Churchill and de Gaulle explores why Britain and France failed to cooperate after the Second World War. Drawing on declassified intelligence material, Matthew Hefler reveals that Winston Churchill opposed a lasting alliance with France. During the war he pursued an unofficial campaign in the Middle East, aiming to oust the French from the Levant, establish a ‘Greater Syria’ and create a Jewish state. Churchill continued this covert political action despite knowing that de Gaulle’s secret services had infiltrated the operation. Hefler reframes their relationship by showing how Churchill, to protect his unofficial policy, worked to discredit de Gaulle as a political force. Ultimately, Churchill’s secret statecraft meant sacrificing Franco-British relations and making de Gaulle an ‘enemy of Britain’.

Samuel Huston Goodfellow examines the transnational spread of Nazism from Germany to Southwest Africa, where former colonists sought to preserve German culture and reclaim influence. By embracing Nazi organizations, they built a movement that peaked in 1939, before the South African administration began to intern Germans at the start of the war. Although local Germans and the party were ideologically aligned, divisions now arose between local ambitions for control of the Mandate territory, and the Nazi regime’s vision of global German unity under Hitler. The experience of war divided support for Hitler and demonstrated that Nazism was no longer useful in Southwest Africa.

From Marienbad in today’s Czech Republic to the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, spas and summer resorts have long been part of modern Jewish life. Jewish visitors helped shape these places into cosmopolitan spaces where unexpected encounters could occur. These spaces brought together both Jews and non-Jews, and Jews from diverse backgrounds with different beliefs and traditions, to meet, socialize, occasionally clash, and often exchange ideas. Jewish Cultures of Rest and Recreation visits these vibrant centers of social life, where visitors mingled and flirted with locals and fellow travelers, enjoyed leisure activities, and spent time with (or without) family.

Alan Maričić examines Yugoslavia’s relations with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) between 1955 and 1968. This period was marked by the FRG’s Hallstein Doctrine, a set of measures placed to prevent international recognition of the GDR. One such measure, which stipulated that the FRG would break off diplomatic relations with any country which recognized the GDR, was enforced in 1957 with Yugoslavia. Maričić argues that Yugoslavia’s decision, driven by its desire for rapprochement with the Eastern Bloc, was a miscalculation, making its already uneasy position in a divided Europe even more precarious.

Red Ghosts traces the history of anti-communism in Argentina from the early twentieth century to the present, including its renewed prominence in the era of Javier Milei. Despite its centrality to the country’s political life, anti-communism has rarely been analysed systematically. From elite fears of the labour movement, through Peronism, the Cold War, and the political violence of the 1970s, to the last military dictatorship and contemporary right-wing movements, Red Ghosts reveals the persistent—and often underestimated—role of anti-communism in shaping Argentina’s political culture. In doing so, it offers indispensable insights into the current resurgence of far-right discourses and movements in Argentina, and across Latin America.

Sam A. Mustafa examines the changing role of Prussia in the lives of German people, from the founding of the empire in 1871 to the present. He addresses the steady diminution of Prussia's power within the Reich, its crisis during the Weimar Republic, and the symbolic uses of Prussia by the Nazis. He also explores the historical preservation efforts and the revisions of Prussia in East and West Germany, and the remnants of Prussia in landscapes and popular culture. Mustafa concludes by analyzing the restoration of Prussian structures after 1990 and the surprising return of Prussia to the public consciousness in the twenty-first century.

Lukas Paul Schmelter re-examines the debate over West German Ostpolitik, focusing on Franz Josef Strauss and his approach to foreign policy in the 1960s and early 1970s. He argues that Strauss’ opposition to Brandt’s eastern policy was incited by an alternative strategic concept, centred on European federal union, political integration, and a Europeanised response to détente and the German question. Drawing on archival research, Opposing Ostpolitik situates Strauss within the wider history of Cold War strategy, European integration, and the contested future direction of the Federal Republic.

Focusing on cooperative exchanges between Czechoslovakia and Poland in the 1960s and 70s, this collection explores international science collaborations during the Cold War. During the era of real socialism, the states of Central and Eastern Europe were caught between the "East" and the "West." As members of the Eastern Bloc they had to adhere to Moscow centrism, yet partial autonomy in scientific internationalism and longstanding Western-oriented traditions created space for exceptions. The Contributors to this volume provide a nuanced understanding of socialist hierarchies and the knowledge transfers they facilitated, challenging the perception that socialist scholars acted solely according to rigid, reciprocal plans.

