of the organization’s most dramatic and high-profile “direct actions”—as well as some of its most notable failures. This book provides an inside look at one such instance: Greenpeace’s decades-long campaign against the Norwegian whaling industry. Combining historical narrative with systems-theory analysis, author Juliane Riese shows how the organization’s self-presentation as a David pitted against whale-butchering Goliaths was turned on its head. She recounts how opponents successfully discredited the campaign while Greenpeace struggled with internal disagreements and other organizational challenges, providing valuable lessons for other protest movements.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available December 2008

  Hierarchy

  Persistence and Transformation in Social Formations

  Rio, K. & Smedal, O. H. (eds)

  Louis Dumont's concept of hierarchy continues to inspire social scientists. Using it as their starting point, the contributors to this volume introduce both fresh empirical material and new theoretical considerations. On the basis of diverse ethnographic contexts in Oceania, Asia, and the Middle East they challenge some current conceptions of hierarchical formations and reassess former debates - of post-colonial and neo-colonial agendas, ideas of "democratization" and "globalization," and expanding market economies - both with regard to new theoretical issues and the new world situation.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology

• eBook available August 2018

  Hierarchy and Value

  Comparative Perspectives on Moral Order

  Hickel, J. & Haynes, N. (eds)

  Globalization promised to bring about a golden age of liberal individualism, breaking down hierarchies of kinship, caste, and gender around the world and freeing people to express their true, authentic agency. But in some places globalization has spurred the emergence of new forms of hierarchy—or the reemergence of old forms—as people try to reconstitute an imagined past of stable moral order. This is evident from the Islamic revival in the Middle East to visions of the 1950s family among conservatives in the United States. Why does this happen and how do we make sense of this phenomenon? Why do some communities see hierarchy as desireable? In this book, leading anthropologists draw on insightful ethnographic case studies from around the world to address these trends. Together, they develop a theory of hierarchy that treats it both as a relational form and a framework for organizing ideas about the social good.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available July 2021

  How Kinship Systems Change

  On the Dialectics of Practice and Classification

  Parkin, R.

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available March 2019

  How Materials Matter

  Design, Innovation and Materiality in the Pacific

  Were, G.

  How does design and innovation shape people’s lives in the Pacific? Focusing on plant materials from the region, How Materials Matter reveals ways in which a variety of people – from craftswomen and scientists to architects and politicians – work with materials to transform worlds. Recognizing the fragile and ephemeral nature of plant fibres, this work delves into how the biophysical properties of certain leaves and their aesthetic appearance are utilized to communicate information and manage different forms of relations. It breaks new ground by situating plant materials at the centre of innovation in a region.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available December 2019

  A Human Garden

  French Policy and the Transatlantic Legacies of Eugenic Experimentation

  Rosental, P.-A.

  Well into the 1980s, Strasbourg, France, was the site of a curious and little-noted experiment: Ungemach, a garden city dating back to the high days of eugenic experimentation that offered luxury living to couples who were deemed biologically fit and committed to contractual childbearing targets. Supported by public authorities, Ungemach aimed to accelerate human evolution by increasing procreation among eugenically selected parents. In this fascinating history, Paul-André Rosental gives an account of Ungemach’s origins and its perplexing longevity. He casts a troubling light on the influence that eugenics continues to exert—even decades after being discredited as a pseudoscience—in realms as diverse as developmental psychology, postwar policymaking, and liberal-democratic ideals of personal fulfilment.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available January 2012

  Identity Politics and the New Genetics

  Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging

  Schramm, K., Skinner, D., & Rottenburg, R. (eds)

  Racial and ethnic categories have appeared in recent scientific work in novel ways and in relation to a variety of disciplines: medicine, forensics, population genetics and also developments in popular genealogy. Once again, biology is foregrounded in the discussion of human identity. Of particular importance is the preoccupation with origins and personal discovery and the increasing use of racial and ethnic categories in social policy. This new genetic knowledge, expressed in technology and practice, has the potential to disrupt how race and ethnicity are debated, managed and lived. As such, this volume investigates the ways in which existing social categories are both maintained and transformed at the intersection of the natural (sciences) and the cultural (politics). The contributors include medical researchers, anthropologists, historians of science and sociologists of race relations; together, they explore the new and challenging landscape where biology becomes the stuff of identity.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available April 2012

  Images of Power and the Power of Images

  Control, Ownership, and Public Space

  Kapferer, J. (ed)

  Real places and events are constructed and used to symbolize abstract formulations of power and authority in politics, corporate practice, the arts, religion, and community. By analyzing the aesthetics of public space in contexts both mundane and remarkable, the contributors examine the social relationship between public and private activities that impart meaning to groups of people beyond their individual or local circumstances. From a range of perspectives—anthropological, sociological, and socio-cultural—the contributors discuss road-making in Peru, mass housing in Britain, an unsettling traveling exhibition, and an art fair in London; we explore the meaning of walls in Jerusalem, a Zen garden in Japan, and religious themes in Europe and India. Literally and figuratively, these situations influence the ways in which ordinary people interpret their everyday worlds. By deconstructing the taken for- granted definitions of social value (democracy, equality, individualism, fortune), the authors reveal the ideological role of imagery and imagination in a globalized political context.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• 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 June 2019

  In Pursuit of Belonging

  Forging an Ethical Life in European-Turkish Spaces

  Rottmann, S, B.

  Belonging is a not a state that we achieve, but a struggle that we wage. The struggle for belonging is more difficult if one is returning to a homeland after many years abroad. In Pursuit of Belonging is an ethnography of Turkish migrants’ struggle for understanding, intimacy and appreciation when they return from Germany to their Turkish homeland. Drawing on an established tradition of life story writing in anthropology, Rottmann conveys the struggle to forge an ethical life by relating the experiences of a second-generation German-Turkish woman named Leyla.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology

• eBook available September 2015

  In the Absence of the Gift

  New Forms of Value and Personhood in a Papua New Guinea Community

  Rasmussen, A. E.

  By adopting ideas like “development,” members of a Papua New Guinean community find themselves continuously negotiating what can be expected of a relative or a community member. Nearly half the people born on the remote Mbuke Islands become teachers, businessmen, or bureaucrats in urban centers, while those who stay at home ask migrant relatives “What about me?” This detailed ethnography sheds light on remittance motivations and documents how terms like “community” can be useful in places otherwise permeated by kinship. As the state withdraws, Mbuke people explore what social ends might be reached through involvement with the cash economy.

  Subject: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available May 2018

  In the Best Interests of the Child

  Loss and Suffering in Adoption Proceedings

  Mass, M.

  Marshalling her experience as an expert witness in court proceedings on non-consensual, confidential adoption in Israel, Mass describes legal proceedings following the Israeli state petition that declares children eligible for adoption because of alleged parental incapability, and explores the politics of state intervention in the parent/child relationship. The selected case studies present the testimonies of the children, the parents, the designated adoptive parents, and the state’s representatives, as well as the author’s own testimony.

  Subject: Sociology

• 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 August 2011

  Indigenous Peoples and Demography

  The Complex Relation between Identity and Statistics

  Axelsson, P. & Sköld, P. (eds)

  When researchers want to study indigenous populations they are dependent upon the highly variable way in which states or territories enumerate, categorise and differentiate indigenous people. In this volume, anthropologists, historians, demographers and sociologists have come together for the first time to examine the historical and contemporary construct of indigenous people in a number of fascinating geographical contexts around the world, including Canada, the United States, Colombia, Russia, Scandinavia, the Balkans and Australia. Using historical and demographical evidence, the contributors explore the creation and validity of categories for enumerating indigenous populations, the use and misuse of ethnic markers, micro-demographic investigations, and demographic databases, and thereby show how the situation varies substantially between countries.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• 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 November 2020

  Invisible Faces and Hidden Stories

  Narratives of Vulnerable Populations and Their Caregivers

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

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

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Applied Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available October 2019

  Inward Looking

  The Impact of Migration on Romanipe from the Romani Perspective

  Marinov, A. G.

  At present, Roma are an integral part of Europe, though they face structural and social inequalities and different forms of exclusion and discrimination. Inward Looking seeks to understand the relationship between Romani identity, performance and migration. Particularly, it studies the idea of ‘Romanipe’ through the prism of the personal accounts of Romani migrants. It also seeks to understand the relationships between the Romani groups in Europe, due to their increased travel and convergence, and predict the effects of migration on (new) Romani consciousness. The findings are based on qualitative data gathered from Romani migrants from three towns in Bulgaria.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available March 2012

  Israeli Identities

  Jews and Arabs Facing the Self and the Other

  Auron, Y.

