Bringing together diverse disciplinary perspectives, The Making of Turkish Contemporary History explores the complexities of historiography by focusing on often-overlooked decades of the post-1950s. It examines tensions between global research trends and national narratives, highlighting the role of disciplinary norms as well as the emergence of inter- and post-disciplinary approaches. It also addresses the growing influence of grassroots historians who challenge state-controlled interpretations of the past. As struggles over historical interpretation intensify, the authors offer a timely analysis of how contemporary history becomes a battleground for ideological dominance in an authoritarian context. Engaging and thought-provoking, this is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of knowledge production, contested historical truths, and the political stakes of writing contemporary history.

Liberalism—in its political, economic, and ethical forms—shaped the 19th-century Western world. Rooted in philosophy and expressed through economic and political systems, liberalism was complex and often contradictory. This book explores the influence of liberalism on music in Portugal, Spain, and Latin America—regions where liberalism evolved amid conflict that left deep cultural marks. Rather than focusing on nation-states, the authors trace the circulation of music across borders and highlight cultural exchanges during pivotal moments such as the “Atlantic crises” (after 1807-08) and the revolutionary cycle of 1820–1823. Through operas, zarzuelas, the press, wind and brass bands, as well as debates on slavery, they reveal how liberalism was performed and imagined, offering a fresh perspective on music and ideology.

Being prejudiced is usually taken to mean having hasty and poorly founded feelings and opinions, usually negative, that are based on too little real knowledge and careful consideration. Definitions, however, are not explanations. The Origins of Prejudice is a short and unconventional book that shows you step-by-step both how and why all of us who are human often rely uncritically on what we believe to be true about the people, things, and events shaping our lives outside the hidden world of our bony skull. This book aims to show how we can learn from our possibly unintentional acts and self-serving misdeeds to live together in supportive, less conflicted ways.

Digital media perpetuates every aspect of our lives, including our temporal perceptions. Time and attention have become one of the most precious resources, for users as well as corporate business. This book sheds light on these critical connections and how they influence not only our daily lives, but also how they exist in emerging power structures. It brings advances in the anthropological thinking about time into conversation with theorizations of media to develop an understanding of how media and time affect each other while keeping human experiences at the heart of the conversation.

In Italy, national broadcasting and underworld media networks share a playbook, crafting political narratives and social identities, building neoliberal markets of visibility, and mobilizing the poor as populist political actors. Focusing on the social peripheries of Naples, this book examines how Camorra, one of Europe’s most entrenched and violently coercive criminal organizations, runs music, television, and online media empires that collide with state-regulated cultural industries. It reveals “systems” of cultural production where licit and illicit merge, entertainment becomes political, and power feeds on the public it claims to serve. In doing so, it challenges the mainstream understanding of the relationship between media, democracy, and violence in Italy and beyond.

Drawing on the concept of biopower and projecting it into the realm of the city, this book explores a multidisciplinary comparative analysis of two countries – Estonia and Ukraine – from the viewpoint of urban biopolitics, a concept that allows us to see how various groups of urban populations come into life and why their lifestyles matter for political calculations. It dissects the interconnections between the geopolitical conditions of military conflict with Russia in Ukraine and European institutional membership in Estonia, and forms of urban biopolitical governance. In doing so, the book highlights how cities become sites where global pressures and local political management converge.

In rural Punu communities, song and dance are profoundly relational and affective practices, generated ever anew through ritual encounters among humans and with more-than-human beings. In this ethnography, the author immerses the reader into the rhythms of resonance, attunement and amplification that intensify the performances and open pathways to participation into the water spirit world. Following African feminist scholars and Ingold’s anthropology of life, she offers a matrifocal, ontogenetic reading that critically engages with affect theory, advocating for its re-animation.