Based in the Valsusa, a valley in the western Italian Alps bordering France, the No TAV movement has opposed the construction of a transborder high-speed railway for over thirty years. As the largest and longest-running of Italy’s lotte territoriali (territorial struggles), it offers a sustained example of place-based resistance. Bringing together the anthropology of resistance and infrastructure with political theory and geography, this book situates the movement alongside similar struggles across Europe and beyond. It argues for territorio as a generative force in shaping liberatory politics beyond neoliberal hegemony and right-wing reaction.

Travel narratives have been recorded since the invention of writing, surviving as myths, epics, official records, diaries, and personal accounts. Despite this long history, their significance remains largely absent from contemporary studies of travel and tourism. Bringing together philosophical, historical, and anthropological perspectives, this book examines what these narratives reveal about the nature of travel experience. It shows how accounts from the past illuminate the enduring fascination with what lies beyond everyday life. Situating tourism within a longer history, it argues that, despite its contested impacts, travel reflects a persistent human impulse that continues to shape contemporary practices.

Beginning in 1955, when she moved at the age of nine to Ankara, Türkiye, Colfer traces a life shaped by encounters with a very different culture and the inequities it revealed. Combining autoethnography with an analysis of modern-day colonialism, she charts her changing understandings of the world, many of which were shared more broadly. The narrative highlights inequities at multiple scales and reflects on both the successes and shortcomings of her own efforts to address them. In doing so, it invites readers to examine their own lives in light of such injustices and to consider how to “make good trouble.”

Famous for its ‘Modern Dance on Baby Oil’, the Taipei Dance Circle (1984–2019) changed how we think about movements. This book captures a rare behind-the-scenes look in dance ethnography at the group's final experimental years (2014-2017) after losing their founder, Shaw-Lu Liu. During this chaotic but creative and liminal phase, the author compares Shaw-Lu Liu’s and Cheng-Chieh Yu’s choreographic methodologies through thirteen months of fieldwork, positioning divergent paths in modern / postmodern dance. Bridging anthropology and dance studies, this book takes you deep into the slippery and creative world of movements, substance, objects, imagination and aesthetics.

Things are constantly moving; animals, plants, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information and ideas have mobilities that are dynamic and complex. The Anthropological Handbook of Mobility takes stock of the dispersed body of anthropological work on mobilities, as both an object of study and an analytical lens. From an anthropological point of view, this guide provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to mobility studies for students, scholars, and anyone else wanting to know more about the implications of mobility.

Roman Polanski after The Pianist examines Polanski’s later films as a distinct and coherent phase in his career. Situating these works within changing industrial, cultural and political conditions, the book shows how Polanski’s late cinema rethinks genre, sound, work, domestic space and historical memory. Drawing on production studies, sound analysis and theories of authorship and mediation, it explores the formal strategies through which these films construct their cinematic worlds. Engaging contemporary debates on art, morality and authorship, the authors argue for the critical autonomy of artworks in a culture increasingly shaped by biographical scrutiny and moral judgement.

Examining the origins of a wide variety of cultural conventions, including calendar customs, folklore, annual holidays, and ethnic identity, this work uses a critical lens to evaluate popular understanding. It suggests that common opinions in this realm are often misinterpreted and considers why this is the case. It also asks why people care about such questions: some, such as the origin of the universe, attract a great deal of attention, while others, such as the origins of particular words, are of more limited interest.

Bringing together theoretical, ethnographic, and internationally contributed chapters, this book introduces a tripartite approach to anthropology. It highlights the need to study individuals alongside customary groups, to examine persons sequestered within their socio-cultural contexts amid changing global circumstances, and to reflect on one’s own society. Drawing on the Covid-19 lockdown, Contributors discuss their own experiences of in-placement. The volume also considers how epidemics qualify as disasters within the risk field and asks whether certain long-established postulations may now be outdated.

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.

Through a dialogue between a philosopher and an anthropologist, one a specialist in ancient Greek and Chinese thought, the other in Amazonian Indigenous peoples, Geoffrey Lloyd and Aparecida Vilaça revise our understanding of beliefs and behaviours considered counter-intuitive in the Western world. These include ideas about the body and its antitheses, dreams, sickness, gods and the narratives and myths which are used to untangle these concepts. What is distinctive about the approach adopted here is that it poses radical questions about the nature of the problems themselves. This turns the study into a resource for the revision of many of our own current presuppositions.

Jane Ellen Harrison transformed the study of Greek religion with her discovery of a religious system predating that of the Olympic gods and goddesses familiar to the modern world. This biography introduces her work and ideas, which have influenced and profoundly shaped scholarship, primarily in the classics, throughout the last century. Through her penetrating study of Greek art and epigraphy, she found evidence of rituals of this religion that had been hiding in plain sight for centuries. This earlier religion had a darker, chthonic character in which goddesses, underworld divinities, and daemons played a much larger role.

