Berghahn Books

The concept of “Waithood” was developed by political scientist Diane Singerman to describe the expanding period of time between adolescence and full adulthood as young people wait to secure steady employment and marry. The contributors to this volume employ the waithood concept as a frame for richly detailed ethnographic studies of “youth in waiting” from a variety of world areas, including the Middle East Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the U.S, revealing that whether voluntary or involuntary, the phenomenon of youth waithood necessitates a recognition of new gender and family roles.

Cashless infrastructures are rapidly increasing, as credit cards, cryptocurrencies, online and mobile money, remittances, demonetization, and digitalization process replace coins and currencies around the world. Who’s Cashing In? explores how different modes of cashlessness impact, transform and challenge the everyday lives and livelihoods of local communities. Drawing from a wide range of ethnographic studies, this volume offers a concise look at how social actors and intermediaries respond to this change in the materiality of money throughout multiple regional contexts.

Issues of the construction of Self and Other, normally in the context of social exclusion of those perceived as different, have assumed a new urgency. This collection offers a fresh perspective on the ongoing debates on these questions in the social sciences and the humanities by focusing specifically on one theoretical proposition, namely, that the seemingly universal processes of identity formation and exclusion of the 'other' can be differentiated according to three modalities. All contributors directly engage with rigorous empirical testing and theoretical cross-examination of this proposition. Their results have direct implications not only for a more differentiated understanding of collective identities, but also for a better understanding of extreme collective violence and genocide.

In the last forty years anthropologists have made major contributions to understanding the heterogeneity of reproductive trends and processes underlying them. Fertility transition, rather than the story of the triumphant spread of Western birth control rationality, reveals a diversity of reproductive means and ends continuing before, during, and after transition. This collection brings together anthropological case studies, placing them in a comparative framework of compositional demography and conjunctural action.  The volume addresses major issues of inequality and distribution which shape population and social structures, and in which fertility trends and the formation and size of families are not decided solely or primarily by reproduction.

Through reference to one of its most canonical figures: Bronislaw Malinowski, this volume de-centres anthropology seemingly in a paradox. Considering Malinowski as a disciplinary metonym, this de-centring addresses current debates on world anthropologies and the decolonization of anthropological knowledge, production, and careers. Despite (and because of) the publication of his diaries (Malinowski 1967), Malinowski remains part of an equivocal global anthropological tradition. Featuring scholars across various locations, genders and generations, this book neither celebrates nor “cancels” Malinowski. Instead, it offers an eccentric space of reconsideration and a prism for reflecting on power configurations in anthropology today.

A teleoperated robot roaming in the streets of Mumbai enables anyone to put oneself in the place of the Hindu god Ganesha and have a conversation. Initially conceived as an anthropological experiment, the machine was launched in 2014 and became a collective, political and metaphysical experience. Can a machine make a good divine interface? Likewise, what might be the virtues of hacking a god to understand our relation to machines? The Ganesh Yourself experiment is not only a fascinating exercise in anthropology by design, the first of this kind, but it also leads to a radical deconstruction of religion, politics and technology, opening unthinkable possibilities.

The complexities of the relationship between food and kinship are highlighted in eating disorders. This book is an in-depth ethnographic account of a public treatment centre for eating disorders in Italy. By examining the practices and ethics of care that attempt to reconcile the patients’, family carers’, and the professionals’ conflicting notions about eating disorders, this book explores how bodies are both material in their sociality and social in their materiality. Food and family emerge aligned in the production and treatment of these conditions, as healthcare professionals tackle the patient’s kinship relationships for intervention. Ultimately, kinship makes and unmakes people through food.

Single motherhood, a new family form, demonstrates an accomplishment of paradoxical synergies between 2nd wave feminism and neoliberalism. Single Mother by Choice chronicles the journey of Ann, a 41-year-old woman throughout her intensive mothering of three donor-conceived children from infancy to tween years. The Christian Right’s embrace of neoliberalism provided a permission structure for this and other emerging families, while simultaneously influencing progressive parents with trickle down neoliberal values that weaken the moral architecture of childhood and the nation. This fine-grained analysis of one family’s life illuminates the complexities of twenty-first century, middle-class American motherhood, whether single or not.

In an increasingly modernised French Polynesian society, some Christians have been tackling contemporary social issues and repatriate traditional indigenous values . Pursuing the past in the present means grappling with ongoing existential issues as an indigenous people, such as the dismantling of the kinship community, the decline of domestic agriculture and the loss of indigenous cultural heritage. Māòhi Christians strive to reconnect with a perceived Indigenous, sacred past within a present they consider to be alienating. This book illustrates how indigenous Christians perceive social change and how their historical perceptions inform the creation of their own Christianity.

Travel writing appears to be the most oxymoronic of genres: the practice of writing and reading typically requires stasis and travel writing emerges from movement. From the concurrent physical and emotional journeys of Ella Maillart and Annemarie Schwarzenbach to the instantaneous digital discourses of contemporary urban travellers, and from the challenges of writing in the extreme conditions of the Antarctic to those of updating guidebooks via Google Streetview, this book examines the tensions between actual journeys and their resultant texts. Writing on the Move asks questions about the meaning of ‘movement’ – and what counts as ‘travel writing’ – in an age of virtual journeying and enforced immobility.

The annexation of Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere after World War II dramatically reshaped popular understandings of the natural environment. With an eco-critical approach, Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe breaks new ground in documenting how filmmakers increasingly saw cinema as a tool to critique the social and environmental damage of large-scale projects from socialist regimes and newly forming capitalist presences. New and established scholars with backgrounds across Europe, the United States, and Australia come together to reflect on how the cultural sphere has, and can still, play a role in redefining our relationship to nature.

Trademark-protected since 1910, the famous woollen cloth known as Harris Tweed can only be produced in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland – yet it is exported to over 50 countries around the world. Examining contemporary experiences of work and life, this book is the first in-depth anthropological study of the renowned textile industry, complementing and updating existing historical and ethnographic research. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork research in the Outer Hebrides, it offers an intimate account of industry workers’ lived experiences and contributes to anthropological debates on work and labour, cultural production, inclusive belonging and place-making in global capitalism.

A major contribution to the history of European anthropology, this book highlights the Porto School of Anthropology and analyses the work of its main mentor, Mendes Correia (1888-1960). It goes beyond a Portuguese focus to present a wider comparative analysis in which the colonial empire, knowledge of origins, ethnic identity and cultural practices all receive special attention. The analysis takes into account the fact that nationalism, as associated with an ethno-racial paradigm, decisively influenced discourse and scientific and political practices.