Forced migration is an international problem impacting global powers as well as smaller resource-constrained countries. The rhetoric, globally and locally is rife with a confusing tangle about war, violence, persecution, vulnerability, victimhood, thievery, welfare leaching, and economy recking. Arts Initiatives by Refugees for Refugees is a narrative-driven book based in global multi-site research about the arts and cultural dimension of refugee “crises” in discrete geographic and social-political contexts. The stories highlight agency, creativity, pleasure, celebration, entrepreneurship, friendship, and community because we typically don’t associate these things with refugees. They emphasize how refugees contribute to their own communities and their host countries, contrary to stereotypical and often xenophobic anti-refugee assumptions.

It is often assumed that the first memoirs to be written by survivors of Nazi persecution were only published after the war, but this is not the case. Reading Hitler’s Victims is the first study to explore the personal memoirs that were published for British readers by refugees from Nazi persecution, both before and during the war. By asking whose memoirs were published, and why and how they were shaped by translators and editors, this study reveals the changing victim tropes that took centre stage in the British imagination of Nazism between 1933 and 1945. Jewish victims were rarely represented, and instead, German and Austrian Christians came to represent ‘what Britain was fighting for’. This publishing history reveals how unofficial censorship practices shaped British public discourse about Nazism’s victims, and argues that a focus on victim narratives makes such censorship inevitable.

An enduring yet underexamined tradition in popular cinema, body swap narratives have captivated audiences across cultures and genres. This volume offers the first study of the ‘body swap’ film, examining notable examples such as the Freaky Friday films alongside comedies, horrors, and hybrid forms shaped by bodily transformation. Extending beyond cinema, Contributors trace the trope’s evolution across television, videogames, digital platforms, online identity practices, and avatar relationships. Grounded in film studies yet interdisciplinary in scope, the collection engages gender theory, race theory, trans scholarship, transnational media studies, and philosophy to illuminate how body swapping reshapes understandings of identity, embodiment, and power in global media culture.

This is the first account of studio animation written from an historical-poetic perspective. Focusing on how animated films are created and experienced, Poetics of Animation brings together the study of visual style, performance, storytelling, and sound situating them within their industrial and technological contexts. It traces how animators work within and against convention, and how constraints become sources of invention and style. It also explores the ways in which animation overlaps with, but remains distinct from, live-action filmmaking, revealing how the medium’s unique properties shape its poetic structures. Combining critical depth with accessibility, Poetics of Animation offers an original contribution to animation studies and serves as a valuable teaching resource for students, scholars, and practitioners interested in understanding the art and craft of animation.

Linking contemporary concerns about democratic fragility with historical analysis, this volume examines the crisis and failure of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe during the interwar period from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. The contributions explore political culture, constitutional traditions, religion, violence, and crisis discourse in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Rather than focusing narrowly on institutional breakdown, the authors emphasize long-term cultural legacies, narratives of crisis, and exclusionary identities that undermined democratic pluralism. Interwar Europe functioned as a laboratory of democracy whose experiences offer critical insights into the challenges facing liberal democracies today.

Through vivid case studies set in diverse historical and social contexts, Tobias Hof traces the global evolution of right-wing terrorism across time and continents – spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the present day – revealing how terrorist movements have transformed, adapted, and connected through transnational networks. Exploring their shifting ideologies, motivations, and inner workings, he uncovers the uneasy ties between terrorist groups, conservative elites, and state security forces. Both sweeping in scope and rich in detail, he offers readers an unprecedented understanding of the deep historical roots and enduring dynamics of right-wing terrorism.

Drawing on extensive archival records, Business as Usual shows how the legal system in Germany continued to operate with the same personnel, administrative routines, and institutional habits between 1943 and 1948, despite violence, mass murder, bombings, and regime change. This strict adherence to legal formalism acted as a “normalization machine” for mass atrocities, facilitating the compromised but seamless transition into the post-war administration. By tracing everyday judicial work in extraordinary circumstances, it reveals how legal institutions endure, adapt, and serve an inestimable purpose even in moments of profound upheaval. Moreover, only within the framework of the normal, ordinary law could the ideological exception of Nazi law unfold. In other words: besides the banality of evil, there is also evilness in banality.

