Weathering Fields explores the meanings that people and societies have ascribed to the relationships between climate, famine events and food supplies. Bringing historical perspectives into conversation with contemporary understandings of environment and climate change, it reveals the diversity and local specificity of climate–food interactions while tracing the connections between local experiences and broader global understandings. Case studies range from early modern Korea and seventeenth-Century North-East England, to nineteenth-Century Anatolia and 1920s East Africa. Weathering Fields demonstrates that hunger is fundamentally political, revealing how social relations and power structures have shaped historical experiences of climate, food and famine. In doing so it emphasises the importance of political and social domains for making meaningful change.

The Trawniki men, named after the SS training camp near Lublin, belonged to the "foreign national" auxiliary troops in service of the Nazis and were drawn primarily from Soviet prisoners of war. They were employed across occupied Poland and the Soviet Union where they performed a wide range of tasks. These included guarding forced labor and POW camps, participating directly in Operation Reinhardt, the liquidation of ghettos, and the operation of extermination camps. Their status, however, was ambiguous. Shaped by coercion, survival, and shifting incentives, the Trawniki men displayed behaviors of extreme violence, desertion, and occasional resistance. Trawniki Men and the Holocaust examines the formation, recruitment, and deployment of this group, situating them within the wider structures of Nazi occupation and genocide. In doing so, it reveals the fluid boundaries between coercion and collaboration, and the complex realities behind the implementation of mass murder in Eastern Europe.

Bruno Frank’s "Lying as a Principle of Governance" ("Lüge als Staatsprinzip"), composed in 1939 during the author’s exile in California, was not published in German until 2024. Now translated by Andrew S. Gross, this edition also contains Frank’s “For the Love of Humanity” ("Von der Menschenliebe"), along with relevant letters from Thomas and Erika Mann, all of which appear in the German edition. A new introduction by Gross places Frank’s essays within historical and philosophical context, and extensive notes increase its accessibility to an English-language readership.

Drawing on archival field notes from Nepal in the 1970s, this book explores the metaphysical dramas woven into ritual and everyday life. Explicating the metaphysics enacted in Hindu life and ritual, it offers new conceptualisations of personhood, time and existence. Engaging with new and classic approaches to sacrifice, sexual difference, mythology, rites of passage, witchcraft, architecture and more, the study draws from anthropology, comparative religion and philosophy. Through archival experimentation with the ethnographic, it opens up new conceptualisations of anthropology and demonstrates the possibilities for experimentation beyond the strictures of methodological and disciplinary orthodoxy.

After Poland joined the European Union in 2004, a new wave of playwriting emerged in response to changing social realities. Natasha Oxley investigates twelve plays which were written during the first decade of Polish EU membership, by key playwrights Paweł Demirski, Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk, Dorota Masłowska, and Przemysław Wojcieszek. The analysis reveals a prominence of non-naturalistic approaches and the importance of humour, even when addressing heavy issues. Three major themes are contextualized and evidenced through examples from the plays: dealing with Poland’s past in the present, the human body, and social marginalization in contemporary Polish society.

At the intersection of Romani Studies, Critical Security Studies and Political Theory, this book makes a major contribution to debates on security, citizenship and development. Focusing on Roma in Europe, it examines how contemporary regimes that claim to protect often actively racialize and marginalize them. Viewed through the lens of the ambivalence of protection, the book shows how Roma are simultaneously framed as at risk and as threats, and are subjected to racialized evictions, surveillance and development policies. Combining empirical depth with theoretical rigor, it reveals the structural contradictions of protection in European governance and their implications for rights, inclusion and mobility.

Framing walking as narrative, ritual, research practice, creative method and everyday experience, this volume explores how embodied movement shapes creativity, place-making and social and environmental relations. It examines the cultural, historical and methodological significance of movement on foot within folkloristic and ethnological research. Through innovative case studies and experimental methodologies, it demonstrates how walking generates new perspectives on tradition and lived experience across past and present contexts. As the first comprehensive engagement with walking in these fields, the collection shows how this seemingly ordinary practice offers powerful tools for understanding cultural processes and addressing pressing social and environmental challenges.

Mirrors, as objects designed for reflection, have played a significant role in various academic disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, technology, sciences, and arts. This book aims to consolidate current data and methodologies in mirror studies in three sections: Archaeology, Art and Anthropology, and Physics and Medicine. Departing from traditional approaches that primarily focus on the artifacts themselves, it seeks to understand mirrors within broader contexts, such as their materials and materiality, sociocultural and political significance, as well as their functions and symbolic representations.

