Berghahn Books

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.

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 human remains 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 human remains, Investigating Online Heritage Crime conducts an exacting examination of these relatively under-researched "sites" of heritage crime, revealing how this underground world operates within the wider social media ecosystem of platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Through doing so, this volume illuminates how developments in AI and LLM (Large Language Model) usage are profoundly reshaping the global online trafficking marketplace, and how public policy can best adapt to this change.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

Informed by over two decades of anthropological research in Chhattisgarh, Education, Aspiration and Social Mobility brings ethnographic nuance to the contradictory ways in which education represents both a strategy for social mobility and a very tangible risk, whose transformative potential is not as straightforward as proponents suggest. This book examines the relationship between education, aspiration and social mobility amongst marginalized Adivasi (tribal) youth in rural India and how young people navigate the tensions and uncertainty that emanate from this contradiction – fashioning their own meanings and understandings of education against a backdrop of structural constraints and a future in flux.

On Malaita in Solomon Islands, an evangelical Israelite-inspired movement centers on a distinctive time-consciousness that reads the historical past and present as prophetic signs of an imminent future. This book examines how these ‘prophetic histories’ interweave biblical narrative, theological reflection, local accounts, kastom practice, spiritual journeys and Old-Testament political theory. Michael Maeliau, the movement’s foremost leader, casts the resulting stories as divine messages. His theological reasoning transcends time, space, hierarchy and surface identity, to uncover the true essence of Malaita and establish a theocracy on the island. At the movement’s core lies a prophetic order that integrates events, scripture and kastom while foregrounding the agency of God and divine revelations.

An updated review of post-contact archaeology in the Upper Great Lakes region was long overdue. In this comprehensive reassessment of recent and ongoing developments in the field, Post-Contact Archaeology of Michigan and the Upper Great Lakes Region examines the breadth and diversity of the area’s archaeological sites, highlighting the discoveries that are reshaping our understanding of post-contact archaeology. Gathering case studies that range from terrestrial and underwater cultural sites, to the period of the earliest European settlement to the present day, this volume spotlights how deeply interconnected excavation of the past, and current social justice initiatives are.

The twin effects of ever-increasing mobility and rising globalization have done much to dislodge formerly stable social relations and our sense of time and place. In this exacting and geographically wide-ranging reassessment of the overlap between borders and heritage, Ali Mozaffari and David C. Harvey interrogate how this “hyperglobalization” has simultaneously challenged and intensified notions of sovereignty and nationality. Ranging from the impact of empathy in border-heritage work, to the Europeanization of war heritage narratives and border-heritage complexes in the Middle East, this volume illuminates the methodological implications of viewing heritage as both an engagement with the borders of the past and an activity that continually creates them. 

Within the Habsburg Empire of the late nineteenth century, nature became a central focus of political, economic, and scientific attention. A source of valuable natural resources and a platform for consolidating wider, territorial rule, its management and control was subsumed into a broader system of imperial governance. In this exacting analysis of the correlation between the environment and power, Habsburg Natures explores how the natural world fundamentally shaped the political and economic landscape within the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1850 to 1918. Ranging from forestry and coal-mining to river politics and natural disasters, this volume spotlights how deeply intertwined the histories of environmentalism and empire are.

Revived by the global resonance of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, this book adds to the current discussion on the idea of decolonizing Europe. Drawing inspiration from the study of colonialism, postcolonialism and the imperative to decolonize knowledge and practice, the editors bring together a group of scholars approaching these issues through ethnographic inquiry. The volume explores how race, colonial legacies and structural inequality are addressed across diverse European contexts – north, central, eastern and southern – as well as in their entanglements with regions beyond Europe. It offers critical, grounded insights into the possibilities and challenges of decolonial thinking today.

Up to 200,000 Melanesian men, women, and children work as artisanal miners, yet their lifeworlds are seriously under-researched. This ethnography of a multigenerational community of migrant miners in Papua New Guinea shows that dreaming mediates how they experience and manage gold mining. Men argue that they alone can mine successfully by forming oneiric marriage bonds with the spirits of the land. Women draw on their own dream experience to challenge this, asserting their equal capacity to marry spirits and their right to mine. For women and men alike, dreams provide legitimations of agency and commentaries on mutual dependencies and moral obligations in the domestic domain and between humans and nonhumans.

