Once upon a time is now

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.

Consuming the inedible

Everyday, millions of people eat earth, clay, nasal mucus, and similar substances. Yet food practices like these are strikingly understudied in a sustained, interdisciplinary manner. This book aims to correct this neglect. Contributors, utilizing anthropological, nutritional, biochemical, psych...

What is existential anthropology?

Anthropologists from both sides of the Atlantic address the meaning of "Existential Anthropology". Explores how various approaches to the human condition might be brought together on the levels of method and of theory.

Commerce as politics

This is the first comprehensive economic history of the Basotho people of Southern Africa and spans from the 1820s to the present day. The book documents what the Basotho have done on their own account, focusing on their systematic exclusion from trade and their political efforts to insert them...

The nazi genocide of the roma

Analyzes the patterns of persecution of the Roma in Nazi-dominated Europe Employs case studies across 6 countries to generate a critical mass of evidence indicating criminal intent on the part of the Nazi regime to destroying the Roma as a distinct group Includes essays on issues of...

The devil is disorder

Shakespeare and social engagement

Shakespeare’s roots in applied and participatory performance practices have been recently explored within a wide variety of educational, theatrical and community settings. Shakespeare and Social Engagement explores these settings, as well as audiences who have largely been excluded from existin...

The language encounter in the americas, 1492-1800

Managing ambiguity

First ethnographic study of favors in a former Yugoslav country; First ethnographic study of a welfare system in a former Yugoslav country; It explores how the same people pursue favors across several fields (social protection, healthcare, humanitarianism), rather than just to focus ...

Kharkov/kharkiv

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city located on the Ukrainian-Russian historical borderland, has often been overlooked given its historic role. Kharkov/Kharkov for the first time uncovers the city’s long history, from the 17th century to today, and its process of becoming a borderland and und...

Cosmic coherence

Humans are unique in their ability to create systematic accounts of the world – theories based on guiding cosmological principles. This book is about the role of cognition in creating cosmologies, and explores this through the ethnography and history of Yijing divination in China.

War on the homefront

About half of the women in the United States and Canada have been physically or sexually assaulted after the age of 16. The figures in other countries are similar. Written by an outsider (an anthropologist) and an insider (a spousal abuse survivor), this book offers a humanistic, rather than st...

Post-communist nostalgia

Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people’s lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all ...

Agent of change

Drawn from across the U.S. and Mesoamerica, the chapters in this volume explore the use, meanings, and cross-cultural patterns present in the use of ash. and highlight the importance of ash in ritual closure, social memory, and cultural transformation.

Gender in germany and beyond

Jean Quataert’s former students, colleagues, and collaborators come together in Gender in Germany and Beyond to not only celebrate Quataert’s shaping of the field of modern German, Women’s and transnational history, but also to expand on that scholarship, setting a precedent for the future of t...

Migration by boat

The only edited volume to date to focus specifically on forced sea migrations and their memorializations. Covers a wide international (geographic) berth in terms of case studies, and therefore has international appeal. An excellent example of engaged social sciences regarding current...

Small adults or big kids?

This book explores the meaning of adolescence, a critical period of the life course, through the analysis of material culture, historical documents, skeletal remains, isotope analysis, and other lines of evidence. By considering the implications for archaeologists and biological anthropologists...

Between the avant-garde and the everyday

The wave of anti-authoritarian political activity associated with the term “1968” can by no means be confined under the rubric of “protest,” understood narrowly in terms of street marches and other reactions to state initiatives. Indeed, the actions generated in response to “1968” frequently in...

Languages of civil society

The past two decades have witnessed a revival of the concept of ‘civil society’. From East Central Europe to Latin America and East Asia to the recent calls for a ‘European civil society’ and a ‘global civil society’, the concept signifies the need for national and supra–national forms of civic...

The rise of national socialism and the working classes in weimar germany

Before seizing power the Nazi movement assembled an exceptionally broad social coalition of activists and supporters. Many were working class, but there remains considerable disagreement over the precise size and structure of this constituency and still more over its ideology and politics. An i...

The masculine woman in weimar germany

first comprehensive study of the "masculinized" modern woman in post-World War I Germany compares mainstream media and "queer" subcultural representations to showcase the significance and complexity of female masculinities within Weimar German culture an interdisciplinary cultural hi...

Distributed objects

The first cross-disciplinary exploration of Art and Agency by leading scholars in their fields. Examines the reception and influence of a highly influential and still controversial theory 15 years after its publication. Includes a hitherto unpublished essay by Gell (‘The Network of S...

