Berghahn Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impoverished, indebted, and underdeveloped at the close of World War II, Romania underwent dramatic changes as part of its transition to a centrally planned economy. As with the Soviet experience, it pursued a policy of “primitive socialist accumulation” whereby the state appropriated agricultural surplus and restricted workers’ consumption in support of industrial growth. Focusing on the daily operations of planning in the ethnically mixed city of Cluj from 1945 to 1955, this book argues that socialist accumulation was deeply contradictory: it not only inherited some of the classical tensions of capital accumulation, but also generated its own, which derived from the multivocal nature of the state socialist worker as a creator of value, as living labour, and as a subject of emancipatory politics.

The racialization of immigrant labor and the labor strife in the coal and textile communities in northeastern Pennsylvania appears to be an isolated incident in history. Rather this history can serve as a touchstone, connecting the history of the exploited laborers to today’s labor in the global economy. By drawing parallels between the past and present – for example, the coal mines of the nineteenth-century northeastern Pennsylvania and the sweatshops of the twenty-first century in Bangladesh – we can have difficult conversations about the past and advance our commitment to address social justice issues.

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.

Grounded in multi-generational stories from Kinmen in Taiwan, Visions of Marriage explores the historical entanglements between the pursuit of new personal and national futures. Focusing on the relational and future-making aspects of marriage, the ethnography highlights the intersection of transformations across familial generations and shifting political economies in Taiwan, and more globally. While theories of modernity often treat marriage as an index of social change, without adequate attention to its transformative capacities generated through personal and familial agency, this volume provides comparative insights on family change and demographic shifts in Asia.

Illuminating the complex processes of China’s uneven urbanization through the lens of the transition from village commons to public goods, this book is set in three urbanized villages in Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Xi’an, which have experienced similar demographic explosions and dramatic changes to their landscapes, the livelihoods of its inhabitants, and the power structures governing their residents. Graduated provision is the delivery of public goods informed by the teleological ideology of urbanization, and by neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics, and has been employed as an answer to the challenges of making public goods, such as welfare provisions, public parks, education, and senior care, equally accessible to all in recently urbanized communities. 

A cross-disciplinary volume that combines and puts into dialogue perspectives on disasters, this book includes contributions from anthropology, history, cultural studies, sociology, and literary studies. Offering a rich and diverse set of arguments and analyses on the ever-relevant theme of catastrophe in the circum-Caribbean, it will encourage debate and collaboration between scholars working on disasters from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

In presenting a variety of theoretical and cross-cultural perspectives on pure food, this volume demonstrates similarities and variations in cultural beliefs, behaviours and practices in different societies. These in turn highlight that pure food is a common issue for humanity, whatever the society, whatever the era. As a subject with much contemporary and cross-disciplinary relevance, Pure Food will appeal to students and academics involved in any food-related discipline, to professional practitioners promoting healthier foods and nutrition and to general readers with an interest in food.

Don Handelman’s groundbreaking work in anthropology is showcased in this collection of his most powerful essays, edited by Matan Shapiro and Jackie Feldman. The book looks at the intellectual and spiritual roots of Handelman’s initiation into anthropology; his work on ritual and on “bureaucratic logic”; analyses of cosmology; and innovative essays on Anthropology and Deleuzian thinking. Handelman reconsiders his theory of the forming of form and how this relates to a new theory of the dynamics of time. This will be the definitive collection of articles by one of the most important anthropologists of the late 20th Century.

Drawing on an ethnography of Sherbro coastal communities in Sierra Leone, this book analyses the politics and practice of identity through the lens of the reciprocal relations that exist between socio-ethnic groups. Anaïs Ménard examines the implications of the social arrangement that binds landlords and strangers in a frontier region, the Freetown Peninsula, characterized by high degrees of individual mobility and social interactions. She showcases the processes by which Sherbro identity emerged as a flexible category of practice, allowing individuals the possibility to claim multiple origins and perform ethnic crossovers while remaining Sherbro.

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.

What are we to make of statements that jaguars see themselves as humans, or of doubts about the boundary between dreams and waking? Jointly authored by an anthropologist and a philosopher, this book investigates some of the most puzzling ideas and practices reported in modern ethnography and ancient philosophy, concerning humans, animals, persons, spirits, agency, selfhood, consciousness, nature, life, death, disease and health. The study’s twin aims are first to explore the possibility of achieving a better understanding of the materials we discuss and then to see what lessons we can draw from them to challenge and revise our own fundamental assumptions.

