Communities of faith

Most studies of modern religious change have viewed it as a process of secularization in which the advance of science and technology discredits religious beliefs and destroys religious institutions. Yet religion has stubbornly failed to expire in the West, and in some places is undergoing a res...

Habsburg civil servants

An innovative exploration of the lives of Habsburg civil servants from the nineteenth century onwards, this volume spotlights the role they played in maintaining the Habsburg Empire’s rule over geographically disparate domains. In doing so, Habsburg Civil Servants illuminates how this social gr...

Humanity's soldier

French security policy has posed a puzzle to many people outside France, including politicians and even defense specialists such as the author, who took time off from his administrative position in Whitehall in order to study French thinking about security in detail. As with many other studies,...

Economic citizenship

Describes how, with the spread of neoliberal projects, responsibility for the welfare of minority and poor citizens has shifted from states to local communities. Exposes the paradoxes that are deep within neoliberal interpretations of citizenship. Analyzes the unexpected consequences...

The german skills machine

In recent years the German economy has grown sluggishly and created few new jobs. These developments have led observers to question the future viability of a model that in the past seemed able to combine economic growth, competitiveness in export markets, and low social inequality. This volume ...

The peirce seminar papers

Philosophers and linguists have come together for this volume to provide a glimpse of current thinking about language in a semiotic mode and of the analyses that result from applying the theory of signs of the American philosopher-scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) to subjects that Pe...

Kinship, community, and self

David Warren Sabean was a pioneer in the historical-anthropological study of kinship, community, and selfhood in early modern and modern Europe. The significance of Sabean’s scholarship is reflected in original research contributed by former students and essays written by his contemporaries, de...

Elsdon best

New Zealander ethnographer, Elsdon Best 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. This volume is dedicated to  this important scholar, who at the same time was shadowed b...

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...

Italy between europeanization and domestic politics

The science of state power in the habsburg monarchy, 1790-1880

The science of Statistik (statistics) by the Habsburg state in the long 19th century was adapted to the political growth of imperial power. The Science of State Power in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790-1880 connects the disciplinary history of German sciences of the state to the integration of terr...

Metaphors of spain

Brings together leading historians to examine Spanish nationalism through its diverse and complementary cultural artefacts. Addresses “formal” representations such as the flag to music, bullfighting, and other more diffuse examples. Describes a nationalism that is constantly evolving...

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.

Frontier ethnographies

Frontier Ethnographies explores the ethnographic edges of contemporary anthropological inquiry in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Through examining moments of insecurity, vulnerability, doubt, fear, failure, and daydreaming, the volume reflects on the researchers’ experiences and challenges of doing ...

The social life of water

Addresses impacts of commodification, urbanisation and technology on availability and quality of water supplies Demonstrates ways in which water influences all domains of social life Addresses issue of water as a human right from indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives Outline...

Ethnographies of movement, sociality and space

Exploring the complex dynamics of twenty-first century spatial sociality, physical movement and placemaking in Northern Ireland, this volume provides a much-needed multi-dimensional perspective that undermines the dominant image of the region as a conflict-ridden place. The contributions here d...

Final sale in berlin

The book has many unusual case studies but is not a case study in itself, it draws on a real mountain of material. The database the book is based on is accessible to all readers (www2.hu-berlin.de/djgb). For a German study it is – everyone says – really well written. The study ma...

Rethinking atlantic empire

In recent years, the historiography of nineteenth-century Spain has been invigorated by interdisciplinary engagement with scholars working on topics such as empire, slavery, and race, exemplified by the work of Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. Rethinking Atlantic Empire places Schmidt-Nowara’s work ...

From missionaries to main street

The Htoo family, who are Sgaw Karen and originally from Burma, resettled in the United States refugee resettlement program in 2007. This book chronicles their life in their new country. The book provides historical and cultural information on the Sgaw Karen people against the backdrop of the Ht...

Above the death pits, beneath the flag

Israeli youth voyages to Poland are one of the most popular and influential forms of transmission of Holocaust memory in Israeli society. Through intensive participant observation, group discussions, student diaries, and questionnaires, the author demonstrates how the State shapes Poland into a...

The sea commands

Azenha do Mar is a fishing community on the southwest coast of Portugal. It came into existence around forty years ago, as an outcome of the abandonment of work in the fields and of propitious ecological conditions. This book looks at the migration processes since the founding of the community ...

Views of violence

Focus on WWII related memories in museum and memorials International comparison (Germany and austria in the wider Wetern and Eastern European context + North America) Views of Violencepresents the first edited collection on the English-speaking market that targets the specific medi...

Women’s empowerment and son preference in india

This book reviews the feminist, ethical and legal discourse on sex selective abortions and draws on women’s empowerment as an analytical lens to examine the son preference expressed in the notion of Vansh (lineage) among pregnant women.