  The question of identity is one of present-day Israel’s cardinal and most pressing issues. In a comprehensive examination of the identity issue, this study focuses on attitudes toward the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora; the Holocaust and its repercussions on identity; attitudes toward the state of Israel and Zionism; and attitudes toward Jewish religion. Israeli Arab students (Israeli Palestinians) and Jewish Israeli students were asked corresponding questions regarding their identity. It was found that, rather than lessening its impact over the years, the Holocaust has become a major factor, at times the paramount factor in Jewish identity. Similarly, among Palestinians the Naqba has become a major factor in Palestinian-Israeli identity. However, the overall results show that the identity of a Jewish citizen of Israel is not purely Israeli, nor is it purely Jewish. It is, to varying degrees, a synthesis of Jewish and Israeli components, depending on the particular sub-groups or sub-identities. The same holds for Israeli-Arabs or Israeli-Palestinians who have neither a purely Israeli identity nor a purely Palestinian (or Arab) one.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Sociology

• eBook available January 2020

  Jaguars of the Dawn

  Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer

  Pierini, E.

  The Brazilian Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) is the place where the worlds of the living and the spirits merge and the boundaries between lives are regularly crossed. Drawing upon over a decade of extensive fieldwork in temples of the Amanhecer in Brazil and Europe, the author explores how mediums understand their experiences and how they learn to establish relationships with their spirit guides. She sheds light on the ways in which mediumistic development in the Vale do Amanhecer is used for therapeutic purposes and informs notions of body and self, of illness and wellbeing.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available November 2013

  Japanese Tourism

  Spaces, Places and Structures

  Funck, C. & Cooper, M.

  The changing patterns of Japanese tourism and the views of the Japanese tourist since the Meiji Restoration, in 1868, are given an in-depth historical, geographical, economic and social analysis in this book. As well as providing a case study for the purpose of investigating the changing face of global tourism from the 19th to the 21st Century, this account of Japanese tourism explores both domestic social relations and international geographical, political and economic relations, especially in the northeast Asian context. Socio-cultural and geographical analysis form the research framework for the book, in three ways: first, there is an emphasis on scale as tourism phenomena and their implications are discussed both in a global context and at the national, regional and local levels; second, the discussion is informed by primary data sources such as censuses and surveys; and third, the incorporation of fieldwork and case studies adds concreteness to the overall picture of Japanese tourism. This book is a significant addition to an area of study currently under-represented in the literature.

  Subjects: Travel and Tourism Sociology

• eBook available June 2012

  Journeys Into Madness

  Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire

  Blackshaw, G. & Wieber, S. (eds)

  At the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud’s investigation of the mind represented a particular journey into mental illness, but it was not the only exploration of this ‘territory’ in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Sanatoriums were the new tourism destinations, psychiatrists were collecting art works produced by patients and writers were developing innovative literary techniques to convey a character’s interior life. This collection of essays uses the framework of journeys in order to highlight the diverse artistic, cultural and medical responses to a peculiarly Viennese anxiety about the madness of modern times. The travellers of these journeys vary from patients to doctors, artists to writers, architects to composers and royalty to tourists; in engaging with their histories, the contributors reveal the different ways in which madness was experienced and represented in ‘Vienna 1900’.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• eBook available November 2010

  The Ju/’hoan San of Nyae Nyae and Namibian Independence

  Development, Democracy, and Indigenous Voices in Southern Africa

  Biesele, M. & Hitchcock, R. K.

  The Ju/’hoan San, or Ju/’hoansi, of Namibia and Botswana are perhaps the most fully described indigenous people in all of anthropology. This is the story of how this group of former hunter-gatherers, speaking an exotic click language, formed a grassroots movement that led them to become a dynamic part of the new nation that grew from the ashes of apartheid South West Africa. While coverage of this group in the writings of Richard Lee, Lorna Marshall, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, and films by John Marshall includes extensive information on their traditional ways of life, this book continues the story as it has unfolded since 1990. Peopled with accounts of and from contemporary Ju>/’hoan people, the book gives newly-literate Ju/’hoansi the chance to address the world with their own voices. In doing so, the images and myths of the Ju/’hoan and other San (previously called “Bushmen”) as either noble savages or helpless victims are discredited. This important book demonstrates the responsiveness of current anthropological advocacy to the aspirations of one of the best-known indigenous societies.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) 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 June 2012

  Learning From the Children

  Childhood, Culture and Identity in a Changing World

  Waldren, J. & Kaminski, I.-M. (eds)

  Children and youth, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds, are experiencing lifestyle choices their parents never imagined and contributing to the transformation of ideals, traditions, education and adult–child power dynamics. As a result of the advances in technology and media as well as the effects of globalization, the transmission of social and cultural practices from parents to children is changing. Based on a number of qualitative studies, this book offers insights into the lives of children and youth in Britain, Japan, Spain, Israel/Palestine, and Pakistan. Attention is focused on the child’s perspective within the social-power dynamics involved in adult–child relations, which reveals the dilemmas of policy, planning and parenting in a changing world.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Mobility Studies

• eBook available October 2007

  Learning Religion

  Anthropological Approaches

  Berliner, D. & Sarró, R. (eds)

  As we enter the 21st century, it becomes increasingly difficult to envisage a world detached from religion or an anthropology blind to its study. Yet, how people become religious is still poorly studied. This volume gathers some of the most distinguished scholars in the field to offer a new perspective for the study of religion, one that examines the works of transmission and innovation through the prism of learning. They argue that religious culture is socially and dynamically constructed by agents who are not mere passive recipients but engaged in active learning processes. Finding a middle way between the social and the cognitive, they see learning religions not as a mechanism of “downloading” but also as a social process with its relational dimension.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology Sociology

• eBook available April 2021

  Liminal Moves

  Traveling along Places, Meanings, and Times

  Cangià, F.

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

  Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available August 2021

  Living Like a Girl

  Agency, Social Vulnerability and Welfare Measures in Europe and Beyond

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

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

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

• 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

• eBook available April 2019

  Luso-Tropicalism and Its Discontents

  The Making and Unmaking of Racial Exceptionalism

  Anderson, W., Roque, R., & Ventura Santos, R. (eds)

  Modern perceptions of race across much of the Global South are indebted to the Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre, who in works such as The Masters and the Slaves claimed that Portuguese colonialism produced exceptionally benign and tolerant race relations. This volume radically reinterprets Freyre’s Luso-tropicalist arguments and critically engages with the historical complexity of racial concepts and practices in the Portuguese-speaking world. Encompassing Brazil as well as Portuguese-speaking societies in Africa, Asia, and even Portugal itself, it places an interdisciplinary group of scholars in conversation to challenge the conventional understanding of twentieth-century racialization, proffering new insights into such controversial topics as human plasticity, racial amalgamation, and the tropes and proxies of whiteness.

  Subjects: Colonial History History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available July 2016

  Made In Egypt

  Gendered Identity and Aspiration on the Globalised Shop Floor

  Chakravarti, L. Z.

  This ground-breaking ethnography of an export-orientated garment assembly factory in Egypt examines the dynamic relationships between its managers – emergent Mubarak-bizniz (business) elites who are caught in an intensely competitive globalized supply chain – and the local daily-life realities of their young, educated, and mixed-gender labour force. Constructions of power and resistance, as well as individual aspirations and identities, are explored through articulations of class, gender and religion in both management discourses and shop floor practices. Leila Chakravarti’s compelling study also moves beyond the confines of the factory, examining the interplay with the wider world around it.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available April 2011

  Mapping Difference

  The Many Faces of Women in Contemporary Ukraine

  Rubchak, M. J. (ed)

  Drawn from various disciplines and a broad spectrum of research interests, these essays reflect on the challenging issues confronting women in Ukraine today. The contributors are an interdisciplinary, transnational group of scholars from gender studies, feminist theory, history, anthropology, sociology, women’s studies, and literature. Among the issues they address are: the impact of migration, education, early socialization of gender roles, the role of the media in perpetuating and shaping negative stereotypes, the gendered nature of language, women and the media, literature by women, and local appropriation of gender and feminist theory. Each author offers a fresh and unique perspective on the current process of survival strategies and postcommunist identity reconstruction among Ukrainian women in their current climate of patriarchalism.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• 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 June 2017

  Mary Douglas

  Understanding Social Thought and Conflict

  6, P. & Richards, P.

