Berghahn Open Access Titles

Berghahn Books supports practical open access policies that help make scholarship available to a broader audience in a sustainable way.

In addition to offering gold open access options that uphold publication mandates instituted by our authors' funding partners, we also participate in initiatives, such as Knowledge Unlatched, which provide collective funding opportunities for selected titles.

If Open Access status is required for your publication, please contact your Berghahn editor.

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  Afropolitan Horizons

  Essays toward a Literary Anthropology of Nigeria

  Hannerz, U.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Nigeria is a country shaped by internal diversity and transnational connections, past and present. Leading Nigerian writers from Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole have portrayed these Nigerian issues, and have also written about some of the momentous events in Nigerian history. Afropolitan Horizons discusses their work alongside other novelists and commentators, as well as describing the ways in which Nigeria has appeared in foreign news reporting. It is all interwoven with the author’s own anthropological field research in a town in Central Nigeria.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Literary Studies Anthropology of Religion

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  After Corporate Paternalism

  Material Renovation and Social Change in Times of Ruination

  Straube, C.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

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

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Sociology

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  After the 'Socialist Spring'

  Collectivisation and Economic Transformation in the GDR

  Last, G.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Historical analysis of the German Democratic Republic has tended to adopt a top-down model of the transmission of authority. However, developments were more complicated than the standard state/society dichotomy that has dominated the debate among GDR historians. Drawing on a broad range of archival material from state and SED party sources as well as Stasi files and individual farm records along with some oral history interviews, this book provides a thorough investigation of the transformation of the rural sector from a range of perspectives. Focusing on the region of Bezirk Erfurt, the author examines on the one hand how East Germans responded to the end of private farming by resisting, manipulating but also participating in the new system of rural organization. However, he also shows how the regime sought via its representatives to implement its aims with a combination of compromise and material incentive as well as administrative pressure and other more draconian measures. The reader thus gains valuable insight into the processes by which the SED regime attained stability in the 1970s and yet was increasingly vulnerable to growing popular dissatisfaction and economic stagnation and decline in the 1980s, leading to its eventual collapse.

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

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  After the Pink Tide

  Corporate State Formation and New Egalitarianisms in Latin America

  Gold, M. & Zagato, A. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the University of Bergen.

  The left-wing Pink Tide movement that swept across Latin America seems now to be overturned, as a new wave of free-market thinkers emerge across the continent. This book analyses the emergence of corporate power within Latin America and the response of egalitarian movements across the continent trying to break open the constraints of the state. Through an ethnographically grounded and localized anthropological perspective, this book argues that at a time when the regular structures of political participation have been ruptured, the Latin American context reveals multiple expressions of egalitarian movements that strive (and sometimes momentarily manage) to break through the state’s apparatus.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

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  Alienating Labour

  Workers on the Road from Socialism to Capitalism in East Germany and Hungary

  Bartha, E.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The Communist Party dictatorships in Hungary and East Germany sought to win over the “masses” with promises of providing for ever-increasing levels of consumption. This policy—successful at the outset—in the long-term proved to be detrimental for the regimes because it shifted working class political consciousness to the right while it effectively excluded leftist alternatives from the public sphere. This book argues that this policy can provide the key to understanding of the collapse of the regimes. It examines the case studies of two large factories, Carl Zeiss Jena (East Germany) and Rába in Győr (Hungary), and demonstrates how the study of the formation of the relationship between the workers’ state and the industrial working class can offer illuminating insights into the important issue of the legitimacy (and its eventual loss) of Communist regimes.

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

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  Animals, Plants and Afterimages

  The Art and Science of Representing Extinction

  Bienvenue, V. & Chare, N. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The sixth mass extinction or Anthropocene extinction is one of the most pervasive issues of our time. Animals, Plants and Afterimages brings together leading scholars in the humanities and life sciences to explore how extinct species are represented in art and visual culture, with a special emphasis on museums. Engaging with celebrated cases of vanished species such as the quagga and the thylacine as well as less well-known examples of animals and plants, these essays explore how representations of recent and ancient extinctions help advance scientific understanding and speak to contemporary ecological and environmental concerns.

  Subjects: Media Studies Environmental Studies (General) Cultural Studies (General)

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  An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange

  Interactions, Transactions and Ethics in Asia and Beyond

  Copeman, J., Long, N. J., Chau, L. M., Cook, J. & Marsden, M.(eds)

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Universidade, Galicia, in collaboration with the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela.

  Dialogues, encounters and interactions through which particular ways of knowing, understanding and thinking about the world are forged lie at the centre of anthropology. Such ‘intellectual exchange’ is also central to anthropologists’ own professional practice: from their interactions with research participants and modes of pedagogy to their engagements with each other and scholars from adjacent disciplines. This collection of essays explores how such processes might best be studied cross-culturally. Foregrounding the diverse interactions, ethical reasoning, and intellectual lives of people from across the continent of Asia, the volume develops an anthropology of intellectual exchange itself.

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

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  The Anthroposcene of Weather and Climate

  Ethnographic Contributions to the Climate Change Debate

  Sillitoe, P. (ed)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  While it is widely acknowledged that climate change is among the greatest global challenges of our times, it has local implications too.  This volume forefronts these local issues, giving anthropology a voice in this great debate, which is otherwise dominated by natural scientists and policy makers.  It shows what an ethnographic focus can offer in furthering our understanding of the lived realities of climate debates. Contributors from communities around the world discuss local knowledge of, and responses to, environmental changes that need to feature in scientifically framed policies regarding mitigation and adaptation measures if they are to be effective.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Urban Studies

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  Basic and Applied Research

  The Language of Science Policy in the Twentieth Century

  Kaldewey, D. & Schauz, D. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the University of Bonn.

  The distinction between basic and applied research was central to twentieth-century science and policymaking, and if this framework has been contested in recent years, it nonetheless remains ubiquitous in both scientific and public discourse. Employing a transnational, diachronic perspective informed by historical semantics, this volume traces the conceptual history of the basic–applied distinction from the nineteenth century to today, taking stock of European developments alongside comparative case studies from the United States and China. It shows how an older dichotomy of pure and applied science was reconceived in response to rapid scientific progress and then further transformed by the geopolitical circumstances of the postwar era.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

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  Beyond the Social Contract

  An Anthropology of Tax

  Makovicky, N. & Smith, R. (eds)

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Berghahn Open Anthro, in partnership with Libraria.

  Tax and taxation are conventionally understood as the embodiment of social contract. This ground-breaking collection of essays challenges this truism, examining what tax might tell us about the limits of social-contract thinking. The contributors shed light on contemporary fiscal structures and public debates about the moralities, practices, and imaginaries of tax systems, using tax to explore the nature of citizenship, personal freedom, and moral and economic value. Their ethnographically grounded accounts show how taxation may be influenced by spaces of fiscal sovereignty that exist outside or alongside the state, taking various forms, from alternative religious communities to economic collectives.

  Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology

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  Bondage

  Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries

  Stanziani, A.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with the support of Knowledge Unlatched.

  For the first time, this book provides the global history of labor in Central Eurasia, Russia, Europe, and the Indian Ocean between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. It contests common views on free and unfree labor, and compares the latter to many Western countries where wage conditions resembled those of domestic servants. This gave rise to extreme forms of dependency in the colonies, not only under slavery, but also afterwards in form of indentured labor in the Indian Ocean and obligatory labor in Africa. Stanziani shows that unfree labor and forms of economic coercion were perfectly compatible with market development and capitalism, proven by the consistent economic growth that took place all over Eurasia between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. This growth was labor intensive: commercial expansion, transformations in agriculture, and the first industrial revolution required more labor, not less. Finally, Stanziani demonstrates that this world did not collapse after the French Revolution or the British industrial revolution, as is commonly assumed, but instead between 1870 and 1914, with the second industrial revolution and the rise of the welfare state.

  Subject: History (General)

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  Borders across Healthcare

  Moral Economies of Healthcare and Migration in Europe

  Sahraoui, N. (ed)

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the European Commission Horizon 2020 - ERC Starting Grant N. 638259 EU Border Care [2015-2021].

