The archaeology of tribal societies

Anthropological archaeologists have long attempted to develop models that will let them better understand the evolution of human social organization. This volume explores social organization in tribal - or 'autonomous village' - societies from several different ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and ...

Fifty years of peasant wars in latin america

Informed by Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, published in 1969, this book examines selected peasant struggles in seven Latin American countries during the last fifty years and suggests the continuing relevance of Wolf’s approach.

Reconceiving muslim men

Through anthropological accounts of Muslim men’s everyday lives in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and diasporic settings, Reconceiving Muslim Men explores the creative ways in which Muslim men care for and nurture their families and communities. By focusing on reproduction, love, and care, this...

Silenced communities

Silenced Communities offers an ethnographic account of the failed demilitarization of the rural militia in the town of Santo Tomás Chichicastenango following the Guatemalan Civil War. Author Marcia Esparza explores how legacies of grassroots militarization affect indigenous communities exploite...

Music and postwar transitions in the 19th and 20th centuries

Music and Postwar Transitions takes a groundbreaking and much anticipated dive into the concept of postwar transitions and how these affect and are affected by the world of music. Leading scholars in the field explore new approaches to create a novel understanding of music and postwar periods.

The life of property

In Béarn, a region of south-west France, longstanding and resilient ideas of property and practices of inheritance control the destinies of those living in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival research that combines ethnography and intellectual history, this ...

French intellectuals against the left

In the latter half of the 1970s, the French intellectual Left denounced communism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics through a critique of left-wing totalitarianism that paved the way for today's postmodern, liberal, and moderate republican political options. Contrary to the dominant understa...

Cesare lombroso’s legacy in latin america

The book differs from anything published so far because it focuses on Latin America, especially Cuba, Argentina and Brazil. The main focus is on the Brazilian context, which differs substantially from Cuba and Argentina because of the much lower intellectual density and absence of univer...

Deconstructing dolls

Deconstructing Dolls explores the role of dolls in girlhood and young womanhood, seeking to understand the historical and contemporary significance of dolls particularly as they relate social meanings in the lives of girls.

Former neighbors, future allies?

Former Neighbors, Future Allies is a key bridge into the research and perspectives needed to nurture ethnography’s growing role in German studies. This volume creates a space for dialogue between North American Germanists and ethnographers in and of the German-speaking world, enriching both fie...

Losing and finding prussia in the twentieth century

First study in any language to examine the changing role of Prussia - as a state, an identity, and a cultural presence - in the lives of German people over the period from the First World War to the present. Brings together over a century of diverse German scholarship on Prussia. Use...

Liberal imperialism in germany

Outsiders

In this timely and insightful new book, Markus Bell presents the case study of Korean-Japanese – “Zainichi” – who have escaped North Korea in the years following the end of the Cold War. Through building alliances and long-distance relationships, Zainichi returnees resist forced integration and...

Antarctic materialities

Examines myriad approaches to the significance of materiality in Antarctica considering that while Antarctica has received uneven attention in global cultural studies, it is a vital region for the understanding of modernity, colonialism, capitalism and our contemporary world. Brings toge...

Memorializing the gdr

Since unification, eastern Germany has witnessed a rapidly changing memorial landscape. Memorializing the GDR provides the first in-depth study of this key topic, investigating the individuals and groups involved in the creation or destruction of memorials while addressing the subject’s complex...

Lives in fragments

The lens of life stories allows us to identify contested memories and counter-narratives, thus offering new ways of interpreting the social dynamics that led to acts of genocidal violence and their remembrance, yet also to their denial.  Lives in Fragments focuses on life stories that were frag...

Authenticity and authorship in pacific island encounters

Reconsidering issues of representation in the insular Pacific, this volume explores authenticity and authorship in practice as “traveling concepts” that spawn cross-fertilization along the cultural and historical routes they traverse. The chapters are contextualized by a strongly theorized intr...

Elsdon best

This volume is dedicated to the New Zealander ethnographer Elsdon Best (1856-1931) who is a key figure in the history of anthropology due to his involuntary triggering of a fundamental and long-lasting anthropological debate on the Māori concept of hau.

Problems of conception

The Biotechnology Act in Norway, one of the most restrictive in Europe, forbids egg donation and surrogacy and has rescinded the anonymity clause with respect to donor insemination. Thus, it limits people’s choice as to how they can procreate within the boundaries of the nation state. The autho...

Celebrating ethnicity and nation

Arising out of the context of the re-configuration of Europe, new perspectives are applied by the authors of this volume to the process of nation-building in the United States. By focusing on a variety of public celebrations and festivities from the Revolution to the early twentieth century, th...

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...

The image that never ends

This book explores the relationship between images and anthropology, offering a deeper understanding of how visual culture shapes our world. It addresses how anthropology can help us reflect on the role of images in daily life and reconsiders classic anthropological themes—ritual, kinship, and ...