  Mary Douglas’s innovative explanations for styles of human thought and for the dynamics of institutional change have furnished a distinctive and powerful theory of how conflicts are managed, yet her work remains astonishingly poorly appreciated in social science disciplines. This volume introduces Douglas’s theories, and outlines the ways in which her work is of continuing importance for the future of the social sciences. Mary Douglas: Understanding Human Thought and Conflict shows how Douglas laid out the agenda for revitalizing social science by reworking Durkheim’s legacy for today, and reviews the growing body of research across the social sciences which has used, tested or developed her approach.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology

• eBook available April 2012

  Maternalism Reconsidered

  Motherhood, Welfare and Social Policy in the Twentieth Century

  Klein, M. van der, Plant, R. J., Sanders, Nichole, & Weintrob L. R. (eds)

  Beginning in the late 19th century, competing ideas about motherhood had a profound impact on the development and implementation of social welfare policies. Calls for programmes aimed at assisting and directing mothers emanated from all quarters of the globe, advanced by states and voluntary organizations, liberals and conservatives, feminists and anti-feminists – a phenomenon that scholars have since termed ‘maternalism’. This volume reassesses maternalism by providing critical reflections on prior usages of the concept, and by expanding its meaning to encompass geographical areas, political regimes and cultural concerns that scholars have rarely addressed. From Argentina, Brazil and Mexico City to France, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Ukraine, the United States and Canada, these case studies offer fresh theoretical and historical perspectives within a transnational and comparative framework. As a whole, the volume demonstrates how maternalist ideologies have been employed by state actors, reformers and poor clients, with myriad political and social ramifications.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available July 2021

  Matsutake Worlds

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

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

  Subjects: Sociology Food & Nutrition

• eBook available July 2009

  Mediating Europe

  New Media, Mass Communications, and the European Public Sphere

  Harrison, J. & Wessels, B. (eds)

  The on-going constitutionalization of Europe has led to various changes in media and communications, opening up areas of debate regarding the role of traditional and new media in developing a specific European public sphere as part of the wider European Project. This timely volume addresses the little understood relationship between old and new media, communications policy at the European level, issues of regulation and competition within the EU, the role of the European Parliament in media policymaking, and the questions emerging about the sustainability of traditional public service broadcasting. To understand the concrete significance of these debates two contributions address specific practical areas, i.e. the potential of online environments and specific developments in European media contexts, such as channel strategies, web-related services, iDTV and community networks. Consequently, Mediating Europe provides an original and important contribution to understanding the role of the media in shaping a European public sphere.

  Subjects: Media Studies Sociology

• eBook available September 2015

  The Merkel Republic

  An Appraisal

  Langenbacher, E. (ed)

  Chancellor Angela Merkel has dominated German and European politics for almost a decade. Her stellar reputation, sound political and economic management, and popularity inside of Germany resulted in one of the most decisive electoral victories for her conservative parties in postwar Germany—the country can rightfully be deemed the Merkel Republic. Bringing together German politics experts from both sides of the Atlantic, this volume addresses the campaign, results, and consequences of the 2013 Bundestag election. Chapters delve into a diverse array of themes, including immigrant-origin and women candidates, the fate of the small parties, and the prospects for the SPD, the new coalition partner, as well as more general structural trends like the Europeanization and cosmopolitanization of German politics.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• 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

• eBook available May 2016

  Migration by Boat

  Discourses of Trauma, Exclusion and Survival

  Mannik, L. (ed)

  At a time when thousands of refugees risk their lives undertaking perilous journeys by boat across the Mediterranean, this multidisciplinary volume could not be more pertinent. It offers various contemporary case studies of boat migrations undertaken by asylum seekers and refugees around the globe and shows that boats not only move people and cultural capital between places, but also fuel cultural fantasies, dreams of adventure and hope, along with fears of invasion and terrorism. The ambiguous nature of memories, media representations and popular culture productions are highlighted throughout in order to address negative stereotypes and conversely, humanize the individuals involved.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology Transport Studies

• eBook available May 2015

  Militant Around the Clock?

  Left-Wing Youth Politics, Leisure, and Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship Greece, 1974-1981

  Papadogiannis, N.

  During the 1970s, left-wing youth militancy in Greece intensified, especially after the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1974. This is the first study of the impact of that political activism on the leisure pursuits and sexual behavior of Greek youth, analyzing the cultural politics of left-wing organizations alongside the actual practices of their members. Through an examination of Maoists, Socialists, Euro-Communists, and pro-Soviet groups, it demonstrates that left-wing youth in Greece collaborated closely with comrades from both Western and Eastern European countries in developing their political stances. Moreover, young left-wingers in Greece appropriated American cultural products while simultaneously modeling some of their leisure and sexual practices on Soviet society. Still, despite being heavily influenced by cultures outside Greece, left-wing youth played a major role in the reinvention of a Greek “popular tradition.” This book critically interrogates the notion of “sexual revolution” by shedding light on the contradictory sexual transformations in Greece to which young left-wingers contributed.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available August 2013

  The Mind of the Nation

  Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851-1955

  Klautke, E.

  Völkerpsychologie played an important role in establishing the social sciences via the works of such scholars as Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, Ernest Renan, Franz Boas, and Werner Sombart. In Germany, the intellectual history of “folk psychology” was represented by Moritz Lazarus, Heymann Steinthal, Wilhelm Wundt and Willy Hellpach. This book follows the invention of the discipline in the nineteenth century, its rise around the turn of the century and its ultimate demise after the Second World War. In addition, it shows that despite the repudiation of “folk psychology” and its failed institutionalization, the discipline remains relevant as a precursor of contemporary studies of “national identity.”

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available October 2020

  The Mobility of Memory

  Migrations and Diasporas across European Borders

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

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

  Subjects: Mobility Studies Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology Memory Studies

• eBook available August 2020

  Modernity and the Unmaking of Men

  Schuber, V.

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• 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 May 2012

  Moving Subjects, Moving Objects

  Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions

  Svašek, M. (ed)

  In recent years an increasing number of scholars have incorporated a focus on emotions in their theories of material culture, transnationalism and globalization, and this book aims to contribute to this field of inquiry. It examines how ‘emotions’ can be theorized, and serves as a useful analytical tool for understanding the interrelated mobility of humans, objects and images. Ethnographically rich, and theoretically grounded case studies offer new perspectives on the relations between migration, material culture and emotions. While some chapters address the many different ways in which migrants and migrant artists express their emotions through objects and images in transnational contexts, other chapters focus on how particular works of art, everyday objects and artefacts can evoke feelings specific to particular migrant groups and communities. Case studies also analyse how artists, academics and policy makers can stimulate positive interaction between migrants and non-migrant communities.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Mobility Studies Sociology

• eBook available May 2010

  Multicultural Dialogue

  Dilemmas, Paradoxes, Conflicts

  Gressgård, R.

  As cross-cultural migration increases democratic states face a particular challenge: how to grant equal rights and dignity to individuals while recognizing cultural distinctiveness. In response to the greater number of ethnic and religious minority groups, state policies seem to focus on managing cultural differences through planned pluralism. This book explores the dilemmas, paradoxes, and conflicts that emerge when differences are managed within this conceptual framework. After a critical investigation of the perceived logic of identity, indicative of Western nation-states and at the root of their pluralistic intentions, the author takes issue with both universalist notions of equality and cultural relativist notions of distinctiveness. However, without identity is it possible to participate in dialogue and form communities? Is there a way out of this impasse? The book argues in favor of communities based on nonidentitarian difference, developed and maintained through open and critical dialogue.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology

• eBook available September 2012

  Narrating the Future in Siberia

  Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny

  Ulturgasheva, O.

  The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first full-length ethnographic study among the adolescence of Siberian indigenous peoples, it presents the young people’s narratives about their own future and shows how they form constructs of time, space, agency and personhood through the process of growing up and experiencing their social world. The study brings a new perspective to the anthropology of childhood and uncovers a quite unexpected dynamic in narrating and foreshadowing the future while relating it to cultural patterns of prediction and fulfillment in nomadic cosmology.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available December 2019

  Nationalism Revisited

  Austrian Social Closure from Romanticism to the Digital Age

  Karner, C.

  Focused on the German-speaking parts of the former Habsburg Empire, and on present-day Austria in particular, this book offers a series of highly innovative analyses of the interplay of nationalism’s discursive and institutional facets. Here, Christian Karner develops a distinctive perspective on Austrian nationalism over the longue durée, tracing nationalistic ways of thinking and mobilizing from the late eighteenth century to the present. Through close analyses of key texts representing diverse settings and historical episodes, this book traces the connections, continuities and ruptures that have characterized the varieties of Austrian nationalism.

  Subjects: History (General) Sociology

• eBook available March 2020

  Navigating Miscarriage

  Social, Medical and Conceptual Perspectives

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

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

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available June 2015

  New Imaginaries

  Youthful Reinvention of Ukraine's Cultural Paradigm

  Rubchak, M.J. (ed)

  Having been spared the constraints imposed on intellectual discourse by the totalitarian regime of the past, young Ukrainian scholars now engage with many Western ideological theories and practices in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom and uncensored scholarship. Displacing the Soviet legacy of prescribed thought and practices, this volume’s female contributors have infused their work with Western elements, although vestiges of Soviet-style ideas, research methodology, and writing linger. The result is the articulation of a “New Imaginaries” — neither Soviet nor Western — that offers a unique approach to the study of gender by presenting a portrait of Ukrainian society as seen through the eyes of a new generation of feminist scholars.