Focusing on Italy, this book discusses how women negotiate sexuality and social status in a Western sexscape constituted by multifaceted articulations of women’s sexuality, commodities and modernity. Drawing from ethnographic research, this book brings together the narratives of Italian and migrant women pole dancing for leisure, women pole and lap dancing for work, as well as women selling sex. By tracing commonalities in women’s processes of subjectivation and othering across the non/sex working women divide, the book foregrounds the intersecting structures of oppression under which women negotiate selfhood.

In the Netherlands, girls and young women are increasingly active in women-only kickboxing. The general assumption, in the Netherlands and in western Europe more broadly, is that women’s sport is a form of secular, feminist empowerment. Muslim women’s participation would then exemplify the incongruence of Islam with the modern, secular nation-state. Punching Back provides a detailed ethnographic study that contests this view by showing that young Muslim women who kickbox establish agentive selves by playing with gender norms, challenging expectations, and living out their religious subjectivities.

By studying how different societies understand categories such as time and causality, the Durkheimians decentered Western epistemology.  With contributions from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, media studies, and sinology, this volume illustrates the interdisciplinarity and intellectual rigor of the “category project” which did not only stir controversies among contemporary scholars but paved the way for other theories exploring how the thoughts of individuals are prefigured by society and vice versa.

Offering an original discussion of the gentrification phenomenon in Europe, this book provides new theoretical insights into classical works on the subject. Using a thorough analysis of the diversity of the forms, places and actors of gentrification in an attempt to isolate its ‘DNA’, the book addresses the place of social groups in cities, their competition over the appropriation of space, the infrastructure unequally offered to them by economic and political actors and the stakes of everyday social relationships.

Over the past century, the impact of football on Germany has been manifold, influencing the arts, political debates, and even contributing to the construction of cultural memories and national narratives. Football Nation analyses the game’s fluid role in shaping and reflecting German society, and spans its focus on modern German history, from the Wilhelmine era to the early 21st century. Expounding on topics of gender, class, fandom, spectatorship, antisemitism, nationalism, and internationalism, a diverse group of interdisciplinary scholars offer a novel approach to understanding the many influences of football throughout its extensive history which until recently has only been available to a German-speaking readership.

Pilgrimage, as a global activity linked to the sacred, speaks to the special significance of persons, places and events. This book relates these sentiments to the curatorship of the Camino de Santiago that comprises a lattice of European pilgrimage itineraries converging at Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. The detailed analysis focuses on the management of pilgrimage settings as heritage and tourism linked to the shrine of Saint James and gives particular attention to investment guidelines, land use planning regulations, environmental stewardship, information dissemination and museology.

Being prejudiced is usually taken to mean having hasty and poorly founded feelings and opinions, usually negative, that are based on too little real knowledge and careful consideration. Definitions, however, are not explanations. The Origins of Prejudice is a short and unconventional book that shows you step-by-step both how and why all of us who are human often rely uncritically on what we believe to be true about the people, things, and events shaping our lives outside the hidden world of our bony skull. This book aims to show how we can learn from our possibly unintentional acts and self-serving misdeeds to live together in supportive, less conflicted ways.

Education is arguably the central arena where the discipline of anthropology is reproduced, challenged, and renewed. This volume examines how anthropology is taught and transformed in diverse institutional and socio-political contexts worldwide. Covering themes such as multimodal teaching, research-led learning, and disciplinary boundaries, the book offers new insights into the changing role of teaching within anthropology.  This book compiles ethnographically grounded case studies to explore how educators respond to technological advancements, neoliberal influences, and calls for decolonising pedagogy. By highlighting content-specific strategies and comparative reflection, this study views anthropological education as a vibrant and critical space where anthropology is reimagined and revitalised.

Anthropology has an important role in articulating people’s engagements with water at different spatial and temporal scales, and in showing how local relationships with waterways and marine areas translate into larger anthropogenic impacts on regional and global ecosystems. This volume explores diverse relationships with waterbodies, and considers how these are expressed in art, material culture and infrastructures. Focusing on the multiple and overlapping scales at which people relate to water in contexts including wave science, Indigenous cosmology, extractive industries and environmental activism, it suggests that efforts to achieve more sustainable and equitable engagements with water must also be multi-scalar.

Amaravati, the new capital of Andhra Pradesh, exemplifies India’s policy thrust on urbanization. Tracing the rise, abandonment and revival of Amaravati, Urbanizing the Future delves into the ambitious plan to build a brand-new city in an agrarian landscape. The book unpacks the entanglements of caste, capital, and state power in shaping development through a regional lens. Urbanizing the Future highlights the disruptions and conflicts engendered by mega-projects as agricultural land is converted into urban real estate. Combining political economy and history with long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the Amaravati story offers a compelling critique of planned urbanization as a contested and uneven process in contemporary India.

While Psychology and Anthropology share certain overlapping interests, there is no agreed schema or paradigm for this area. Rejecting both psychoanalysis and the biopsychosocial model as insufficient, this collection brings together studies on Hasidic concepts of illness, the religious origins of schizophrenia, Christian stigmata, the “third sex” in Albania, jinn possession among European immigrants, and reincarnation among the Druze. The volume argues for plural models integrating biological, psychodynamic, and sociocultural perspectives. It highlights the enduring tension between Psychiatry’s naturalistic explanations and Anthropology’s personalistic approach, suggesting that both offer partial yet essential insights into human experience.

Engaging critically with concepts of race, species, and otherness, Alterity and Human Evolution contributes to current debates on human evolution. In a political climate marked by movements such as Black Lives Matter and policies like Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14168 against ‘gender ideology’, this volume brings together a group of leading scholars in archeology, paleoanthropology and human evolution to examine how narratives of human origins intersect with issues of race, gender, and anthropocentrism. Drawing on postcolonial and critical frameworks from the Humanities and Social Sciences, it interrogates key foundational concepts and assumptions underpinning evolutionary discourses.

Homogenization, monochromatic rendering, and the process of schematic imposition is readily apparent in modern mainstream Jewish French politics. The Jewish Maghreb explores complex self and communal understandings of Maghrebi Jewish populations and their descendants in France through ethnography across generations. This study examines how colonial history, migration, and geopolitics shape ongoing Maghrebi belonging. From commercial networks in Paris to Algerian pilgrimage journeys, the book reveals communal North African Jewish navigation of plural sediments of self and history. The heuristic ‘maghrebinicité,’ works to illuminate ongoing negotiations of memory, citizenship, and cultural transmission in postcolonial France, offering fresh insights into diaspora, return, and the persistence of transnational connections.