  Examining which actors determine undocumented migrants’ access to healthcare on the ground, this volume looks at what happens in the daily interactions between administrative personnel, healthcare professionals and migrant patients in healthcare institutions across Europe. Borders across Healthcare explores contemporary moral economies of the healthcare-migration nexus. The volume documents the many ways in which borders come to disrupt healthcare settings and illuminates how judgements of a health-related deservingness become increasingly important, producing hierarchies that undermine a universal right to healthcare.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Mobility Studies Sociology

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  Bush Bound

  Young Men and Rural Permanence in Migrant West Africa

  Gaibazzi, P.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from University of Bayreuth and the Heisenberg Programme of the German Research Council.

  Whereas most studies of migration focus on movement, this book examines the experience of staying put. It looks at young men living in a Soninke-speaking village in Gambia who, although eager to travel abroad for money and experience, settle as farmers, heads of families, businessmen, civic activists, or, alternatively, as unemployed, demoted youth. Those who stay do so not only because of financial and legal limitations, but also because of pressures to maintain family and social bases in the Gambia valley. ‘Stayers’ thus enable migrants to migrate, while ensuring the activities and values attached to rural life are passed on to the future generations.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

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  Citizens into Dishonored Felons

  Felony Disenfranchisement, Honor, and Rehabilitation in Germany, 1806-1933

  de Groot, T.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the German Historical Institute Washington.

  Over the course of its history, the German Empire increasingly withheld basic rights—such as joining the army, holding public office, and even voting—as a form of legal punishment. Dishonored offenders were often stigmatized in both formal and informal ways, as their convictions shaped how they were treated in prisons, their position in the labour market, and their access to rehabilitative resources.  With a focus on Imperial Germany’s criminal policies and their afterlives in the Weimar era, Citizens into Dishonored Felons demonstrates how criminal punishment was never solely a disciplinary measure, but that it reflected a national moral compass that authorities used to dictate the rights to citizenship, honour and trust.

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

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  Coming of Age

  Constructing and Controlling Youth in Munich, 1942-1973

  Kalb, M.

  Full Text PDFMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

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

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

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  Comrades in Arms

  Military Masculinities in East German Culture

  Smith, T.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Without question, the East German National People’s Army was a profoundly masculine institution that emphasized traditional ideals of stoicism, sacrifice, and physical courage. Nonetheless, as this innovative study demonstrates, depictions of the military in the film and literature of the GDR were far more nuanced and ambivalent. Departing from past studies that have found in such portrayals an unchanging, idealized masculinity, Comrades in Arms shows how cultural works both before and after reunification place violence, physical vulnerability, and military theatricality, as well as conscripts’ powerful emotions and desires, at the center of soldiers’ lives and the military institution itself.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality History: 20th Century to Present

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  Contextualizing Disaster

  Button, G. V. & Schuller, M. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Contextualizing Disaster offers a comparative analysis of six recent "highly visible" disasters and several slow-burning, "hidden," crises that include typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, chemical spills, and the unfolding consequences of rising seas and climate change. The book argues that, while disasters are increasingly represented by the media as unique, exceptional, newsworthy events, it is a mistake to think of disasters as isolated or discrete occurrences. Rather, building on insights developed by political ecologists, this book makes a compelling argument for understanding disasters as transnational and global phenomena.

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

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  Cooling Down

  Local Responses to Global Climate Change

  Hoffman, S. M., Eriksen, T. H., & Mendes, P. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Climate change is a slowly advancing crisis sweeping over the planet and affecting different habitats in strikingly diverse ways. While nations have signed treaties and implemented policies, most actual climate change assessments, adaptations, and countermeasures take place at the local level. People are responding by adjusting their practices, livelihoods, and cultures, protesting and migrating. This book portrays the diversity of explanations and remedies as expressed at the community level and its emphasis on the crucial importance of ethnographic detail in demonstrating how people in different parts of the world are scaling down the phenomenon of global warming.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Urban Studies

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  Corporate Social Responsibility and the Paradoxes of State Capitalism

  Ethnographies of Norwegian Energy and Extraction Businesses Abroad

  Knudsen, S. (ed)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from University of Bergen.

  Through a series of case studies in diverse regions of the world, this book explores how transnational Norwegian energy and extractive industries handle corporate social responsibility (CSR) when operating abroad in places such as China, Brazil, and Turkey. With significant state ownership and embeddedness in the Nordic societal model, Norwegian capitalism is often represented as “benign” or ethical. By tracing CSR policy and practice—from headquarters to operations—this volume critically explores the workings of Norwegian corporate capitalism and its engagement with key issues of responsibility, accountability, and sustainability.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology

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  Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany

  Wetzell, R. F. (ed)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The history of criminal justice in modern Germany has become a vibrant field of research, as demonstrated in this volume. Following an introductory survey, the twelve chapters examine major topics in the history of crime and criminal justice from Imperial Germany, through the Weimar and Nazi eras, to the early postwar years. These topics include case studies of criminal trials, the development of juvenile justice, and the efforts to reform the penal code, criminal procedure, and the prison system. The collection also reveals that the history of criminal justice has much to contribute to other areas of historical inquiry: it explores the changing relationship of criminal justice to psychiatry and social welfare, analyzes representations of crime and criminal justice in the media and literature, and uses the lens of criminal justice to illuminate German social history, gender history, and the history of sexuality.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

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  Cryptopolitics

  Exposure, Concealment, and Digital Media

  Bernal, V., Pype, K., & Rodima-Taylor, D. (eds)

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the FWO (Fund for Scientific Research in Flanders license.

  Hidden information, double meanings, double-crossing, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages have always been important techniques in negotiating social and political power dynamics. Yet these tools, “cryptopolitics,” are transformed when used within digital media. Focusing on African societies, Cryptopolitics brings together empirically grounded studies of digital media toconsider public culture, sociality, and power in all its forms, illustrating the analytical potential of cryptopolitics to elucidate intimate relationships, political protest, and economic strategies in the digital age.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Media Studies

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  Cyborg Mind

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

  MacKellar, C.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

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

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

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

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  Deadly Contradictions

  The New American Empire and Global Warring

  Reyna, S. P.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  As US imperialism continues to dictate foreign policy, Deadly Contradictions is a compelling account of the American empire. Stephen P. Reyna argues that contemporary forms of violence exercised by American elites in the colonies, client state, and regions of interest have deferred imperial problems, but not without raising their own set of deadly contradictions. This book can be read many ways: as a polemic against geopolitics, as a classic social anthropological text, or as a seminal analysis of twenty-four US global wars during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras.
   

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

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  Delta Life

  Exploring Dynamic Environments where Rivers Meet the Sea

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

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

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

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

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  Designing Worlds

  National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization

  Fallan, K. & Lees-Maffei, G. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. with the support of the University of Oslo and the University of Hertfordshire.

  From consumer products to architecture to advertising to digital technology, design is an undeniably global phenomenon. Yet despite their professed transnational perspective, historical studies of design have all too often succumbed to a bias toward Western, industrialized nations. This diverse but rigorously curated collection recalibrates our understanding of design history, reassessing regional and national cultures while situating them within an international context. Here, contributors from five continents offer nuanced studies that range from South Africa to the Czech Republic, all the while sensitive to the complexities of local variation and the role of nation-states in identity construction.

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

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  Diamonds and War

  State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine

  De Vries, D.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The mining of diamonds, their trading mechanisms, their financial institutions, and, not least, their cultural expressions as luxury items have engaged the work of historians, economists, social scientists, and international relations experts. Based on previously unexamined historical documents found in archives in Belgium, England, Israel, the Netherlands, and the United States, this book is the first in English to tell the story of the formation of one of the world’s main strongholds of diamond production and trade in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s. The history of the diamond-cutting industry, characterized by a long-standing Jewish presence, is discussed as a social history embedded in the international political economy of its times; the genesis of the industry in Palestine is placed on a broad continuum within the geographic and economic dislocations of Dutch, Belgian, and German diamond-cutting centers. In providing a micro-historical and interdisciplinary perspective, the story of the diamond industry in Mandate Palestine proposes a more nuanced picture of the uncritical approach to the strict boundaries of ethnic-based occupational communities. This book unravels the Middle-eastern pattern of state intervention in the empowerment of private capital and recasts this craft culture’s inseparability from international politics during a period of war and transformation of empire.