  Subjects: Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available July 2016

  New Uses of Bourdieu in Film and Media Studies

  Austin, G. (ed)

  Through his influential work on cultural capital and social mobility, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has provided critical insights into the complex interactions of power, class, and culture in the modern era. Ubiquitous though Bourdieu’s theories are, however, they have only intermittently been used to study some of the most important forms of cultural production today: cinema and new media. With topics ranging from film festivals and photography to constantly evolving mobile technologies, this collection demonstrates the enormous relevance that Bourdieu’s key concepts hold for the field of media studies, deploying them as powerful tools of analysis and forging new avenues of inquiry in the process.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Media Studies Sociology

• eBook available February 2012

  Nordic Paths to Modernity

  Árnason, J. P. & Wittrock, B. (eds)

  Within the growing attention to the diverse forms and trajectories of modern societies, the Nordic countries are now widely seen as a distinctive and instructive case. While discussions have centred on the ‘Nordic model’ of the welfare state and its record of adaptation to the changing global environment of the late twentieth century, this volume’s focus goes beyond these themes. The guiding principle here is that a long-term historical-sociological perspective is needed to make sense of the Nordic paths to modernity; of their significant but not complete convergence in patterns, which for some time were perceived as aspects of a model to be emulated in other settings; and of the specific features that still set the five countries in question (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland) apart from one another. The contributors explore transformative processes, above all the change from an absolutistmilitary state to a democratic one with its welfarist phase, as well as the crucial experiences that will have significant implications on future developments.

  Subjects: Development Studies History (General) Sociology

• eBook available October 2016

  The Nuclear Crisis

  The Arms Race, Cold War Anxiety, and the German Peace Movement of the 1980s

  Becker-Schaum, C., Gassert, P., Mausbach, W., Klimke, M., and Zepp, M. (eds)

  In 1983, more than one million Germans joined together to protest NATO’s deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe. International media overflowed with images of marches, rallies, and human chains as protesters blockaded depots and agitated for disarmament. Though they failed to halt the deployment, the episode was a decisive one for German society, revealing deep divisions in the nation’s political culture while continuing to mobilize activists. This volume provides a comprehensive reference work on the “Euromissiles” crisis as experienced by its various protagonists, analyzing NATO’s diplomatic and military maneuvering and tracing the political, cultural, and moral discourses that surrounded the missiles’ deployment in East and West Germany.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available January 2020

  On Violence in History

  Dwyer, P. & Micale, M. S. (eds)

  Is global violence on the decline? Steven Pinker’s highly-publicized argument that human violence across the world has been dramatically abating continues to influence discourse among academics and the general public alike. In this provocative volume, a cast of eminent historians interrogate Pinker’s thesis by exposing the realities of violence throughout human history. In doing so, they reveal the history of human violence to be richer, more thought-provoking, and considerably more complicated than Pinker claims.

  Subjects: History (General) Sociology

• eBook available September 2016

  The Online World of Surrogacy

  Berend, Z.

  Zsuzsa Berend presents a methodologically innovative ethnography of SurroMomsOnline.com, the largest surrogacy support website in the United States. Surrogates’ views emerge from the stories, debates, and discussions that unfold online. The Online World of Surrogacy documents these collective meaning-making practices and explores their practical, emotional, and moral implications. In doing so, the book works through themes of interest across the social sciences, including definitions of parenthood, the symbolic role of money, reproductive loss, altruism, and the moral valuation of relationships.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available June 2012

  Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes

  An Anthropology of Everyday Religion

  Schielke, S. & Debevec, L. (eds)

  Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available January 2018

  Parallel Lives Revisited

  Mediterranean Guest Workers and their Families at Work and in the Neighbourhood, 1960-1980

  Bock, J. De

  Originally coined in 2001 in a report on racial tensions in the United Kingdom, the concept of “parallel lives” has become familiar in the European discourse on immigrant integration. There, it refers to what is perceived as the segregation of immigrant populations from the rest of society. However, the historical roots of this presumed segregation are rarely the focus of discussion. Combining quantitative analysis, archival research, and over one hundred oral history interviews, Parallel Lives Revisited explores the lives of immigrants from six Mediterranean countries in a postwar Belgian city to provide a fascinating account of how their experiences of integration have changed at work and in their neighborhoods across two decades.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available April 2016

  Parenthood between Generations

  Transforming Reproductive Cultures

  Pooley, S. & Qureshi, K. (eds)

  Recent literature has identified modern “parenting” as an expert-led practice—one which begins with pre-pregnancy decisions, entails distinct types of intimate relationships, places intense burdens on mothers and increasingly on fathers too. Exploring within diverse historical and global contexts how men and women make—and break—relations between generations when becoming parents, this volume brings together innovative qualitative research by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists. The chapters focus tightly on inter-generational transmission and demonstrate its importance for understanding how people become parents and rear children.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• 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 2017

  The Persistence of Race

  Continuity and Change in Germany from the Wilhelmine Empire to National Socialism

  Day, L. & Haag, O. (eds)

  Race in 20th-century German history is an inescapable topic, one that has been defined overwhelmingly by the narratives of degeneracy that prefigured the Nuremberg Laws and death camps of the Third Reich. As the contributions to this innovative volume show, however, German society produced a much more complex variety of racial representations over the first part of the century. Here, historians explore the hateful depictions of the Nazi period alongside idealized images of African, Pacific and Australian indigenous peoples, demonstrating both the remarkable fixity race had as an object of fascination for German society as well as the conceptual plasticity it exhibited through several historical eras.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available March 2019

  Playing the Marginality Game

  Identity Politics in West Africa

  Schroven, A.

  In Guinea, situated against the background of central government struggles, rural elites use identity politics through contemporary political reforms to maintain their privileges and perpetuate a generations-old local social contract that bridges ethnic and religious divides. Simultaneously, administrative reform and national unrest lead to the creative re-combination of sources of authority and practices of legitimate rule. Past periods of colonization, socialism and authoritarian regime are reflected in contemporary struggles to make sense of participatory democracy and the future of the embattled Guinean national state.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Development Studies

• eBook available September 2012

  Playing with Languages

  Children and Change in a Caribbean Village

  Paugh, A. L.

  Over several generations villagers of Dominica have been shifting from Patwa, an Afro-French creole, to English, the official language. Despite government efforts at Patwa revitalization and cultural heritage tourism, rural caregivers and teachers prohibit children from speaking Patwa in their presence. Drawing on detailed ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of video-recorded social interaction in naturalistic home, school, village and urban settings, the study explores this paradox and examines the role of children and their social worlds. It offers much-needed insights into the study of language socialization, language shift and Caribbean children’s agency and social lives, contributing to the burgeoning interdisciplinary study of children’s cultures. Further, it demonstrates the critical role played by children in the transmission and transformation of linguistic practices, which ultimately may determine the fate of a language.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Educational Studies Sociology

• eBook available September 2013

  A Policy Travelogue

  Tracing Welfare Reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada

  Kingfisher, C.

  An ethnography of the development and travel of the New Zealand model of neoliberal welfare reform, this study explores the social life of policy, which is one of process, motion, and change. Different actors, including not only policy élites but also providers and recipients, engage with it in light of their own resources and knowledge. Drawing on two analytic frameworks of the contemporary anthropology of policy—translation and assemblage—Kingfisher situates policy as an artifact and architect of cultural meaning, as well as a site of power struggles. All points of engagement with policy are approached as sites of policy production that serve to transform it as well as reproduce it. As such, A Policy Travelogue provides an antidote to theorizations of policy as a-cultural, rational, and straightforwardly technical.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available April 2011

  Policy Worlds

  Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power

  Shore, C., Wright S., & Però, D.