Eduards Volters was a Latvian linguist, renowned early ethnographer, and archeologist with the Russian Imperial Geographical Society. He studied the Lithuanians and Latvians in the Northwest Krai of the Russian Empire and Lithuania from 1882 to 1941. As Volters began his research at a time when the printing of Lithuanian and Latgalian publications in the Latin alphabet was forbidden, this book aims to uncover his role as one of the founders of literate Lithuanian and Latvian communities. This study compares various historical and theoretical contexts in anthropology and decolonization to reveal how Volters reconciled his ethnographic work within the political goals of the empire.

In Black Lisbon, Richard Cleminson traces the local and transnational intersections between peoples in Portugal and across the Portuguese African empire, in order to interrogate the development of movements based in Lisbon that resisted or sought to reconfigure colonialism. He analyses how ‘race’ and nation were conceptualised, mobilised and lived by colonised black Africans in Lisbon and in the Portuguese colonies across time. Integral to this inquiry is the siting of ‘colonial-questioning’ movements in Portugal as part of organizations and publications within other racialised and imperial spaces. To what degree did movements in Black Lisbon accommodate their demands to Portuguese colonial prerogatives? How far did organizations adopt visions of a decentralised ‘Greater Portugal’ or a federal Africa?

Ernst Kitzinger was one of the great art historians of the twentieth century, and a refugee incarcerated in Hay, New South Wales during WWII. As a German Jew he had sought refuge in Britain in 1935, but in 1940 was one of 2,500 men arrested as ‘enemy aliens’ and deported to Australia aboard the HMT Dunera. Kitzinger rallied his fellow internees to communicate their peculiar circumstances. In powerful and often deeply moving prose and poetry, they mused on their lot and the misfortunes of refugees. Never before published, their words remain strikingly relevant today.

The Greek Revolution of 1821 was not merely a national uprising—it was a transnational event that reshaped the Eastern Mediterranean and reverberated across the globe. Moving beyond traditional nationalist historiography, this study draws on recent transnational and Ottoman-centered scholarship to examine how diaspora networks, European Philhellenes, and great power rivalries transformed a regional revolt into an international cause. The Ottoman context is treated not as a passive or declining backdrop, but as a dynamic, multiethnic polity grappling with reform, resistance, and the challenges of maintaining imperial cohesion. Drawing on multilingual and cross-regional sources, the Contributors explore how the Revolution was perceived, contested, and reshaped across diverse cultural and political spaces, embedding 1821 within the broader currents of nineteenth-century revolution, diplomacy, and state formation.

The Social Survey in Global Perspective traces the evolution of social surveys beyond celebrated metropolitan examples, exploring their worldwide impact across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors examine surveys in diverse contexts—from colonial territories to grassroots women’s organizations—to reveal methodological challenges and profound social influence. The collection illuminates how surveys shaped state power, social movements, and individual identity while often reproducing existing hierarchies. By exploring the double-sided legacy of social surveying—as an engine of both progressive reform and state surveillance—this book offers a critical reassessment of empirical practices that continue to determine how we understand ourselves, our societies and our world.

Between 1933 and 1942, around 20,000 refugees fled to Shanghai to escape Nazi-occupied Europe, most of them Jewish. Unable to assimilate into Chinese culture, the Jewish community spent a decade preserving their own culture and enduring harsh Japanese occupation in Shanghai, before dispersing around the world after the end of World War II. Steve Hochstadt, whose Viennese grandparents were among those who fled, tells their story by weaving together hundreds of sources and dozens of interviews into a series of compelling essays on this unique, but little-known rescue.

Pandemics spread throughout early modern Germany on a regular basis and profoundly affected public policy and private lives. While plague was central, other diseases such as French pox, which appeared in the 1490s, were of concern as well. This volume examines both historical data and textual evidence to explore how early modern states, communities, and individuals responded to such outbreaks, how they dealt with ensuing political, ethical, intellectual, social, and pragmatic issues, and how they handled arising conflicts. The focus is on the period between 1480 and 1720, between the onset of printed plague literature and the end of periodic outbreaks of plague.

The Afterlives of Tamil Tigers explores the experience of war, defeat, and exile among former fighters—both men and women—of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), through the testimonies of veterans now living in France. Moving beyond the organisation’s reputation for violence, Giacomo Mantovan sheds light on the everyday lives, emotions, and ideological commitment of its combatants. By tracing their life trajectories—from military training to exile, through combat, torture, loss, and survival—he examines how these experiences have left a lasting imprint on their identities and ways of being in the world.

From August 1942 to April 1945, Siemens & Halske AG maintained its own so-called production facility adjacent to the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp, where up to 2,300 female prisoners were deployed in forced labor. This volume contains excerpts from letters, witness statements, arrest reports, diaries, compensation claims, autobiographies and interviews from Ravensbrück survivors who were forced to work in the armaments factory. The texts shed light on the system of forced labor in the context of the concentration camp, questions of discouragement and hope as well as the women's will for self-assertion and resistance

The existence and achievements of Jewish “self-rescuers” within Nazi-occupied Hungary remains, in spite of their significance, historically underexplored. In this illuminating chronicle of the life and work of Jewish couple, László and Eugenia Szamosi, Remembering Resistance seeks to address this lacunae, offering an unique insight into a family’s personal history of resistance under the Nazi regime. Combining oral testimony from fellow survivors, with a previously-unpublished translation of László’s memoir, this book foregrounds the remarkable work of the Szamosis and their network, in rescuing Jews from the Death Marches and reuniting displaced families. Through doing so, this book offers a powerful framework for mediating how we remember Jewish experiences of the Holocaust.

Addressing polarized narratives of authoritarian control and societal resistance, this volume reconsiders the totalitarianism paradigm in the study of the Soviet Bloc. Historians, philosophers, and literary scholars explore both its enduring explanatory power and its conceptual limits, drawing on insights from social epistemology and the history of social sciences. Case studies on Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the former GDR, Ukraine and the Soviet Union reveal how education, publishing, and cultural production shaped institutional life and intra-bloc interactions. The contributions develop new historiographical standards for understanding the complex interplay between imperial influence and local agency across the diverse societies of the former socialist world, while exploring the potential of various social-theoretical frameworks.