Shaped by the criminalization of migration and control over movement, the Balkan Route has emerged as a key site of border violence and migrant resistance along the southeastern edges of the European Union. Keywords of the Balkan Route explores the vocabularies structuring this regime by tracing the meanings, overlaps, and tensions of terms such as Autonomy, Route, Waiting, Game, and Solidarity. Featuring contributors from Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia, the volume draws on ethnographic research and interdisciplinary approaches to examine restricted mobilities and border struggles through critically engaged perspectives and experimental analytical formats.

Focused on social change in a coastal village in Sri Lanka, this book emphasizes processes over structures, based on the fundamental premise that society is defined by change rather than stasis. In the village, change emerged as a response to broader economic and political forces, yet the people were far from passive victims of these external influences. Instead, they actively engaged with shifting circumstances, seizing new opportunities as they arose. Change was generally perceived in a positive light, reflecting the community’s resilience and adaptability.

We live in a time of profound transformation in the field of image and visual culture. Roger Canals redefines visual anthropology from both a theoretical and practical perspective, drawing on numerous examples from everyday life as well as insights from his own films and research. This book explores the relationship between images and anthropology, offering a deeper understanding of how visual culture shapes our world. It addresses how anthropology can help us reflect on the role of images in daily life and reconsider classic anthropological themes—ritual, kinship, and power—through the lens of contemporary visuality.

Lasting traces of the Cold War continue to shape the social landscape in Italy and Greece. Lurking Cold War critiques the connections between global categories and individual experiences, foregrounding Cold War resonances through materiality, imagination, speculation, and affect – in literature, bureaucracy, and the family. Introducing a theory of methexi, it explores how people and history are brought into communion, blurring the boundaries between the known and unknown, reality and imagination, form and interpretation. The result is an articulation of history that not only reveals the ongoing presence of the Cold War but shows how and why it still matters today.

In the fields of literary and memory studies, the cultural impact of the Bosnian War of 1992-1995 appears—despite the scale of devastation—somewhat minimal. Reading War, Making Memory focuses on how authors from the diaspora of the former Yugoslavia have transmitted and translated the realities of the war in their fiction, illuminating how these texts interpolate the culture and memory of Bosnia-Herzegovina into an act of “mnemonic migration.” Drawing from close readings, studies of public reception, and focus group interviews, this volume explores the attempt to reshape social frameworks of memory, and the wider reception and impact of memory-making literature across Europe.

The artistic potential modern, urban housing (“Neubau”) offered to writers and directors in East Germany from the 1960s to 1980s remains underexplored. Neubau Atmospheres seeks to bridge that gap by providing an incisive analysis of East German cinematic, literary, and architectural case studies, highlighting how the modernist housing of the GDR provided a potent vehicle for mediating the emotional and social experience of its denizens. Considering how these cinematic and literary representations focalized ideas of class, gender, and age, author Stephan Ehrig makes a compelling case for viewing this engagement with the urban environment as a cultural genre in its own right.

The concept of transition occupies an awkward place within scholarship on contemporary European history. Seemingly unable to decipher the complex factors shaping the processes of democratization, it risks appearing redundant as a framework for understanding recent and on-going political developments. In European Perspectives on Transition, Pablo Sánchez León and Agustín Cosovschi prove otherwise, offering a pioneering and much-needed conceptual history of transition from a comparative perspective. Bringing together eight case studies on transitional discourse, ranging from the so-called Third Wave of Southern Europe in the 1970s to the regime changes in Central and Eastern Europe, this volume models a vital new way for studying temporality and transition within Europe.

Reconciling Sweden’s reputation for political neutrality and scientific prestige alongside its involvement in extractivist colonial projects exposes uncomfortable overlaps between these seemingly disparate ventures. In this illuminating reappraisal of the intersections between Swedish colonialism and its industrial history, Neutrality’s Empire explores how Swedish actors—ranging from diplomats and business leaders to missionaries, geologists and engineers—leveraged Sweden’s global standing to access valuable mineral resources across Africa and Asia. In doing so, this book presents a historical narrative which clarifies Sweden’s entanglement with the forces of globalization, colonialism, and climate change.