Food and culinary practices can carry memory across generations, geographies, and histories. This book, a collection of oral histories centred on interviews with elders, traces various journeys from Italy to Switzerland, Bulgaria to Turkey, and across regions of India, revealing how migration, war, gender roles, and political upheaval shape culinary practices. From antifascist Pastasciutta to Maharashtrian home cooking, each contribution shows how recipes, kitchen spaces, and shared meals function as living archives of resilience and belonging. Blending scholarly insight with creative expression, the book positions food as both intimate memory and collective history, inviting readers to see their own family tables as sites of remembrance.

Exploring ethnographic encounters that challenge anthropology’s deepest commitments, this book develops a diagnostic framework for situations in which collaboration becomes ethically impossible, solidarity risks complicity, and reflexivity intensifies rather than resolves the tensions of fieldwork. Drawing on research with far-right communities in London and on HPV and COVID vaccination in Dublin, it examines the limits of empathy, dialogue, and taking participants seriously when the familiar becomes strange within the anthropologist’s own society. Rather than offering prescriptions or straightforward resolutions, the book opens new pathways for researchers studying difficult subjects.

Focusing on the Indigenous peoples of Kamchatka, this volume brings together decades of field research by anthropologists from around the world, including Indigenous Kamchatkan scholars. It examines the lives of Itelmens, Koryaks, Chukchis, Alutors, and Ainus through topics including relationships to the landscape and mapmaking, storytelling, fishing and making a living, social and political life, rituals and personhood, and histories of cultural exchange, trade, and migration. It addresses Kamchatka’s distinct history of settler-colonial occupation and its contemporary legacies. Offering a broad anthropological perspective on this diverse region of Russia, the collection also speaks to scholars of folklore, religion, geography, and related disciplines.

Officially recognised as an ethnic group, the Mao identity carries complex, sometimes contradictory meanings, from stigma to prestige. For some individuals, Mao signals descent from enslaved people; for others, non-slave ancestry. Examining the historical and political transformations of the Mao social identity in Western Ethiopia, the book challenges the assumption that ethnicity determines social position. It shows how local hierarchies shape the meaning and impact of social identities. Drawing on rich empirical data, it explores how Mao groups negotiate identity through politics, marriage and labour, and how these interpretations have interacted with regional and national changes over the past fifty years.

Focusing on the Asháninka and Nomatsigenga peoples of the Peruvian Amazon, this book engages with current debates on archived sonic legacies and their restitution to the Indigenous communities where they were recorded. Taking a decolonial approach to the anthropology of music, it explores how original song-dances are mobilized to support demands for cultural autonomy, control of rainforest territories, and a “good life” on Indigenous terms. Inspired by the return of archival materials and grounded in a collaborative project, community members and anthropologists work together to reinvigorate ancestral arts and Indigenize archives, contributing to decolonial futures.

Providing a novel, ground-up perspective on the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s revolutionary struggle, this book explores supporters’ political commitments and practices in Turkish, Iraqi, and Syrian Kurdistan as well as in the German diaspora. Binding the movement together across all these sites, it argues, is a common obligation to the movement’s martyrs, which guides and shapes the struggle in various ways. Through complex relations between the living and the dead, the book contends that the movement’s political structure should be seen as founded on a social order of sacrifice.

A new and comprehensive analysis of the 1867 dualist settlement and the formation of Austria-Hungary, from its conception to implementation. Exploring important events, key figures, and individual case studies, the analysis is underpinned by three themes: regionally-centred perspectives, the mechanics of government, and the emergence of participatory political cultures. Leading researchers, working in multiple languages and across a variety of topics, have contributed to this fresh, integrated investigation and interpretation.

Moving Nature explores the Anthropocene in Scandinavia through the movement of organisms, substances and ideologies, from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Case studies explore the Pacific oyster and wild boar as alien species, the production of Arctic animal museum specimens, changing Nordic livestock regimes, the afterlives of Swedish copper production, eighteenth century attempts to combat ‘evil herbs’, and clearing of Argentinian rainforest by Swedish migrants. Collectively, they show how the Anthropocene in Scandinavia can be characterised by such movements, and how they promoted progress and related to the welfare state, whilst remaining entangled with transgressive and colonial forms of intervention.

Nation-states use heritage to project cultural unity and commemorate nationally significant events and achievements. In appearing to commemorate, however, heritage often has the opposite effect: it obliterates the memory of how national identity was forged. This book, which draws on a wide array of ethnographic materials, connects the idea of heritage back to the social practices associated with inheritance. That link, despite its complexity and wide cultural variation, has equipped nation-states and other major authorities with a powerful means of suppressing dissidence, creativity, and debate about history and identity. By seeking the spectral traces of earlier forms of language, spatial arrangements, and political life, however, we can recover some of the diverse voices that the forces of nationalism and capitalism have ignored or suppressed in the name of heritage. 