Looking at encounters that can puncture or jolt us, this volume uses art as a lens through which to register and understand exceptional experiences. The volume also includes the fieldworker’s experience of unexpected events that can lead to key understandings, as well as revelatory moments that happen during artistic creation and while looking at art. By exploring exceptional experiences through art, the volume asks probing questions for anthropology. In recognizing that art is all-encompassing – including, as it does, narrative, performance, dance and images – Exceptional Experiences situates itself within a number of conversations on methodological and conceptual issues in anthropology and beyond.

It is commonplace that the modern world is more international than at any point in human history. Yet the sheer profusion of terms for describing politics beyond the nation state—including “international,” “European,” “global,” “transnational” and “cosmopolitan,” among others – is but one indication of how conceptually complex this field actually is. Taking a wide view of internationalism(s) in Europe since the eighteenth century, Nationalism and Internationalism Intertwined explores discourses and practices to challenge nation-centered histories and trace the entanglements that arise from international cooperation. A multidisciplinary group of scholars in history, discourse studies and digital humanities asks how internationalism has been experienced, understood, constructed, debated and redefined across different European political cultures as well as related to the wider world.

The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no longer taken for granted, The Politics of Making Kinship demonstrates how political processes have shaped concepts of kinship over time and, conversely, how political projects have been shaped by specific understandings, idioms and uses of kinship. Taking vantage points from the post-Roman era to early modernity, and from colonial imperialism to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond this international set of scholars place kinship centerstage and reintegrate it with political theory.

Uto-Aztecan iconic practices are primarily conditioned by the consciousness of the snake as a death-dealing power, and as such, an animal that displays the deepest fears and anxieties of the individual. The attempt to study a snake simulacrum thus constitutes the basic objective of this volume. A long, all-embracing iconicity of snakes and related snake motifs are evident in different cultural expressions ranging from rock art templates to other cultural artifacts like basketry, pottery, temple architecture and sculptural motifs. Uto-Aztecan iconography demonstrates a symbolic memorial order of emotional valences, as well as the negotiations with death and a belief in rebirth, just as the skin-shedding snake reptile manifests in its life cycle.

In the 1970s, in his capacity as government representative from the Afghan Institute of Archaeology, Ghulam Rahman Amiri accompanied a joint Afghan-US archaeological mission to the Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan. The results of his work were published in Farsi as a descriptive ethnographic monograph. The Helmand Baluch is the first English translation of Amiri’s extraordinary encounters. This rich ethnography describes the cultural, political, and economic systems of the Baluch people living in the lower Helmand River Valley of Afghanistan. It is an area that has received little study since the early 20th Century, yet is a region with a remarkable history in one of the most volatile territories in the world.

Over the course of the long and violent twentieth century, only a minority of international crime perpetrators ever stood trial, and a central challenge of this era was the effort to ensure that not all these crimes remained unpunished. This required not only establishing a legal record but also courage, determination, and inventiveness in realizing justice. Defeating Impunity moves from the little-known trials of the 1920s to the Yugoslavia tribunal in the 2000s, from Belgium in 1914 to Ukraine in 1943, and to Stuttgart and Düsseldorf in 1975. It illustrates the extent to which the language of law drew an international horizon of justice.

Through a series of case studies in diverse regions of the world, this book explores how transnational Norwegian energy and extractive industries handle corporate social responsibility (CSR) when operating abroad in places such as China, Brazil, and Turkey. With significant state ownership and embeddedness in the Nordic societal model, Norwegian capitalism is often represented as “benign” or ethical. By tracing CSR policy and practice—from headquarters to operations—this volume critically explores the workings of Norwegian corporate capitalism and its engagement with key issues of responsibility, accountability, and sustainability.

The “meantime” represents the gap between what is past and the unknown future. When considered as waiting, the meantime is defined as a period of suspension to be endured. By contrast, the contributors of this volume understand it as a space of “the possible” where calculation coexists with uncertainty, promises with disappointment, and imminence with deferral. Attending to the temporalities of emerging rather than settled facts, they put the stress on the temporal tactics, social commitments, material connections, dispositional orientations, and affective circuits that emerge in the meantime even in the most desperate times.

In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision’. However, it ended dramatically when two men believed to be sorcerers and responsible for much of the society’s problems were hung by persons fearing for the island’s future security. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on Ahamb between 2010 and 2017, this book investigates how upheavals like the Ahamb revival can emerge to address and sometimes resolve social problems, but also carry risks of exacerbating the same problems they arise to address.