The relationship between texts and the field of cultural heritage remains ill-defined. Although scholarship has long recognized the importance of textual practices in mediating cultural identity and memory, the emphasis heritage studies places on authentic, material traces downplays the unique impact of their creative transmission and appropriation. Focusing on the afterlives of written artifacts and the re-use of their textual contents, primarily within East Asia, Textual Heritage highlights how textual practices offer a lens for understanding questions of canonization, embodiment, and circulation. Through case studies ranging from Japanese court music to Japanese linked verse, this volume advances a theory of “humanistic heritage studies” that better understands the overlap between literary and heritage studies.

In this innovative analysis of German elementary education, Katharine Kennedy uses textbooks, curricula, and pedagogical texts to trace continuities and changes in the lessons taught in the elementary schools of Wilhelmine, Weimar, and Nazi Germany. Children in all three periods were exposed to recurring texts that reinforced attachment to God, region, and fatherland. However, they also encountered evolving symbols of the nation and shifting ideas about the identity of Germany and the German people. By blending lessons on Hitler, race, and heredity with traditional narratives, Nazi education conveyed its ideology under the cloak of virtue, patriotism, and normality. It provides a compelling example of how a dictatorship manipulates religion and tradition to legitimize a brutal, lawless, and racist regime.

Between May and July 1944, over 440,000 Jews were deported from the Hungarian provinces to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where 330,000 perished. Gendarmes, Bureaucrats, and Jews offers a fresh perspective on these events, examining not only the Nazi regime but also the complicity of the Hungarian state, particularly its Gendarmerie, in facilitating these deportations. This book presents for the first time in English the essential, unabridged, primary sources on the concentration, ghettoization, and deportation of Hungarian Jews. Of particular significance are progress reports of Gendarmerie Lieutenant Colonel László Ferenczy, Hungary’s liaison to Adolf Eichmann, and the previously unpublished reports from two cities, Ungvár and Szolnok. These documents provide crucial insight into one of the darkest chapters in European history, making this book a much-needed chronicle of the Holocaust.

Often home to rural, indigenous communities, mountain regions are rapidly becoming preserves for the social elite, and altogether unsustainable within the climate crisis. Bringing together scholars from geography, sociology, anthropology, history, and urban studies, Mountainscapes seeks to re-examine the dynamics of mountain mobilities and better understand how tourism, migration, and pastoralism impacts mountain communities. Ranging from the Swiss Alps to the Chilean Andes, this volume illuminates how the processes of place-making and non-belonging specifically manifest and evolve within our ever-changing mountain regions.

A hundred years after his death, the life and legacy of the Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad remains deeply felt in a wide range of global cultural contexts. The Resonance of Joseph Conrad in Contemporary Culture brings together scholars of wide-ranging backgrounds to provide a holistic assessment of the afterlife of Conrad’s work. Ranging from Conrad’s influence upon contemporary writers, to the impact of his translators and his adaptation within film and graphic novels, this volume illuminates how Conrad’s approach to questions of moral ambiguity and the haunting complexities of colonialism continues to inform the cultural output of our modern, globalized world.

In this exacting assessment of the bounty policies enacted against the Tasmanian Tiger and the Newfoundland Wolf, Animal Genocide and its Aftermath provides a much-needed reappraisal of the legal, political, and social definition of animal killing. Analyzing natural history collections and cultural representations, this book advances a compelling case for viewing the bounty schemes as a form of genocide that requires its own historical reckoning. Ethical issues regarding the evocation of animal genocide in film, literature, photography and museum exhibitions are also explored.

Latina was founded in 1932 by the Fascist Regime and is often described by its inhabitants through its absences, as a place where there is ‘nothing’. The book examines the role of absence in place-making and delves into the lived experience of Latina. Through the analytical lens of haunting, this work explores its inhabitants’ efforts to see their city as a meaningful social space, as they navigate the city’s multiple histories and the absent presence of the contested past.

Ibn Khaldun’s theory of dynastic history, economics, and group cohesion has drawn attention far beyond his North African home. He holds a unique place in the Western imagination, cited by figures as diverse as Mark Zuckerberg and President Ronald Reagan. His holistic, functionalist approach foreshadowed the development of modern social science. Whether analyzing kin-based solidarity, the role of religion in communal life, or the interplay between the universal and the particular, his emphasis on direct observation and cultural interpretation makes him a vital progenitor to contemporary anthropology.

