Berghahn Books

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 This book explores the meaning of adolescence through the analysis of material culture, historical documents, skeletal remains, isotope analysis, and other lines of evidence.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex selective abortions are unjust, unethical and illegal in India, yet the experience of motherhood for pregnant women can be influenced by ‘son preference’ from those who support female feticide. Women are denied agency in exercising reproductive rights and the medical fraternity often fosters the misuse of technologies for sex selective abortions in India. This book reviews the feminist, ethical and legal discourse on sex selective abortions and draws on women’s empowerment as an analytical lens to examine the son preference expressed in the notion of Vansh (lineage) among pregnant women, their partner s and mothers-in-law in three Indian states.

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

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