Peripheral vision

An in-depth ethnography of Portugal from 2005-2010 examining ‘modernization through technology’ Uses surveillance studies to explain the current fragilities of Portugal’s young democratic system Broadens the usual technocentric perspective of surveillance studies through political an...

Education, aspiration and social mobility

Informed by over two decades of anthropological research in Chhattisgarh, this book examines how the marginalized Adivasi (tribal) youth in rural India navigate the contradictory ways in which education represents both a strategy for social mobility and a very tangible risk.

Patterns of provocation

Over the past thirty years social scientists and particularly social historians have stressed the need to take popular protest seriously. The corollary of this, the need to take the policing of protest seriously, seems to have been less well acknowledged. The aim of this volume is to redress th...

A social history of europe, 1945-2000

Focuses on the fundamental challenges European societies underwent in the second half of the twentieth century Explores what divides Europeans, what unites them, and what sets them apart from the rest of the world An important addition for library collections and an important volume ...

Becoming other

Most of us are conscious of having a single and stable self, but the self is more fragmented and plastic than we care to think. David Berliner explores the captivating world of identity through an array of astonishing 'exo-experiences.'

Gardening the world

Offers multi-group comparative ethnography within river catchment area. Provides new theoretical insights into why societies use resources unsustainably. Eludicates complex social and cultural dynamics of water use and management. Considers what water means to different groups of...

Transactions, transgressions, transformation

American culture has been one of the most controversial exports of the United States: greeted with enthusiasm by some, with hostility by others. Yet, few societies escape its influence. However, not all changes should be interpreted simply as "Americanization." The shaping of the postwar world ...

Federalism doomed?

The conceptual uncertainty when dealing with processes of integration and disintegration in Europe is striking because traditional notions of the nation-state, constitutionalism, sovereignty, and federalism do not account for emerging realities in either Western or Eastern Europe. This volume...

The anthropology of corporate social responsibility

The first and only edited volume on the anthropology of corporate social responsibility. Offers a critical, comprehensive overview charting the anthropological contribution to the analysis of corporate social responsibility. Draws together work of key thinkers/anthropologists work...

Central america in the new millennium

Study of transitions to democracy in a region known for political volatility Study of struggles of ordinary workers and peasants to survive in ongoing economic crisis Important situated research on globalisation processes Ethnographic "micro" approach to structural "macro" issues

The politics of relations

Rethinking the contributions of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology for political ethnography, the Politics of Relations elaborates its relational approach to the state along four interlaced axes of research – embeddedness, boundary work, modalities and strategic selectivity – that ena...

The 1926/27 soviet polar census expeditions

Utilizes primary sources from recently opened archives as well as interviews with descendents of the expeditions The first book-size effort to address the status of the Siberian indigenous people The culmination of eight years of work with primary record cards and sources

Haunted by history

Europe is a continent weighed down by the shadows of its past, its wars, the traditional enmities, the suspicions of neighbours fuelled by historical memories. This has immediate consequences for the understanding and representation of the past: journalists, politicians, historians often apply ...

Collective terms

Provides an alternate view of the fractious French suburbs Suggests new ways for thinking about difference in everyday life One of the only English-language studies of the history of the French suburbs and the French New Towns Draws on the view from France to provide an alternate...

Social anthropology in the arab world

There are ongoing efforts in anthropology to decolonise its history and give fairer space to marginalised traditions. This book examines the history and institutionalisation of anthropology in the Maghreb, the Mashreq and the Gulf, in an open and collaborative manner and from various perspectiv...

Religion and pride

Through the examination of religious practices and public performance, the author offers a compelling study of how the Hindu community in the French territory of La Réunion assert pride in their religion as a means of gaining recognition as a religious minority.

Living like a girl

Radcliffe-brown

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) is widely renowned as a founder of modern social anthropology. This biography challenges popular stereotypes of him as a misplaced positivist and colonial conservative. It shows Radcliffe-Brown to be a thoroughly cosmopolitan scholar, a committed fieldworker, ...

Practice theory and the biosocial

From urban infrastructures to the medieval plague and from antibiotic resistance to epigenetics, this book develops an account of how previous and present arrangements make some futures more likely than others. By demonstrating the relevance of social and practice theories, this study considers...

Times of history, times of nature

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 not...

Wilhelminism and its legacies

What was distinctive—and distinctively "modern"—about German society and politics in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II? In addressing this question, these essays assemble cutting-edge research by fourteen international scholars. Based on evidence of an explicit and self-confidently "bourgeois" forma...

Dances with spiders