Indigenous medicine among the bedouin in the middle east

First native anthropologist to discover tribal secrets of traditional medicine. Unique data on medicine among pastoral-nomadic, semi-nomadic, and settled tribes. Healers and clients tell their stories. Synthesis between traditional and bio-medicine to/for their reciprocal enrichm...

Studying contemporary western society

Few anthropologists today realize the pioneering role Margaret Mead played in the investigation of contemporary cultures. This volume collects and presents a variety of her essays on research methodology relating to contemporary culture. Many of these essays were printed originally in limited c...

Disaster upon disaster

A consistent problem that confronts disaster reduction is the disjunction between academic and expert knowledge and policies and practices of agencies mandated to deal with the concern. Disaster Upon Disaster illuminates the numerous disjunctions between the suppositions, realities, agendas, an...

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...

Religious sensibilities in pursuit of sexual well-being

Through detailed ethnographic analysis, this book shows how religious sensibilities inform the health practices, issues of sexuality and well-being of the Ghanian-Dutch and Somali-Dutch communities residing in the Randstad area of the Netherlands.

Modernity and secession

The northern Italian, ‘Padanian’ identity, fostered by the Lega Nord, is rooted in the long-standing tradition, in political and scholarly discourse, of casting regional differences within Italy in terms of a North-South geographic divide. Trying to come to terms, in the late 1980s and 1990s, w...

Jewish medical resistance in the holocaust

This book is a unique study into the work of Jewish doctors in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust The text utilises archival material and memoirs of Holocaust survivors to explore an unknown chapter of the Holocaust The volume illustrates how human morality can surv...

Manufacturing tibetan medicine

Describes how the Tibetan medicine industry has become central to the debate about Tibet's future Explains how considerations of profit and capital have transformed the industry into producing commodities for the Chinese national market

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...

Great expectations

The negotiation of expectations in tourism is a complex and dynamic process – one that is central to the imagination of cultural difference. Expectations not only affect the lives and experiences of tourists, but also their hosts, and play an important part in the success or failure of the over...

Imagining bosnian muslims in central europe

As a Slavic-speaking religious and ethnic “Other” living just a stone’s throw from the symbolic heart of the continent, the Muslim peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina have long occupied a liminal space in the European imagination. This volume assembles contributions from historians, anthropologis...

Germany’s struggle for modernity

In this history of Germany from 1780 to 1918, Jürgen Kocka re-examines the seismic changes that took place within society, economy, culture, and politics. Innovatively resituating these developments within a wider, European context, this book provides fresh insights into the emergence of classi...

Our common denominator

A re-assertion of the importance of "universals" or cross-cultural commonalities in anthropological research. Poses the question of how anthropology can help mankind approach humanity from a vantage point open to commonalities.

Fragile futures

Caring for small children and the family in Burkina Faso is hard work. Although the health infrastructure in Burkina Faso is weak and many citizens feel neglected by the state, Fragile Futures shows that the state continues to play an important role in people’s engagements and hopes for a bette...

Sexual self-fashioning

Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, this book provides an ethnographic account of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. It argues that by embracing, rejecting, and questioning modernity in stories about sexuality, the Iranian Dutch actively engage in proce...

Indispensable eyesores

Collapsing concrete colossuses, run-down overgrown skeletons, immutable architectural misfits: the outcasts from our built environment, which we are dying to dispose of — and yet cannot do without — have inspired many ghost stories, crime novels and urban legends. Such narratives reveal the sig...

Sensitive subjects

Sensitive Subjects examines how contemporary German-language cinema may be read as seeking to produce greater political sensitivity in audiences through its form—that is, by employing medium-specific devices such as lighting, sound, editing and mise-en-scène in ways that prompt a more critical ...

Cycling and recycling

Describes how environmental activists, researchers, and policymakers have increasingly turned to mobilizing older technologies in their pursuit of sustainability. Explores the historical fortunes of bicycling and waste recycling. Traces their development over time and provides valuab...

War and women across continents

An important collection of articles that challenge both historically and currently the hegemonic masculinity of wars, conflicts and soldiers involved in wars and conflict. Highlights women’s experiences and sacrifices in defending their countries and laments their societal traditional cu...

Preservation and place

Historically significant archaeological sites affiliated with two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer history in the United States are examined in this unique volume. The importance of the preservation process in documenting and interpreting the lives and experiences of queer...

Women becoming practitioner researchers

Sixteen early career researchers (ECRs) tell their stories in Women Becoming Practitioner Researchers, focusing on connecting potential and current doctoral students with an understanding of what to expect in the transition from professional or schoolteacher environments to working for universi...

State practices and zionist images

Although the Israeli state subscribes to the principles of administrative fairness and equality for Jews and Arabs before the law, the reality looks very different. Focusing on Arab land loss inside Israel proper and the struggle over development resources, this study explores the interaction b...

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...

Spirits and letters

Studies of religion have a tendency to conceptualise ‘the Spirit’ and ‘the Letter’ as mutually exclusive and intrinsically antagonistic. However, the history of religions abounds in cases where charismatic leaders deliberately refer to and make use of writings. This book challenges prevailing s...

Post-contact archaeology of michigan and the upper great lakes region

In this comprehensive reassessment of post-contact archaeology in the Upper Great Lakes region, Sarah L. Surface-Evans and Misty M. Jackson highlight the diversity and breadth of the area’s archaeological sites and the innovative findings they offer. In doing so, they highlight archaeology’s im...

Identity and networks

Repair, brokenness, breakthrough

We are all repairers. Exploring some of the ways in which repair practices and perceptions of brokenness vary culturally Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough argues that repair is an attempt to extend the life of things as well as an answer to failures, gaps, wrongdoings and leftovers.

Not even past

Unmatched list of contributors – combination of very high-profile scholars and emerging voices. Comparative work illustrating the connections between Vietnam and contemporary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unique focus on what is left behind, and the local consequences of US actions. ...

On the margins of religion

Focusing on places, objects, bodies, narratives and ritual spaces where religion may be found or inscribed, the authors reveal the role of religion in contesting rights to places, to knowledge and to property, as well as access to resources. Through analyses of specific historical processes in ...

Modernity and the unmaking of men

Responding to the renewed emphasis on the significance of village studies, this book focuses on aging bachelorhood as a site of intolerable angst when faced with rural depopulation and social precarity. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Macedonian society, the book explore...

Hammerstein’s daughters

An enlightening chronicle of General Kurt von Hammerstein’s daughters, Marie Louise, Maria Therese, and Helga, and their attempts to thwart Hitler’s regime, this book provides an unrivalled insight into an overlooked history of tradition, resistance, adaptation, and rebellion in Nazi Germany.

Transnationalities of migrant moral economies in a transforming world

An enlightening reassessment of migrant moral economies, Transnationalities of Migrant Moral Economies in a Transforming World examines the transformative potential of transnational mobility to create social networks capable of resisting authoritarianism and of rethinking reciprocity in a rapid...

Humour, comedy and laughter

An examination of the cognitive, social, and moral aspects of humour and its potential to bring about a sense of amity and mutual understanding, even among different and possibly hostile people. Describes how the positive aspects of humour far outweigh the danger of deepening divisions a...

Existential anthropology

Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic methods, Jackson explores a variety of compelling topics, including 9/11, episodes from the war in Sierra Leone and its aftermath, the marginalization of indigenous Australians, the application of new technologies, mundane forms of rituali...

The anti-social contract

Set in a remote district of villagers and nomadic pastoralists in the northernmost part of Mongolia, this ethnography reveals an everyday universe where uncertain relations are as much internally cultivated in indigenous Mongolian perceptions of social relatedness, as it is externally confronte...

History of the low countries

The history of the smaller European countries is rather neglected in the teaching of European history at university level. We are therefore pleased to announce the publication of the first comprehensive history of the Low Countries - in English - from Roman Times to the present. Remaining polit...

Lela in bali

Lela in Bali tells the story of an annual festival of eighteenth-century kingdoms in Northern Cameroon that was swept up in the migrations of marauding slave-raiders during the nineteenth century and carried south towards the coast. Lela was transformed first into a mounted durbar, like those o...

Punks and skins united

A rare ethnographic insight into Eastern German punk and skinhead scenes: The book offers a uniquely in-depth anthropological study of punk and skinhead communities in eastern Germany, based on fieldwork and close observation of everyday life in the subculture. It is one of a very small hand...

Haunting ruins

Ruins, rubble and decaying material can foster a more layered theory of time, change and memory. The seven ethnographic case studies in Haunting Ruins trace human engagements with the temporal forces of ruins, which can trace the past and transform the present.

Matters of testimony

The first book-length examination of the significance of the Scrolls of Auschwitz as Holocaust testimony. Discusses the unique insights the Scrolls provide and challenges the idea that most significant Holocaust testimony was produced retrospectively. Examines testimony from both Eas...

Marketing hope

Looks at how get-rich-quick schemes manifest themselves in a Siberian town. By focusing on the social dynamics of these popular economies, Leonie Schiffauer provides insights into how capitalist logic is learned and negotiated, and how it affects local realities in a post-Soviet environment.

The pursuit of pleasurable work

Against the backdrop of an alienating, technologizing and ever-accelerating world of material production, this book tells an intimate story: one about a community of woodworkers training at an historic institution in London’s East End during the present ‘renaissance of craftsmanship’.

The logic of environmentalism

Although modernity’s understanding of nature and culture has now been superseded by that of environmentalism, the power to define the meaning of both, and hence the meaning of the world itself, remains in the same (Western) hands. This bold argument is at the center of this provocative book tha...

And keep your powder dry

Margaret Mead wrote this comprehensive sketch of the culture of the United States - the first since de Tocqueville - in 1942 at the beginnning of the Second World War, when Americans were confronted by foreign powers from both Europe and Asia in a particularly challenging manner. Mead's work be...