The rise and demise of german statism

German statism as a political ideology has been the subject of many historical studies. Whereas most of these focus on theoretical texts, cultural works, and vague "traditions", this study understands German statism as a functioning logic of political membership, a logic that has helped to dete...

Je t’aime... moi non plus

A series of limiting definitions have tended to delineate the Franco-British cinematic relationship. As this collection of essays reveals, there is much more to it than simple oppositions between British critical esteem for the films of France and French dismissal of ‘le cinéma British’, or the...

Defeating impunity

Over the course of the long and violent twentieth century, only a minority of the perpetrators of international crimes ever stood trial. In analyzing and documenting the challenge addressing that status of international justice and its realization, this collection uses an international perspect...

The long aftermath

This broadly interdisciplinary volume investigates Europeans’ individual and collective memories of the "Long Second World War" and the ways in which they have shaped the continent’s cultural heritage. Offers thoroughly contextualized explorations of novels, memoirs, films, and other cul...

Critical theory

The retirement of the distinguished philosopher Jürgen Habermas from his chair at the University of Frankfurt signalled an important caesura in the history of Critical Theory: the transition from the Habermasian project, to different forms of inquiry in the work of the next generation. This cha...

Bedouin century

The Bedouin in the Negev region have undergone a remarkable change of life style in the course of the 20th century: within a few generations they changed from being nomads to an almost sedentary and highly educated population. The author, who is a Bedouin himself and has worked in the Israeli M...

Nordic war stories

Nordic War Stories explores the commonalities and divergences among the five Nordic countries, examining formal and informal national historiographies alongside representations of the second world war in canonical literary works, memoirs, and films. Together, they comprise a valuable companion ...

Secret spaces, forbidden places

In this highly original approach to the study of the construction of culture, this collection of previously unpublished essays explore the topography of the secret and the forbidden, focusing on specific moments in recent cultural and political history. By bringing together writers from differe...

Decolonizing europe

This 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 chal...

Sex and the empire that is no more

J. Lorand Matory researches the trans-Atlantic comings and goings of Yoruba religion, as well as ethnic diversity in Black North America. With the support of the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, ...

Green encounters

Since the 1970s and 1980s, Monte Verde, Costa Rica has emerged as one of the most renowned sites of nature conservation and ecotourism in Costa Rica, and some would argue, Latin America. It has received substantial attention in literature and media on tropical conservation, sustainable developm...

Advancing refugee protection in south africa

Divided into three thematic parts to guide the reader, this important volume documents the development and implementation of refugee policy in South Africa over a 10-year period from 1996 until 2006. In doing so, it addresses issues of detention, gender, children and health as well as welfare p...

Music and manipulation

Since the beginning of human civilization, music has been used as a device to control social behavior, where it has operated as much to promote solidarity within groups as hostility between competing groups. Music is an emotive manipulator that influences attitude, motivation and behavior at ma...

In search of salt

Relatively recent Bantu-speaking migrants to central Cameroon, the Beti have had an eventful history. Based on extensive interviews and traditional Beti (Fang) poetry, in addition to German and French archival sources, the author of this readable study recreates the social structure of the Beti...

More than mere spectacle

More than Mere Spectacle brings together new research on the numerous coronations and inaugurations in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy, examining why so many of them still took place, what political, legal, social, and cultural significance they bore, and how they adapt...

Empathy and healing

Fire in the dark

Anthropologists who are employed to change the worlds they are researching find themselves in a potentially contradictory position. Combining the various roles and expectations involved in working with Gypsies and local government at the same time as conducting anthropological research, provide...

Region-building

After two centuries of nation-building, the world has entered an era of region-building in search of political stability, cultural cohesion, and socio-economic development. Nations involved in the regional structures and integration schemes that are emerging in most regions of the world are dee...

Representations of “japanese nature”

“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 dim...

Morals of legitimacy

With the growing fragmentation of western societies and disillusionment with the political process, the question of legitimacy has become one of the key issues of contemporary politics and is examined in this volume in depth for the first time. Drawing on ethnographic material from the U.S., Eu...

On the order of chaos

Over the past two decades, “chaos theory” – the perception of order previously hidden in phenomena of apparent randomness and disorder – has fundamentally transformed the natural sciences. In recent years, numerous scholars in the social sciences and humanities have attempted to adapt the insig...

Centering the margin

In a completely new approach to borders and border crossing, this volume suggests a re-conceptualization of the nation in Southeast Asia. Choosing an actor approach, the individual chapters in this volume capture the narratives of minorities, migrants and refugees who inhabit and cross borders ...

Through the water and the storm

Drawing on quantitative, socio-economic and legal methodologies, this book examines the features of Mediterranean seaborne trade through the maritime Average procedures drafted or sent to Genoa, a small but wealthy Italian maritime republic, between 1590 and 1700.

Grammars of identity / alterity

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 speci...

Israel and the diaspora in jewish law

THE FREEHOF INSTITUTE OF PROGRESSIVE HALAKHAH The Freehof Institute of Progressive Halakhah is a creative research center devoted to studying and defining the progressive character of the halakhah in accordance with the principles and theology of Reform Judaism. It seeks to establish the ideol...

Changing perceptions of the public sphere

Initially propounded by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas in 1962 in order to describe the realm of social discourse between the state on one hand, and the private sphere of the market and the family on the other, the concept of a bourgeois public sphere quickly became a central point of referenc...

Colette's republic

In France’s Third Republic, secularism was, for its adherents, a new faith, a civic religion founded on a rabid belief in progress and the Enlightenment conviction that men (and women) could remake their world. And yet with all of its pragmatic smoothing over of the supernatural edges of Cathol...