Based on fieldwork conducted between 2001-2008 in urban East Africa, this book explores who the patients, practitioners and paraprofessionals doing Chinese medicine were in this early period of renewed China-Africa relations. Rather than taking recourse to the ‘placebo effect’, the author explains through the spatialities and materialities of the medical procedures provided why -  apart from purchasing the Chinese antimalarial called Artemisinin -  locals would try out their ‘alternatively modern’ formulas for treating a wide range of post-colonial disorders and seek their sexual enhancement medicines.

The Vienna Gestapo headquarters was the largest of its kind in the German Reich and the most important instrument of Nazi terror in Austria, responsible for the persecution of Jews, suppression of resistance and policing of forced labourers. Of the more than fifty thousand people arrested by the Vienna Gestapo, many were subjected to torturous interrogation before being either sent to concentration camps or handed over to the Nazi judiciary for prosecution. This comprehensive survey by three expert historians focuses on these victims of repression and persecution as well as the structure of the Vienna Gestapo and the perpetrators of its crimes.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, traditional historiography has emphasized the similarities between Italy and Germany as “late nations”, including the parallel roles of “great men” such as Bismarck and Cavour. Rethinking the Age of Emancipation aims at a critical reassessment of the development of these two “late” nations from a new and transnational perspective. Essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars examine the discursive relationships among nationalism, war, and emancipation as well as the ambiguous roles of historical protagonists with competing national, political, and religious loyalties.

As an historical account of the exchange of “duplicate specimens” between anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and museums, collectors, and schools around the world in the late nineteenth century, this book reveals connections between both well-known museums and little-known local institutions, created through the exchange of museum objects. It explores how anthropologists categorized some objects in their collections as “duplicate specimens,” making them potential candidates for exchange. This historical form of what museum professionals would now call deaccessioning considers the intellectual and technical requirement of classifying objects in museums, and suggests that a deeper understanding of past museum practice can inform mission-driven contemporary museum work.

Since the 1960s, nations across the “developed world” have been profoundly shaped by deindustrialization. In regions in which previously dominant industries faced crises or have disappeared altogether, industrial heritage offers a fascinating window into the phenomenon’s cultural dimensions. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, even as forms of industrial heritage provide anchors of identity for local populations, their meanings remain deeply contested, as both radical and conservative varieties of nostalgia intermingle with critical approaches and straightforward apologias for a past that was often full of pain, exploitation and struggle.

Although it lasted only thirty years, German colonial rule dramatically transformed South West Africa. The colonial government not only committed the first genocide of the twentieth century against the Herero and Nama, but in their efforts to establish a “model colony” and “racial state,” they brought about even more destructive and long-lasting consequences. In this now-classic study—available here for the first time in English—the author provides an indispensable account of Germany's colonial utopia in what is present-day Namibia, showing how the highly rationalized planning of Wilhelmine authorities ultimately failed even as it added to the profound immiseration of the African population.

Work played a central role in Nazi ideology and propaganda, and even today there remain some who still emphasize the supposedly positive aspects of the regime’s labor policies, ignoring the horrific and inhumane conditions they produced. This definitive volume provides, for the first time, a systematic study of the Reich Ministry of Labor and its implementation of National Socialist work doctrine. In detailed and illuminating chapters, contributors scrutinize political maneuvering, ministerial operations, relations between party and administration, and individual officials’ actions to reveal the surprising extent to which administrative apparatuses were involved in the Nazi regime and its crimes.

Of the many innovative approaches to emerge during the twenty-first century, one of the most productive has been the interdisciplinary nexus of theories and methodologies broadly defined as “the study of emotions.” While this conceptual toolkit has generated significant insights, it has overwhelmingly focused on emotions as linguistic and semantic phenomena. This edited volume looks instead to the material aspects of emotion in German culture, encompassing the body, literature, photography, aesthetics, and a variety of other themes.

During the 1960s and 1970s, rapidly growing environmental awareness and concern created unprecedented demand for ecological expertise and novel challenges for ecological advocacy groups such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). This book reveals how, despite their vast scientific knowledge and their attempts to incorporate socially relevant themes, IUCN experts inevitably struggled to make global schemes for nature conservation a central concern for UNESCO, UNEP and other intergovernmental organizations.