  There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, constraining or confined to static texts; rather, they are productive, continually contested and able to create new social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations. Anthropologists do not stand outside or above systems of governance but are themselves subject to the rhetoric and rationalities of policy. The analyses of policy worlds presented by the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for understanding systems of knowledge and power and the positioning of academics within them.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Applied Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available May 2019

  Political Networks and Social Movements

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

  Valdiva 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 October 2018

  The Politics of Authenticity

  Countercultures and Radical Movements across the Iron Curtain, 1968-1989

  Häberlen, J. C., Keck-Szajbel, M., & Mahoney, K. (eds)

  Following the convulsions of 1968, one element uniting many of the disparate social movements that arose across Europe was the pursuit of an elusive “authenticity” that could help activists to understand fundamental truths about themselves—their feelings, aspirations, sexualities, and disappointments. This volume offers a fascinating exploration of the politics of authenticity as they manifested themselves among such groups as Italian leftists, East German lesbian activists, and punks on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Together they show not only how authenticity came to define varied social contexts, but also how it helped to usher in the neoliberalism of a subsequent era.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available June 2012

  The Politics of Education Reform in the Middle East

  Self and Other in Textbooks and Curricula

  Alayan, S., Rohde, A., & Dhouib, S. (eds)

  Education systems and textbooks in selected countries of the Middle East are increasingly the subject of debate. This volume presents and analyzes the major trends as well as the scope and the limits of education reform initiatives undertaken in recent years. In curricula and teaching materials, representations of the “Self” and the “Other” offer insights into the contemporary dynamics of identity politics. By building on a network of scholars working in various countries in the Middle East itself, this book aims to contribute to the evolution of a field of comparative education studies in this region.

  Subjects: Educational Studies Sociology

• eBook available November 2020

  Politics of the Dunes

  Poetry, Architecture, and Coloniality at the Open City

  Woods, M.

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

  Subjects: Urban Studies Sociology History (General)

• eBook available March 2016

  Post-Ottoman Coexistence

  Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict

  Bryant, R. (ed)

  In Southeast Europe, the Balkans, and Middle East, scholars often refer to the “peaceful coexistence” of various religious and ethnic groups under the Ottoman Empire before ethnonationalist conflicts dissolved that shared space and created legacies of division. Post-Ottoman Coexistence interrogates ways of living together and asks what practices enabled centuries of cooperation and sharing, as well as how and when such sharing was disrupted. Contributors discuss both historical and contemporary practices of coexistence within the context of ethno-national conflict and its aftermath.
   

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology

• eBook available April 2019

  Post-Ottoman Topologies

  The Presence of the Past in the Era of the Nation-State

  Argenti, N. (ed)

  How are historians and social scientists to understand the emergence, the multiplicity, and the mutability of collective memories of the Ottoman Empire in the political formations that succeeded it? With contributions focussing on several of the nation-states whose peoples once were united under the aegis of Ottoman suzerainty, this volume proposes new theoretical approaches to the experience and transmission of the past through time. Developing the concept of topology, contributors explore collective memories of Ottoman identity and post-Ottoman state formation in a contemporary epoch that, echoing late modernity, we might term “late nationalism”.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Memory Studies

• eBook available March 2020

  Postwar Soldiers

  Historical Controversies and West German Democratization, 1945–1955

  Echternkamp, J.

  Contemporary historians have transformed our understanding of the German military in World War II, debunking the “clean Wehrmacht” myth that held most soldiers innocent of wartime atrocities. Considerably less attention has been paid to those soldiers at the end of hostilities. In Postwar Soldiers, Jörg Echternkamp analyzes three themes in the early history of West Germany: interpretations of the war during its conclusion and the occupation period; military veteran communities’ self-perceptions; and the public rehabilitation of the image of the German soldier. As Echternkamp shows, public controversies around these topics helped to drive the social processes that legitimized the democratic postwar order.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available December 2016

  Poverty and Welfare in Modern German History

  Raphael, L. (ed)

  For many, the history of German social policy is defined primarily by that nation’s postwar emergence as a model of the European welfare state. As this comprehensive volume demonstrates, however, the question of how to care for the poor has had significant implications for German history throughout the modern era. Here, eight leading historians provide essential case studies and syntheses of current research into German welfare, from the Holy Roman Empire to the present day. Along the way, they trace the parallel historical dynamics that have continued to shape German society, including religious diversity, political exclusion and inclusion, and concepts of race and gender.

  Subjects: History (General) Sociology

• eBook available October 2014

  The Power of Death

  Contemporary Reflections on Death in Western Society

  Blanco, M.-J. & Vidal, R. (eds)

  The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a“dying party” in the Netherlands; examinations of the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Sociology Literary Studies

• eBook available March 2016

  Protest Cultures

  A Companion

  Fahlenbrach, K., Klimke, M., & Scharloth, J. (eds)

  Protest is a ubiquitous and richly varied social phenomenon, one that finds expression not only in modern social movements and political organizations but also in grassroots initiatives, individual action, and creative works. It constitutes a distinct cultural domain, one whose symbolic content is regularly deployed by media and advertisers, among other actors. Yet within social movement scholarship, such cultural considerations have been comparatively neglected. Protest Cultures: A Companion dramatically expands the analytical perspective on protest beyond its political and sociological aspects. It combines cutting-edge synthetic essays with concise, accessible case studies on a remarkable array of protest cultures, outlining key literature and future lines of inquiry.

  Subjects: Sociology History: 20th Century to Present

• 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

• eBook available December 2008

  Pursuits of Happiness

  Well-Being in Anthropological Perspective

  Mathews, G. & Izquierdo, C. (eds)

  Anthropology has long shied away from examining how human beings may lead happy and fulfilling lives. This book, however, shows that the ethnographic examination of well-being—defined as “the optimal state for an individual, a community, and a society”—and the comparison of well-being within and across societies is a new and important area for anthropological inquiry. Distinctly different in different places, but also reflecting our common humanity, well-being is intimately linked to the idea of happiness and its pursuits. Noted anthropological researchers have come together in this volume to examine well-being in a range of diverse ways and to investigate it in a range of settings: from the Peruvian Amazon, the Australian outback, and the Canadian north, to India, China, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available April 2016

  Rationed Life

  Science, Everyday Life, and Working-Class Politics in the Bohemian Lands, 1914–1918

  Kučera, R.

  Far from the battlefront, hundreds of thousands of workers toiled in Bohemian factories over the course of World War I, and their lives were inescapably shaped by the conflict. In particular, they faced new and dramatic forms of material hardship that strained social ties and placed in sharp relief the most mundane aspects of daily life, such as when, what, and with whom to eat. This study reconstructs the experience of the Bohemian working class during the Great War through explorations of four basic spheres—food, labor, gender, and protest—that comprise a fascinating case study in early twentieth-century social history.

  Subjects: Sociology

• eBook available August 2004

  Rebordering the Mediterranean

  Boundaries and Citizenship in Southern Europe

  Suárez-Navaz, L.

  Offering a rich ethnographic account, this book traces the historical processes by which Andalusians experienced the shift from being poor emigrants to northern Europe to becoming privileged citizens of the southern borderland of the European Union, a region where thousands of African immigrants have come in search of a better life. It draws on extended ethnographic fieldwork in Granada and Senegal, exploring the shifting, complementary and yet antagonistic relations between Spaniards and African immigrants in the Andalusian agrarian work place. The author's findings challenge the assumption of fixed national, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries vis-à-vis outside migration in core countries, showing how legal and cultural identities of Andalusians are constructed together with that of immigrants.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available June 2018

  Reconceiving Muslim Men

  Love and Marriage, Family and Care in Precarious Times

  Inhorn, M. C. & Naguib, N. (eds)

  This volume provides intimate anthropological accounts of Muslim men’s everyday lives in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and diasporic communities in the West. Amid increasing political turmoil and economic precarity, Muslim men around the world are enacting nurturing roles as husbands, sons, fathers, and community members, thereby challenging broader systems of patriarchy and oppression. By focusing on the ways in which Muslim men care for those they love, this volume challenges stereotypes and showcases Muslim men’s humanity.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• 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 September 2019

  Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough

  Ethnographic Responses

  Martínez, F. & Laviolette, P. (eds)

  Exploring some of the ways in which repair practices and perceptions of brokenness vary culturally, Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough argues that repair is both a process and also a consequence which is sought out—an attempt to extend the life of things as well as an answer to failures, gaps, wrongdoings, and leftovers. This volume develops an open-ended combination of empirical and theoretical questions including: What does it mean to claim that something is broken? At what point is something broken repairable? What are the social relationships that take place around repair? And how much tolerance for failure do our societies have?

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Heritage Studies

• eBook available May 2016

  Rescuing the Vulnerable

  Poverty, Welfare and Social Ties in Modern Europe

  Althammer, B., Raphael, L., & Stazic-Wendt, T. (eds)

  In many ways, the European welfare state constituted a response to the new forms of social fracture and economic turbulence that were born out of industrialization—challenges that were particularly acute for groups whose integration into society seemed the most tenuous. Covering a range of national cases, this volume explores the relationship of weak social ties to poverty and how ideas about this relationship informed welfare policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By focusing on three representative populations—neglected children, the homeless, and the unemployed—it provides a rich, comparative consideration of the shifting perceptions, representations, and lived experiences of social vulnerability in modern Europe.