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

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  Difficult Folk?

  A Political History of Social Anthropology

  Mills, D.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with the support of Knowledge Unlatched.

  How should we tell the histories of academic disciplines? All too often, the political and institutional dimensions of knowledge production are lost beneath the intellectual debates. This book redresses the balance. Written in a narrative style and drawing on archival sources and oral histories, it depicts the complex pattern of personal and administrative relationships that shape scholarly worlds.

  Focusing on the field of social anthropology in twentieth-century Britain, this book describes individual, departmental and institutional rivalries over funding and influence. It examines the efforts of scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Evans-Pritchard and Max Gluckman to further their own visions for social anthropology. Did the future lie with the humanities or the social sciences, with addressing social problems or developing scholarly autonomy? This new history situates the discipline's rise within the post-war expansion of British universities and the challenges created by the end of Empire.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology

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  Digital Archives and Collections

  Creating Online Access to Cultural Heritage

  Müller, K.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg; ZIRS; Fritz Thyssen Foundation; Deutscher Akademikerinnenbund.

  Museums and archives all over the world digitize their collections and provide online access to heritage material. But what factors determine the content, structure and use of these online inventories? This book turns to India and Europe to answer this question. It explains how museums and archives envision, decide and conduct digitization and online dissemination. It also sheds light on born-digital, community-based archives, which have established themselves as new actors in the field. Based on anthropological fieldwork, the chapters in the book trace digital archives from technical advancements and postcolonial initiatives to programming alternatives, editing content, and active use of digital archives.

  Subjects: Museum Studies Media Studies Anthropology (General)

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  Driving Modernity

  Technology, Experts, Politics, and Fascist Motorways, 1922-1943

  Moraglio, M.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  On March 26th, 1923, in a formal ceremony, construction of the Milan–Alpine Lakes autostrada officially began, the preliminary step toward what would become the first European motorway. That Benito Mussolini himself participated in the festivities indicates just how important the project was to Italian Fascism. Driving Modernity recounts the twisting fortunes of the autostrada, which—alongside railways, aviation, and other forms of mobility—Italian authorities hoped would spread an ideology of technological nationalism. It explains how Italy ultimately failed to realize its mammoth infrastructural vision, addressing the political and social conditions that made a coherent plan of development impossible.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Mobility Studies Transport Studies

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  Enduring Uncertainty

  Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life

  Hasselberg, I.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Focusing on the lived experience of immigration policy and processes, this volume provides fascinating insights into the deportation process as it is felt and understood by those subjected to it. The author presents a rich and innovative ethnography of deportation and deportability experienced by migrants convicted of criminal offenses in England and Wales. The unique perspectives developed here – on due process in immigration appeals, migrant surveillance and control, social relations and sense of self, and compliance and resistance – are important for broader understandings of border control policy and human rights.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

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  Engaging Environments in Tonga

  Cultivating Beauty and Nurturing Relations in a Changing World

  Perminow, A. A.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  On March 11, 2011, a tsunami warning was issued for Tonga in Polynesia. On the low and small island of Kotu, people were unperturbed in the face of impending catastrophe. The book starts out from the puzzle of peoples’ responses and reactions to this warning as well as their attitudes to a gradual rise of sea level and questions why people seemed so unconcerned about this and the accompanying loss of land. The book is an ethnography of the relationship between people and their environment based on fieldwork over three decades.

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

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  Entangled Entertainers

  Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

  Hödl, K.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched

  Viennese popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century was the product of the city’s Jewish and non-Jewish residents alike. While these two communities interacted in a variety of ways to their mutual benefit, Jewish culture was also inevitably shaped by the city’s persistent bouts of antisemitism. This fascinating study explores how Jewish artists, performers, and impresarios reacted to prejudice, showing how they articulated identity through performative engagement rather than anchoring it in origin and descent. In this way, they attempted to transcend a racialized identity even as they indelibly inscribed their Jewish existence into the cultural history of the era.

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

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  Entertaining German Culture

  Contemporary Transnational Television and Film

  Ehrig, S., Schaper, B. & Ward, E. (eds)

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license

  Audiences for contemporary German film and television are becoming increasingly transnational, and depictions of German cultural history are moving beyond the typical post-war focus on German’s problematic past. Entertaining German Culture explores this radical shift, building on recent research into transnational culture to argue that a new process of internal and external cultural reabsorption is taking place through areas of mutually assimilating cultural exchange such as streaming services, an increasingly international film market, and the import and export of Anglo-American media formats.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Media Studies History (General)

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  Environing Empire

  Nature, Infrastructure and the Making of German Southwest Africa

  Kalb, M.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Even leaving aside the vast death and suffering that it wrought on indigenous populations, German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile for most. For years colonists wrestled ocean waters, desert landscapes, and widespread aridity as they tried to reach inland in their effort of turning outwardly barren lands into a profitable settler colony. In his innovative environmental history, Martin Kalb outlines the development of the colony up to World War I, deconstructing the common settler narrative, all to reveal the importance of natural forces and the Kaisereich’s everyday violence.

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

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  Ethnographies of Power

  A Political Anthropology of Energy

  Loloum, T., Abram, S., & Ortar, N. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

  Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General)

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  European Regions and Boundaries

  A Conceptual History

  Mishkova, D. & Trencsényi, B. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  It is difficult to speak about Europe today without reference to its constitutive regions—supra-national geographical designations such as “Scandinavia,” “Eastern Europe,” and “the Balkans.” Such formulations are so ubiquitous that they are frequently treated as empirical realities rather than a series of shifting, overlapping, and historically constructed concepts. This volume is the first to provide a synthetic account of these concepts and the historical and intellectual contexts in which they emerged. Bringing together prominent international scholars from across multiple disciplines, it systematically and comprehensively explores how such “meso-regions” have been conceptualized throughout modern European history.

  Subjects: History (General) Mobility Studies

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  Europeanization in Sweden

  Opportunities and Challenges for Civil Society Organizations

  Meeuwisse, A. & Scaramuzzino, R. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from University of Lund.

  Notwithstanding its many successes since 1945, the project of European integration currently faces major difficulties, from financial crises and mass immigration to the departure of the UK from the European Union. At the same time, these challenges have spurred civil society organizations within and across Europe, revealing a shared public sphere in which citizens can mobilize around refugee rights, opposition to austerity policies, and other issues. Europeanization in Sweden assembles new empirical research on how these processes have played out in one of the continent’s wealthiest nations, providing insights into whether, and how, the “Swedish model” can guide European integration.

  Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

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  Extremism, Society, and the State

  Loperfido, G. (ed)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the University of Bergen.

  Extremism does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, extremism is a relative concept that often emerges in crisis situations, taking shape within the tense and contradictory relations that tie marginal spaces, state orders, and mainstream culture. This collected volume brings together leading anthropologists and cultural analysts to offer a concise look at the narratives, symbolic, and metaphoric fields related to extremism, systematizing an approach to extremism, and placing these ideologies into historical, political, and geo-systemic contexts.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

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  Footprints in Paradise

  Ecotourism, Local Knowledge, and Nature Therapies in Okinawa

  Murray, A. E.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The economic imperative of sustainable tourism development frequently shapes life on small subtropical islands. In Okinawa, ecotourism promises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride. Footprints in Paradise explores the transformation in community and sense of place as Okinawans come to view themselves through the lens of the visiting tourist consumer, and as their language, landscapes, and wildlife are reconstituted as treasured and vulnerable resources. The rediscovery and revaluing of local ecological knowledge strengthens Okinawan or Uchinaa cultural heritage, despite the controversial presence of US military bases amidst a hegemonic Japanese state.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism Environmental Studies (General)

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  A Foreign Affair

  Billy Wilder's American Films

  Gemünden, G.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  With six Academy Awards, four entries on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest American movies, and more titles on the National Historic Register of classic films deemed worthy of preservation than any other director, Billy Wilder counts as one of the most accomplished filmmakers ever to work in Hollywood. Yet how American is Billy Wilder, the Jewish émigré from Central Europe? This book underscores this complex issue, unpacking underlying contradictions where previous commentators routinely smoothed them out. Wilder emerges as an artist with roots in sensationalist journalism and the world of entertainment as well as with an awareness of literary culture and the avant-garde, features that lead to productive and often highly original confrontations between high and low.