Selfhood and recognition

The disciplines of philosophy and cultural anthropology have one thing in common: human behavior. Yet surprisingly, dialogue between the two fields has remained largely silent until now. Selfhood and Recognition combines philosophical and cultural anthropological accounts of the perception of i...

Silence, screen, and spectacle

Takes on an innovative focus on “spectacular memory,” asking how spectacle functions in processes of memory, countermemory, and silencing. Breaks new ground in the discussion of absence, both in terms of the ‘absent,’ missing dialogues, texts, monuments and communities, as well as the “d...

The struggle for the past

Organized around Argentine “memory wars” since the 1970s, The Struggle for the Past undertakes an innovative exploration of memory’s dynamic social character. In addition to its analysis of how human rights movements have inflected public memory and democratization in Argentina, it also gives a...

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...

Astonishment and evocation

International scholars from the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, and rhetoric explore the spellbinding power of elusive meanings as people experience them in daily life and while gazing at works of art, watching films or studying other cultures. Covers the evocative power of visual ar...

The history of thyssen

The History of Thyssenprovides a summary of a research project funded by the Thyssen Foundations. It is both an explanation of how the project was conceptualized and executed and a detailed case study of a family and business during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Ignaz maybaum

Ignaz Maybaum (1897-1976) is widely recognized as one of the foremost Jewish theologians of the post-Holocaust era. Although he is mentioned in most treatments of post-Holocaust Jewish theology, his works are out of print and are only accessible to a small readership. Nicholas de Lange (who w...

The iron gates mesolithic

The Mesolithic sites in the Iron Gates Gorge of the Danube River, between Yugoslavia and Romania are reviewed in this volume. The author offers fundamental re-analyses and interpretations of stratigraphies, relative and absolute chronologies, architecture and settlement organization, the placem...

National socialist extermination policies

Moving beyond the well-established problems and public discussions of the Holocaust, this collection of essays, written by some of the leading German historians of the younger generation, leaves behind the increasingly agitated arguments of the last years and substantially broadens, and in many...

Anthropology and philosophy

Dialogues about the disciplinary boarders of anthropology and philosophy. Trust discussed as a research topic of field work and philosophical theorizing. Hope discussed as a research topic of field work and philosophical theorizing. New theorizing on trust and hope. Interdisc...

Shakespeare and his biographical afterlives

New Shakespeare biographies are published every year, though very little new documentary evidence has come to light. Inevitably speculative, these biographies straddle the line between fact and fiction. Shakespeare and His Biographical Afterlives explores the relationship between fiction and no...

The search for normality

The Historikerstreit of the 1980s has ended inconclusively amidst heated debates on the nature and course of German national history. The author follows the debates beyond the unexpected reunification of the country in 1990 and analyzes the most recent trends in German historiography. Reunifica...

Disenchantment with market economics

The life-worlds and personal experiences of workers and employees in three enterprises in East Berlin at the moment of political and economic upheaval stand at the centre of the book. It sets out in 1989 at the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall witnessing the confrontations with the market ...

Borders of belonging

This book explores how such struggles unfold in practice at a highly symbolic battlefield site in the Danish/German borderland. Comprised of an ethnography of two profoundly different institutions – a conventional museum and an experience-based heritage center – it analyses the ways in which st...

The historical practice of diversity

While multicultural composition of nations has become a catchword in public debates, few educators, not to speak of the general public, realize that cultural interaction was the rule throughout history. Starting with the Islam-Christian-Jewish Mediterranean world of the early modern period, thi...

Genocide on settler frontiers

Focuses on conflicts between hunter-gatherers and commercial stock farmers. Highlights destructive impact of commercial stock farming and its connection to international markets. Raises the question of whether these conflicts were inherently genocidal, an issue not yet addressed by s...

Enchanted by cinema

Enchanted by Cinema explores the films of the European music film pioneer William Thiele, as well as his career as an exile in Hollywood. Examining a wide range of the director’s filmography, the contributors address a variety of political, aesthetic and cross-cultural issues.

The european puzzle

The twin concepts of “Culture” and “Identity” are inescapable in any discussion of European Integration and yet over the last ten years their meaning has become increasingly contested. By combining an anthropological and political perspective, the authors challenge the traditional boundaries wi...

Captives, colonists and craftspeople

Collaborators collaborating

As bio-capital in the form of medical knowledge, skills and investments moves with greater frequency from its origin in First World industrialized settings to resource-poor communities with weak or little infrastructure, countries with emerging economies are starting to expand new indigenous sc...

Colette's republic

In France’s Third Republic, secularism was, for its adherents, a new faith, a civic religion founded on a rabid belief in progress and the Enlightenment conviction that men (and women) could remake their world. And yet with all of its pragmatic smoothing over of the supernatural edges of Cathol...