  Subjects: History (General) Sociology

• eBook available March 2020

  Rethinking the Age of Emancipation

  Comparative and Transnational Perspectives on Gender, Family, and Religion in Italy and Germany, 1800–1918

  Baumeister, M., Lenhard, P., & Nattermann, R. (eds)

  Since the end of the nineteenth century, traditional historiography has emphasized the similarities between Italy and Germany as “late nations”, including the parallel roles of “great men” such as Bismarck and Cavour. Rethinking the Age of Emancipation aims at a critical reassessment of the development of these two “late” nations from a new and transnational perspective. Essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars examine the discursive relationships among nationalism, war, and emancipation as well as the ambiguous roles of historical protagonists with competing national, political, and religious loyalties.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Jewish Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available December 2017

  Returning Life

  Language, Life Force and History in Kilimanjaro

  Myhre, K. C.

  A group of Chagga-speaking men descend the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro to butcher animals and pour milk, beer, and blood on the ground, requesting rain for their continued existence. Returning Life explores how this event engages activities where life force is transferred and transformed to afford and affect beings of different kinds. Historical sources demonstrate how the phenomenon of life force encompasses coffee cash-cropping, Catholic Christianity, and colonial and post-colonial rule, and features in cognate languages from throughout the area. As this vivid ethnography explores how life projects through beings of different kinds, it brings to life concepts and practices that extend through time and space, transcending established analytics.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• 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

• eBook available April 2016

  The Revolution before the Revolution

  Late Authoritarianism and Student Protest in Portugal

  Accornero, G.

  Histories of Portugal’s transition to democracy have long focused on the 1974 military coup that toppled the authoritarian Estado Novo regime and set in motion the divestment of the nation’s colonial holdings. However, the events of this “Carnation Revolution” were in many ways the culmination of a much longer process of resistance and protest originating in universities and other sectors of society. Combining careful research in police, government, and student archives with insights from social movement theory, The Revolution before the Revolution broadens our understanding of Portuguese democratization by tracing the societal convulsions that preceded it over the course of the “long 1960s.”

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available February 2021

  Rhetoric and Social Relations

  Dialectics of Bonding and Contestation

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

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available April 2020

  Rhetorical Minds

  Meditations on the Cognitive Science of Persuasion

  Oakley, T.

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available July 2015

  The Rhythm of Eternity

  The German Youth Movement and the Experience of the Past, 1900-1933

  Adriaansen, R.-J.

  The Weimar era in Germany is often characterized as a time of significant change. Such periods of rupture transform the way people envision the past, present, and future. This book traces the conceptions of time and history in the Germany of the early 20th century. By focusing on both the discourse and practices of the youth movement, the author shows how it reinterpreted and revived the past to overthrow the premises of modern historical thought. In so doing, this book provides insight into the social implications of the ideological de-historicization of the past.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• 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

• eBook available February 2018

  Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces

  Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus

  Darieva, T., Mühlfried, F., & Tuite, K. (eds)

  Though long-associated with violence, the Caucasus is a region rich with religious conviviality. Based on fresh ethnographies in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Russian Federation, Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces discusses vanishing and emerging sacred places in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious post-Soviet Caucasus. In exploring the effects of de-secularization, growing institutional control over hybrid sacred sites, and attempts to review social boundaries between the religious and the secular, these essays give way to an emergent Caucasus viewed from the ground up: dynamic, continually remaking itself, within shifting and indefinite frontiers.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology

• eBook available April 2020

  Selfishness and Selflessness

  New Approaches to Understanding Morality

  Layne, L. L. (ed)

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available February 2012

  Sexual Knowledge

  Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900-1934

  McEwen, B.

  Vienna’s unique intellectual, political, and religious traditions had a powerful impact on the transformation of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century. Whereas turn-of-the-century sexology, as practiced in Vienna as a medical science, sought to classify and heal individuals, during the interwar years, sexual knowledge was employed by a variety of actors to heal the social body: the truncated, diseased, and impoverished population of the newly created Republic of Austria. Based on rich source material, this book charts cultural changes that are hallmarks of the modern era, such as the rise of the companionate marriage, the role of expert advice in intimate matters, and the body as a source of pleasure and anxiety. These changes are evidence of a dramatic shift in attitudes from a form of scientific inquiry largely practiced by medical specialists to a social reform movement led by and intended for a wider audience that included workers, women, and children.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• eBook available July 2012

  Sharing the Sacra

  The Politics and Pragmatics of Intercommunal Relations around Holy Places

  Bowman, G. (ed)

  “Shared” sites, where members of distinct, or factionally opposed, religious communities interact—or fail to interact—is the focus of this volume. Chapters based on fieldwork from such diverse sites as India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, China, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and Vietnam demonstrate how sharing and tolerance are both more complex and multifaceted than they are often recognized to be. By including both historical processes (the development of Chinese funerals in late imperial Beijing or the refashioning of memorial commemoration in the wake of the Vietnam war) and particular events (the visit of Pope John Paul II to shared shrines in Sri Lanka or the Al-Qaeda bombing of an ancient Jewish synagogue on the Island of Djerba in Tunisia), the volume demonstrates the importance of understanding the wider contexts within which social interactions take place and shows that tolerance and intercommunalism are simultaneously possible and perpetually under threat.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology Heritage Studies

• eBook available March 2011

  Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300-1900

  Johnson, C. H. & Sabean, D. W. (eds)

  Recently considerable interest has developed about the degree to which anthropological approaches to kinship can be used for the study of the long-term development of European history. From the late middle ages to the dawn of the twentieth century, kinship - rather than declining, as is often assumed - was twice reconfigured in dramatic ways and became increasingly significant as a force in historical change, with remarkable similarities across European society. Applying interdisciplinary approaches from social and cultural history and literature and focusing on sibling relationships, this volume takes up the challenge of examining the systemic and structural development of kinship over the long term by looking at the close inner-familial dynamics of ruling families (the Hohenzollerns), cultural leaders (the Mendelssohns), business and professional classes, and political figures (the Gladstones)in France, Italy, Germany, and England. It offers insight into the current issues in kinship studies and draws from a wide range of personal documents: letters, autobiographies, testaments, memoirs, as well as genealogies and works of art.

  Subjects: History (General) Sociology

• eBook available May 2017

  Sisters in Arms

  Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968

  Karcher, K.

  Few figures in modern German history are as central to the public memory of radical protest than Ulrike Meinhof, but she was only the most prominent of the countless German women—and militant male feminists—who supported and joined in revolutionary actions from the 1960s onward. Sisters in Arms gives a bracing account of how feminist ideas were enacted by West German leftist organizations from the infamous Red Army Faction to less well-known groups such as the Red Zora. It analyzes their confrontational and violent tactics in challenging the abortion ban, opposing violence against women, and campaigning for solidarity with Third World women workers. Though these groups often diverged ideologically and tactically, they all demonstrated the potency of militant feminism within postwar protest movements.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available November 2019

  Social Im/mobilities in Africa

  Ethnographic Approaches

  Noret, J. (ed)

  Grounded in both theory and ethnography, this volume insists on taking social positionality seriously when accounting for Africa’s current age of polarizing wealth. To this end, the book advocates a multidimensional view of African societies, in which social positions consist of a variety of intersecting social powers - or ‘capitals’ – including wealth, education, social relationships, religion, ethnicity, and others. Accordingly, the notion of social im/mobilities emphasizes the complexities of current changes, taking us beyond the prism of a one-dimensional social ladder, for social moves cannot always be apprehended through the binaries of ‘gains’ and ‘losses’.

  Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available November 2013

  The Social Life of Achievement

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

  What happens when people “achieve”? Why do reactions to “achievement” vary so profoundly? And how might an anthropological study of achievement and its consequences allow us to develop a more nuanced model of the motivated agency that operates in the social world? These questions lie at the heart of this volume. Drawing on research from Southeast Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America, this collection develops an innovative framework for explaining achievement’s multiple effects—one which brings together cutting-edge theoretical insights into politics, psychology, ethics, materiality, aurality, embodiment, affect and narrative. In doing so, the volume advances a new agenda for the study of achievement within anthropology, emphasizing the significance of achievement as a moment of cultural invention, and the complexity of “the achiever” as a subject position.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available March 2016

  Social Movement Studies in Europe

  The State of the Art

  Fillieule, O. & Accornero, G. (eds)

  Bringing together over forty established and emerging scholars, this landmark volume is the first to comprehensively examine the evolution and current practice of social movement studies in a specifically European context. While its first half offers comparative approaches to an array of significant issues and movements, its second half assembles focused national studies that include most major European states. Throughout, these contributions are guided by a shared set of historical and social-scientific questions with a particular emphasis on political sociology, thus offering a bold and uncommonly unified survey that will be essential for scholars and students of European social movements.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available July 2015

  Social Quality Theory

  A New Perspective on Social Development

  Herrmann, P. & Lin, K. (eds)

  Social quality thinking emerged from a critique of one-sided policies by breaking through the limitations previously set by purely economistic paradigms. By tracing its expansion and presenting different aspects of social quality theory, this volume provides an overview of a more nuanced approach,  which assesses societal progress and introduces proposals that are relevant for policy making. Crucially, important components emerge with research by scholars from Asia, particularly China, eastern Europe, and other regions beyond western Europe, the theory’s place of origin. As this volume shows, this rich diversity of approaches and their cross-national comparisons reveal the increasingly important role of social quality theory for informing political debates on development and sustainability.