  Subject: Film and Television Studies

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  Foreigners in Their Own Country

  Identity and Rejection in France

  Martin, L. M.

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Based on in-depth interviews with people throughout France who trace their origins to non-European countries, Foreigners in Their Own Country reports on the experience of not being seen as “French” because of one’s physical appearance. Paying close attention to how individuals speak about themselves and their feelings of acceptance or rejection, this book provides an intimate account of the challenges faced by the millions of people in France—and throughout Western Europe—who fully participate in the life of their country but are often not seen as belonging there.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology

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  From Clans to Co-ops

  Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily

  Rakopoulos, T.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the University of Bergen.

  From Clans to Co-ops explores the social, political, and economic relations that enable the constitution of cooperatives operating on land confiscated from mafiosi in Sicily, a project that the state hails as arguably the greatest symbolic victory over the mafia in Italian history. Rakopoulos’s ethnographic focus is on access to resources, divisions of labor, ideologies of community and food, and the material changes that cooperatives bring to people’s lives in terms of kinship, work and land management. The book contributes to broader debates about cooperativism, how labor might be salvaged from market fundamentalism, and to emergent discourses about the ‘human’ economy.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Food & Nutrition

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  From Self-fulfilment to Survival of the Fittest

  Work in European Cinema from the 1960s to the Present

  Mazierska, E.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Contrary to the assumption that Western and Eastern European economies and cinemas were very different from each other, they actually had much in common. After the Second World War both the East and the West adopted a mixed system, containing elements of both socialism and capitalism, and from the 1980s on the whole of Europe, albeit at an uneven speed, followed the neoliberal agenda. This book examines how the economic systems of the East and West impacted labor by focusing on the representation of work in European cinema. Using a Marxist perspective, it compares the situation of workers in Western and Eastern Europe as represented in both auteurist and popular films, including those of Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrzej Wajda, DušanMakavejev, Jerzy Skolimowski, the Dardenne Brothers, Ulrich Seidl and many others.

  Subject: Film and Television Studies

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  From Village Commons to Public Goods

  Graduated Provision in Urbanizing China

  Trémon, A.-C.

  Full Text PDFMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

  Illuminating the complex processes of China’s uneven urbanization through the lens of the transition from village commons to public goods, this book is set in three urbanized villages in Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Xi’an, which have experienced similar demographic explosions and dramatic changes to their landscapes, the livelihoods of its inhabitants, and the power structures governing their residents. Graduated provision is the delivery of public goods informed by the teleological ideology of urbanization, and by neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics, and has been employed as an answer to the challenges of making public goods, such as welfare provisions, public parks, education, and senior care, equally accessible to all in recently urbanized communities. 

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Sociology

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  Germany On Their Minds

  German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988

  Schenderlein, A. C.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable—whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.

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

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  The Girl in the Pandemic

  Transnational Perspectives

  Mitchell, C. & Smith, A. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  As seen in previous pandemics, girls and young women are particularly vulnerable as social issues such as homelessness, mental healthcare, access to education, and child labor are often exacerbated. The Girl in the Pandemic considers what academics, community activists, and those working in local, national, and global NGOs are learning about the lives of girls and young women during pandemics. Drawing from a range of responses during the pandemic including first person narratives, community ethnographies, and participatory action research, this collection offers a picture of how the COVID-19 pandemic played out in eight different countries.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Development Studies Sociology

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  Girlhood and the Politics of Place

  Mitchell, C. & Rentschler, C. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Examining context-specific conditions in which girls live, learn, work, play, and organize deepens the understanding of place-making practices of girls and young women worldwide. Focusing on place across health, literary and historical studies, art history, communications, media studies, sociology, and education allows for investigations of how girlhood is positioned in relation to interdisciplinary and transnational research methodologies, media environments, geographic locations, history, and social spaces. This book offers a comprehensive reading on how girlhood scholars construct and deploy research frameworks that directly engage girls in the research process.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

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  Going to Pentecost

  An Experimental Approach to Studies in Pentecostalism

  Eriksen, A. Blanes, R. L., MacCarthy, M.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the University of Bergen.

  Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Vanuatu, Angola, and Papua New Guinea/the Trobriand Islands respectively, Going to Pentecost offers a comparative study of Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, focusing on key issues as economy, urban sociality, and healing. More than an ordinary comparative book, it recognizes the changing nature of religion in the contemporary world – in particular the emergence of “non-territorial” religion (which is no longer specific to places or cultures) – and represents an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements in general and Pentecostalism in particular.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

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  Grazing Communities

  Pastoralism on the Move and Biocultural Heritage Frictions

  Bindi, L. (ed)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Pastoralism is a diffused and ancient form of human subsistence and probably one of the most studied by anthropologists at the crossroads between continuities and transformations. The present critical discourse on sustainable and responsible development implies a change of practices, a huge socio-economic transformation, and the return of new shepherds and herders in different European regions. Transhumance and extensive breeding are revitalized as a potential resource for inner and rural areas of Europe against depopulation and as an efficient form of farming deeply influencing landscape and functioning as a perfect eco-system service. This book is an occasion to reconsider grazing communities’ frictions in the new global heritage scenario.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Development Studies

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  Identity Politics and the New Genetics

  Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging

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

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

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

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

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  Impotent Warriors

  Perspectives on Gulf War Syndrome, Vulnerability and Masculinity

  Kilshaw, S.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  From September 1990 to June 1991, the UK deployed 53,462 military personnel in the Gulf War. After the end of the conflict anecdotal reports of various disorders affecting troops who fought in the Gulf began to surface. This mysterious illness was given the name “Gulf War Syndrome” (GWS). This book is an investigation into this recently emergent illness, particularly relevant given ongoing UK deployments to Iraq, describing how the illness became a potent symbol for a plethora of issues, anxieties, and concerns. At present, the debate about GWS is polarized along two lines: there are those who think it is a unique, organic condition caused by Gulf War toxins and those who argue that it is probably a psychological condition that can be seen as part of a larger group of illnesses. Using the methods and perspective of anthropology, with its focus on nuances and subtleties, the author provides a new approach to understanding GWS, one that makes sense of the cultural circumstances, specific and general, which gave rise to the illness.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality

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  Indigenous Resurgence

  Decolonialization and Movements for Environmental Justice

  Dhillon, J.

  Full Text PDFMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community’s protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology Colonial History

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  Insidious Capital

  Frontlines of Value at the End of a Global Cycle

  Kalb, D. (ed)

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the Trond Mohn Foundation (Bergen license, University of Bergen, Government of Norway.

  With a team of anthropologists and geographers, Insidious Capital explores “value and values” in what may well be the last phase of capitalist globalization. In a global perspective of fast transforming social spaces that move from East to West, the book explores the struggles around the exploitation and valuation of labor, environmental politics, expansion of the ground rent, new hierarchies, the contradictions of higher education, the off shoring of “immaterial” labor, the illiberal right, and the mobilizations against it. This is a book about the variegated frontlines of value within an uneven, but not random, geography of capitalist expansion.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

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  Integrating Strangers

  Sherbro Identity and The Politics of Reciprocity along the Sierra Leonean Coast

  Ménard, A.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

  Drawing on an ethnography of Sherbro coastal communities in Sierra Leone, this book analyses the politics and practice of identity through the lens of the reciprocal relations that exist between socio-ethnic groups. Anaïs Ménard examines the implications of the social arrangement that binds landlords and strangers in a frontier region, the Freetown Peninsula, characterized by high degrees of individual mobility and social interactions. She showcases the processes by which Sherbro identity emerged as a flexible category of practice, allowing individuals the possibility to claim multiple origins and perform ethnic crossovers while remaining Sherbro.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies

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  Judging 'Privileged' Jews

  Holocaust Ethics, Representation, and the 'Grey Zone'

  Brown, A.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The Nazis’ persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust included the creation of prisoner hierarchies that forced victims to cooperate with their persecutors. Many in the camps and ghettos came to hold so-called “privileged” positions, and their behavior has often been judged as self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such controversial figures constitute an intrinsically important, frequently misunderstood, and often taboo aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on Primo Levi’s concept of the “grey zone,” this study analyzes the passing of moral judgment on “privileged” Jews as represented by writers, such as Raul Hilberg, and in films, including Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Negotiating the problems and potentialities of “representing the unrepresentable,” this book engages with issues that are fundamental to present-day attempts to understand the Holocaust and deeply relevant to reflections on human nature.

