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.

Drawing on extensive archival records, Business as Usual shows how the legal system in Germany continued to operate with the same personnel, administrative routines, and institutional habits between 1943 and 1948, despite violence, mass murder, bombings, and regime change. This strict adherence to legal formalism acted as a “normalization machine” for mass atrocities, facilitating the compromised but seamless transition into the post-war administration. By tracing everyday judicial work in extraordinary circumstances, it reveals how legal institutions endure, adapt, and serve an inestimable purpose even in moments of profound upheaval. Moreover, only within the framework of the normal, ordinary law could the ideological exception of Nazi law unfold. In other words: besides the banality of evil, there is also evilness in banality.

Through vivid case studies set in diverse historical and social contexts, Tobias Hof traces the global evolution of right-wing terrorism across time and continents – spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the present day – revealing how terrorist movements have transformed, adapted, and connected through transnational networks. Exploring their shifting ideologies, motivations, and inner workings, he uncovers the uneasy ties between terrorist groups, conservative elites, and state security forces. Both sweeping in scope and rich in detail, he offers readers an unprecedented understanding of the deep historical roots and enduring dynamics of right-wing terrorism.

Linking contemporary concerns about democratic fragility with historical analysis, this volume examines the crisis and failure of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe during the interwar period from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. The contributions explore political culture, constitutional traditions, religion, violence, and crisis discourse in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Rather than focusing narrowly on institutional breakdown, the authors emphasize long-term cultural legacies, narratives of crisis, and exclusionary identities that undermined democratic pluralism. Interwar Europe functioned as a laboratory of democracy whose experiences offer critical insights into the challenges facing liberal democracies today.

Terrorism in Question crafts a political anthropology of post-9/11 “new terrorism” by investigating who needs the category of terrorists and offering a global framework to understand anthropology, Islam and terrorism. In contrast to their depiction as antimodern, barbarian and fanatic, this study theorizes “Muslim terrorists” as radical friends of equality and visionaries of an unrecognized ethical politics. Marshalling fieldwork with media practitioners and refugees, participant observation of counterterrorism conferences in India and Oslo, and encounters with terrorists, it reorients anthropology to elevate its public voice. This book shows how fieldwork, poetry and political theory come together to exemplify decolonized knowledge.

The views of space and place of people living in the Caribbean are different from Northern folk; Inequality is bound to socially constructed traits like race, gender, class, sexual orientation and other aspects of discrimination. Through interconnected perspectives on environment, gender inequality, identity and Caribbean spatial re-colonisation influences on social, cultural and environmental landscapes, The Inequity of Caribbean Spaces and Designed Places: Race, Class and Gender examines socio-spatial (in)justices beyond physical and geographical boundaries that Caribbean societies face.

Through ethnographic research conducted among landfill workers and waste pickers, Europe’s Disappearing Waste explores the inner workings of the Czech waste management system that is underpinned by the belief that waste should disappear. Waste streams give rise to underflows that provide opportunities for those who refuse to be passive witnesses of disposal and loss of value. The normative assumptions about market-based solutions and techno-optimism in waste management are called into question, directing attention to the commitment to salvage that provides an alternative way of relating to waste.

Cesare Lombroso is considered the founder of criminology with his theory distinguishing criminals from noncriminal by physical oddities. This book argues that the study of ethnography in Latin America should give more attention to the Lombroso school and the academic exchange between relatively marginal national anthropologies, such as the Italian and Latin American schools. From racial ideas in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century to Lombroso’s voyages to South America and his legacy after his passing, Cesare Lombroso in Latin America is presented through an anthropologist’s eye through interpretation of many explored and unexplored historical documents.

The Middle East currently dominates the news, often with misleading stories that cast local people as terrorists or oppressed. In Search of Worldviews argues that in-depth anthropological studies are the best data-driven way to provide accurate information from local perspectives on everyday topics such as women’s roles, why Islam is overtaking other major religions, why democracy has difficulty taking hold, how minorities cope, and formal and informal methods of conflict resolution. It also helps us understand ourselves better when we know how other cultures address the same human problems. Using anthropological techniques such as participant observations, historic document research, and institutional analysis, each chapter of this book poses an important question about the Middle East with a focus on local perspectives.