  Subjects: Sociology Development Studies

• eBook available October 2019

  Sometime Kin

  Layers of Memory, Boundaries of Ethnography

  Wallman, S.

  In Sometime Kin, Sandra Wallman paints the portrait of an Alpine settlement – its history, economy and culture, and its unusual resistance to outsiders and modernization. Against this, her journal shows the villagers embracing her four small children and acting as participant observers in the two-way process of research. This project happened more than forty years ago and involved a uniquely large fieldwork family, but its insights have wider significance. The book argues that the intrusion of observation inevitably distorts the ordinary life observed, that the challenges of multi-vocality and “truth” are always with us, and that memory is the bedrock of every ethnographic enterprise.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology

• eBook available February 2018

  Soup, Love, and a Helping Hand

  Social Relations and Support in Guangzhou, China

  Fleischer, F.

  Despite growing affluence, a large number of urban Chinese have problems making ends meet. Based on ethnographic research among several different types of communities in Guangzhou, China, Soup, Love and a Helping Hand examines different modes and ideologies of help/support, as well as the related issues of reciprocity, relatedness (kinship), and changing state-society relations in contemporary China. With an emphasis on the subjective experience, Fleischer’s research carefully explores people’s ideas about moral obligations, social expectations, and visions of urban Chinese society.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available May 2020

  Spaces of Solidarity

  Karen Activism in the Thailand-Burma Borderlands

  Sharples, R.

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

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available January 2007

  State and Civil Society in Northern Europe

  The Swedish Model Reconsidered

  Trägårdh, L. (ed)

  In the current neo-liberal political and economic climate, it is often suggested that a large and strong state stands in opposition to an autonomous and vibrant civil society. However, the simultaneous presence in Sweden of both a famously large public sector and an unusually vital civil society poses an interesting and important theoretical challenge to these views with serious political and policy implications. Studies show that in a comparative context Sweden scores very highly when it comes to the strength and vitality of its civil society as well as social capital, as measured in terms of trust, lack of corruption, and membership of voluntary associations. The “Swedish Model,” therefore, offers important insights into the dynamics of state and civil society relations, which go against current trends of undermining the importance of the welfare state, and presents autonomous civic participation as the only way forward.

  Subject: Sociology

• eBook available August 2008

  The State and the Arts

  Articulating Power and Subversion

  Kapferer, J.

  Judith Kapferer and her collaborators present an insightful volume that interrogates relations between the state and the arts in diverse national and cultural settings. The authors critique the taken-for-granted assumption about the place of the arts in liberal or social democratic states and the role of the arts in supporting or opposing the ideological work of government and non-government institutions. This innovative volume explores the challenges posed by the state to the arts and by the arts to the state, focusing on several transformations of the interrelations between state and commercial arts policies in the current era. These ongoing challenges include the control of repressive tolerance, complicity with and resistance to state power, and the commoditization of the arts, including their accommodation to market and state apparatuses. While endeavouring to avoid the currently dominant pragmatic and didactic priorities of officialdom, the contributors tackle social and cultural policy and practice in the arts as well as connections between national states and dissenting art from a range of genres.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

• 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

• eBook available May 2020

  Structures of Protection?

  Rethinking Refugee Shelter

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

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

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available September 2009

  Substitute Parents

  Biological and Social Perspectives on Alloparenting in Human Societies

  Bentley, G. & Mace, R. (eds)

  From a comparative perspective, human life histories are unique and raising offspring is unusually costly: humans have relatively short birth intervals compared to other apes, childhood is long, mothers care simultaneously for many dependent children (other apes raise one offspring at a time), infant mortality is high in natural fertility/mortality populations, and human females have a long post-reproductive lifespan. These features conspire to make child raising very burdensome. Mothers frequently defray these costs with paternal help (not usual in other ape species), although this contribution is not always enough. Grandmothers, elder siblings, paid allocarers, or society as a whole, help to defray the costs of childcare, both in our evolutionary past and now. Studying offspring care in a various human societies, and other mammalian species, a wide range of specialists such as anthropologists, psychologists, animal behaviorists, evolutionary ecologists, economists and sociologists, have contributed to this volume, offering new insights into and a better understanding of one of the key areas of human society.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available October 2008

  Suffering and Evil

  The Durkheimian Legacy

  Pickering, W. S. F. & Rosati, M. (eds)

  Until recently the subject of suffering and evil was neglected in the sociological world and was almost absent in Durkheimian studies as well. This book aims to fill the gap, with particular reference to the Durkheimian tradition, by exploring the different meanings that the concepts of evil and suffering have in Durkheim's works, together with the general role they play in his sociology. It also examines the meanings and roles of these concepts in relation to suffering and evil in the work of other authors within the group of the Année sociologique up until the beginning of World War II. Finally, the Durkheimian legacy in its wider aspects is assessed, with particular reference to the importance of the Durkheimian categories in understanding and conceptualizing contemporary forms of evil and suffering.

  Subjects: Sociology Theory and Methodology

• eBook available September 2008

  Taking Sides

  Ethics, Politics, and Fieldwork in Anthropology

  Armbruster, H. & Lærke, A. (eds)

  Concerns with research ethics have intensified over recent years, in large part as a symptom of "audit cultures" (M. Strathern) but also as a serious matter of engagement with the ethical complexities in contemporary research fields. This volume, written by a new generation of scholars engaged with contemporary global movements for social justice and peace, reflects their efforts in trying to integrate their scholarly pursuits with their understanding of social science, politics and ethics, and what political commitment means in practice and in fieldwork. This is a book of argument and analysis, written with passion, clarity and intellectual sophistication, which touches on issues of vital significance to social scientists and activists in general.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology

• eBook available March 2021

  A Taste for Oppression

  A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus

  Hervouet, R.

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available July 2021

  Textures of Belonging

  Senses, Objects and Spaces of Romanian Roma

  Racleş, A.

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available November 2012

  The Third World in the Global 1960s

  Christiansen, S. & Scarlett, Z. (eds)

  Decades after the massive student protest movements that consumed much of the world, the 1960s remain a significant subject of scholarly inquiry. While important work has been done regarding radical activism in the United States and Western Europe, events in what is today known as the Global South—Asia, Africa, and Latin America—have yet to receive the attention they deserve. This volume inserts the Third World into the study of the 1960s by examining the local and international articulations of youth protest in various geographical, social, and cultural arenas. Rejecting the notion that the Third World existed on the periphery, it situates the events of the 1960s in a more inclusive context, building a richer, more nuanced understanding of the era that better reflects the dynamism of the period.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology History (General)

• eBook available November 2015

  Time and the Field

  Dalsgaard, S. & Nielsen, M. (eds)

  In recent years, ethnographic fieldwork has been subjected to analytical scrutiny in anthropology. Ethnography remains anchored in tropes of spatiality with the association between field and fieldworker characterized by distances in space. With updates on the discussion of contemporary requirements to ethnographic research practice, Time and the Field rethinks the notion of the field in terms of time rather than space. Such an approach not only implies a particular attention to the methodology of studying local (social and ontological) imaginaries of time, but furthermore destabilitizes the relationship between fieldworker and fieldsite, allowing it to emerge as a dynamic and ever-shifting constellation.

  Subjects: Applied Anthropology Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• eBook available June 2020

  Time Work

  Studies of Temporal Agency

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

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

  Subjects: Applied Anthropology Sociology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available January 2016

  Trust Us

  Reproducing the Nation and the Scandinavian Nationalist Populist Parties

  Hellström, A.

  In Scandinavia, there is separation in the electorate between those who embrace diversity and those who wish for tighter bonds between people and nation. This book focuses on three nationalist populist parties in Scandinavia—the Sweden Democrats, the Progress Party in Norway, and the Danish People’s Party. In order to affect domestic politics by addressing this conflict of diversity versus homogeneity, these parties must enter the national parliament while earning the nation’s trust. Of the three, the Sweden Democrats have yet to earn the trust of the mainstream, leading to polarized and emotionally driven public debate that raises the question of national identity and what is understood as the common man.