  Subjects: Genocide History History (General) Jewish Studies

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  Lessons in Perception

  The Avant-Garde Filmmaker as Practical Psychologist

  Taberham, P.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Narrative comprehension, memory, motion, depth perception, synesthesia, hallucination, and dreaming have long been objects of fascination for cognitive psychologists. They have also been among the most potent sources of creative inspiration for experimental filmmakers. Lessons in Perception melds film theory and cognitive science in a stimulating investigation of the work of iconic experimental artists such as Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Maya Deren, and Jordan Belson. In illustrating how avant-garde filmmakers draw from their own mental and perceptual capacities, author Paul Taberham offers a compelling account of how their works expand the spectator’s range of aesthetic sensitivities and open creative vistas uncharted by commercial cinema.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Media Studies Sociology

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  Living on a Time Bomb

  Local Negotiations of Oil Extraction in a Mexican Community

  Schöneich, S.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Providing a holistic understanding of extensive oil extraction in rural Mexico, this book focuses on a campesino community, where oil extraction is deeply inscribed into the daily lives of the community members. The book shows how oil shapes the space where it is extracted in every aspect and produces multiple uncertainties. The community members express these uncertainties using the metaphor of the time bomb. The book shows how they find ways to "live off the time bomb" by using mechanisms of short-term coping and long-term adaptation and thus, developing the capability to determine their lives despite the ever-changing challenges.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

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  Making Bodies Kosher

  The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England

  Kasstan, B.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Wellcome Trust.

  Minority populations are often regarded as being ‘hard to reach’ and evading state expectations of health protection. This ethnographic and archival study analyses how devout Jews in Britain negotiate healthcare services to preserve the reproduction of culture and continuity. This book demonstrates how the transformative and transgressive possibilities of technology reveal multiple pursuits of protection between this religious minority and the state. Making Bodies Kosher advances theoretical perspectives of immunity, and sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, social history and the study of religions.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Jewish Studies Anthropology of Religion

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  Making Multiple Babies

  Anticipatory Regimes of Assisted Reproduction

  Wu, C.-L.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support of the National Taiwan University.

  Human beings have been producing more twins, triplets, and quadruplets than ever before, due to the expansion of medically assisted conception. This book analyzes the anticipatory regimes of making multiple babies. With archival documents, participant observation, in-depth interviews, and registry data, this book traces the global and local governance of the assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) used to tackle multiple pregnancy since the 1970s, highlighting the early promotion of single embryo transfer in Belgium and Japan and the making of the world’s most lenient guidelines in Taiwan.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

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  Making Things Happen

  Community Participation and Disaster Reconstruction in Pakistan

  Murphy Thomas, J.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Drawing on the Pakistan Earthquake Reconstruction and Recovery Project (PERRP), this volume explores the sociocultural side of post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction. As the latter is often fraught with delays and even abandonment—one cause being ineffective interactions between construction and local people—PERRP used anthropological and participatory approaches. Along with strong construction management, such approaches led to the rebuilding being completed on time. As disasters are increasing in number and intensity, so too will be the need for reconstruction, for which PERRP has lessons to offer.

  Subjects: Applied Anthropology Development Studies

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  Managing Sacralities

  Competing and Converging Claims of Religious Heritage

  Hemel, E. van den, Salemink, O., & Stengs, I. (eds)

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the Dutch National Research Council (NWO license, the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, and the Meertens Institute.

  What happens when religious sites, objects and practices become cultural heritage? What are —religious or secular—sources of expertise and authority that validate and regulate heritage sites, objects and practices? As cultural heritage becomes an increasingly popular and influential frame, these questions arise in diverse and challenging manners. The question who controls, manages, and frames religious heritage, and how, arises with particular urgency. Case studies from Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom present an analysis of the paradoxes and challenges that arise when religious sites are transformed into heritage.

  Subjects: Heritage Studies History (General) Anthropology of Religion

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  Moral Economy at Work

  Ethnographic Investigations in Eurasia

  Yalçın-Heckmann, L. (ed)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The idea of a moral economy has been explored and assessed in numerous disciplines. The anthropological studies in this volume provide a new perspective to this idea by showing how the relations of workers, employees and employers, and of firms, families and households are interwoven with local notions of moralities. From concepts of individual autonomy, kinship obligations, to ways of expressing mutuality or creativity, moral values exert an unrealized influence, and these often produce more consent than resistance or outrage.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

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  Once Upon a Time is Now

  A Kalahari Memoir

  Biesele, M.

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Fifty years after her first fieldwork with Ju/'hoan San hunter-gatherers, anthropologist Megan Biesele has written this exceptional memoir based on personal journals she wrote at the time.

  The treasure trove of vivid learning experiences and nightly ponderings she found has led to a memoir of rare value to anthropology students and academics as well as to general readers. Her experiences focus on the long-lived healing dance, known to many as the trance dance, and the intricate beliefs, artistry, and social system that support it.

  She describes her immersion in a creative community enlivened and kept healthy by that dance, which she calls "one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind."

  From the Preface:
  A few years ago I finally got around to looking back into the box of personal field journals I had not opened for over forty years. I found a treasure trove. It was an overwhelming experience. So much that I had forgotten came vividly alive: I laughed, wept, and was terrified all over again at my temerity in taking on what I had taken on. To do justice to the richness of these notebooks, I realized, I would have to do a completely different sort of writing from anything I had ever done before.

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

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  Opening Up the University

  Teaching and Learning with Refugees

  Cantat, C., Cook, I., & Rajaram, P. K. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Through a series of empirically and theoretically informed reflections, Opening Up the University offers insights into the process of setting up and running programs that cater to displaced students. Including contributions from educators, administrators, practitioners, and students, this expansive collected volume aims to inspire and question those who are considering creating their own interventions, speaking to policy makers and university administrators on specific points relating to the access and success of refugees in higher education, and suggests concrete avenues for further action within existing academic structures.

  Subjects: Educational Studies Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology

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  Optimizing the German Workforce

  Labor Administration from Bismarck to the Economic Miracle

  Meskill, D.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  During the twentieth century, German government and industry created a highly skilled workforce as part of an ambitious program to control and develop the country’s human resources. Yet, these long-standing efforts to match as many workers as possible to skilled vocations and to establish a system of job training have received little scholarly attention, until now. The author’s account of the broad support for this program challenges the standard historical accounts that focus on disagreements over the German political-economic order and points instead to an important area of consensus. These advances are explained in terms of political policies of corporatist compromise and national security as well as industry’s evolving production strategies. By tracing the development of these policies over the course of a century, the author also suggests important continuities in Germany’s domestic politics, even across such different regimes as Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, and post-1945 West Germany.

  Subject: History (General)

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  Parenthood between Generations

  Transforming Reproductive Cultures

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

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

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

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology

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  Patrons of Women

  Literacy Projects and Gender Development in Rural Nepal

  Hertzog, E.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Assuming that women’s empowerment would accelerate the pace of social change in rural Nepal, the World Bank urged the Nepali government to undertake a “Gender Activities Project” within an ongoing long-term water-engineering scheme. The author, an anthropologist specializing in bureaucratic organizations and gender studies, was hired to monitor the project. Analyzing her own experience as a practicing “development expert,” she demonstrates that the professed goal of “women’s empowerment” is a pretext for promoting economic organizational goals and the interests of local elites. She shows how a project intended to benefit women, through teaching them literary and agricultural skills, fails to provide them with any of the promised resources. Going beyond the conventional analysis that positions aid givers vis-à-vis powerless victimized recipients, she draws attention to the complexity of the process and the active role played by the Nepalese rural women who pursue their own interests and aspirations within this unequal world. The book makes an important contribution to the growing critique of “development” projects and of women’s development projects in particular.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Development Studies Anthropology (General)

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  Peripheries at the Centre

  Borderland Schooling in Interwar Europe

  Venken, M.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg.

  Following the Treaty of Versailles, European nation-states were faced with the challenge of instilling national loyalty in their new borderlands, in which fellow citizens often differed dramatically from one another along religious, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic lines. Peripheries at the Centre compares the experiences of schooling in Upper Silesia in Poland and Eupen, Sankt Vith, and Malmedy in Belgium — border regions detached from the German Empire after the First World War. It demonstrates how newly configured countries envisioned borderland schools and language learning as tools for realizing the imagined peaceful Europe that underscored the political geography of the interwar period.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Educational Studies

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  Post-Ottoman Coexistence

  Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict

  Bryant, R. (ed)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

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

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology

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  Postcoloniality

  The French Dimension

  Majumdar, M. A.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  “Postcolonial theory” has become one of the key issues of scholarly debates worldwide; debates, so the author argues, which have become rather sterile and are characterized by a repetitive reworking of old hackneyed issues, focussing on cultural questions of language and identity in particular. Gradually, a gulf has emerged between Anglophone and Francophone thinking in this area. The author investigates the causes for the apparent stagnation that has overtaken much of the current debate and explores the particular characteristics of French global strategy and cultural policy, as well as the divergent responses to current debates on globalization. Outlining in particular the contribution of thinkers such as Césaire, Senghor, Memmi, Sartre and Fanon to the worldwide development of anti-imperialist ideas, she offers a critical perspective on the ongoing difficulties of France’s relationship with its colonial and postcolonial Others and suggests new lines of thought that are currently emerging in the Francophone world, which may have the capacity to take these debates.

  Subject: Colonial History

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  The Power of the Story

  Writing Disasters in Haiti and the Circum-Caribbean

  Joos, V., Munro, M. & Ribó, J. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  A cross-disciplinary volume that combines and puts into dialogue perspectives on disasters, this book includes contributions from anthropology, history, cultural studies, sociology, and literary studies. Offering a rich and diverse set of arguments and analyses on the ever-relevant theme of catastrophe in the circum-Caribbean, it will encourage debate and collaboration between scholars working on disasters from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

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  Preventing Dementia?

  Critical Perspectives on a New Paradigm of Preparing for Old Age

  Leibing, A. & Schicktanz, S. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.

  The conceptualization of dementia has changed dramatically in recent years with the claim that, through early detection and by controlling several risk factors, a prevention of dementia is possible. Although encouraging and providing hope against this feared condition, this claim is open to scrutiny. This volume looks at how this new conceptualization ignores many of the factors which influence a dementia sufferers’ prognosis, including their history with education, food and exercise as well as their living in different epistemic cultures. The central aim is to question the concept of prevention and analyze its impact on aging people and aging societies.

  Subject: Medical Anthropology

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  Refugees on the Move

  Crisis and Response in Turkey and Europe

  Balkan, E. & Kutlu Tonak, Z. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Refugees on the Move highlights and explores the profound complexities of the current refugee issue by focusing specifically on Syrian refugees in Turkey and other European countries and responses from the host countries involved. It examines the causes of the movement of refugee populations, the difficulties they face during their journeys, the daily challenges and obstacles they experience, and host governments’ attempts to manage and overcome the so-called “refugee crisis.”

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

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  Remapping Knowledge

  Intercultural Studies for a Global Age

  Spariosu, Mihai I.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The growing interdependence of the local and the global demand innovative approaches to human development. Such approaches, the author argues, ought to be based on the emerging ethics of global intelligence, defined as the ability to understand, respond to, and work toward what will benefit all human beings and will support and enrich all life on this planet. As no national or supranational authority can predefine or predetermine it, global intelligence involves long-term, collective learning processes and can emerge only from continuing intercultural research, dialogue, and cooperation. In this book, the author elaborates the basic principles of a new field of intercultural studies, oriented toward global intelligence. He proposes concrete research and educational programs that would help create intercultural learning environments designed to stimulate sustainable human development throughout the world.

  Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General)

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  Resettled Iraqi Refugees in the United States

  War, Refuge, Belonging, Participation, and Protest

  Keyel, J.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The American war against Iraq has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and displaced millions of people. Between 20 March 2003 and 30 September 2017, more than 172,000 Iraqis resettled in the United States. This book explores the experiences of fifteen Iraqis who resettled in the US after 2003. It examines the long war against Iraq that began in 1991 and the decisions some Iraqis made to leave their homes and seek refuge in the United States. The book also delves into the possibilities for belonging and cultural exchange for this cohort of Iraqis and their political engagement with non-profit organizations, advocacy, and activism against the 2017 Travel Ban.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

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  The Return of Polyandry

  Kinship and Marriage in Central Tibet

  Fjeld, H. E.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the University of Oslo.

  Tibet is known for its broad range of marriage practices, particularly polyandry, where two or more brothers share one wife. With economic development and massive Chinese social and political reforms, including new marriage laws prohibiting plural marriages, polyandry was expected to disappear from Tibetan social lives. This book takes as its starting point the surprising increase in polyandry in Panam valley from the 1980s. It explores married lives in polyandrous houses and develops a theory of a flexible kinship of potentiality through the lens of a farming village in Tibet Autonomous Region.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

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  Risky Futures

  Climate, Geopolitics and Local Realities in the Uncertain Circumpolar North

  Ulturgasheva, O. & Bodenhorn, B. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The volume examines complex intersections of environmental conditions, geopolitical tensions and local innovative reactions characterising ‘the Arctic’ in the early twenty-first century. What happens in the region (such as permafrost thaw or methane release) not only sweeps rapidly through local ecosystems but also has profound global implications. Bringing together a unique combination of authors who are local practitioners, indigenous scholars and international researchers, the book provides nuanced views of the social consequences of climate change and environmental risks across human and non-human realms.

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

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  Screening Nature

  Cinema beyond the Human

  Pick, A. & Narraway, G. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Environmentalism and ecology are areas of rapid growth in academia and society at large. Screening Nature is the first comprehensive work that groups together the wide range of concerns in the field of cinema and the environment, and what could be termed “posthuman cinema.” It comprises key readings that highlight the centrality of nature and nonhuman animals to the cinematic medium, and to the language and institution of film. The book offers a fresh and timely intervention into contemporary film theory through a focus on the nonhuman environment as principal register in many filmic texts. Screening Nature offers an extensive resource for teachers, undergraduate students, and more advanced scholars on the intersections between the natural world and the worlds of film. It emphasizes the cross-cultural and geographically diverse relevance of the topic of cinema ecology.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Cultural Studies (General)

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  Selling the Economic Miracle

  Economic Reconstruction and Politics in West Germany, 1949-1957

  Spicka, M. E.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Through an examination of election campaign propaganda and various public relations campaigns, reflecting new electioneering techniques borrowed from the United States, this work explores how conservative political and economic groups sought to construct and sell a political meaning of the Social Market Economy and the Economic Miracle in West Germany during the 1950s.The political meaning of economics contributed to conservative electoral success, constructed a new belief in the free market economy within West German society, and provided legitimacy and political stability for the new Federal Republic of Germany.

