Transitions and transformations

illustrates how population ageing has become embedded within individual, social and cultural life courses introduces a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to studying life course transitions in conjunction with broader sociocultural transformations  explores the overl...

Europe in crisis

The volume shows how conceptions of and projects for Europe were transformed by contemporaries’ experiences of crisis between 1917 and 1957. It investigates the ideas of a wide range of intellectuals from across the continent. It examines the relationship between ideas of Europe and ...

Multiple nature-cultures, diverse anthropologies

Over time, the role of nature in anthropology has evolved from being a mere backdrop for social and cultural diversity to being viewed as an integral part of the ontological entanglement of human and nonhuman agents. This transformation of the role of nature offers important insight into the re...

Culture, rhetoric and the vicissitudes of life

Inspired by the Rhetoric Culture Project, this volume focuses on the use of imagery, narrative, and cultural schemes to deal with predicaments that arise during the course of life. The contributors explore how people muster their resources to understand and deal with emergencies such as illness...

Under siege

Studies on the First World War are plentiful but most tend to focus on the combatants. This volume offers a new and highly original perspective that shows the reader the civilian side of this protracted and destructive war through a succession of "snapshots": 130 excerpts from leading American ...

Post-war women's writing in german

Women in the Federal Republic, the former GDR, Switzerland and Austria have initiated a remarkable literary movement, especially after 1968, which is also attracting growing attention elsewhere. Informed by critical feminist and literary theory, this broad-ranging collection, the first of its k...

Western historical thinking

What is history – a question historians have been asking themselves time and again. Does "history" as an academic discipline, as it has evolved in the West over the centuries, represent a specific mode of historical thinking that can bedefined in contrast to other forms of historical consciousn...

Understanding cultural transmission in anthropology

Extensive multidisciplinary contributions Wide coverage of cultural transmission in various cognate fields Contributions from leaders in relevant disciplinary fields

Japan and germany in the modern world

First study of the fascinating parallelism that characterizes developments in Japan and Germany by one of Germany's leading Japan specialists. With the founding of their respective national states, the Meiji Empire in 1869 and the German Reich in 1871, Japan and Germany entered world politics...

Identity politics and the new genetics

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 partic...

The environment in jewish law

Environmental concerns are at the top of the agenda around the world. Judaism, like the other world religions, only rarely raised issues concerning the environment in the past. This means that modern Judaism, the halakhic tradition no less than others, must build on a slim foundation in its eff...

An earth-colored sea

Although the post-colonial situation has attracted considerable interest over recent years, one important colonial power – Portugal – has not been given any attention. This book is the first to explore notions of ethnicity, "race", culture, and nation in the context of the debate on colonialism...

Remaking the human

The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions – is now a part of our lives. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive, and provides ethnographic insights into people’s motives and aspiration...

Returning life

The book centers on vernacular concepts and claims to investigate how ‘life’ is an effect of transfers and transformations of ‘life force’ that occur through parts of persons, houses, livestock, and crops in the activity of ‘dwelling’ and that afford and constitute the existence of beings of...

Legends of people, myths of state

The civil war in Sri Lanka and the part that nationalism seemed to play in it inspired the writing of this book some twenty-three years ago. The argument was developed through a comparative analysis of nationalism in Sri Lanka with the author’s native Australia. At the time this constituted an ...

Rethinking jewishness in weimar cinema

The film industry in the Weimar Republic was a major site for German-Jewish experience that provided a sphere for Jewish "outsiders" to shape mainstream culture. The essays in Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema offer new historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to the signific...

A sealed and secret kinship

Adoption has long been a controversial subject in the United States as well as in other western countries, but never more so than in the past three decades. Why that is and how public attention affects the decisions made by those who arrange, legalize, and experience adoptive kinship constitute...

Rights in exile

Of the estimated 12 million refugees in the world, more than 7 million have been confined to camps, effectively "warehoused," in some cases, for 10 years or more. Holding refugees in camps was anathema to the founders of the refugee protection regime. Today, with most refugees encamped in the l...

Space and spatiality in modern german-jewish history

This wide-ranging volume revisits both literal and metaphorical spaces in modern German history, working from an expansive concept of “the spatial” to examine the ways in which Jewishness has been attributed to them, and what the implications have been in different eras and social contexts.

Vital diplomacy

Focusing on the major ceremonial cycle of the Enawene-nawe people, Vital Diplomacy sheds new light on classic Amazonian themes such as manioc cultivation and cuisine, predatory relations with non-humans, and the interplay of myth and practice, and to consider dynamics of kin, clan, and gender r...

Morality, hope and grief

Focuses on the micro-politics of illness, treatment and death in order to offer innovative insights into the complex processes that shape individual and community responses to AIDS Describes the dilemmas that families, communities and health professionals face and shed new light on the t...

Reproducing class

Concentrationary cinema

It is the first dedicated study of Alain Resnais’s benchmark film that draws together a range of authors across French, film and anti-colonial studies to analyse the political aesthetics of this film It proposes a new perspective on Alain Resnais’s film by shifting it from Holocaust stud...