  Subjects: Sociology History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available April 2016

  Trusting and its Tribulations

  Interdisciplinary Engagements with Intimacy, Sociality and Trust

  Broch-Due, V. & Ystanes, M. (eds)

  Despite its immense significance and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the complex workings of trust are poorly understood and theorized. This volume explores trust and mistrust amidst locally situated scenes of sociality and intimacy. Because intimacy has often been taken for granted as the foundation of trust relations, the ethnographies presented here challenge us to think about dangerous intimacies, marked by mistrust, as well as forms of trust that cohere through non-intimate forms of sociality.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available February 2012

  Tuff City

  Urban Change and Contested Space in Central Naples

  Dines, N.

  During the 1990s, Naples’ left-wing administration sought to tackle the city’s infamous reputation of being poor, crime-ridden, chaotic and dirty by reclaiming the city’s cultural and architectural heritage. This book examines the conflicts surrounding the reimaging and reordering of the city’s historic centre through detailed case studies of two piazzas and a centro sociale, focusing on a series of issues that include heritage, decorum, security, pedestrianization, tourism, immigration and new forms of urban protest. This monograph is the first in-depth study of the complex transformations of one of Europe’s most fascinating and misunderstood cities. It represents a new critical approach to the questions of public space, citizenship and urban regeneration as well as a broader methodological critique of how we write about contemporary cities.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Sociology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2018

  Urban Dreams

  Transformations of Family Life in Burkina Faso

  Roth, C.
  de Jong, W., Perlik, M., Steuer, N., & Znoj, H. (eds)

  Claudia Roth's work on Bobo-Dioulasso, a city of half a million residents in Burkina Faso, provides uniquely detailed insight into the evolving life-world of a West African urban population in one of the poorest countries in the world. Closely documenting the livelihood strategies of members of various neighbourhoods, Roth’s work calls into question established notions of “the African family” as a solidary network, documents changing marriage and kinship relations under the impact of a persistent economic crisis, and explores the increasingly precarious social status of young women and men.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Urban Studies

• eBook available April 2012

  Urban Residence

  Housing and Social Transformations in Globalizing Ecuador

  Klaufus, C.

  Riobamba and Cuenca, two intermediate cities in Ecuador, have become part of global networks through transnational migration, incoming remittances, tourism, and global economic connections. Their landscape is changing in several significant ways, a reflection of the social and urban transformations occurring in contemporary Ecuadorian society. Exploring the discourses and actions of two contrasting population groups, rarely studied in tandem, within these cities—popular-settlement residents and professionals in the planning and construction sector—this study analyzes how each is involved in house designs and neighborhood consolidation. Ideas, ambitions, and power relations come into play at every stage of the production and use of urban space, and as a result individual decisions about both house designs and the urban layout influence the development of the urban fabric. Knowledge about intermediate cities is crucial in order to understand current trends in the predominantly urban societies of Latin America, and this study is an example of needed interdisciplinary scholarship that contributes to the fields of urban studies, urban anthropology, sociology, and architecture.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Applied Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available September 2019

  The Vampire

  Origins of a European Myth

  Bohn, T. M.

  Even before Bram Stoker immortalized Transylvania as the homeland of his fictional Count Dracula, the figure of the vampire was inextricably tied to Eastern Europe in the popular imagination. Drawing on a wealth of heretofore neglected sources, this book offers a fascinating account of how vampires—whose various incarnations originally emerged from the folk traditions of societies throughout the world—became identified with such a specific region. It demonstrates that the modern conception of the vampire was born in the crucible of the Enlightenment, embodying a mysterious, Eastern “otherness” that stood opposed to Western rationality.

  Subjects: Sociology Literary Studies History (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available September 2021

  Vertiginous Life

  An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen

  Knight, D. M.

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available December 2020

  Waithood

  Gender, Education, and Global Delays in Marriage and Childbearing

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

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available July 2009

  A Walk to the River in Amazonia

  Ordinary Reality for the Mehinaku Indians

  Stang, C. D.

  Our lives are mostly composed of ordinary reality — the flow of moment-to-moment existence — and yet it has been largely overlooked as a subject in itself for anthropological study. In this work, the author achieves an understanding of this part of reality for the Mehinaku Indians, an Amazonian people, in two stages: first by observing various aspects of their experience and second by relating how these different facets come to play in a stream of ordinary consciousness, a walk to the river. In this way, abstract schemata such as ‘cosmology,’ ‘sociality,’ ‘gender,’ and the ‘everyday’ are understood as they are actually lived. This book contributes to the ethnography of the Amazon, specifically the Upper Xingu, with an approach that crosses disciplinary boundaries between anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. In doing so it attempts to comprehend what Malinowski called the ‘imponderabilia of actual life.’

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• eBook available August 2010

  The Ways of Friendship

  Anthropological Perspectives

  Desai, A. & Killick, E. (eds)

  Friendship is an essential part of human experience, involving ideas of love and morality as well as material and pragmatic concerns. Making and having friends is a central aspect of everyday life in all human societies. Yet friendship is often considered of secondary significance in comparison to domains such as kinship, economics and politics. How important are friends in different cultural contexts? What would a study of society viewed through the lens of friendship look like? Does friendship affect the shape of society as much as society moulds friendship? Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe, this volume offers answers to these questions and examines the ideology and practice of friendship as it is embedded in wider social contexts and transformations.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available October 2020

  We Come as Members of the Superior Race

  Distortions and Education Policy Discourse in Sub-Saharan Africa

  Mfum-Mensah, O.

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

  Subject: Educational Studies Sociology

• eBook available October 2020

  What Now

  Everyday Endurance and Social Intensity in an Australian Aboriginal Community

  Dalley, C.

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available May 2009

  When God Comes to Town

  Religious Traditions in Urban Contexts

  Pinxten, R. & Dikomitis, L. (eds)

  Around 1800 roughly three per cent of the human population lived in urban areas; by 2030 this number is expected to have gone up to some seventy per cent. This poses problems for traditional religions that are all rooted in rural, small-scale societies. The authors in this volume question what the possible appeal of these old religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam could be in the new urban environment and, conversely, what impact global urbanization will have on learning and on the performance and nature of ritual. Anthropologists, historians and political scientists have come together in this volume to analyse attempts made by churches and informal groups to adapt to these changes and, at the same time, to explore new ways to study religions in a largely urbanized environment.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available December 2005

  Where Have All the Homeless Gone?

  The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis

  Marcus, A.

  For a decade, from 1983 to 1993, homelessness was a major concern in the United States. In 1994, this public concern suddenly disappeared, without any significant reduction in the number of people without proper housing. By examining the making and unmaking of a homeless crisis, this book explores how public understandings of what constitutes a social crisis are shaped.

  Drawing on five years of ethnographic research in New York City with African Americans and Latinos living in poverty, Where Have All the Homeless Gone? reveals that the homeless “crisis” was driven as much by political misrepresentations of poverty, race, and social difference, as the housing, unemployment, and healthcare problems that caused homelessness and continue to plague American cities.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Urban Studies Sociology

• eBook available May 2017

  Wolf Conflicts

  A Sociological Study

  Skogen, K., Krange, O., & Figari, H.

  Wolf populations have recently made a comeback in Northern Europe and North America. These large carnivores can cause predictable conflicts by preying on livestock, and competing with hunters for game. But their arrivals often become deeply embedded in more general societal tensions, which arise alongside processes of social change that put considerable pressure on rural communities and on the rural working class in particular. Based on research and case studies conducted in Norway, Wolf Conflicts discusses various aspects of this complex picture, including conflicts over land use and conservation, and more general patterns of hegemony and resistance in modern societies.

  Subjects: Sociology Environmental Studies (General)

• 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 July 2020

  Working in Greece and Turkey

  A Comparative Labour History from Empires to Nation-States, 1840–1940

  Papastefanaki, L. & Kabadayı, M. E. (eds)

  As was the case in many other countries, it was only in the early years of this century that Greek and Turkish labour historians began to systematically look beyond national borders to investigate their intricately interrelated histories. The studies in Working in Greece and Turkey provide an overdue exploration of labour history on both sides of the Aegean, before as well as after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Deploying the approaches of global labour history as a framework, this volume presents transnational, transcontinental, and diachronic comparisons that illuminate the shared history of Greece and Turkey.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available March 2018

  World Heritage Craze in China

  Universal Discourse, National Culture, and Local Memory

  Yan, H.

  There is a World Heritage Craze in China. China claims to have the longest continuous civilization in the world and is seeking recognition from UNESCO. This book explores three dimensions of the UNESCO World Heritage initiative with particular relevance for China: the universal agenda, the national practices, and the local responses. With a sociological lens, this book offers comprehensive insights into World Heritage, as well as China’s deep social, cultural, and political structures.

  Subjects: Heritage Studies Archaeology Sociology Travel and Tourism