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

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  Sentient Ecologies

  Xenophobic Imaginaries of Landscape

  Coțofană, A. & Kuran, H. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Employing methodological perspectives from the fields of political geography, environmental studies, anthropology, and their cognate disciplines, this volume explores alternative logics of sentient landscapes as racist, xenophobic, and right-wing. While the field of sentient landscapes has gained critical attention, the literature rarely seems to question the intentionality of sentient landscapes, which are often romanticized as pure, good, and just, and perceived as protectors of those who are powerless, indigenous, and colonized. The book takes a new stance on sentient landscapes with the intention of dispelling the denial of “coevalness” represented by their scholarly romanticization.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

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  Settling for Less

  The Planned Resettlement of Israel's Negev Bedouin

  Dinero, S. C.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The resettlement of the Negev Bedouin (Israel) has been wrought with controversy since its inception in the 1960s. Presenting evidence from a two-decade period, the author addresses how the changes that took place over the past sixty to seventy years have served the needs and interests of the State rather than those of Bedouin community at large. While town living fostered improvements in social and economic development, numerous unintended consequences jeopardized the success of this planning initiative. As a result, the Bedouin community endured excessive hardship and rapid change, abandoning its nomadic lifestyle and traditions in response to the economic, political, and social pressure from the State—and received very little in return.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General)

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  A State of Peace in Europe

  West Germany and the CSCE, 1966-1975

  Hakkarainen, P.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s West German foreign policy underwent substantial transformations: from bilateral to multilateral, from reactive to proactive. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was an ideal setting for this evolution, enabling the Federal Republic to take the lead early on in Western preparations for the conference and to play a decisive role in the actual East–West negotiations leading to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Based on extensive original research of recently released documents, spanning more than fifteen archives in eight countries, this study is a substantial contribution to scholarly discussions on the history of détente, the CSCE and West German foreign policy. The author stresses the importance of looking beyond the bipolarity of the Cold War decades and emphasizes the interconnectedness of European integration and European détente. He highlights the need to place the genesis of the CSCE conference in its historical context rather than looking at it through the prism of the events of 1989, and shows that the bilateral and multilateral elements (Ostpolitik and the CSCE) were parallel rather than successive phenomena, parts of the same complex process and in constant interaction with each other.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

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  Submerged on the Surface

  The Not-So-Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941–1945

  Lutjens Jr., R. N.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Between 1941 and 1945, thousands of German Jews, in fear for their lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and live submerged in the shadows of the Nazi capital. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that “hidden” Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to ensure their own survival.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History

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  The Surplus Woman

  Unmarried in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918

  Dollard, C. L.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The first German women’s movement embraced the belief in a demographic surplus of unwed women, known as the Frauenüberschuß, as a central leitmotif in the campaign for reform. Proponents of the female surplus held that the advances of industry and urbanization had upset traditional marriage patterns and left too many bourgeois women without a husband. This book explores the ways in which the realms of literature, sexology, demography, socialism, and female activism addressed the perceived plight of unwed women. Case studies of reformers, including Lily Braun, Ruth Bré, Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne, Helene Lange, Alice Salomon, Helene Stöcker, and Clara Zetkin, demonstrate the expansive influence of the discourse surrounding a female surfeit. By combining the approaches of cultural, social, and gender history, The Surplus Woman provides the first sustained analysis of the ways in which imperial Germans conceptualized anxiety about female marital status as both a product and a reflection of changing times.

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

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  Sweden after Nazism

  Politics and Culture in the Wake of the Second World War

  Östling, J.

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Lund University.

  As a nominally neutral power during the Second World War, Sweden in the early postwar era has received comparatively little attention from historians. Nonetheless, as this definitive study shows, the war—and particularly the specter of Nazism—changed Swedish society profoundly. Prior to 1939, many Swedes shared an unmistakable affinity for German culture, and even after the outbreak of hostilities there remained prominent apologists for the Third Reich. After the Allied victory, however, Swedish intellectuals reframed Nazism as a discredited, distinctively German phenomenon rooted in militarism and Romanticism. Accordingly, Swedes’ self-conception underwent a dramatic reformulation. From this interplay of suppressed traditions and bright dreams for the future, postwar Sweden emerged.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

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  Tangled Mobilities

  Places, Affects, and Personhood across Social Spheres in Asian Migration

  Fresnoza-Flot, A. & Liu-Farrer, G. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The emotional, social, and economic challenges faced by migrants and their families are interconnected through complex decisions related to mobility. Tangled Mobilities examines the different crisscrossing and intersecting mobilities in the lives of Asian migrants, their family members across Asia and Europe, and the social spaces connecting these regions. In exploring how the migratory process unfolds in different stages of migrants’ lives, the chapters in this collected volume broaden perspectives on mobility, offering insight into the way places, affects, and personhood are shaped by and connected to it.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology

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  Temple Tracks

  Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia

  Sinha, V.

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Temple Tracks critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and ‘traces’.

  Subjects: Transport Studies Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology of Religion

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  Terrorism and the Pandemic

  Weaponizing of COVID-19

  Gunaratna, R. & Pethö-Kiss, K.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  The global pandemic has offered extraordinary opportunities for extremists and terrorists to mobilize themselves and revive as more powerful actors in the security landscape. But could these threat groups actually capitalize on the coronavirus crisis and advance their malevolent agendas? Utilizing the largest COVID-19-related terrorism database, the book presents an analysis built upon a quantitative and qualitative comparison between the nature of both the radical Islamist and the far-right-related threat in 2018 and 2020. It provides, for the first time, a true picture of novel trends since the pandemic outbreak.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology of Religion

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  Thinking Europe

  A History of the European Idea since 1800

  Andrén, M.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the University of Gothenburg.

  Presenting a new historical narrative on European integration and identity this title examines how the concept of Europe has been entangled in a dynamic and dramatic tension between calls for unity and arguments for borders and division. Through an in-depth intellectual history of the idea of Europe, Mats Andren interrogates the concept of integration and more recent debates surrounding European identity across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the post-war period. Applying a broad range of original sources this unique work will be key reading for students and researchers studying European History, European Studies, Political History and related fields.

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

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  This Land Is Not For Sale

  Trust and Transitions in Northern Uganda

  Meinert, L. & Reynolds Whyte, S. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Although violent conflict has declined in northern Uganda, tensions and mistrust concerning land have increased. Residents try to deal with acquisitions by investors and exclusions from forests and wildlife reserves. Land wrangles among neighbours and relatives are widespread. The growing commodification of land challenges ideals of entrustment for future generations. Using extended case studies, collaborating researchers analyze the principles and practices that shape access to land. Contributors examine the multiplicity of land claims, the nature of transactions and the management of conflicts. They show how access to land is governed through intimate relations of gender, generation and belonging.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Sociology

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  Times of History, Times of Nature

  Temporalization and the Limits of Modern Knowledge

  Ekstrom, A. & Bergwik, S. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

  As climate change becomes an increasingly important part of public discourse, the relationship between time in nature and history is changing. Nature can no longer be considered a slow and immobile background to human history, and the future can no longer be viewed as open and detached from the past. Times of History, Times of Nature engages with this historical shift in temporal sensibilities through a combination of detailed case studies and synthesizing efforts. Focusing on the history of knowledge, media theory, and environmental humanities, this volume explores the rich and nuanced notions of time and temporality that have emerged in response to climate change.

  Subjects: History (General) Environmental Studies (General) Media Studies

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  The Train Journey

  Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust

  Gigliotti, S.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Deportations by train were critical in the Nazis’ genocidal vision of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Historians have estimated that between 1941 and 1944 up to three million Jews were transported to their deaths in concentration and extermination camps. In his writings on the “Final Solution,” Raul Hilberg pondered the role of trains: “How can railways be regarded as anything more than physical equipment that was used, when the time came, to transport the Jews from various cities to shooting grounds and gas chambers in Eastern Europe?” This book explores the question by analyzing the victims’ experiences at each stage of forced relocation: the round-ups and departures from the ghettos, the captivity in trains, and finally, the arrival at the camps. Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced the train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to the more studied, fixed locations of persecution, such as ghettos and camps.