Craft and cooperative practices are currently resurging in many European and North American societies. Builders often construct certain political sensibilities through their daily work, which frame their wider social and political engagement with the encompassing society. This book explores the revival of cooperative craftwork in Denmark, delving into construction sites and political assemblies to reveal the dreams, drives, and desires of a diverse group of builders working in a Copenhagen-based craft co-op. It sheds light on the political capacities of cooperative craftwork and on cooperative practitioners’ complicated relation to capitalist practices; practices which they simultaneously refuse, ridicule, and reproduce.

In Mubende Hill, Uganda, African art history lives through its spiritual traditions. Centering the agency of ritual objects and the ancestral Omweyimirize tree, this book reveals how clay pots, calabashes, Bachwezi cups and other artefacts mediate healing, identity, and continuity among the Balyammere. Drawing on oral histories, participatory fieldwork and decolonial critique, the author challenges museum practices that silence sacred objects by stripping them from context. It foregrounds indigenous interpretive authority while highlighting contemporary artistic re-engagements that sustain cultural knowledge, spiritual vitality and African epistemic sovereignty.

In late imperial China, debates over how virtuosity in medical practice might be cultivated unfolded within a world that connected physicians to scholars, poets, calligraphers, Buddhist monks, Daoist life-cultivation experts and military strategists. This book traces these debates, showing how medicine was imagined as akin to poetry, how clinical insight was shaped through meditative bodily practices and how practitioners pursued empirical investigation. At the same time, medicine and the body became vital conceptual resources for intellectuals seeking to address broader social and philosophical questions

New approaches to studies of the Antarctic and adjacent ocean regions have emerged in recent years. Challenging the idea of a pristine, uninhabited continent, this book shows how materialities create, transform, and connect Antarctic worlds, revealing the region as a historically layered landscape deeply entangled with global histories, politics, and imaginaries. It explores how objects, infrastructures, and material practices have shaped human relations with Antarctica.

The question of the human/non-human boundary remains unanswered today. This book explores the relationship between people, society and nature through the lens of robots and robotics research. Blending ethnographic fieldwork with critical analysis and literature, it develops an original interpretation of contemporary technology – that a deeper understanding of the field leads to a greater appreciation for human embodiment and creativity, rather than a belief in imminent machine intelligence.

Contemporary public discourses about archaeology are routinely characterized by scientific and historical narratives that leave the water blank. This book weaves together voices from across the Asia-Pacific region, revealing maritime archaeology as a labour of love rooted in connection, compassion and community. Contributors from Hawaii to Sri Lanka share how emotion and relationality shape their work with submerged heritage. The collaboration of archaeologists and communities collaborating to preserve maritime cultural heritage is demonstrated throughout, recognizing that wholeness emerges not from uniformity but from the symphony of the distinct voices united by a shared passion for the ocean’s stories.

The history of timekeeping has always involved choosing or converting between various ways of representing time, a phenomenon called time pluralism. The Unsettled Clock: The Persistence of Time Pluralism explores time pluralism by documenting historical cases and examining its persistence in present. Drawing examples from medieval York, the Habsburg empire of early modern Europe, Renaissance astronomy, legal time in the US and UK before time zones were adopted, and the persistence of time pluralism in current atomic time metrology, this analysis offers a political and historical look into how timekeeping has been shaped, challenged, and manipulated.

The idea of culture has become a creative framework in Marshall Islanders’ quest to realise a community based on communality, meaningful work, and self-reliance. These values are consciously pitted against selfishness, wage-labour, and money dependency, which are values commonly deemed to belong to the realm of “the economy”. Culturing Money analyses what sort of conceptual and practical work that the dialectics of culture and economy can do for Marshall Islanders in their quest for a meaningful life where self-reliance is the ultimate goal.