Kant, Goethe, Schiller and other eighteenth-century German intellectuals loom large in the history of the humanities—both in terms of their individual achievements and their collective embodiment of the values that inform modern humanistic inquiry. Taking full account of the manifold challenges that the humanities face today, this volume recasts the question of their viability by tracing their long-disputed premises in German literature and philosophy. Through insightful analyses of key texts, Alexander Mathäs mounts a broad defense of the humanistic tradition, emphasizing its pursuit of a universal ethics and ability to render human experiences comprehensible through literary imagination.

Well before the far-right resurgence that has most recently transformed European politics, Austria’s 1999 parliamentary elections surprised the world with the unexpected success of the Freedom Party of Austria and its charismatic leader, Jörg Haider. The party’s perceived xenophobia, isolationism, and unabashed nationalism in turn inspired a massive protest movement that expressed opposition not only through street protests but also in novels, plays, films, and music. Through careful readings of this varied cultural output, The Art of Resistance traces the aesthetic styles and strategies deployed during this time, providing critical context for understanding modern Austrian history as well as the European protest movements of today.

In Vanuatu, commoditization and revitalization of culture and the arts do not necessarily work against each other; both revolve around value formation and the authentication of things. This book investigates the meaning and value of (art) objects as commodities in differing states of transit and transition: in the local place, on the market, in the museum. It provides an ethnographic account of commoditization in a context of revitalization of culture and the arts in Vanuatu, and the issues this generates, such as authentication of actions and things, indigenized copyright, and kastom disputes over ownership and the nature of kastom itself.

The Museum of Mankind was an innovative and popular showcase for minority cultures from around the non-Western world from 1970 to 1997. This memoir is a critical appreciation of its achievements in the various roles of a national museum, of the personalities of its staff and of the issues raised in the representation of exotic cultures. Issues of changing museum theory and practice are raised in a detailed case-study that also focuses on the social life of the museum community. This is the first history of a remarkable museum and a memorable interlude in the long history of one of the world’s oldest and greatest museums. Although not presented as an academic study, it should be useful for museum and cultural studies as a well as a wider readership interested in the British Museum.

Spanning Europe, Asia and the Pacific, Encounters with Emotions investigates experiences of face-to-face transcultural encounters from the seventeenth century to the present and the emotional dynamics that helped to shape them. Each of the case studies collected here investigates fascinating historiographical questions that arise from the study of emotion, from the strategies people have used to interpret and understand each other’s emotions to the roles that emotions have played in obstructing communication across cultural divides. Together, they explore the cultural aspects of nature as well as the bodily dimensions of nurture and trace the historical trajectories that shape our understandings of current cultural boundaries and effects of globalization.

How do the Kara, a small population residing on the eastern bank of the Omo River in southern Ethiopia, manage to be neither annexed nor exterminated by any of the larger groups that surround them? Through the theoretical lens of rhetoric, this book offers an interactionalist analysis of how the Kara negotiate ethnic and non-ethnic differences among themselves, the relations with their various neighbors, and eventually their integration in the Ethiopian state. The model of the “Wheel of Autonomy” captures the interplay of distinction, agency and autonomy that drives these dynamics and offers an innovative perspective on social relations.

The contribution of Southeast Asia to the world economy (during the late prehistoric and early historic periods) has not received much attention. It has often been viewed as a region of peripheral entrepôts, especially in the early centuries of the current era. Recent archaeological evidence revealed the existence of established and productive polities in Southeast Asia in the early parts of the historic period and earlier. This book recalibrates these interactions of Southeast Asia with other parts of the world economy, and gives the region its due instead of treating it as little more than of marginal interest.

By and large, the histories of East and West Germany have been studied in relative isolation. And yet, for all their differences, the historical trajectories of both nations were interrelated in complex ways, shaped by economic crises, social and cultural changes, protest movements, and other phenomena so diffuse that they could hardly be contained by the Iron Curtain. Accordingly, A History Shared and Divided offers a collective portrait of the two Germanies that is both broad and deep. It brings together comprehensive thematic surveys by specialists in social history, media, education, the environment, and similar topics to assemble a monumental account of both nations from the crises of the 1970s to—and beyond—the reunification era.