Emplaced Belief is an innovative interdisciplinary volume that explores the conceptual and lived relations between the academic fields of religion and heritage. The Contributors adopt a wholistic approach to consider emplacement — a broad interrelation of objects, peoples, histories and places — in the analysis of relations between religion and heritage. To be ‘emplaced’ is to be situated, yet such positioning is the result of multiple conscious and unconscious forces, agencies, discourses, and epistemologies. The volume’s title refers not only to physical locations of import, but also to the role of cultural practices and religious epistemologies in the establishment of religious heritage: the act of emplacement. That is, the religious, social, political and cultural practices that denote ‘heritage’ and the dynamics that revise, reinforce, or remove any such attribution.

Nineteenth-century Germany invented the way we eat. Women experimenting in households, French chefs fleeing guillotines, and one of the most rapidly evolving food industries in the world forged recognizably modern eating practices between 1780 and 1910. While central Europeans merely aimed to survive long winters, experiment with translated recipes and curious ingredients from abroad, and embrace the conveniences of industrial life, their consumption habits and cooking practices created a new product landscape. Throughout this transitional era of history, individuals visibly communicated their self-understandings through food. This study of central European food modernity and middle-class identity aims to provide fresh footing for discussions in our own changing global era.

The lives of Georgian women who migrated to Thessaloniki, in Greece from the mid-1900s onwards remain largely invisible. Georgian Migrant Women on the Move seeks to bridge this gap by examining how this convergence of life worlds offered both challenges and turning points for Greek communities and Georgian migrants alike. Ranging from the historical Greek migrant experience of unregulated care work and uncertain political status to the potent sense of home and motherhood in Georgian culture, this study tracks how divergent ideas of gender and class are reshaped by transnational mobility. Consequently, it illuminates the methods Georgian women used to reforge their identities in the face of rupture and change.

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 fragmented and shattered through the historical violence of the Armenian genocide, and offers a nuanced understanding of genocide’s complex historical and social dimensions. Diverse ego-documents and self-narrative sources become subject of analysis in chapters that investigate the historiography and remembrance of the Armenian genocide. By drawing attention to biographical trajectories and manifestations, Lives in Fragments reflects on the history and memory of genocidal violence. 

Raul Hilberg (1926-2007) was a pioneer of Holocaust historiography. After sifting through tens of thousands of perpetrators documents, he published The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961, with two revised editions to follow in 1985 and 2003. Hilberg’s magnum opus describes the persecution as a complex bureaucratic process involving the entire German society. The book has served as a foundational text and intellectual companion to the field of Holocaust historiography since its first publication.

The contributions in this volume explore the origins of Hilberg’s pioneering study, map out the debates in which it was implicated, highlight its unprecedented accomplishments as well as disturbing blind spots, and use “The Destruction” as a prism for an appraisal of eight decades of Holocaust research.

From Reddit and YouTube to collector forums and live auctions, the avenues through which cultural heritage can be bought and sold are rapidly growing alongside new digital technologies. Considering anew the implications of this digital expansion for the online trafficking of cultural property and human remains, Investigating Online Heritage Crime conducts an exacting examination of these relatively under-researched "sites" of heritage crime. The chapters address how networks operate within and because of the interconnected social media and e-commerce landscape. Through doing so, this volume highlights where markets for online heritage are headed, especially given the ever-prevalent adoption of AI and LLM (Large Language Models) technology that is profoundly reshaping all aspects of online life, including licit and illicit commerce.

Practice Theory and the Biosocial - Microbes, Matter and Milieu shows what recent developments in social theory bring to questions about how bacteria, viruses, microscopic materials and societies develop in tandem. The examples discussed – from urban infrastructures to the medieval plague and from antibiotic resistance to epigenetics –develop an account of how previous and present arrangements make some futures more likely than others and how unequal patterns of exposure and entanglement arise. This book aims to demonstrate the relevance of social and practice theories by overcoming classic distinctions between the very small and the very large, between agency and structure, and between nature and culture.

Lampedusa evokes the crossings made by migrants and refugees and its name is associated with the sad sequence of shipwrecks and deaths in the central Mediterranean. For several centuries, Lampedusa has been an uninhabited land at the frontier of two conflicting worlds: between Africa and Europe and between Christianity and Islam. It was a stopover for sailors and a zone of religious truce. This book follows an ethnographic account of the social life on this small island, exploring its history articulated with the present where thousands of migrants and tourists cohabit both well and poorly in a few square miles.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, residents of Alma, a village in Kyrgyzstan, were faced with many challenges. Economic crisis and the elimination of welfare support forced an entire generation to become labour migrants in Russia. Those ‘left behind’ were sustained by migrants’ remittances and charitable activities, but at a cost. As villagers built upon existing kinship structures to create new practices of mutual aid on the lines of Islamic teaching, they suffered from the ‘dark side of kinship.’ This book shares experiences of people in Alma and its Moscow-based diaspora and how they created a ‘moral economy of migration’ that became territorialised as kindship was de-territorialised.

Where Saints Show Respect reveals the penetration of mafia values in Sicilian society. Instead of focusing on sensational criminality, this study considers rituals through which local society learns deep respect – sometimes fearful, but often playful or pious – for those values and their enforcers. State and Church misconstrue these values as vestiges of a society morally damned and left behind in a pagan past. This study draws on three decades of ethnographic research to explore a strikingly different Sicily from the self-congratulatory version of government and religious leaders, where a seemingly obscure set of rural practices offers a critical perspective on modernity itself.

Since the 1970s, the recurring discourse of a ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe has affected border strategies that create a context of suspicion and criminalise asylum applicants. This book examines how the Netherlands engages with the arrival of certain (often illegalised) travellers and the asylum procedure, a tense liminal space and time that ensures decisions of in- and exclusion. Dutch asylum procedure is a peculiar legal procedure that gathers different people and sensitivities together to make swift, life-altering decisions for those applying for protection. Based on an extensive ethnography, this book reveals the ways in which suspicious compassion in Dutch asylum pervades an objective decision-making practice.  

Since the 1970s, the transformation of Pakhtun areas has brought far-reaching changes to all aspects of society. This book investigates evolving patterns of social relations among Pakhtuns, focusing on the practice of gham khadee (participation in sorrows and joys) as a key mode of social and political engagement. Given that political standing among Pakhtuns is tied to honour, the book also explores how gham khadee and the doing of favours enable leaders to build profiles and political followings. Offering a faithful account of Pakhtun reality, this study contests the stereotypical representation of Pakhtunwali and considers gham khadee to be a manifestation of the code of life.