Governance processes often fail to integrate Indigenous perspectives or address issues such as sovereignty, self-determination, and decolonization, making successful policy outcomes difficult to achieve. It is vital for Indigenous and non-Indigenous governments to collaborate in producing sustainable, mutually beneficial outcomes. This volume highlights the importance of authentic Indigenous inclusion in governance processes at national and subnational levels worldwide. Through case studies and best-practice models, it examines the opportunities and barriers Indigenous Peoples face in collaborative governance. In doing so, it offers recommendations for practice and policy that promote social equity.

From winemaking in occupied territories to fishing in polluted seas, home cooking in refugee communities, and vegan cheese-making, this collection explores the complex ways taste and place intersect with political, ecological, social, and economic issues. Through diverse ethnographic case studies, leading food scholars examine the meaning and making of place and taste. In doing so, the book challenges unsettling terroir-inspired notions of a fixed taste of place and pushes the boundaries of what we think we know about their connections.

Despite his significance, the role of Austrian politician Bruno Kreisky remains under-represented in Anglo-American Cold War scholarship. Serving as foreign minister from 1959 to 1966 and chancellor from 1970 to 1983, his political career oversaw seismic developments in both Austria’s postwar recovery and broader international relations with the Middle East, the Communist Bloc, and the United States. In this enlightening and geographically wide-ranging reappraisal of his life and legacy, Bruno Kreisky’s Foreign Policy: A Reassessment seeks to reinstate the global repercussions of Kreisky’s work. Ranging from his involvement in the Marshall Plan to his role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, this volume highlights how Kreisky profoundly reshaped the geopolitical landscape of the modern era.

Monasteries are typically characterized by physical and symbolic limitations on access as they are usually known through written texts and accounts by nuns who live in that world but do not allow others to have access. This has often resulted in research based on indirect sources. This volume is the result of observant participation in which the ethnographer is a protagonist social actor in two French monasteries of Discalced Carmelite nuns. The author experiences and narrates details of their everyday life that usually remain unseen but contribute to shaping community-building processes and, at the same time, construe the religious woman.

Anthropology and psychology share a long history of rivalry, collaboration, and mutual disregard. This volume reconsiders psychology as a field of anthropological enquiry. In doing so, it takes an ethnographic approach to psychology, examining psychotherapeutic practices and models of mental health at the heart of ‘psy’. Featuring ethnographic studies of psychological therapies, subjects, and professionals, the book also suggests what an anthropological voice can offer to improve psychological healthcare. At the cutting edge of ethnographic research, this book brings together studies from the Global North and Global South, showing how psychological realities shape our understandings of what it means to be human.

Known for its anarchist and leftist movements, its uprisings and its vibrant counterculture, Exarcheia has long been a symbol of resistance and political activism in Greece. Through the voices and experiences of those who live, work and move through Exarcheia, this book delves into Athens’ most contested neighbourhood – both its visible, striking elements and the unseen, elusive forces that linger in whispers, silences and memories. It unravels the tensions and contradictions of a place where beauty and resistance, decay and resilience are coexistent. Rather than reinforcing or dismissing its clichés and stereotypes, this exploration reveals the layered histories and political narratives that shape Exarcheia’s past, present and future.

For centuries, locals in many Swiss Alpine villages have depended on visitors’ wanderlust to sustain their livelihoods. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a German-speaking village and tourist resort between 2017 and 2023, this book explores people’s everyday experience of tourism as a volatile yet vital industry, where successes and failures in the past, present and future intersect in puzzling ways. Following ‘native’ locals, migrant hospitality workers from (mostly) Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as tourism lobbyists in this globalized mountain village, it examines how power imbalance among those dependent on tourism elicit different responses to the dilemmas of tourism.

The function of ethnic studies education in K-12 schools remains a deeply contentious issue within the U.S. Often based on university ethnic studies courses, its focus on the lived experiences of Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian/Pacific Islander communities is predictably the target of much conservative commentary, leaving its disregard for the lives of American Jews underexplored. Focusing on how this absence correlates with the rising spate of antisemitism within the U.S., Jewish Inclusion in Ethnic Studies Education provides a clarifying re-examination of the current issues and oversights affecting ethnic studies teaching. In doing so, Daniel Ian Rubin illuminates the possibilities a reformed ethnic studies program offers for eliminating antisemitism among the next generation.

On a temporary visit to London, a Palestinian family found themselves unable to return to Gaza during Israel’s 2008 war on their city. Understanding their stay in London as an act of ‘anchoring’, the family opened a Palestinian café and sought to make their lives – as individuals, as a family and as a community – viable in the face of uncertainty. By following the stories of various family members as they struggled to recreate a sense of home, this moving ethnography introduces the concept of anchorage as a novel lens to understand migration, home and place, highlighting the fluidity, temporariness and serendipity of these experiences.

Since its inception about a century ago, the anthropology of Europe has transitioned from studies of settled communities, shaped by fieldwork traditions elsewhere, to a focus on more mobile and virtual communities. This book provides a partial retrospective on the field, offering a rich collection of ethnographic summaries from across the continent. It will be of interest to students and academics seeking a survey of this branch of anthropology, whether for private study or university courses.

Following the fallout of the 2008 recession in the Republic of Ireland, its creative economy is framed as a window onto a range of other shifts in contemporary Irish society, including the recent rise of Irish nationalism. This book follows a group of young activists and artists who were facing increasingly precarious housing and labour market and were involved in a range of activist campaigns – particularly for reproductive rights and social and affordable housing, critiquing what they referred to as ‘neoliberalism’.

Anthropology in Australia has been both celebrated and contested, particularly in its engagements with Indigenous people. This book delves into senses of place and belonging across diverse sectors of society with a particular focus on the intimacies and tensions of engagements with Indigenous Australia. It examines the politics of anthropology, the sensitivities of cross-cultural understanding, and the challenges posed by rising Indigenous activism. David Trigger reflects on a career committed to cultural relativism while grappling with inherited values and beliefs. The book's conclusion addresses what “shared country” in the context of “different stories” can mean for the future.

Advancing contemporary scholarly debates on the role of home in understanding displacement and emplacement, A Long Journey Home explores powerful personal narratives from Colombia. The book examines the experiences of those whose sense of home has been disrupted by decades of conflict and violence. It highlights the profound feelings of loss and the enduring struggle of living without a home – an experience that can last for years or even decades. Through these stories, the book reveals how internally displaced people use creativity and imagination to remake their home while on the move.

The legacy of the German General, Otto Liman von Sanders, remains highly contested in the history of twentieth-century Europe and the Middle East. Noted for leading the 5^th Ottoman army’s successful defence of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli in 1915, his role in opposing the Young Turks’ genocide policy and safeguarding Greeks, Armenians, and Jews is overshadowed by his imprisonment for war crimes in 1919. In this enlightening reassessment of Liman von Sanders’ life, Muriel Mirak-Weissbach uses previously-unpublished archival materials to uncover new dimensions to this story and, in doing so, explores wider ethical questions concerning the role of the individual in global crises, the nature of morality in military conflict, and the limitations of justice.

Ranging from Boko Haram to the war in the Central African Republic, insecurity forms a major factor among societies in the Lake Chad Basin (Cameroon, Central African Republic, Niger, Nigeria, Chad). Marred by conflict and violence, these territories are difficult to access and not well-known, so they tend to be out of reach for scholarly study and development programs. The long-term and in-depth field studies that this volume presents offer a window on conflict analysis based on insights into local dynamics and the lived world of the people themselves.

As a tool of globalized mobility, the car provides a useful barometer for charting the global development of socio-cultural, economic, technical, and political modernization. Shaped by prevailing gender and racial norms and popularized by a Western-driven car culture, it is a commodity whose access and use embodies wider inequalities. In this comprehensive world history of (auto)mobility, Gijs Mom draws upon his extensive research into the field to assess the past and present of road cultures, and hypothesize their future. Ranging from the impact of climate change to decolonization, this volume spotlights how profoundly ‘automobilism’ impacts our sense of identity and imagination.

Historical consensus is largely unanimous in viewing the German nobility under the Weimar Republic as completely enthralled by fascism. In this enlightening chronicle of General Kurt von Hammerstein and his family, Hammerstein’s Daughters provides an important counter example to this paradigm. A staunch opponent of Hitler and his policies, Kurt von Hammerstein’s daughters, Marie Louise, Maria Therese, and Helga, notably renounced their status and privileges, enabling resistance to the Nazi regime through their support of persecuted Jews and the KPD intelligence service. By documenting the heroic efforts of these overlooked women, Gottfried Paasche offers a fascinating view of his family’s personal history which spotlights an alternative story of tradition, resistance, adaptation, and rebellion under National Socialism.

Historical lessons are useful or even necessary for our guidance and orientation in time. These lessons, however, have often been overlooked in historical reflections on watershed moments, such as genocides, treaties, and global movements. Focusing on how cataclysmic events, primarily within Central and Eastern Europe, have been transmitted across borders and generations, this volume interrogates how the theory of historical lessons has evolved, ultimately providing a useful framework for understanding contemporary conflicts and issues. Spanning topics from the mediation of history within film to the influence of historical oppression on student activism, this volume re-evaluates historiography’s potential for analyzing the past and engaging with the present.

Sex selective abortions are unjust, unethical and illegal in India, yet the experience of motherhood for pregnant women can be influenced by ‘son preference’ from those who support female feticide. Women are denied agency in exercising reproductive rights and the medical fraternity often fosters the misuse of technologies for sex selective abortions 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, their partner s and mothers-in-law in three Indian states.

Cosmology or cosmological ideas are often sought to solve problems in our daily lives. This book aims to rethink the topic of cosmology in anthropology through an ethnographic description of the many entanglements of cosmological ideas and the personal and political lives of individuals within the K’iche’ Maya community of Momostenango, Guatemala. It addresses the question of why they turn to cosmology in an everyday context and how it is powerful and efficient for them. It also shows the way Indigenous cosmological ideas are echoed by contemporary philosophical and scientific conceptions.

The relationship between storytelling, neurodiversity, and memory remains critically overlooked. While scholarship recognizes the presence of neurodiverse thinking in popular folktales, and access to works by autistic people is growing, the opportunity neurodiverse storytelling offers to reshape communication and remembrance is largely neglected. Autistic Dreaming illuminates how the integration of neurodivergent perspectives can expand ideas of polysensory memory and the connection between human and more-than-human memory. Focusing on autistic activists’ blogs, memoirs, artworks and films, this study spotlights a neuroqueer method of remembering that reforges links between the present and the past, and the individual and collective.

Since the beginning of human history, stories have helped people make sense of their lives and their world. Today, an understanding of storytelling is invaluable as we seek to orient ourselves within a flood of raw information and an unprecedented variety of supposedly true accounts. In Stories Make the World, award-winning screenwriter Stephen Most offers a captivating, refreshingly heartfelt exploration of how documentary filmmakers and other storytellers come to understand their subjects and cast light on the world through their art. Drawing on the author’s decades of experience behind the scenes of television and film documentaries, this is an indispensable account of the principles and paradoxes that attend the quest to represent reality truthfully.

Belfast is often analysed as a divided society, anchored in ethno-politico-religious differences amid a long history of conflict. However, shifting the focus of academic attention reveals a range of alternative narratives of city life. Using storytelling as a leitmotif, this ethnographic account explores the epistemological validity of engaging with strangers in a range of settings, such as street corners, a hairdresser’s and a storytelling evening. It considers how creative writers represent life in Belfast. The author employs a variety of methods, including a dog as a research assistant and storytelling on location which demonstrates how people can re-shape and re-narrate life in Belfast.

Offering the first comprehensive historiographic exploration of women’s roles in the Zionist movement worldwide, this geographically wide-ranging study explores the ideologies, goals, strategies, activities, accomplishments and failures of women’s organizations and individuals in Europe, the United States, Latin America, the Middle East, and North Africa. Covering the period from the inception of Zionism to the founding of Israel, this volume sheds light on how women’s unique mode of Zionism differed from that of men and how it influenced the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine, in Israel, and the Zionist movement as a whole.

Juǀ’hoansi have occupied the Kalahari Desert in Namibia, Africa for at least 35,000 years and possess the oldest human DNA. Their traditional educational practices are the oldest curricula human beings have. Juǀ’hoan collective decision-making processes epitomize direct, participatory democracy: one person/one vote, enhanced by in-depth negotiations that lead to consensus. These practices are the basis for their education and culture. For Juǀ’hoansi, child autonomy is paramount and for democracy to thrive, children require independence to make decisions through play-exploration to experience multiple possible outcomes. This book explores how this egalitarian culture became the foundation of an enduring democracy.

Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge genocide claimed an estimated 1.7 million lives. Survivors faced starvation, torture, and dangerous journeys through mountainous and mine-filled jungles. Upon arriving at refugee camps, they faced uncertainty and hardship before eventually moving to the USA where they struggled to adapt to urban life. This book tells the survival stories of seven Cambodians who endured the Khmer Rouge Genocide, their escape to Thailand, and their difficult resettlement in the United States. It is a collection of first-person oral histories, supplemented by images of documents and photographs, highlighting journeys of resilience, survival, and adaptation amidst profound trauma.

Within France, the expression “duty of memory” (le devoir de mémoire)speaks to a complex and ever-evolving relationship with the past. Emerging in the 1970s, this term raised questions about memorialization which dominated public debates in the 1990s, highlighting France’s entanglements with colonialism and the Holocaust. Drawing on a variety of interviews, archival sources, and data surveys, author Sébastien Ledoux spotlights how the trajectory of this term offers a lens for understanding contemporary societies’ relationship with the past on a global scale.

The role played by film in reshaping Austria’s post-war national identity is often studied within narrow historical and geographical margins. Film history traditionally focuses on either the work of a sole director, German cinematography, or the immediate aftermath of World War II, and neglects the link that exists between historical television films and Austria’s distinct culture of remembrance. In Austria’s Difficult Past, Jakub Gortat addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of television films produced by Austrian (ORF) and German television studios between 1961 and 1980. In doing so, he explores the way films mediated the burden of memory and the legacy of Austria’s complicity in the Nazi regime.

Politics and power are understood as interconnected yet opposed forms of agency that do not exist without each other and depend on transgressions and the upholding of social boundaries. Language and Political Subjectivity is an ethnographic and historical piece of research that considers how Indigenous and diasporic communities, with their political subjectivities, expand over significant sociohistorical changes, debates, and struggles in the transformation of Chilean democracy and Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. It offers an innovative approach to stancemaking as a rhetorical semiotic process that produces truth, beliefs, and certainties about social realities and relations.

Marcus Banks was one of the scholars who changed the way visual anthropology and visual methods were regarded in social and cultural anthropology. This collection of Banks’ essays considers the role of collaboration in the making of ethnographic films and makes the case for slow research. It discusses the meaning of anthropological research in film archives and illustrates how to analyse a wide range of visual material like maps, diagrams and enigmatic photographs. It situates Banks' work in contemporary visual anthropology and Howard Morphy’s Afterword explores how Banks’ work helped illuminate his own collaboration with the filmmaker Ian Dunlop in aboriginal Australia.

Synthesizing critical perspectives on the impact of disasters in regard to social inequality, this book brings together key insights from political ecology and historical materialism. Querying assumptions about the “normal” conditions of life, it examines the exploitative structures and practices that shape everyday life using theoretical approaches including Rhythmanalysis, Metabolic Rift Theory, and Conjunctural Analysis . It argues that disasters are intimately linked to historical processes that foster contemporary unequal relationships, and should therefore include both those commonly associated with nature as well as those we consider facets of history and social conflict, such as war and destitution.

The discovery and development of metals as tool media is a topic of global interest. This phenomenon is generally associated with sedentary, agricultural societies; however, in North America metal use by hunter-gatherer populations began as early as 9,000 years ago and continued into modern times. The regional and cultural diversity of research in this volume contributes to how we conceptualize hunter-gatherer innovation, technological proficiency, and complex decision-making in the past. Readers are challenged to reconsider long-held assumptions about how, when, and under what conditions metal became a part of humanity’s story.

There are ongoing efforts in anthropology to decolonise its history and give fairer space to marginalised traditions. This book examines the history and institutionalisation of anthropology in the Maghreb, the Mashreq and the Gulf, in an open and collaborative manner and from various perspectives. Its primary focus is two-fold: first, to reorient the anthropological focus towards studies conducted in the region, particularly on the conditions conducive to the institutionalisation of anthropological knowledge; second, to shed light on anthropological studies in languages other than English. offering different theoretical and epistemological perspectives.

This collection marks the EASA Book Series’ 50th volume and celebrates collaborative forms of knowledge production in anthropology. It is organized around eight key themes and concepts that have marked anthropological debates in Europe over the past 20 years. Featuring engaging contributions, anthropologists from different generations and backgrounds come together to collaboratively reflect on questions that keep recurring throughout the book series. As a tribute to anthropology in and of Europe, the book is an experiment in collaboration as much as a testament to anthropology’s vitality and relevance in a world which sees itself confronted by challenges of planetary dimension.