Racism in the modern world

Features historians from various regional specialisations Explores racism from comparative and transnational perspectives Seeks to answer questions relating to the diffusion of racial belief systems around the globe

Girlhood and the politics of place

Offers a comprehensive reading on how girlhood scholars construct and deploy research frameworks that directly engage girls in the research process. Investigates how girlhood is positioned in relation to interdisciplinary and transnational research methodologies, media environments, geog...

Archeologies of confession

Can one give voice to those whom history has forgotten? The essays collected here examine the formation of religious identities during the Reformation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany through case studies of remembering and forgetting—instances in which patterns and practices of re...

Making things happen

Making Things Happen is about the sociocultural side of post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction, drawing on one project, the Pakistan Earthquake Reconstruction and Recovery Project (PERRP). As disasters are increasing in number and intensity so too will be the need for reconstruction, for w...

Echoes of surrealism

Echoes of Surrealism surveys areas of surrealist art throughout the entire lifespan of the GDR and explores analyses of the interaction and reciprocal influences of various art forms. Focusing on individual authors, visual artists, film directors and musicians who have taken a surrealist perspe...

The global age-friendly community movement

This book provides an introduction to the global phenomenon of the age-friendly community movement, through an extensive collection of international case studies by researchers and practitioners. It explores current tensions in the movement and offers a wide-ranging set of recommendations for a...

Forging the collective memory

When studying the origins of the First World War, scholars have relied heavily on the series of key diplomatic documents published by the governments of both the defeated and the victorious powers in the 1920s and 1930s. However, this volume shows that these volumes, rather than dealing objecti...

The frightful stage

In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore...

Pathways to heaven

How does global Christianity relate to processes of globalisation and modernization and what form does it take in different local settings? These questions have lately proved to be of increasing interest to many scholars in the social sciences and humanities. This study examines the tensions, a...

Social torture

As Director of the Refugee Law Project at the University of Makerere, Kampala, Uganda, Dolan offers a behind-the-scenes, cross-disciplinary study of one of Africa's longest running and most intractable conflicts. This book shows how, alongside the activities of the Lord's Resistance Army, gover...

Islam and assisted reproductive technologies

The  first comprehensive study of Islam in relation to assisted reproductive technologies. A comparative perspective on the Sunni and Shia practices of assisted reproductive technologies. An assessment of some of the implications of assisted reproductive technologies in Muslim countr...

Peace at all costs

Peace at All Costs reconsiders postwar Polish-German relations as an interdisciplinary case study of reconciliation and follows an influential network of non-state peace activists, major players in print and audiovisual media, as they attempted to establish dialogue in the 1950s and 1960s.

Sartre, self-formation and masculinities

Published on the occasion of Sartre's Centenary, this book helps to understand the man behind the work, offering a psycho-social analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre with an emphasis on his masculinity. It sets out to contextualize Sartre in terms of his psycho-sexual formation and processes of self-co...

Essay on time

Time, as we experience it, is a social and cultural phenomenon. The pioneering study of the social representation of time was by Henri Hubert (1872-1927). Hubert was a core member of the group who worked with Émile Durkheim and a close collaborator with Marcel Mauss. His essay on time is a good...

A durkheimian quest

The book is a thorough and unpretentious reading of Durkheim The book undertakes detailed, up-to-date investigations of Durkheim’s work in an effort to restore its freshness and reveal it as originally created Reconstructs Durkheim’s concern with a modern world in crisis and his hope...

Fascist interactions

Differentiates and explores various modes of interaction—between fascists and conservatives in particular countries, between diverse fascist or quasi-fascist formations on the supranational level, between fascists and the liberal democracies, and between fascists and communists. Shows ho...

A stranger in paris

In this compact and tightly argued essay, the author maintains that the French Third Republic - and European history during this period in general - can only be understood if particular attention is paid to the special relationship that existed between France and Germany. The experience of the ...

Topographies of suffering

At the forefront of transcultural innovations in memory studies. Provides a new interdisciplinary approach to the study of Holocaust commemoration, combining approaches from literary ecocriticism, cultural geography and cultural studies. Sheds new light on transnational networks of H...

Industrial labor on the margins of capitalism

The focus on regular versus precarious labour. Case studies from outside the familiar Euro-American core. Ethnographic methods, linking factory work to households and communities. Focus on multiple dimensions of social inequality in diverse industrial settings and on how they int...

Rethinking social movements after '68

With a focus on West Germany and Europe, Social Movements after ’68 bridges the 1970s and 1980s as a vital period of European political development and social change. Looking past the known ruptures and changes in the history of European social movements, this volume brings together interconnec...

Search after method

Reigniting a tradition of learning by experience, Search After Method is a plea for more lively forms of anthropology. The chapters relate the contributor’s first experiences of working in the field and use their experiences to link their work to the discipline of Anthropology, along with other...