Natufian foragers in the levant

This large volume presents virtually all aspects of the Epipalaeolithic Natufian culture in a series of chapters that cover recent results of field work, analyses of materials and sites, and synthetic or interpretive overviews of various aspects of this important prehistoric culture.

Food, culture and society in india

Bringing together empirical research from across India, this volume examines how food intersects with identity, migration, livelihood and media. It offers interdisciplinary insights into the cultural, political and social dimensions of food in contemporary Indian life.

The middle-income trap in central and eastern europe

Reviewing the story of prosperity in Central and Eastern Europe up to current debates, The Middle-Income Trap in Central and Eastern Europe examines the reality of the diminishing marginal utility of further international investments alongside the pitfalls of higher national innovation.

The cinematic language of theo angelopoulos

The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos offers a detailed study and critical discussion of the acclaimed filmmaker’s cinematic aesthetics as they developed over his career, exploring different styles through which Greek and European history, identity, and loss have been visually articulated...

The devil is disorder

Back to the postindustrial future

First ethnography solely focused on the future One of the first ethnographies solely focused on a postindustrial city Theoretical contribution to anthropology of time (presentism) First English language ethnography of a shrinking city

The emergence of film culture

Offers a new perspective on the development of European film avant-garde, and film culture in the interwar period. The anthology utilises film theory, history and critical writing to explore European film culture from a social, cultural and political perspective. The examination of ...

Having and belonging

Examines the connection between the material culture of the private and public, homes and museums. Investigates the connection between heritage and nation building. Shows that existing museum theories, based on nations living in relative peace, cannot indiscriminately be applied in I...

African crossroads

Cameroon is characterized by an extraordinary geographical, cultural, and linguistic diversity. This collection of essays by eminent historians and anthropologists summarizes three generations of research in Cameroon that began with the collaboration of Phyllis Kaberry and E. M. Chilver soon af...

Relative points of view

The relationship between language and various kinds of non-linguistic behavior has been of great fascination for many of those working in the fields of cultural anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy, or, broadly understood, cultural studies. The authors in this volume explore this relations...

Socialist escapes

Examines Eastern Europeans as individuals who seized opportunities for enjoyment, agency and autonomy while living under repressive rulers. Explores destinations and diversions that provided ordinary and extraordinary breaks away from the monotony of work, school, ideological orthodoxies...

Gendarmes, bureaucrats, and jews

An illuminating chronicle of the concentration, ghettoization, and deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944-1945, Gendarmes, Bureaucrats, and Jews presents, for the first time in English, the key primary sources from the period, documenting how this genocidal program was facilitated by both the Na...

Gender, violence, refugees

The book links forced migration, violence and gender relations. Most studies have a particular focus on sexual violence in refugee camps and/or situations. Many chapters cover different countries and offer original empirical research. The volume offers innovative conceptual appro...

Central european crossroads

During the four decades of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia a vast literature on working-class movements has been produced but it has hardly any value for today’s scholarship. This remarkable study reopens the field. Based on Czech, Slovak, German and other sources, it focuses on the hist...

Bigger fish to fry

What defines cooking as cooking, and why does cooking matter to the understanding of society, cultural change and everyday life? This book explores these questions by proposing a new theory of the meaning of cooking as a willingness to put oneself and one’s meals at risk on a daily basis, with ...

The nation, europe, and the world

Textbooks in history, geography and the social sciences provide important insights into the ways in which nation-states project themselves. Based on case studies of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Turkey Bulgaria, Russia, and the United States, this volume shows the role that c...

The politics of egalitarianism

The essays assembled in this book exemplify the way political anthropologists address a range of problems that deeply affect people throughout the world. The authors draw their inspiration from the work of Canadian anthropologist Richard B. Lee, and, like him, they are concerned with understand...

Being a state and states of being in highland georgia

Explores questions of citizenship, belonging, and mobility in the Highland areas of Georgia. The author scrutinizes local encounters with the erratic Soviet and post-Soviet state and argues that citizenship is both a sought-after means of entitlement and a way of guarding against the sta...

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.'

Saltwater sociality

The inhabitants of Pororan Island, a small group of ‘saltwater people’ in Papua New Guinea, are intensely interested in the movements of persons across the island and across the sea, both in their everyday lives as fishing people and on ritual occasions. From their observations of human movemen...

In-betweenness in greater khartoum

Drawing from original fieldwork in Khartoum and empirical data, In-Betweenness in Greater Khartoum uses in-between spaces as a lens to analyze how political events, in particular the 2011 independence of South Sudan, works along with other processes such as globalization and eco-nomic neo-liber...

Urban sustainability in the arctic

Urban Sustainability in the Arctic advances our understanding of cities in the far north by applying elements of the international standard for urban sustainability (ISO 37120) to numerous Arctic cities. In delivering rich material about northern cities in Alaska, Canada, and Russia, the book e...