Approaching European transitional politics from an ethnographic perspective, The Give and Take of Wind focuses on the practices, frameworks and alternative strategies of those who resist the EU Green Deal. The book examines identity constructs related to territorial sovereignty, public participation and the (consequent) redefinition of the political sphere. By examining Sardinia and the meta-island San Pietro, this book analyses if energy transitions represent a horizon of possible change for communities or whether it is experienced as the imposition of development models. The political and identity-driven nature of such opposition challenges anthropology and other social sciences to elucidate a phenomenon that affects Europe and beyond.

The exchange of important commodities like fish, sago, and pots between communities speaking dozens of different languages was not a focus of anthropological research in Papua New Guinea until the 1990s. This book explores how more than 100 communities who speak nearly fifty languages from five unrelated language phyla interact by developing persistent relations known as “hereditary friendship.” These relations provide everyone along the coast with fish, sago, and earthenware pots as well as many other useful commodities. By minimizing hostilities between and among different groups without invoking marriage, which is so important elsewhere in Papua, friendship relations brought harmony, peace, and basic commodities.

Exploring Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work through a decolonial lens, this book traces Hurston’s journey from her early life (1891–1919) and struggles at the margins (1920–1930) to her peak as a pioneering ethnographer and writer (1931–1956) and her later years (1957–1960). Examining her navigation of a hostile academic environment, it highlights her redefinition of Black autonomy and diasporic identity. Through personal and political narratives, including Barracoon, it underscores Hurston’s enduring influence on Anthropology and contemporary Black thought.

Adolescence is a critical period of the life course, encapsulating biological and social changes as individuals transition from childhood to adulthood. While the archaeology of childhood is a rapidly growing field, there has been little formal discussion on how adolescence may be biologically or socially defined and the spatial and temporal variability within these definitions. This book explores the meaning of adolescence through the analysis of material culture, historical documents, skeletal remains, isotope analysis, and other lines of evidence. Considering the implications for archaeologists and biological anthropologists, this book investigates the lived experiences of adolescents in the past to further our understanding of past societies.

There is little agreement today on what it takes to be intelligent. Yet this word is widely believed to be about something real, mostly biological, and important. From this popular perspective, intelligence is also something you can have a lot of, and luckily find yourself being labeled as a genius. Or sadly, something you do not have nearly enough of, and so find yourself being seen by others, at least behind your back, as silly, stupid, or plainly idiotic. Looked at closely, however, it turns out this word belongs more in the realm of traditional folklore than modern science.

Exploring Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work through a decolonial lens, this book traces Hurston’s journey from her early life (1891–1919) and struggles at the margins (1920–1930) to her peak as a pioneering ethnographer and writer (1931–1956) and her later years (1957–1960). Examining her navigation of a hostile academic environment, it highlights her redefinition of Black autonomy and diasporic identity. Through personal and political narratives, including Barracoon, it underscores Hurston’s enduring influence on Anthropology and contemporary Black thought.

When is sex abnormal and when is it dangerous? A multi-disciplinary approach that includes sociology, anthropology, history, and philosophy provides an understanding of how cultural norms have shifted over time and the implications of these shifts. Proposed definitions of “abnormal” and “dangerous” and their impact on public policies and practices are evaluated, as are our contemporary assumptions about sex and sexuality and the consequences of those assumptions. This should also serve as a toolkit for how to answer questions about sexuality such that readers can apply this model as new questions and social concerns about sex arise in the future.

As a cultural artifact, memorials have been a part of funerary traditions for centuries and have continued to evolve as human culture has changed over time. This volume draws from a diverse, international group of academics to offer an overview of grieving and memorialization, ranging from traditional modes of expression to contemporary modes that revolve around the digital world. The editorial team is devoted to the death studies milieu and is interested in exploring relevant and timely issues that demonstrate historical persistence and continued growth. This collection of short, accessible essays examines issues related to memorialization, providing a broad overview of contemporary scholarship and an introduction to topics relevant to both established death studies scholars and a broader audience. 

The First World War Centenary of 2014-2018 was a defining period of public engagement in the United Kingdom. Capturing Commemoration provides the first dedicated examination of this period and the activities that marked it. Collaboratively written by leading experts in the field, this study explores how the Centenary was marked as both a national and a transnational commemoration, how it defined national identity, as well as how it was transmitted within museum exhibitions, digital spaces, and amongst younger generations. In doing so, this volume reflects on the ‘collaborative turn’ taking place within public history, and its implications for cooperation between the academy and the public.

Sociocultural environments prompt us to notice and mark certain differences over others. This book investigates five paradoxes in the discourses and practices around such differences: the paradox of mixing, standardization, narrative, proximity, and tolerance. Drawing on the notion of unit thinking, it explores how perceived differences emerge fluidly in specific contexts. Through critical analyses of race studies, language education, global education/study abroad, and volunteer/service work, the book examines how these fields build on or capitalize on pre-conceived differences. It opens up discussions for new understandings of differences that challenge essentialist framings and inform alternative practices.

Set in Tel Aviv’s Bitcoin Embassy between 2017 and 2019, Community in a Crowd explores the everyday activities and social dynamics of Israeli Bitcoin enthusiasts. It examines how participants promoted Libertarian narratives and ritualized practices to challenge the moral authority of the ‘centralized’ political-economic order. Revisiting Bitcoin’s popular association with radical individualism, the book contrasts the sprawling, impersonal crowds of online trading with the formation of an intimate, egalitarian community through in-person encounters. Advancing a new theoretical framework, it offers insights into contemporary mass movements grounded in techno-utopian visions of society and reconsiders how decentralized technologies foster both anonymity and solidarity.

In the wake of Greece’s 2008 economic collapse, African women in Athens navigated intensified discrimination shaped by the intersecting forces of gender, race and migration status. This feminist ethnography investigates how processes of racialization intersect with gender and migration status to produce complex forms of disadvantage. This book argues that gendered racialization renders these women not only invisible but also hyper-visible in stereotypical ways that heighten their exposure to discrimination and precarity. Through everyday survival tactics, home-making practices and collective mobilization, these women resist exclusion and marginalization. Acting individually and collectively, they work to improve material conditions and gain social intelligibility, ultimately challenging normative boundaries of belonging in contemporary Greece.

Exploring the entangled relationships between food, culture and society in India, this edited collection brings together empirically grounded research across diverse regions and contexts. Organised into four sections – Food, Culture and Identity; Food, Memory and Migration; Food, Livelihood and Nutrition; and Food, Consumption and Media – it highlights the complex roles food plays in shaping identity, mobility, labour and representation. Drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives, the volume contributes to broader conversations in sociology, social anthropology, international development, geography, cultural studies and food studies, offering a textured account of contemporary foodways and their significance in everyday Indian life.