This book is an ethnography on Mapuche ritual healing transformations from the perspective of the phenomenology of the body. It explores how people identify a Mapuche shaman, or a “real Machi”, a person who can see illness and misfortune through divinatory techniques. These techniques produce changes in bodily and affective experience, which are not mediated by reconfigurations of symbolic meaning. Machi also experience küymin, or ritual trance, through which a group of people can receive a direct message from ‘spirits from the past’. Thus, embodying the ancestors, Machi can provide both explanations of illness and misfortune and moral guidance for future action.

Drawing on ethnography, historical sources, and folklore, this book examines how fishermen and coastal communities in Japan read winds, clouds, seas, animals, and celestial signs to anticipate change and manage risk. Centred on the vernacular forecasting framework known as kantenbōki, the study traces the entanglement of sensory perception, language, ritual, and labor in everyday engagements with atmosphere. Moving between micro-scale practices and broader climatic regimes, the book shows how local weather knowledge persists, adapts, and intertwines with modern meteorology, revealing weather as a relational, cultural, and ecological field rather than a mere physical backdrop.

Using the overlooked and seemingly trivial digital practices of scrolling, swiping, and snapping as a vantage point, this ethnography explores how young people in Vienna inhabit digital time and space amid boredom, unemployment, migration, school pressures and fragmented life trajectories. By combining digital and design anthropology, it situates these mundane digital practices within historical continuities and broader societal regimes that value productivity and discipline while negating idleness and practices associated with marginalized populations. Through fieldwork, workshops, and co-design, it reveals how digital devices are entangled with experiences of sociality, waiting, and boredom, offering an alternative to moralizing narratives of “mindless scrolling” and of scrolling through digital worlds.

Tracing the emergence of autism in Portugal, from its early recognition in child psychiatry to the rise of parent-led advocacy and digital activism, this book examines how families confront inadequate services, challenge outdated paradigms and advocate for educational and social reforms. Drawing on ethnography and critical analysis, it defines advocacy as a transformative practice that reshapes parents’ identities and links care with politics, showing how digital infrastructures become a force for collectivising in the absence of state support, revealing the intertwined socio-institutional and affective dimensions of care and civic engagement in Portugal. It explores how autistic subjectivities challenge normative notions of personhood and citizenship.

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. The book directly addresses prejudice, discrimination, and harmful beliefs, asking why humans develop biased views about others and how these attitudes shape social conflict. It is highly relevant to contemporary debates about racism, polarization, and misinformation that are particularly pressing in today’s divided political landscape.

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.

Shakespeare’s enduring significance lies in the persistent counternarrative his plays and poetry offer against the permanence of mortality. This study examines the strategies through which Shakespeare resists death’s finality, situating its argument within the cultural realities of the Shakespearean age. Across three sections, it analyzes the dramatic and poetic techniques that articulate this challenge to mortality. While acknowledging the importance of textual and performance-based scholarship, the book argues for renewed attention to Shakespearean meaning. In doing so, it reconsiders what continues to make Shakespeare matter within literary and intellectual history.

First published in 2017, Metaphors of Spain traces the complex history of twentieth-century Spanish nationalism. This history places a set of famously distinctive regional identities against a backdrop of religious conflict, separatist tensions, and the autocratic rule of Francisco Franco. And despite the undeniably political character of that story, cultural history can also provide essential insights into the subject. Metaphors of Spain brings together leading historians to examine Spanish nationalism through its diverse and complementary cultural artifacts, from “formal” representations such as the flag to music, bullfighting, and other more diffuse examples. Together they describe not a Spanish national “essence,” but a nationalism that is constantly evolving and accommodates multiple interpretations. This second edition includes an extensive new introduction and an additional chapter exploring food and nationalism.

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.

From the nineteenth century onward, there have been gaps between travel writing and anthropological sciences, but also commonalities and continuous interactions in the anglophone world. Through a variety of case studies resulting from a collaboration between anthropologists and literary scholars, Anthropology and Travel Writing follows the shift from armchair speculation to sustained fieldwork, from the picturesque to analytic thick description and from colonial typologies to Indigenous counter-readings. Attentive to the notions of authority, validity, identity and reflexivity, this volume explores how alterity is scrutinized and staged, delineating the aesthetic, analytic and ethical stakes of representation.

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 the voyages of Lombroso’s collaborators 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.