With over 3 billion individuals that play video games worldwide, gamers consume immense amounts of data about the digital worlds they explore. Archaeogaming as Scholarly Play encourages readers to step into the intersection of archaeology and video games to critically examine how these games (re)present the past and those associated with exhuming it, should they be archaeologists or adventurers. In doing so, this volume suggests alternative approaches to archaeological pedagogy and provides new narratives in theoretical discourse.

High-speed trains are an icon of the green revolution in transport and mobility. For more than thirty years, AVE (Alta Velocidad Española, or Spanish HSR (High Speed Rail)) has been an instrument for transforming the public railway company, reshaping labor relations and advancing a model of regional development; yet Spain remains a car-dominated society. Frontiers of Appropriation delves into the history of Europe’s most advanced high-speed rail system to assess the transformations it has brought about. The towering yet marginal position of AVE in the Spanish transport market is not a paradox but an expression of the role of HSR in consolidating the hegemonic mobility paradigm.

Offering an interdisciplinary approach to conceptual history, Concepts of Culture broadens its scope through a series of experimental case studies in ‘applied conceptual history’. Bringing together Contributors from a variety of disciplines—including art history, comparative literature, cultural studies, German studies, and history— it offers a range of theoretically reflected applications of conceptual history that focus on the cultural concepts, and thereby contribute to the methodological development of these particular fields of research.

The idea of culture has become a creative framework in Marshall Islanders’ quest to realise a community based on communality, meaningful work, and self-reliance. These values are consciously pitted against selfishness, wage-labour, and money dependency, which are values commonly deemed to belong to the realm of “the economy”. Culturing Money analyses what sort of conceptual and practical work that the dialectics of culture and economy can do for Marshall Islanders in their quest for a meaningful life where self-reliance is the ultimate goal.

The history of timekeeping has always involved choosing or converting between various ways of representing time, a phenomenon called time pluralism. The Unsettled Clock: The Persistence of Time Pluralism explores time pluralism by documenting historical cases and examining its persistence in present. Drawing examples from medieval York, the Habsburg empire of early modern Europe, Renaissance astronomy, legal time in the US and UK before time zones were adopted, and the persistence of time pluralism in current atomic time metrology, this analysis offers a political and historical look into how timekeeping has been shaped, challenged, and manipulated.

Competition often appears to typify capitalist social life as a process that defines relative value and pits people against one another. But capitalism is not all there is to competition. In ethnographic perspective, the outcomes of competition depend on always varied, shifting and contested interpretations of what is worth competing for and how to do so. Hence, even when competition is imaged to engineer pre-defined changes or institute particular social orders, in practice its effects are often complex and unexpected. This book explores how competition is an unruly dynamic that generates unforeseen possibilities for human connection and mediates divergent social orders, rather than imposing one or another.

Archaeological literature has often placed the role of crafting within discourses of craft specialization, anchoring it to questions related to sociopolitical complexity, which linked political processes with productive organization. This book invites us to think differently and discuss crafting as a way of making, knowing, and being in the world. Through utilizing examples from various time periods and across global landscapes, it reimagines questions of being and belonging, and other affective modalities related to how we articulate meaning, in text, image or speech. Importantly, the book considers what it means to make, as a way to produce knowledge about the worlds we inhabit.

Told through the voices of twenty European Jews who survived the Holocaust, The Hunted presents a micro historical account of persecution and survival under Nazi rule. Drawing on diaries and memoirs, it reconstructs a multiplicity of experiences across national, social, and religious contexts, examining how individual decisions were shaped by family networks, local conditions, and shifting policies. Each chapter traces a single year in the lives of the protagonists, situating their choices within the evolving administrative and legal framework of Nazi persecution. Author-drawn maps place individuals in their evolving landscapes—showing the escape routes they attempted, the barriers they met, and the ghettos, camps, and killing sites they endured. By weaving together meticulously researched historical context and personal testimony, The Hunted offers a vivid human portrait of survival amid one of history’s darkest chapters.

The historical emergence of centralised mineral resource governance in Ghana can be tied to its failed colonially transplanted legal system. This book offers a sobering reflection of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) formalisation, with a focus on its complex operationalisation in formerly colonized societies. Through its thought-provoking analysis, engagement with the archives and emphasis on knowledge co-production, the study crucially examines how sustainability is engendered in indigenous, small-scale mining operations. Its reliance on decolonial legal pluralism and indigenous philosophy seeks to ignite meaningful conversations which are grounded in environmental responsibility, transparency and accountability in the administration of access to mineral rights.