The question of how to conceive of the Holocaust within a wider, historical framework remains contentious. For some, it is a universal catastrophe that provides a blueprint for understanding comparable instances of targeted violence, while for others its particularity precludes any comparison with other genocides. Outside Looking In provides a fresh reassessment of the problem of Holocaust universalization, highlighting how the legacy of the Holocaust is transmitted across a variety of global cultural contexts. Ranging from the representation of the Holocaust in literature and film, to how its implications inform the work of politicians and legal theorists, this volume spotlights how foundational the Holocaust is to our global social and imaginative outlook.

An Anthropology of Global Immunization explores some of the most pressing vaccine concerns of our time, from HPV to COVID-19, HIV and beyond. This edited collection develops a unique anthropological response to the question of global immunization, addressing issues from vaccine hesitancy and conspiracy theories to local biopolitics. The global perspectives in this volume are bound together by critical anthropological themes of nationalism, governance and local biosocial realities. The collection lays a critical foundation to understand vaccine development, implementation and public health policy.

As climate change accelerates, melting sea ice is fueling the global imagination and geopolitical anticipation of the Arctic region’s accessible transport routes and possibilities for resource extraction. “Silk Roads” are being conjured across the circumpolar North, both as official Arctic and infrastructural policy, and as broader visions of global connectivity with other markets. Following the myriad ways that local economies and agencies are proliferating around the anticipation of large-scale infrastructural corridors and their often-unrealized arteries, Arctic Silk Roads examines the different conditions under which top-down infrastructural dreams facilitate or constrain individual agencies.

The lived experiences of two authors, Siegfried von Vegesack and Werner Bergengruen, provide a fascinating lens into the reality of migration and identity in twentieth-century Europe. Forced to leave their Baltic homeland and forge new lives in Germany, both authors contended with life under the Nazi regime and the social upheaval that took place after its fall. In this illuminating examination of the relationship between migration and literature, Martyn Housden interrogates how the experience of displacement informed the authorship of each figure. By charting how their writing interpolated the period’s many ruptures, this study offers an unrivalled insight into the complexities of identity and nationhood in a conflict-torn continent. 

Transience is found in every meeting and form of coexistence between people and things that live and exist by, or move across or along, the Black Sea. It may come in various forms and guises, from de facto states, tourism, migration, trafficking or military troops, and it needs to be written and captured in sensuous, affective and imaginative ways. With particular attention to poetics, politics and aesthetics, this volume focuses on the scales of transient moments and histories, and enables readers to see and sense the many forms of transience that occur in a given landscape, sea or space.

The German chemical firm, I.G. Farben, remains an object of historical scrutiny. Responsible for developing the gasoline and aviation fuel so integral to the Nazi regime’s military campaign, the company’s executives enabled the Third Reich’s war crimes through their use of forced labor from the Auschwitz concentration camp. While this complicity did result in their conviction at the Nuremberg trials, Stephan H. Lindner provides a fresh perspective on this watershed event, highlighting how the legacy of this trial shaped postwar Europe’s understanding of collusion and reparation. Charting its build up, the events of the trial itself, and its aftermath, this volume spotlights the complexities of corporate social responsibility and of putting the military-industrial complex on trial. 

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Istanbul witnessed a cinematic revolution that carried profound implications for the way ideas of identity, nation, and gender were conceived. Re-examining film’s potential as both an artistic and ideological discipline, Torn is the Curtain interrogates the relationship between early film cultures and ideas of social transformation, highlighting how emergent ideas of post-colonialism, Orientalism, and feminism impacted Turkish film aesthetics. Consequently, this volume highlights how early cinema culture was not only shaped by ever-changing religious and cultural forces, but did itself shape contemporary debates about identity and cross-cultural exchange.

The dispute between the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire over rulership of the kingdom of Hungary dominated military affairs between 1526 and 1699. A battleground for a wider theological contest between Christian and Muslim imperial forces, the conflict witnessed notable developments in military technology and religious strife, including the development of gunpowder and the European Reformation. Bringing together his wealth of research on this lengthy conflict, historian James Tracy provides a comprehensive and exacting examination of the implications this battle had for notions of sovereignty, statehood, and civilization. Ranging from the Veneto-Ottoman peace negotiations of 1573-4 to the “Book of Halil Beg” in Habsburg-Ottoman diplomacy, this volume serves as a vital guide to a turbulent period of history.

The figure of the ‘politician’ occupies a central yet fraught position in the media landscape of contemporary Europe. A frequent source of criticism in everyday news bulletins, the term itself is loaded with an emotional significance that corresponds with prevailing perceptions of current political administrations. In this geographically wide-ranging assessment of the figure of the politician in modern and contemporary Europe, Pasi Ihalainen, Rosario López, Kari Palonen, and Henk te Velde re-examine the trajectory of terms like ‘politician’ and ‘statesman’, illuminating its correspondence with emerging, political trends. Drawing on a variety of data surveys from several European countries, this volume spotlights how profoundly the concept of representative democracy is shifting. 

In the decades that followed World War II, cheap and plentiful oil helped to fuel rapid economic growth, ensure political stability, and reinforce the legitimacy of liberal democracies. Yet waves of price increases and the use of the so-called “oil weapon” by a group of Arab oil-producing countries in the early 1970s demonstrated the West’s dependence on this vital resource and its vulnerability to economic volatility and political conflicts. Oil and Sovereignty analyzes the national and international strategies that American and European governments formulated to restructure the world of oil and deal with the era’s disruptions. It shows how a variety of different actors combined diplomacy, knowledge creation, economic restructuring, and public relations in their attempts to impose stability and reassert national sovereignty.

As seen in previous pandemics, girls and young women are particularly vulnerable as social issues such as homelessness, mental healthcare, access to education, and child labor are often exacerbated. The Girl in the Pandemic considers what academics, community activists, and those working in local, national, and global NGOs are learning about the lives of girls and young women during pandemics. Drawing from a range of responses during the pandemic including first person narratives, community ethnographies, and participatory action research, this collection offers a picture of how the COVID-19 pandemic played out in eight different countries.

Over the course of its history, the German Empire increasingly withheld basic rights—such as joining the army, holding public office, and even voting—as a form of legal punishment. Dishonored offenders were often stigmatized in both formal and informal ways, as their convictions shaped how they were treated in prisons, their position in the labour market, and their access to rehabilitative resources.  With a focus on Imperial Germany’s criminal policies and their afterlives in the Weimar era, Citizens into Dishonored Felons demonstrates how criminal punishment was never solely a disciplinary measure, but that it reflected a national moral compass that authorities used to dictate the rights to citizenship, honour and trust.

Exploring the dynamics of identity formation processes in diasporic spaces, this book analyses how gender, cultural and religious practices are renegotiated in a situation of displacement. The author presents the comparative case study of Somali migrant women in Nairobi and Johannesburg:  two cosmopolitan urban hubs in the global South. The book is based on and includes ethnographic observations in Nairobi and Johannesburg, first-person accounts of migration journeys across the African continent and women’s reflections on what it means to be a Somali woman today.

While German unification promised a new historical beginning, it also stirred discussions about contemporary Germany’s Nazi past and ideas of citizenship and belonging in a changing Europe. Minority Discourses in Germany Since 1990 explores the intersections and divergences between Black German, Turkish German, and German Jewish experiences, with reflections on the evolving academic paradigms with which these are studied. Informed by comparative approaches, the volume investigates social and aesthetic interventions into contemporary German public and political discourse on memory, racism, citizenship, immigration, and history.

The field of memory studies has typically focused on everyday memory and commemoration practices through which we construct meaning and identities. The Right to Memory looks beyond these everyday practices, focusing instead on how memory relates to human rights and socio-legal constructs in order to legitimize and protect groups and individuals. With case studies including Polish Holocaust Law, the Indian origins of Amartya Sen’s capability theory approach, and the right to memory through digital technologies in Brazilian and British museums, this collected volume seeks to establish the right to memory as a foundational topic in memory studies.

Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second largest city and its former capital. Situated within 40 km of the Ukrainian-Russian border it is one of those East-Central European “liminal” cities which became a center of modernization and pluralization in the borderland area, playing a prominent role in the process of nation building. Volodymyr Kravchenko’s expanded edition of Kharkov/Kharkiv, now in the English-language and including a new chapter on the reconfiguration of the Ukrainian-Russian borderland during and after the watershed Euromaidan event, uniquely uncovers the city’s long history, from the 17th century to today. Addressing issues of regional and national identities, Ukrainian-Russian relations, mental mapping, historical narratives and the ensuing de/reconstruction of national mythologies, this book, fills a unique gap in the literature on Kharkiv.

Arguably the most important—and influential—German woman writer of the last century, Christa Wolf was long heralded as "die gesamtdeutsche Autorin," an author for all of Germany; but, after 1989 in unified Germany, Wolf found herself suddenly embroiled in controversies that challenged her integrity and consigned her to an ideologically suspect identity as "DDR Schriftstellerin” (GDR writer) or “Staatsdichterin” (state poet). What Remains: Responses to the Legacy of Christa Wolf asks the question of what truly remains of her legacy in the annals of contemporary German culture and history. Unlike most of what appeared in the wake of Wolf’s death, however, the contributions to this international volume seek neither to monumentalize her nor to dismantle her stature, but to employ a range of methodologies—comparative, intertextual, psychoanalytic, historical, transcultural—to offer sensitive assessments of Wolf’s major literary texts, as well as of her lesser known work in genres such as film and essay.

Why has “car society” proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In this follow-up to his magisterial Atlantic Automobilism, Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so difficult. Drawing on archival research as well as wide-ranging forays into popular culture, Mom reveals here the roots of the exuberance, excess, and danger that define modern automotive culture.

As a Slavic-speaking religious and ethnic “Other” living just a stone’s throw from the symbolic heart of the continent, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina have long occupied a liminal space in the European imagination. To a significant degree, the wider representations and perceptions of this population can be traced to the reports of Central European—and especially Habsburg—diplomats, scholars, journalists, tourists, and other observers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This volume assembles contributions from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and literary scholars to examine the political, social, and discursive dimensions of Bosnian Muslims’ encounters with the West since the nineteenth century.

As an ethnography of Central Australian singing traditions and ceremonial contexts, this book asks questions about the vitality of the cultural knowledge and practices highly valued by Warlpiri people and fundamental to their cultural heritage. Set against a discussion of the contemporary vitality of Aboriginal musical traditions in Australia and embedded in the historical background of this region, the book lays out the features of Warlpiri songs and ceremonies, and centers on a focal case study of the Warlpiri Kurdiji ceremony to illustrate the modes in which core cultural themes are being passed on through song to future generations.

In 2015, both Portugal and Spain passed laws enabling descendants of Sephardi Jews to obtain citizenship, an historic offer of reconciliation for Jews who were forced to undergo conversions or expelled from Iberia nearly half a millennia ago. Drawing on the memory of the expulsion from Sepharad, the scholarly and personal essays in Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants analyze the impact of reconciliation laws on descendants and contemporary forms of citizenship.

For much of Europe, the interwar period was one of cultural expansion and diversion and increased visibility for lesbians. While historical research on Germany during the period immediately after the First World War has been extensively studied by historians through the lens of gender and sexuality—with an implicit emphasis on the “masculine” dimension of queer female sexuality—the Dutch context has been virtually ignored. Through careful and sensitive studies of medico‐social discourses, media representations, and literary depictions of queer femininity, Different from the Others recovers the submerged history of queer feminine women in both Germany and the Netherlands. Cyd Sturgess provides a theoretical analysis that makes key empirical contributions to the history of Dutch gays and lesbians while reframing our collective understanding of queer femininity more broadly.

Historians of immigration and ethnicity in the United States have typically devoted little attention to Greek Americans, while popular narratives depict them as indifferent or hostile to political and social radicalism. From acclaimed historian Kostis Karpozilos, Red America provides an alternative narrative of the Greek American experience. Focusing on the history of the Greek American Left from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Cold War, this volume uncovers the threads that bound notions of radical social change to everyday immigrant life, tracing ethnic radicalism from the boundaries of a specific community to the epicenter of American social and political history.

Focusing on a sub-set of the Dagomba of northern Ghana, this book looks at the first generation to go through secondary school in the north. After university and post-graduate education, they relocate to Accra, the capital, hundreds of miles south. They crossed social and physical space and have become cosmopolitan while holding on to tradition and attachment to their home town. This bridge generation are patrons to those living up north. This book charts their path into elite status and argues that they use the tools gained through education and social connections to influence politics back home.

Following World War II, Germany was faced not only with the practical tasks of reconstruction and denazification, but also with the longer-term mission of morally “re-civilizing” its citizens—a goal that persisted through the nation’s 1949 split. One of the most important mediums for effecting reeducation was television, whose strengths were particularly evident in the thousands of television plays that were broadcast in both Germanys in the 1950s and 1960s. This book shows how TV dramas transcended state boundaries and—notwithstanding the ideological differences between East and West—addressed shared issues and themes, helping to ease viewers into confronting uncomfortable moral topics.