In cultural and intellectual terms, one of the EU’s most important objectives in pursuing unification has been to develop a common historical narrative of Europe. Across ten compelling case studies, this volume examines the premises underlying such a project to ask: Could such an uncontested history of Europe ever exist? Combining studies of national politics, supranational institutions, and the fraught EU-Mideast periphery with a particular focus on the twentieth century, the contributors to History and Belonging offer a fascinating survey of the attempt to forge a post-national identity politics.

In the first book-length treatise on historical ecology of the West Indies, Island Historical Ecology addresses Caribbean island ecologies from the perspective of social and cultural interventions over approximately eight millennia of human occupations. Environmental coring carried out in carefully selected wetlands allowed for the reconstruction of pre-colonial and colonial landscapes on islands between Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Comparisons with well-documented patterns in the Mediterranean and Pacific islands place this case study into a larger context of island historical ecology.

Focusing on youth, family, work, and consumption, Ambiguous Transitions analyzes the interplay between gender and citizenship postwar Romania. By juxtaposing official sources with oral histories and socialist policies with everyday practices, Jill Massino illuminates the gendered dimensions of socialist modernization and its complex effects on women’s roles, relationships, and identities. Analyzing women as subjects and agents, the book examines how they negotiated the challenges that arose as Romanian society modernized, even as it clung to traditional ideas about gender. Massino concludes by exploring the ambiguities of postsocialism, highlighting how the legacies of the past have shaped politics and women’s lived experiences since 1989.

How can we study the impact of rules on the lives of past people using archaeological evidence? To answer this question, Archaeologies of Rules and Regulation presents case studies drawn from across Europe and the United States. Covering areas as diverse as the use of space in a nineteenth-century U.S. Army camp, the deposition of waste in medieval towns, the experiences of Swedish migrants to North America, the relationship between people and animals in Anglo-Saxon England, these case studies explore the use of archaeological evidence in understanding the relationship between rules, lived experience, and social identity.

With its rapid industrialization, modernization, and gradual democratization, Imperial Germany has typically been understood in secular terms. However, religion and religious actors actually played crucial roles in the history of the Kaiserreich, a fact that becomes particularly evident when viewed through a transnational lens. In this volume, leading scholars of sociology, religious studies, and history study the interplay of secular and religious worldviews beyond the simple interrelation of practices and ideas. By exploring secular perspectives, belief systems, and rituals in a transnational context, they provide new ways of understanding how the borders between Imperial Germany’s secular and religious spheres were continually made and remade.

The history of the Cold War has focused overwhelmingly on statecraft and military power, an approach that has naturally placed Moscow and Washington center stage. Meanwhile, regions such as Alaska, the polar landscapes, and the cold areas of the Soviet periphery have received little attention. However, such environments were of no small importance during the Cold War: in addition to their symbolic significance, they also had direct implications for everything from military strategy to natural resource management. Through histories of these extremely cold environments, this volume makes a novel intervention in Cold War historiography, one whose global and transnational approach undermines the simple opposition of “East” and “West.”

This provocative work offers an anthropological analysis of the phenomenon of political correctness, both as a general phenomenon of communication, in which associations in space and time take precedence over the content of what is communicated, and at specific critical historical conjunctures at which new elites attempt to redefine social reality. Focusing on the crises over the last thirty years of immigration and multiculturalist politics in Sweden, the book examines cases, some in which the author was himself involved, but also comparative material from other countries.

Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific was a major contribution to anthropological theory and method, while simultaneously establishing the sub-field of economic anthropology. Even a century after its publication, Malinowski’s pioneering work remains critical for anthropology in a postcolonial age. This volume uses ethnographic studies from around the world to contextualize the work politically and intellectually, examining its gestation and influence from multiple perspectives. It critically explores the meaning of “economy” for Malinowski from his formation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to his path-breaking fieldwork in Melanesia and ensuing career in London.

Dealing with the dynamics of identification and conflict, this book uses theoretical orientations ranging from political ecology to rational choice theory, interpretive approaches, Marxism and multiscalar analysis. Case studies set in Africa, Europe and Central Asia are grouped in three sections devoted to pastoralism, identity and migration. What connects all of these anthropological explorations is a close focus on processes of identification and conflict at the level of particular actors in relation to the behaviour of large aggregates of people and to systemic conditions.

As one of the most influential ideas in modern European history, democracy has fundamentally reshaped not only the landscape of governance, but also social and political thought throughout the world. Democracy in Modern Europe surveys the conceptual history of democracy in modern Europe, from the Industrial Revolutions of the nineteenth century through both world wars and the rise of welfare states to the present era of the European Union. Exploring individual countries as well as regional dynamics, this volume comprises a tightly organized, comprehensive, and thoroughly up-to-date exploration of a foundational issue in European political and intellectual history.