Syrians living in refuge in Lebanon and Turkey during the war in Syria continued to reckon with the Syrian State as a direct and indirect force in their lives. Through an ethnographic account of everyday life in Syrian families with a variety of political standpoints, this book demonstrates how the experience of displacement was shaped by ongoing deliberations on the ways in which the Syrian State had and continued to intersect people’s lives. It provides new perspectives on the co-constitution of authoritarian rule and displacement in a Middle East context.

A maverick photographer who travelled the world in search of otherness, over time Verger became a prominent ethnographer, botanist and historian. He devoted fifty years of research to the black cultures of Brazil and Africa and to the transatlantic world of the Orisha and Vodun deities. Living in the field, initiated into diverse religious societies, he was reborn under the name of Fatumbi. A go-between of the Yoruba diaspora, Verger practiced an anti-colonial ethnology avant la lettre. This book is an anthropological essay, but also a cross-cultural portrait and the story of an extraordinary life. It provides a detailed analysis of the artistic and scientific work of Pierre Fatumbi Verger (1902-1996).

Crises and displacement have shaped practices and relations of care among Zimbabwean migrants and their families upon their return from South African urban areas. Through ethnographic research primarily in Bulawayo,Economies of Care addresses the intersection of kinship, state functions and migration in sustaining livelihoods amidst Zimbabwe's economic and political instability. It offers an in-depth analysis of how bureaucratic and intimate care structures intertwine, making it an essential resource for scholars of migration, anthropology and African studies.

Pedagogies of Value explores how China is reshaping global hierarchies of worth. Through ethnographic research among marketers, consultants, and brokers who promote foreign goods in Shanghai, Beijing, and beyond, this book investigates how value is taught, contested, and transformed in everyday encounters. From luxury brands and consumer ethnography to real estate, wine, and organic food, the book reveals how foreign intermediaries attempt to ‘educate’ Chinese consumers, only to confront shifting power dynamics that challenge Western authority. Blending vivid narratives with sharp analysis, this study argues that China has become a central arena for reimagining the very meaning of value. 

Between 1898 and 1939, Spain saw the emergence of political and social identities shaped by the concepts of Hispanidad, Catholicism, race, tradition and the Spanish language. Rooted in 19th-century conservative thought, these ideas evolved through intellectual debate and ideological conflict with liberal and left-wing currents. This book explores how such identities were reshaped during Spain’s major political shifts and how they intersected with Latin American discourses. By examining both state-led initiatives and grassroots movements, it offers a dual perspective on the nationalization of the masses and the construction of Spanish and Iberian social and political identities.

A unique study on the relationship between state administration and politics, examining how the office of the Czech Landsmannminister became the primary vehicle for the politicization of the Habsburg state. Through case studies in Vienna, Prague, and České Budějovice, it chronicles the Young Czech Party’s systematic campaign to gain control of selected key positions within the administration of the multinational monarchy. The narrative details how ministers used personnel policy to embed loyalists within the bureaucracy, consistently bypassing merit in favor of national and political allegiance to successfully “Czechize” the formally supranational administration.

More than a century has passed since the arrival of British, French, and Italian forces in Istanbul in 1918, marking the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. The almost five-year-long occupation of the city that followed remains largely ignored in history writing in the former occupying powers, and is often marginalised in Anatolia-centric narratives of the Turkish War of Independence. The book brings together many of the scholars working to redress this neglect in recent years. Chapters cover issues as diverse as policing, commerce, fashion, labour, infrastructure, justice, and housing, revealing the impact of the occupation on all aspects of social, cultural, and political life. By bringing this tumultuous period back into focus, the book makes a significant contribution to First World War studies, research on European imperialism, and the modern history of Istanbul, Turkey, and the Middle East.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States and Germany were seen as rivals in a “race for modernity,” each pursuing distinct visions of the future. America’s image as a technological pioneer reshaped European self-perception, while Germany asserted its own path through science, engineering, and a far-reaching reform of design, architecture, and applied arts. This book explores the cultural encounters and confrontations between 1880 and the 1930s, moving beyond familiar narratives of Fordism and Taylorism to reveal technology as a dynamic cultural force. By tracing the adoption of German science in the United States, the American endeavors of conceptualizing technology in the search for a genuine American culture, and the German fascination and critique of “Americanism” in the Weimar republic, it offers new perspectives on transatlantic modernity.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 dream 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 digital editions, 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 shape 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.