High-speed trains are an icon of the green revolution in transport and mobility. For more than thirty years, AVE (Alta Velocidad Española, or Spanish HSR (High Speed Rail)) has been an instrument for transforming the public railway company, reshaping labor relations and advancing a model of regional development; yet Spain remains a car-dominated society. Frontiers of Appropriation delves into the history of Europe’s most advanced high-speed rail system to assess the transformations it has brought about. The towering yet marginal position of AVE in the Spanish transport market is not a paradox but an expression of the role of HSR in consolidating the hegemonic mobility paradigm.

Archaeological literature has often placed the role of crafting within discourses of craft specialization, anchoring it to questions related to sociopolitical complexity, which linked political processes with productive organization. This book invites us to think differently and discuss crafting as a way of making, knowing, and being in the world. Through utilizing examples from various time periods and across global landscapes, it reimagines questions of being and belonging, and other affective modalities related to how we articulate meaning, in text, image or speech. Importantly, the book considers what it means to make, as a way to produce knowledge about the worlds we inhabit.

Offering an interdisciplinary approach to conceptual history, Concepts of Culture broadens its scope through a series of experimental case studies in ‘applied conceptual history’. Bringing together Contributors from a variety of disciplines—including art history, comparative literature, cultural studies, German studies, and history— it offers a range of theoretically reflected applications of conceptual history that focus on the cultural concepts, and thereby contribute to the methodological development of these particular fields of research.

With over 3 billion individuals that play video games worldwide, gamers consume immense amounts of data about the digital worlds they explore. Archaeogaming as Scholarly Play encourages readers to step into the intersection of archaeology and video games to critically examine how these games (re)present the past and those associated with exhuming it, should they be archaeologists or adventurers. In doing so, this volume suggests alternative approaches to archaeological pedagogy and provides new narratives in theoretical discourse.

The Middle East currently dominates the news, often with misleading stories that cast local people as terrorists or oppressed. In Search of Worldviews argues that in-depth anthropological studies are the best data-driven way to provide accurate information from local perspectives on everyday topics such as women’s roles, why Islam is overtaking other major religions, why democracy has difficulty taking hold, how minorities cope, and formal and informal methods of conflict resolution. It also helps us understand ourselves better when we know how other cultures address the same human problems. Using anthropological techniques such as participant observations, historic document research, and institutional analysis, each chapter of this book poses an important question about the Middle East with a focus on local perspectives.

Cesare Lombroso is considered the founder of criminology with his theory distinguishing criminals from noncriminal by physical oddities. This book argues that the study of ethnography in Latin America should give more attention to the Lombroso school and the academic exchange between relatively marginal national anthropologies, such as the Italian and Latin American schools. From racial ideas in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century to Lombroso’s voyages to South America and his legacy after his passing, Cesare Lombroso’s Legacy in Latin America is presented through an anthropologist’s eye through interpretation of many explored and unexplored historical documents.

Through ethnographic research conducted among landfill workers and waste pickers, Europe’s Disappearing Waste explores the inner workings of the Czech waste management system that is underpinned by the belief that waste should disappear. Waste streams give rise to underflows that provide opportunities for those who refuse to be passive witnesses of disposal and loss of value. The normative assumptions about market-based solutions and techno-optimism in waste management are called into question, directing attention to the commitment to salvage that provides an alternative way of relating to waste.

Anthropological education has both possibilities and limitations in its discourse. Across five key themes and a range of formats from short-form essays to ethnographic fiction, Educating Otherwise brings questions about learning and education, and the role that anthropology plays in these, to the fore. The range of insight offers perspective into the state of the art of theory, research, pedagogy and practice of anthropological education, interrogating how it perpetuates violence, exclusion and privilege and providing vivid accounts of the regenerative practices of educating otherwise that can challenge this.

Exploring Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work through a decolonial lens, this book traces Hurston’s journey from her early life (1891–1919) and struggles at the margins (1920–1930) to her peak as a pioneering ethnographer and writer (1931–1956) and her later years (1957–1960). Examining her navigation of a hostile academic environment, it highlights her redefinition of Black autonomy and diasporic identity. Through personal and political narratives, including Barracoon, it underscores Hurston’s enduring influence on Anthropology and contemporary Black thought.

More than a century has passed since the arrival of British, French, and Italian forces in Istanbul in 1918, marking the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. The almost five-year-long occupation of the city that followed remains largely ignored in history writing in the former occupying powers, and is often marginalised in Anatolia-centric narratives of the Turkish War of Independence. The book brings together many of the scholars working to redress this neglect in recent years. Chapters cover issues as diverse as policing, commerce, fashion, labour, infrastructure, justice, and housing, revealing the impact of the occupation on all aspects of social, cultural, and political life. By bringing this tumultuous period back into focus, the book makes a significant contribution to First World War studies, research on European imperialism, and the modern history of Istanbul, Turkey, and the Middle East.

A unique study on the relationship between state administration and politics, examining how the office of the Czech Landsmannminister became the primary vehicle for the politicization of the Habsburg state. Through case studies in Vienna, Prague, and České Budějovice, it chronicles the Young Czech Party’s systematic campaign to gain control of selected key positions within the administration of the multinational monarchy. The narrative details how ministers used personnel policy to embed loyalists within the bureaucracy, consistently bypassing merit in favor of national and political allegiance to successfully “Czechize” the formally supranational administration.

Between 1898 and 1939, Spain saw the emergence of political and social identities shaped by the concepts of Hispanidad, Catholicism, race, tradition and the Spanish language. Rooted in 19th-century conservative thought, these ideas evolved through intellectual debate and ideological conflict with liberal and left-wing currents. This book explores how such identities were reshaped during Spain’s major political shifts and how they intersected with Latin American discourses. By examining both state-led initiatives and grassroots movements, it offers a dual perspective on the nationalization of the masses and the construction of Spanish and Iberian social and political identities.

Told through the voices of twenty European Jews who survived the Holocaust, The Hunted presents a micro historical account of persecution and survival under Nazi rule. Drawing on diaries and memoirs, it reconstructs a multiplicity of experiences across national, social, and religious contexts, examining how individual decisions were shaped by family networks, local conditions, and shifting policies. Each chapter traces a single year in the lives of the protagonists, situating their choices within the evolving administrative and legal framework of Nazi persecution. Author-drawn maps place individuals in their evolving landscapes—showing the escape routes they attempted, the barriers they met, and the ghettos, camps, and killing sites they endured. By weaving together meticulously researched historical context and personal testimony, The Hunted offers a vivid human portrait of survival amid one of history’s darkest chapters.

Pedagogies of Value explores how China is reshaping global hierarchies of worth. Through ethnographic research among marketers, consultants, and brokers who promote foreign goods in Shanghai, Beijing, and beyond, this book investigates how value is taught, contested, and transformed in everyday encounters. From luxury brands and consumer ethnography to real estate, wine, and organic food, the book reveals how foreign intermediaries attempt to ‘educate’ Chinese consumers, only to confront shifting power dynamics that challenge Western authority. Blending vivid narratives with sharp analysis, this study argues that China has become a central arena for reimagining the very meaning of value. 

Crises and displacement have shaped practices and relations of care among Zimbabwean migrants and their families upon their return from South African urban areas. Through ethnographic research primarily in Bulawayo,Economies of Care addresses the intersection of kinship, state functions and migration in sustaining livelihoods amidst Zimbabwe's economic and political instability. It offers an in-depth analysis of how bureaucratic and intimate care structures intertwine, making it an essential resource for scholars of migration, anthropology and African studies.

Terrorism in Question crafts a political anthropology of post-9/11 “new terrorism” by investigating who needs the category of terrorists and offering a global framework to understand anthropology, Islam and terrorism. In contrast to their depiction as antimodern, barbarian and fanatic, this study theorizes “Muslim terrorists” as radical friends of equality and visionaries of an unrecognized ethical politics. Marshalling fieldwork with media practitioners and refugees, participant observation of counterterrorism conferences in India and Oslo, and encounters with terrorists, it reorients anthropology to elevate its public voice. This book shows how fieldwork, poetry and political theory come together to exemplify decolonized knowledge.

A maverick photographer who travelled the world in search of otherness, over time Verger became a prominent ethnographer, botanist and historian. He devoted fifty years of research to the black cultures of Brazil and Africa and to the transatlantic world of the Orisha and Vodun deities. Living in the field, initiated into diverse religious societies, he was reborn under the name of Fatumbi. A go-between of the Yoruba diaspora, Verger practiced an anti-colonial ethnology avant la lettre. This book is an anthropological essay, but also a cross-cultural portrait and the story of an extraordinary life. It provides a detailed analysis of the artistic and scientific work of Pierre Fatumbi Verger (1902-1996).

Syrians living in refuge in Lebanon and Turkey during the war in Syria continued to reckon with the Syrian State as a direct and indirect force in their lives. Through an ethnographic account of everyday life in Syrian families with a variety of political standpoints, this book demonstrates how the experience of displacement was shaped by ongoing deliberations on the ways in which the Syrian State had and continued to intersect people’s lives. It provides new perspectives on the co-constitution of authoritarian rule and displacement in a Middle East context.

The historical emergence of centralised mineral resource governance in Ghana can be tied to its failed colonially transplanted legal system. This book offers a sobering reflection of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) formalisation, with a focus on its complex operationalisation in formerly colonized societies. Through its thought-provoking analysis, engagement with the archives and emphasis on knowledge co-production, the study crucially examines how sustainability is engendered in indigenous, small-scale mining operations. Its reliance on decolonial legal pluralism and indigenous philosophy seeks to ignite meaningful conversations which are grounded in environmental responsibility, transparency and accountability in the administration of access to mineral rights.

The views of space and place of people living in the Caribbean are different from Northern folk; Inequality is bound to socially constructed traits like race, gender, class, sexual orientation and other aspects of discrimination. Through interconnected perspectives on environment, gender inequality, identity and Caribbean spatial re-colonisation influences on social, cultural and environmental landscapes, The Inequity of Caribbean Spaces and Designed Places: Race, Class and Gender examines socio-spatial (in)justices beyond physical and geographical boundaries that Caribbean societies face.

A teleoperated robot roaming in the streets of Mumbai enables anyone to put oneself in the place of the Hindu god Ganesha and have a conversation. Initially conceived as an anthropological experiment, the machine was launched in 2014 and became a collective, political and metaphysical experience. Can a machine make a good divine interface? Likewise, what might be the virtues of hacking a god to understand our relation to machines? The Ganesh Yourself experiment is not only a fascinating exercise in anthropology by design, the first of this kind, but it also leads to a radical deconstruction of religion, politics and technology, opening unthinkable possibilities.

Education is arguably the central arena where the discipline of anthropology is reproduced, challenged, and renewed. This volume examines how anthropology is taught and transformed in diverse institutional and socio-political contexts worldwide. Covering themes such as multimodal teaching, research-led learning, and disciplinary boundaries, the book offers new insights into the changing role of teaching within anthropology.  This book compiles ethnographically grounded case studies to explore how educators respond to technological advancements, neoliberal influences, and calls for decolonising pedagogy. By highlighting content-specific strategies and comparative reflection, this study views anthropological education as a vibrant and critical space where anthropology is reimagined and revitalised.

Anthropology has an important role in articulating people’s engagements with water at different spatial and temporal scales, and in showing how local relationships with waterways and marine areas translate into larger anthropogenic impacts on regional and global ecosystems. This volume explores diverse relationships with waterbodies, and considers how these are expressed in art, material culture and infrastructures. Focusing on the multiple and overlapping scales at which people relate to water in contexts including wave science, Indigenous cosmology, extractive industries and environmental activism, it suggests that efforts to achieve more sustainable and equitable engagements with water must also be multi-scalar.

Amaravati, the new capital of Andhra Pradesh, exemplifies India’s policy thrust on urbanization. Tracing the rise, abandonment and revival of Amaravati, Urbanizing the Future delves into the ambitious plan to build a brand-new city in an agrarian landscape. The book unpacks the entanglements of caste, capital, and state power in shaping development through a regional lens. Urbanizing the Future highlights the disruptions and conflicts engendered by mega-projects as agricultural land is converted into urban real estate. Combining political economy and history with long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the Amaravati story offers a compelling critique of planned urbanization as a contested and uneven process in contemporary India.

Single motherhood, a new family form, demonstrates an accomplishment of paradoxical synergies between 2nd wave feminism and neoliberalism. Single Mother by Choice chronicles the journey of Ann, a 41-year-old woman throughout her intensive mothering of three donor-conceived children from infancy to tween years. The Christian Right’s embrace of neoliberalism provided a permission structure for this and other emerging families, while simultaneously influencing progressive parents with trickle down neoliberal values that weaken the moral architecture of childhood and the nation. This fine-grained analysis of one family’s life illuminates the complexities of twenty-first century, middle-class American motherhood, whether single or not.

The complexities of the relationship between food and kinship are highlighted in eating disorders. This book is an in-depth ethnographic account of a public treatment centre for eating disorders in Italy. By examining the practices and ethics of care that attempt to reconcile the patients’, family carers’, and the professionals’ conflicting notions about eating disorders, this book explores how bodies are both material in their sociality and social in their materiality. Food and family emerge aligned in the production and treatment of these conditions, as healthcare professionals tackle the patient’s kinship relationships for intervention. Ultimately, kinship makes and unmakes people through food.

Through reference to one of its most canonical figures: Bronislaw Malinowski, this volume de-centres anthropology seemingly in a paradox. Considering Malinowski as a disciplinary metonym, this de-centring addresses current debates on world anthropologies and the decolonization of anthropological knowledge, production, and careers. Despite (and because of) the publication of his diaries (Malinowski 1967), Malinowski remains part of an equivocal global anthropological tradition. Featuring scholars across various locations, genders and generations, this book neither celebrates nor “cancels” Malinowski. Instead, it offers an eccentric space of reconsideration and a prism for reflecting on power configurations in anthropology today.

Competition often appears to typify capitalist social life as a process that defines relative value and pits people against one another. But capitalism is not all there is to competition. In ethnographic perspective, the outcomes of competition depend on always varied, shifting and contested interpretations of what is worth competing for and how to do so. Hence, even when competition is imaged to engineer pre-defined changes or institute particular social orders, in practice its effects are often complex and unexpected. This book explores how competition is an unruly dynamic that generates unforeseen possibilities for human connection and mediates divergent social orders, rather than imposing one or another.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States and Germany were seen as rivals in a “race for modernity,” each pursuing distinct visions of the future. America’s image as a technological pioneer reshaped European self-perception, while Germany asserted its own path through science, engineering, and a far-reaching reform of design, architecture, and applied arts. This book explores the cultural encounters and confrontations between 1880 and the 1930s, moving beyond familiar narratives of Fordism and Taylorism to reveal technology as a dynamic cultural force. By tracing the adoption of German science in the United States, the American endeavors of conceptualizing technology in the search for a genuine American culture, and the German fascination and critique of “Americanism” in the Weimar republic, it offers new perspectives on transatlantic modernity.

The Afterlives of Tamil Tigers explores the experience of war, defeat, and exile among former fighters—both men and women—of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), through the testimonies of veterans now living in France. Moving beyond the organisation’s reputation for violence, Giacomo Mantovan sheds light on the everyday lives, emotions, and ideological commitment of its combatants. By tracing their life trajectories—from military training to exile, through combat, torture, loss, and survival—he examines how these experiences have left a lasting imprint on their identities and ways of being in the world.

Between 1933 and 1942, around 20,000 refugees fled to Shanghai to escape Nazi-occupied Europe, most of them Jewish. Unable to assimilate into Chinese culture, the Jewish community spent a decade preserving their own culture and enduring harsh Japanese occupation in Shanghai, before dispersing around the world after the end of World War II. Steve Hochstadt, whose Viennese grandparents were among those who fled, tells their story by weaving together hundreds of sources and dozens of interviews into a series of compelling essays on this unique, but little-known rescue.

Ernst Kitzinger was one of the great art historians of the twentieth century, and a refugee incarcerated in Hay, New South Wales during WWII. As a German Jew he had sought refuge in Britain in 1935, but in 1940 was one of 2,500 men arrested as ‘enemy aliens’ and deported to Australia aboard the HMT Dunera. Kitzinger rallied his fellow internees to communicate their peculiar circumstances. In powerful and often deeply moving prose and poetry, they mused on their lot and the misfortunes of refugees. Never before published, their words remain strikingly relevant today.

Engaging critically with concepts of race, species, and otherness, this book contributes to current debates on human evolution. In a political climate marked by movements such as Black Lives Matter and policies like Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14168 against ‘gender ideology’, this volume brings together a group of leading scholars in archeology, paleoanthropology and human evolution to examine how narratives of human origins intersect with issues of race, gender, and anthropocentrism. Drawing on postcolonial and critical frameworks from the Humanities and Social Sciences, it interrogates key foundational concepts and assumptions underpinning evolutionary discourses.

Homogenization, monochromatic rendering, and the process of schematic imposition is readily apparent in modern mainstream Jewish French politics. The Jewish Maghreb explores complex self and communal understandings of Maghrebi Jewish populations and their descendants in France through ethnography across generations. This study examines how colonial history, migration, and geopolitics shape ongoing Maghrebi belonging. From commercial networks in Paris to Algerian pilgrimage journeys, the book reveals communal North African Jewish navigation of plural sediments of self and history. The heuristic ‘maghrebinicité,’ works to illuminate ongoing negotiations of memory, citizenship, and cultural transmission in postcolonial France, offering fresh insights into diaspora, return, and the persistence of transnational connections.

Eduards Volters was a Latvian linguist, renowned early ethnographer, and archeologist with the Russian Imperial Geographical Society. He studied the Lithuanians and Latvians in the Northwest Krai of the Russian Empire and Lithuania from 1882 to 1941. As Volters began his research at a time when the printing of Lithuanian and Latgalian publications in the Latin alphabet was forbidden, this book aims to uncover his role as one of the founders of literate Lithuanian and Latvian communities. This study compares various historical and theoretical contexts in anthropology and decolonization to reveal how Volters reconciled his ethnographic work within the political goals of the empire.

While Psychology and Anthropology share certain overlapping interests, there is no agreed schema or paradigm for this area. Rejecting both psychoanalysis and the biopsychosocial model as insufficient, this collection brings together studies on Hasidic concepts of illness, the religious origins of schizophrenia, Christian stigmata, the “third sex” in Albania, jinn possession among European immigrants, and reincarnation among the Druze. The volume argues for plural models integrating biological, psychodynamic, and sociocultural perspectives. It highlights the enduring tension between Psychiatry’s naturalistic explanations and Anthropology’s personalistic approach, suggesting that both offer partial yet essential insights into human experience.

Robert L. Carneiro is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in anthropology in the twentieth century, best known for “A Theory of the Origin of the State” (1970). His efforts throughout his career brought cultural evolutionism from its nineteenth-century origins into the twenty-first century. This book is comprised of thirteen essays, ordered and balanced according to Carneiro’s own conceptual arrangement, and aims to contribute to revitalizing this durable, illuminating theoretical perspective for current and future generations of students and anthropologists.

Ibn Khaldun’s theory of dynastic history, economics, and group cohesion has drawn attention far beyond his North African home. He holds a unique place in the Western imagination, cited by figures as diverse as Mark Zuckerberg and President Ronald Reagan. His holistic, functionalist approach foreshadowed the development of modern social science. Whether analyzing kin-based solidarity, the role of religion in communal life, or the interplay between the universal and the particular, his emphasis on direct observation and cultural interpretation makes him a vital progenitor to contemporary anthropology.