How we define border studies is transforming from focussing on “a line in the sand” to the more complex notions of how constituting a border is practiced, sustained and modified. In the expansion of borders studies, the areas explored across Europe and Asia have been numerous, but the specific themes that arise through comparative case studies are novel when approach Europe and Asian borderlands. Comparing the border experiences in East Asia and Europe in a number of thematic clusters ranging from economics, tourism, and food production to ethnicity, migration and conquest, Borders in East and West aims to decenter border studies from its current focus on the Americas and Europe.

Established in 1955, the Leipzig International Documentary Film Festival became a central arena for staging the cultural politics of the German Democratic Republic, both domestically and in relation to West Germany and the rest of the world. Screened Encounters represents the definitive history of this key event, recounting the political and artistic exchanges it enabled from its founding until German unification, and tracing the outsize influence it exerted on international cultural relations during the Cold War.

New Zealander ethnographer, Elsdon Best is a key figure in the history of anthropology due to his involuntary triggering of a fundamental and long-lasting anthropological debate on the Māori concept of hau. This volume is dedicated to  this important scholar, who at the same time was shadowed by metropolitan anthropology and became an excluded ancestor, along with his Māori interlocutors and ethnographic collaborators. By recentering his place as one of anthropology’s ancestors, the volume contributes to a new perception of the discipline’s past.

The second edition of this remarkable volume updates the immense advances in policy and soft international law with regards to the rights of mobile indigenous peoples in conservation.

The contributors to this book examine the interface between conservation and indigenous communities who are forced to move or settle elsewhere to accommodate environmental policies and biodiversity concerns. The case studies investigate successful and not so successful community-managed projects in Africa, the Middle East, South and SouthEastern Asia, Australia and Latin America.

What happens when religious sites, objects and practices become cultural heritage? What are —religious or secular—sources of expertise and authority that validate and regulate heritage sites, objects and practices? As cultural heritage becomes an increasingly popular and influential frame, these questions arise in diverse and challenging manners. The question who controls, manages, and frames religious heritage, and how, arises with particular urgency. Case studies from Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom present an analysis of the paradoxes and challenges that arise when religious sites are transformed into heritage.

“Nature” as a concept and word is extremely elusive, yet it is commonly taken for granted that “the pristine nature” is “out there.” This book explores the factors that have naturalized the idea of nature as “pristine” into our psyche, and as something that has a spatial, visual, and temporal dimension for “seasons”. Much emphasis is given to the inhabitants demonstrating the dynamic characteristic of nature. As a study done over a long period of history, Representations of “Japanese Nature” shows the mutual support between conceptual principles of nature and the daily activities of the people .

The global pandemic has offered extraordinary opportunities for extremists and terrorists to mobilize themselves and revive as more powerful actors in the security landscape. But could these threat groups actually capitalize on the coronavirus crisis and advance their malevolent agendas? Utilizing the largest COVID-19-related terrorism database, the book presents an analysis built upon a quantitative and qualitative comparison between the nature of both the radical Islamist and the far-right-related threat in 2018 and 2020. It provides, for the first time, a true picture of novel trends since the pandemic outbreak.

Presenting a new historical narrative on European integration and identity this title examines how the concept of Europe has been entangled in a dynamic and dramatic tension between calls for unity and arguments for borders and division. Through an in-depth intellectual history of the idea of Europe, Mats Andren interrogates the concept of integration and more recent debates surrounding European identity across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the post-war period. Applying a broad range of original sources this unique work will be key reading for students and researchers studying European History, European Studies, Political History and related fields.

Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might engage with and enrich each other. The chapters examine how people realize the good in social life, exploring how ethics and values relate to forms of suffering, power and inequality, and, in doing so, demonstrate how focusing on the good enhances social theory. This is the first interdisciplinary engagement with what it means to study the good as a fundamental aspect of social life.

Combining visual and literary analyses and original ethnographic studies as part of a more general political reflection, Migration in the Making of Gulf Space examines the role of migrants and non-citizens in the processes of settling in the Arab States of the Gulf region. The contributions underscore the aspirational character of the Gulf as a place where migrant recognition can be attained while also reflecting on practices of exclusion. The book is the result of an interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars and includes an original contribution by the acclaimed author of the novel Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan.