Generally, insights into indigenous communities is obscure and mystifying, for the reason that they are often believed to be a deprived section of society. In the era of development, it becomes important to re-examine the socio-cultural milieu of an indigenous community to highlight and validate the important theories and impressions that go with the evolution of indigeneity in the context of bio-geophysical, historic, and socio-cultural context. As far as the Indian indigenous communities in general and Himalayan Communities in particular are concerned, one needs to reconsider them in terms of social exclusion.

The inhabitants living in the extremities of cold deserts are believed to be the primogenital inhabitants of Trans-Himalaya, who have witnessed diverse mediators of change. In this book, the nature and course of metamorphosis in an indigenous community is assessed in the light of the past, to portray a chronology of transition from primitive cultural backgrounds to the contemporary era. It gives an idea about the indigenous Trans-Himalayan society not only in terms of antiquity but also in terms of modernity and interface with urban society, which mobilized them from the conservative realm to the present-day world. The impact of the developmental activities in view of cultural change is discussed in depth. The theories and models of transition, social change, and acculturation are discussed to discern as to how the trans-Himalayan communities transformed and in which direction. The book analyzes this socio-cultural or structural change and brings into the limelight different aspects of social change. It rationally examines the theoretical process and unveils the veracities and concerns challenging the indigenous communities in the present-day world.

Repositioning the study of global currencies from below, Dollarizations introduces the concept of "popular currency" to explore what it means to "live" the dollar. This concept takes shape around four themes: political authority, social stratification, collective identity, and historical memory. Drawing on thirteen country specific case studies across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, Dollarizations reveals a social and political dimension of global currency that monetary theory has neglected. Reaching beyond the dollar, this framework increases our understanding of how any global currency becomes familiar, legitimate, and lived by ordinary people, at a time when the yuan and cryptocurrencies enter the contest for monetary supremacy.

A groundbreaking analysis of Vienna’s reconstruction between 1945 and 1949, Red Vienna Revisited bridges policy history with the realities of everyday life, examining the foundational moment when the city transitioned from National Socialism to a democratic political culture. It highlights the pivotal role of Social Democrats in re-establishing governance and addressing social needs amidst material devastation and the complexities of denazification. By exploring the exclusion and subsequent reintegration of "less-implicated" Nazis and the rise of a progressive social justice agenda, this book offers a new perspective on postwar European historiography.

Health Unbound assembles a collection of ethnographic studies on health-environment relations, illustrating how disease, harm and wellbeing emerge in novel ways as health becomes unbound from biomedical approaches. The authors discuss a range of topics including climatic medicine, medical pluralism, pesticides, air pollution, vernacular epidemiologies and medicinal foodways, writing from locations in Africa, Europe, Latin America and Asia. In doing so, they generate original insights into the variegated and troubled landscape of health and medicine today.

Restricted Communication addresses linguistic regimes in the Russian Empire’s western borderlands—a region encompassing modern-day Poland, Right-bank Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. It also engages with broader historiographical debates and demonstrates that identifiable factors—the Russian mental map, the hierarchy of the Empire's enemies, and pressure by non-Russians—shaped a framework within which officials had to navigate their policies. By addressing debates about the Romanov nationality policy and revealing tensions between imperial and nationalist strategies, Darius Staliūnas provides new insights into the interplay of empire, language, and processes of identification in modern European history.

Situating Ghana within the broader global suicide problem, this book argues that understanding suicidal behavior requires attention to local beliefs, values, and norms. Drawing on official data, media reports, literature, proverbs, and interviews, it analyzes the influence of language, funerary rituals, mourning practices, and cultural expressions on societal responses to suicide. The book addresses suicide among men, women, youth, the elderly, and elites, and explores a range of issues including male infertility and erectile dysfunction, while highlighting culturally grounded prevention efforts and offering evidence-based recommendations for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

An auto-ethnography of the two years, 45 years ago, that anthropologist Susan M Kenyon and her family spent in Sennar, a small town in central Sudan. The focus is on the Islamic Sudanese communities around them but includes the trials of a British family adjusting to local expectations, and the efforts of Sudanese neighbors and friends to help ease those difficulties.

Chasing Wild Pigs reconceives hunting through the heuristic of ‘hunting worlds’ - ensembles of human and more-than-human actors, technologies, infrastructures, affects, legal and economic frames, and temporalities knitted together by recurring hunting practices. Rather than policing categories such as subsistence vs. sport or West vs. non-West, the volume treats those boundaries as produced in practice and asks how hunting both creates durable social-ecological orders and can also rupture them. The wild pig (in its wild, feral and domestic guises) is used as a comparative probe because its ecological and social plasticity reveals the infrastructures, ethical repertoires, governance pressures (from biosecurity to conservation), and affective registers that make animals more or less “huntable.” Drawing on a variety of approaches, Contributors combine ethnography with attention to infrastructures, disease regimes, governance, aesthetics and digital afterlives of hunts to address urgent contemporary themes. Some of the latter include zoonoses and biosecurity, eradication vs. stewardship, commodification and social media, and the changing political economies of rural life.

This volume examines how more-than-human perspectives reframe the Arctic as a fully inhabited, living world—moving beyond traditional views of the region as merely human space or extractable resources. Rooted in Fennoscandia, the chapters explore a spectrum of northern entities: from ice, rivers, soil, and permafrost to microbial life, sentient animals, and Indigenous communities. Crucially, these essays demonstrate that relationships of mutual care are the very foundation upon which perception, knowledge-making, rights, and regional governance must be built.

In the past decade, authoritarian populist regimes – which seek to hollow out liberal democratic institutions of the state based on a strategic Measure of popular consent and repression of the opposition – have seen tremendous political success around the globe in what seemed to be firmly established liberal democracies. This book examines an early instance of such contemporary authoritarian populisms: Turkey governed by the AK-Party. It focuses on the ways in which anti-terror politics was used to re-make the state and subdue the opposition and pays particular attention to how processes of (de)valuation and dispossession – in a capitalist sense as well as in terms of state structures of belonging and entitlement – were harnessed in this process. The book highlights multiple social antagonisms and the ways in which they work upon and through state institutions. It also examines the effects of these processes on oppositional people. In developing an anthropological conceptual approach for studying authoritarian populist states, it both provides an analytic lens for the contemporary conjuncture and more broadly for examining politics of state transformation. It contributes, among others, to anthropological discussions on (authoritarian) populism and illiberalism and to the anthropology of the state. The empirical focus is on the period from 2015 through 2019, which marks the high period of widespread anti-terror politics in Turkey, but which is embedded in the book within a longer political trajectory since the 1990s to today. The argument is based on a close observation of developments in Turkey since 2002 and repeated field research in Turkey between 2006 and 2024. It draws to a smaller Extent on research conducted in and on EU institutions in the late 2000s as well as on document analysis.

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.

Politics and Society in Cold War Turkey (1960-1980) offers a comprehensive examination of Turkey’s transformative era between the military coups of 1960 and 1980. Analysing the period within global Cold War conjunctures, it investigates profound socio-political, economic, and cultural shifts. It explores the institutionalisation and subsequent erosion of a liberal constitutional order, alongside the rapid mobilisation of dynamic social forces, including the socialist left, trade unions, women, and marginalised minorities. Conversely, it highlights the severe polarisation driven by the radical right and political Islam. By exploring foreign policy crises, urban informalisation, and cultural production, this seminal work offers an indispensable guide to understanding modern Turkey’s most pivotal era.

Approaching immobility as a dynamic, relational and meaningful experience embedded in power structures, this volume offers a critical anthropological examination of immobility as a central condition shaping contemporary lives. Across diverse ethnographic contexts, it shows how people live through imposed stasis, prolonged waiting and constrained futures, while negotiating uncertainty and limited control over their lives. It foregrounds how immobility is unevenly produced and sustained, yet also inhabited through everyday practices, moral reasoning and acts that seek to preserve dignity, purpose and a sense of possible futures.

Across modern nation-states, Indigenous Peoples continue to resist dispossession and sustain their cultures in the face of historical and contemporary pressures. Through sixteen in-depth case studies spanning six continents, this volume examines shared patterns of colonisation, genocide, land loss and forced assimilation. Bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, it foregrounds Indigenous agency and resilience through strategies including legal action, language revitalisation, political activism and international advocacy. The Contributors address contemporary challenges such as climate change, resource extraction and economic marginalisation, alongside ongoing struggles for sovereignty and self-determination. Together, the case studies offer a comparative perspective on Indigenous cultural survival across diverse global contexts.