Motherhood in Mexico is profoundly shaped by the legacy of colonialism. This ethnography situates motherhood in a critical global health analysis of maternal health inequalities and interventions in the southeast state of Chiapas. Using a transitional life course framework, it demonstrates how the transition to motherhood is never complete. Once a good mother is defined, she becomes undefined, the goal posts moved, and the rules confronted.

For over a century, the Middle East has weathered seemingly endless conflicts, ensnaring political players from around the world. And perhaps no nation has displayed a greater range of policies toward, and experiences in, the region than Germany, as this short and accessible volume demonstrates. Beginning with Kaiser Wilhelm’s intermittent support for Zionism, it follows the course of German-Mideast relations through two world wars and the rise of Adolf Hitler. As Steininger shows, the crimes of the Third Reich have inevitably shaped postwar German Mideast policy, with Germany emerging as one of Israel’s staunchest supporters while continuing to navigate the region’s complex international, religious, and energy politics.

Museums flourished in post-apartheid South Africa. In older museums, there were renovations on the go, and at least fifty new museums opened. Most sought to depict violence and suffering under apartheid and the growth of resistance. These unlikely journeys are tracked as museums became a primary setting for contesting histories. From the renowned Robben Island Museum to the almost unknown Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, the author demonstrates how an institution concerned with the conservation of the past is simultaneously a site for changing history.

Across the medieval and early modern eras, new rulers were celebrated with increasingly elaborate coronations and inaugurations that symbolically conferred legitimacy and political power upon them. Many historians have considered rituals like these as irrelevant to understanding modern governance—an idea that this volume challenges through illuminating case studies focused on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Habsburg lands. Taking the formal elasticity of these events as the key to their lasting relevance, the contributors explore important questions around their political, legal, social, and cultural significance and their curious persistence as a historical phenomenon over time.

During the division of Germany, law became the object of ideological conflicts and the means by which the two national governments conducted their battle over political legitimacy. Legal Entanglements explores how these dynamics produced competing concepts of statehood and sovereignty, all centered on citizens and their rights. Drawing on wide-ranging archival sources, including recently declassified documents, Sebastian Gehrig traces how politicians, diplomats, judges, lawyers, activists and intellectuals navigated the struggle between legal ideologies under the pressures of the Cold War and decolonization. As he shows, in their response to global debates over international law and human rights, their work kept the legal cultures of both German states entangled until 1989.

As in a number of France’s major cities, civil war erupted in Lyon in the summer of 1793, ultimately leading to a siege of the city and a wave of mass executions. Using Lyon as a lens for understanding the politics of revolutionary France, this book reveals the widespread enthusiasm for judicial change in Lyon at the time of the Revolution, as well as the conflicts that ensued between elected magistrates in the face of radical democratization. Julie Patricia Johnson’s investigation of these developments during the bloodiest years of the Revolution offers powerful insights into the passions and the struggles of ordinary people during an extraordinary time.

Though long associated with a small group of coffeehouse elites around the turn of the twentieth century, Viennese “modernist” culture had roots that reached much further back and beyond the rarefied sphere of high culture. In Comical Modernity, Heidi Hakkarainen looks at Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period of dramatic urban renewal during which the city’s rapidly changing face was a mainstay of humorous magazines, books, and other publications aimed at middle-class audiences. As she shows, humor provided a widely accessible means of negotiating an era of radical change.

In an era of rapidly increasing technological advances and international exchange, how did young people come to understand the world beyond their doorsteps? Focusing on Germany through the lens of the history of knowledge, this collection explores various media for children—from textbooks, adventure stories, and other literature to board games, museums, and cultural events—to probe what they aimed to teach young people about different cultures and world regions. These multifaceted contributions from specialists in historical, literary, and cultural studies delve into the ways that children absorbed, combined, and adapted notions of the world.

Located on the border of present-day Romania and Ukraine, the historical region of Bukovina was the site of widespread displacement and violence as it passed from Romanian to Soviet hands and back again during World War II. This study focuses on two groups of “Bukovinians”—ethnic Germans and German-speaking Jews—as they navigated dramatically changed political and social circumstances in and after 1945. Through comparisons of the narratives and self-conceptions of these groups, Resettlers and Survivors gives a nuanced account of how they dealt with the difficult legacies of World War II, while exploring Bukovina’s significance for them as both a geographical location and a “place of memory.”

In an era defined by daily polls, institutional rankings, and other forms of social quantification, it can be easy to forget that comparison has a long historical lineage. Presenting a range of multidisciplinary perspectives, this volume investigates the concepts and practices of comparison from the early modern period to the present. Each chapter demonstrates how comparison has helped to drive the seemingly irresistible dynamism of the modern world, exploring how comparatively minded assessors determine their units of analysis, the criteria they select or ignore, and just who it is that makes use of these comparisons—and to what ends.

Only in recent years has the history of European colonial concentration camps in Africa—in which thousands of prisoners died in appalling conditions—become widely known beyond a handful of specialists. Although they preceded the Third Reich by many decades, the camps’ newfound notoriety has led many to ask to what extent they anticipated the horrors of the Holocaust. Were they designed for mass killing, a misbegotten attempt at modernization, or something else entirely? A Sad Fiasco confronts this difficult question head-on, reconstructing the actions of colonial officials in both British South Africa and German South-West Africa as well as the experiences of internees to explore both the similarities and the divergences between the African camps and their Nazi-era successors.

Political leaders and the news media described the public-health catastrophe of COVID-19 as a crisis, while scholars and public intellectuals portrayed the pandemic as a debacle that would lay bare the inequities and contradictions of an increasingly neoliberal global political economy and usher in an era of progressive, transformative change. Bringing the anthropologies of disaster, epidemics, and crisis into conversation, A Revelatory Pandemic subjects these hopeful expectations of post-pandemic change to social-scientific scrutiny across Latin America and challenges popular and scholarly assumptions about the causes and outcomes of crisis.

Across Europe, racialised groups and other minorities are often subject to discriminatory policies and practices. Facing Discrimination offers insight into the dynamics of religious beliefs and practices among those who are discriminated against, showing how religion as a source of agency interacts with processes of marginalization. Six micro-level studies from Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands examine stigmatised groups and individuals, analysing how religious involvement in its multiple forms and interpretations, affects the capacity to respond to exclusion and shape the acceptance or rejection of imposed categories.