  Subjects: History: World War II Genocide History Memory Studies Transport Studies

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  Transactions with the World

  Ecocriticism and the Environmental Sensibility of New Hollywood

  O'Brien, A.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  In their bold experimentation and bracing engagement with culture and politics, the “New Hollywood” films of the late 1960s and early 1970s are justly celebrated contributions to American cinematic history. Relatively unexplored, however, has been the profound environmental sensibility that characterized movies such as The Wild Bunch, Chinatown, and Nashville. This brisk and engaging study explores how many hallmarks of New Hollywood filmmaking, such as the increased reliance on location shooting and the rejection of American self-mythologizing, made the era such a vividly “grounded” cinematic moment. Synthesizing a range of narrative, aesthetic, and ecocritical theories, it offers a genuinely fresh perspective on one of the most studied periods in film history.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Environmental Studies (General)

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  Transcending the Nostalgic

  Landscapes of Postindustrial Europe beyond Representation

  Jaramillo, G. S. & Tomann, J. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Even as the global economy of the twenty-first century continues its dramatic and unpredictable transformations, the landscapes it leaves in its wake bear the indelible marks of their industrial past. Whether in the form of abandoned physical structures, displaced populations, or ecological impacts, they persist in memory and lived experience across the developed world. This collection explores the affective and “more-than-representational” dimensions of post-industrial landscapes, including narratives, practices, social formations, and other phenomena. Focusing on case studies from across Europe, it examines both the objective and the subjective aspects of societies that, increasingly, produce fewer things and employ fewer workers.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Heritage Studies

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  Translocal Care across Kosovo’s Borders

  Reconfiguring Kinship along Gender and Generational Lines

  Leutloff-Grandits, C.

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  In today’s globalized world, where the foundations of home and social security are destabilized due to wars and neoliberal transformations, the villagers of Kosovo are linked with a common locality despite living across borders. By tracing long-distant family relations with a special focus on cross-border marriages, this study looks at the reconfiguration of care relations, gender and generational roles among kin-members of Kosovo, who now live in different European states.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality

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  Un-Settling Middle Eastern Refugees

  Regimes of Exclusion and Inclusion in the Middle East, Europe, and North America

  Inhorn, M. C. & Volk, L. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Since the Iraq war, the Middle East has been in continuous upheaval, resulting in the displacement of millions of people. Arriving from Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Syria in other parts of the world, the refugees show remarkable resilience and creativity amidst profound adversity. Through careful ethnography, this book vividly illustrates how refugees navigate regimes of exclusion, including cumbersome bureaucracies, financial insecurities, medical challenges, vilifying stereotypes, and threats of violence. The collection bears witness to their struggles, while also highlighting their  aspirations for safety, settlement, and social inclusion in their host societies and new homes.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

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  The UNHCR and the Afghan Crisis

  The Making of the International Refugee Regime

  Scalettaris, G.

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Today the UNHCR is present in more than 130 countries and takes care of some 90 million people. This book looks at how it is deployed and who its agents are. By taking the reader through the offices in charge of the Afghan refugee crisis during the 2000s, in Geneva and in Kabul, the book shows the internal functioning of this international organization. It provides analysis of Afghan refugee policies from an original position, with the author being both agency official and anthropologist, and articulates multiple levels of analysis: the micropolitics of practices as much as the institution and the multi-scalar power relations that shape its environment.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies

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  The Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective

  Knörr, J. & Kohl, C. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  For centuries, Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast region has been the site of regional and global interactions, with societies from different parts of the African continent and beyond engaging in economic trade, cultural exchange and various forms of conflict. This book provides a wide-ranging look at how such encounters have continued into the present day, identifying the disruptions and continuities in religion, language, economics and various other social phenomena. These accounts show a region that, while still grappling with the legacies of colonialism and the slave trade, is both shaped by and an important actor within ever-denser global networks, exhibiting consistent transformation and creative adaptation.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) History (General) Colonial History

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  Violent Becomings

  State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique

  Bertelsen, B. E.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the University of Bergen.

  Violent Becomings conceptualizes the Mozambican state not as the bureaucratically ordered polity of the nation-state, but as a continuously emergent and violently challenged mode of ordering. In doing so, this book addresses the question of why colonial and postcolonial state formation has involved violent articulations with so-called ‘traditional’ forms of sociality. The scope and dynamic nature of such violent becomings is explored through an array of contexts that include colonial regimes of forced labor and pacification, liberation war struggles and civil war, the social engineering of the post-independence state, and the popular appropriation of sovereign violence in riots and lynchings.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Colonial History

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  Visions of Marriage

  Politics and Family on Kinmen, 1920-2020

  Chiu, H.-C.

  Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from European Research Council (ERC license.

  Grounded in multi-generational stories from Kinmen in Taiwan, Visions of Marriage explores the historical entanglements between the pursuit of new personal and national futures. Focusing on the relational and future-making aspects of marriage, the ethnography highlights the intersection of transformations across familial generations and shifting political economies in Taiwan, and more globally. While theories of modernity often treat marriage as an index of social change, without adequate attention to its transformative capacities generated through personal and familial agency, this volume provides comparative insights on family change and demographic shifts in Asia.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality

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  Weary Warriors

  Power, Knowledge, and the Invisible Wounds of Soldiers

  Moss, P. & Prince, M. J.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  As seen in military documents, medical journals, novels, films, television shows, and memoirs, soldiers’ invisible wounds are not innate cracks in individual psyches that break under the stress of war. Instead, the generation of weary warriors is caught up in wider social and political networks and institutions—families, activist groups, government bureaucracies, welfare state programs—mediated through a military hierarchy, psychiatry rooted in mind-body sciences, and various cultural constructs of masculinity. This book offers a history of military psychiatry from the American Civil War to the latest Afghanistan conflict. The authors trace the effects of power and knowledge in relation to the emotional and psychological trauma that shapes soldiers’ bodies, minds, and souls, developing an extensive account of the emergence, diagnosis, and treatment of soldiers’ invisible wounds.

  Subjects: Sociology History (General) Peace and Conflict Studies

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  What We Now Know About Race and Ethnicity

  Banton, M.

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  Attempts of nineteenth-century writers to establish “race” as a biological concept failed after Charles Darwin opened the door to a new world of knowledge. Yet this word already had a place in the organization of everyday life and in ordinary English language usage. This book explains how the idea of race became so important in the USA, generating conceptual confusion that can now be clarified. Developing an international approach, it reviews references to “race,” “racism,” and “ethnicity” in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and comparative politics and identifies promising lines of research that may make it possible to supersede misleading notions of race in the social sciences.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General)

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  Who’s Cashing In?

  Contemporary Perspectives on New Monies and Global Cashlessness

  Sen, A., Lindquist, J., & Kolling, M. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from University of Copenhagen.

  Cashless infrastructures are rapidly increasing, as credit cards, cryptocurrencies, online and mobile money, remittances, demonetization, and digitalization process replace coins and currencies around the world. Who’s Cashing In? explores how different modes of cashlessness impact, transform and challenge the everyday lives and livelihoods of local communities. Drawing from a wide range of ethnographic studies, this volume offers a concise look at how social actors and intermediaries respond to this change in the materiality of money throughout multiple regional contexts.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

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  The Witness as Object

  Video Testimony in Memorial Museums

  Jong, S. de

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Knowledge Unlatched.

  In recent years, historical witnessing has emerged as a category of "museum object." Audiovisual recordings of interviews with individuals remembering events of historical importance are now integral to the collections and research activities of museums. They have also become important components in narrative and exhibition design strategies. With a focus on Holocaust museums, this study scrutinizes for the first time the new global phenomenon of the "musealization" of the witness to history, exploring the processes, prerequisites, and consequences of the transformation of video testimonies into exhibits.

  Subjects: Museum Studies History: 20th Century to Present Media Studies Memory Studies

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  Writing the Great War

  The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present

  Cornelissen, C. & Weinrich, A. (eds)

  Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUBMade available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from the Max Weber Foundation.

  From the Treaty of Versailles to the 2018 centenary and beyond, the history of the First World War has been continually written and rewritten, studied and contested, producing a rich historiography shaped by the social and cultural circumstances of its creation. Writing the Great War provides a groundbreaking survey of this vast body of work, assembling contributions on a variety of national and regional historiographies from some of the most prominent scholars in the field. By analyzing perceptions of the war in contexts ranging from Nazi Germany to India’s struggle for independence, this is an illuminating collective study of the complex interplay of memory and history.

  Subjects: History: World War I History: 20th Century to Present

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