In a series of dazzling essays and immersive ethnographies, Clifford Geertz wrought a gentle revolution in fieldwork and anthropological writing. Drawing on sociology, philosophy, and literary criticism, he fashioned a unique and compelling approach: humanistic, liberal, richly detailed, and aesthetically alive, repositioning anthropology as a key discipline in the contemporary world. Tracing his development across half a century, and assessing his controversial legacy today, this book captures what made Geertz seminal to thinkers as different as Keith Thomas, Jerome Bruner, and Stephen Greenblatt. Through close readings, it shows why he remains both a stimulus for anthropology and a vital resource for contemporary thought.

Military sites across the Caribbean have long served as meaningful points of cultural contact and social interaction. Bringing together archival and archaeological evidence from British, Dutch, Danish, French and Spanish Caribbean islands, this volume examines military sites within their wider social and historical contexts. It explores colonialism, globalisation and community relationships, alongside the contributions of African Caribbean peoples and the significance of military life to Caribbean history and heritage.

Drawing on Hannah Arendt's writings, The World is a Stage uncovers the dramatic foundations of her political thought. In her analysis of totalitarianism, revolution, student movements and other political phenomena, Arendt draws on theatrical concepts such as tragedy, the spectator, and character, while dramatic action provides the model for her concept of politics. Stephen Most also explores the political dimensions of theater, from Greek tragedy and Shakespeare to Enlightenment and modern drama. In so doing, he clarifies Arendt’s claim that "theater is the political art par excellence", while arguing that politics itself is a theatrical art which everyone may engage with for the sake of the world.

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.

Grounded in original accounts of queer lives under authoritarian rule in Azerbaijan, this book introduces the concept of petro-authoritarian violence to show how oil wealth, state power and the regulation of gender and sexuality intersect to shape the marginalisation, control and conditional inclusion of queers. Drawing on ethnography, it traces how queer people navigate political homophobia, nationalism, militarism and NGO donor politics, while also foregrounding everyday practices of conflict, survival, solidarity and resistance. By focusing on local categories and experiences, the book contributes to queer anthropology by rethinking dominant frameworks from the post-Soviet context and highlighting how queer life persists under conditions of constraint and ambiguities.

Based on long-term ethnographic research in a Hungarian village between 2014 and 2026, this book examines how Viktor Orbán’s rule takes shape through everyday ‘populist projects.’ From pest control and greenhouses to soil, flowers and vegetables, rural life becomes a medium for redistributing resources to loyal networks while generating tacit and explicit propaganda. As successive crises – from the 2015 refugee moment to COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine – reconfigure social relations, ordinary practices are recast as symbols of national belonging. Tracing these shifts, the book shows how populism appropriates and exhausts social commons, even as its grip begins to loosen.;

Sustainable mobility projects, including electric transport infrastructures, cycling and pedestrianization initiatives, are implemented in cities across the world today. This book offers an ethnographic exploration of such projects in Cuenca, Ecuador, focused on the controversies around their implementation and the question of what ‘sustainability’ comes to mean and do in this specific context. Against tendencies in critical social sciences to dismiss ‘sustainability’ as always insufficient, especially in modern, neoliberal situations, it proposes to take sustainability claims seriously. Although these claims may draw on modern ideas that separate nature from culture and assume Eurocentric notions of progress, they take different forms in practice.

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.

The Anti-Refugee Machine is a frame for interpretation and analysis to grasp the apparent coincidence of often deliberate entanglements, pragmatic complicities, and unexpected forms of agency or resistance in the sphere of global migration. This book addresses how interventions to control migration and regulate mobility worsen the conditions of displacement, exacerbate capitalist exploitation, and further undermine the political and legal basis for recognition and rights. To this end, the study gathers comparative and translocal case studies from the Global South-North to critically analyse contemporary migration through a wide range of empirical, ethnographic cases that share patterned histories, similarities and relationships.

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.