The French added an American accent to how they lived during the 20^th century.  American consumer society and mass culture modified how they shopped, dined, entertained, enjoyed leisure, conducted business, pursued economic modernity, and defined the good life. Richard F. Kuisel offers an engaging historical survey of French Americanization, exploring jazz, Hollywood, Ford’s assembly line, G.I.s, supermarkets, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, world wars, the Marshall Plan, Disney, and globalization.  Americanization inspired emulation, but also provoked anti-Americanism and anti-globalism. The French confronted the American model and used it as a foil to chart their own way to modernity, reworking American offerings to make them more “French.”

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.

Within the contemporary business sphere, the avoidance of organisational deviance is closely linked to business practice, reputation, responsibility, and the social licence to operate. This book examines organisational deviance through the lenses of motive, opportunity, and convenience, exploring its relationship to corporate social responsibility and private business self-regulation. It considers how normative pressures shape perceptions of legitimacy and influence efforts to avoid malpractice and corruption. Linking organisational deviance to established models of business legitimacy, ethical practice, and conformance, the book also examines episodes of business illegitimacy, revealing how organisations navigate the boundaries between accepted conduct and deviant behaviour.

Examining divorce in contemporary Kenya, this book explores how the end of marriage reshapes women’s social status and respectability in a context where marriage remains central to female adulthood, sexuality, and motherhood. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic research in Nairobi, and digital ethnography of Kenyan social media, it examines how divorced women navigate stigma, shifting identities, and moral expectations. Using Zigon’s concept of moral breakdown, the study shows how divorce creates both vulnerability and ethical possibility, enabling women to renegotiate respectable womanhood and motherhood. In doing so, it highlights the emergence of plural moralities of respectability in Kenyan society.

Half a century after the civil rights era, struggles over air—what we breathe, the ways we know it, who governs it, and how to stake claims through it—have become central to science, politics, law, and the economy. This book explores the links among three urgent issues: rapid growth of urban inequality, amplification of political divisions in major democracies, and the increasing impact of pollution and global warming. It examines how communities on the margins of interconnected energy hubs navigate the social, cultural, and health consequences of air pollution, and how long-running battles over industrial toxicity are being reshaped as climate science becomes central to governance.

Drawing on ethnographic research in the Koya adivasi community of Andhra Pradesh, this book examines the intergenerational experience of sweeping socio-economic change across adivasi India. Following a literary trajectory, it begins with the oral history of a single hilltop village and traces the transformations that have reshaped family life and social relations. Contrasting the experiences of Koya people at different points along a spectrum of cultural and economic integration, it explores how local lives have been shaped by engagement with wider regional and national contexts. In doing so, it offers a nuanced account of continuity, change, and belonging.

Eric Wolf’s magnum opus, Europe and the People Without History (1982), fundamentally challenged social and cultural anthropology’s ingrained problems of localism, synchronism, and culturalism. Against that, it provided a Marx-inspired, relational, processual, multi-scalar theory and method for studying interconnected societies in motion. Wolf’s vision has remained essential for grasping the uneven and combined surprises of global capitalism, including the dynamic “hidden histories” that fuel popular politics and imaginations. This book is an effort by over a dozen international “Wolfian” scholars to critically rethink this nearly fifty-year-old classic from the standpoint of a mightily and scarily accelerating 21st century.

Exploring the life and work of filmmaker Milcho Manchevski, this ethnography offers an intimate account of artistic practice, integrity, and independence. The author provides an insider’s perspective on Manchevski’s wars of independence, examining the challenges posed by nepotism, prejudice, corruption, the turbulence of Macedonian history, Hollywood, and the political economy of filmmaking. This book traces the struggles involved in creating films that remain committed to artistic freedom while navigating competing political, social, and commercial pressures.

Across the world, states use demolitions and displacement to reorganize cities according to particular visions of society. Through the voices and experiences of former slum dwellers evicted in the 1970s from a self-grown settlement beneath a Roman aqueduct, this book examines the social consequences of forced relocation and the ways communities rebuild social life in its aftermath. It reveals the forms of sociality that emerge in the gaps of urban planning and highlights the damage caused when governments respond to grassroots urbanism with bulldozers and relocation schemes.

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.

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 vernacular environmental knowledge, 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.

Concepts of Culture takes an interdisciplinary approach to conceptual history, broadening the scope of Reinhart Koselleck’s original undertaking through a series of experimental case studies in “applied conceptual history.” Drawing on contributors from art history, comparative literature, cultural studies, German studies, and history, the book o  ers theoretically grounded applications of conceptual history to cultural concepts, demonstrating both the plasticity and the urgency of the conceptual historical project today.

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 theorisations 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.