The crisis of the german left

Using Nietzsche's categories of monumentalist, antiquarian and critical history, the author examines the historical and theoretical contexts of the collapse of the GDR in 1989 and looks at the positive and negative legacies of the GDR for the PDS (the successor party to the East German Communis...

In god's name

Despite the widespread trends of secularization in the 20th century, religion has played an important role in several outbreaks of genocide since the First World War. And yet, not many scholars have looked either at the religious aspects of modern genocide, or at the manner in which religion ha...

Aging in today's world

Never before in human existence have the aged been so numerous — and for the most part — healthy. In this important new book, two professionals, an anthropologist and a physician, wrestle with the complex subject of aging. Is it inevitable? Is it a burden or gift? What is successful aging? Why ...

Borders in east and west

The different ways of understanding borders, through culture, politics, or even religion, is transforming and requires multi-disciplinary approaches the complexity of interactions and tensions that may arise. Borders in East and West focuses on the relationships between Europe and East Asia thr...

The language encounter in the americas, 1492-1800

The categorical impulse

Classification, as an object of recent anthropological scrutiny came to prominence during the 1960s, exemplified in the British (constructionist) tradition by the writings of Mary Douglas, and in the American ethno-semantics (cognitive) tradition by the likes of Harold Conklin and Brent Berlin....

Precious pills

Through an ethnography of the social and medical worlds of a community of Tibetan refugees in India, this book addresses two main questions: first, how has the prolonged displacement of Tibetan refugees affected concepts of health in the exile community? Second, how has exile changed traditiona...

Development-induced displacement

Some ten million people worldwide are displaced or resettled every year, due to development projects, such as the construction of dams, irrigation schemes, urban development, transport, conservation or mining projects. The results have usually been very negative for most of those people who hav...

Working for the enemy

General Motors, the largest corporation on earth today, has been the owner since 1929 of Adam Opel AG, Russelsheim, the maker of Opel cars. Ford Motor Company in 1931 built the Ford Werke factory in Cologne, now the headquarters of European Ford. In this book, historians tell the astonishing st...

Factions, friends and feasts

Explores social influence of the Mediterranean climate and the legacy of ethnic and religious conflict over the last 50 years Via case studies, illiustrates complexity of daily life in the region through analysis of the effects of family loyalty, emigration, and the social consequences o...

Germany and the middle east

For more than a hundred years, persistent conflict in the Middle East has led global superpowers like Germany to become involved. Germany and the Middle East encounters in detail how the nation came to accept its historical responsibility towards newer states in the Middle East, and how major d...

Reversible america

Reversible America negotiates the spectacle of Rodeo, cattle ranching, and bullfighting as it has manifested in California through cross border convergences of Iberian bullfighting, Native American hunting methods, and ethics in human and non-human relationships.

Island historical ecology

Island Historical Ecology addresses Caribbean island ecologies from the perspective of social and cultural intervention, focusing on selected islands between Venezuela and Puerto Rico. This volume goes on to compare these ecologies with well-documented patterns in the Mediterranean and Pacific ...

Don't need no thought control

Don't Need No Thought Control explores the dynamic interplay between popular demands, intensifying economic crises, and cultural policy decisions during the Erich Honecker era in a comprehensive and comparative analysis.

The spirit of the berlin republic

The "Berlin Republic" has become the key concept of post-Cold War Germany and as such has been widely discussed inside as well as outside Germany. Symbolized by the move of the government from Bonn to Berlin it signals all the tangible and intangible changes in Germany's position in the world t...

Placing london

London continues to fascinate a vast audience across the world, and an extensive, diverse literature now exists describing and analyzing this metropolis. The central question - what is London? - has produced many answers but none of them, the author argues, uncovers the complex ways in which kn...

Civil society

At the moment, no other European city attracts so much fascination as the city of Berlin. An unrivalled symbol of modern urban life, Berlin is a dynamic city whose inhabitants, in the course of the past two centuries, have lived through both the rapid growth and the violent destruction of the i...

Poverty in transition and transition in poverty

Poverty is an issue facing countries around the globe, yet it is a multi-dimensional phenomenon caused by a variety of factors, differing from context with no linear chain of cause and effect. The occurrence and persistence of poverty is influenced by an interrelated web of economic, social, ps...

The helmand baluch

The late Ghulam Rahman Amiri accompanied a joint Aghan-US archaeological mission to the Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan in the 1970s and published the ethnography in Farsi in Kabul in 1987. This volume, the first English translation, describes the cultural, political, and economic system...

On the nervous edge of an impossible paradise

Conversion to judaism in jewish law

THE FREEHOF INSTITUTE OF PROGRESSIVE HALAKHAH The Freehof Institute of Progressive Halakhah is a creative research center devoted to studying and defining the progressive character of the halakhah in accordance with the principles and theology of Reform Judaism. It seeks to establish the ideol...

Charismatic leadership and social movements

Much of the writing on charisma focuses on specific traits associated with exceptional leaders, a practice that has broadened the concept of charisma to such an extent that it loses its distinctiveness – and therefore its utility. More particularly, the concept’s relevance to the study of socia...

Education policy and equal opportunity in japan

In many societies today, educational aims or goals are commonly characterized in terms of “equality,” “equal opportunity,” “equal access” or “equal rights,” the underlying assumption being that “equality” in some form is an intelligible and sensible educational ideal. Yet, there are different v...

Aspirations of young adults in urban asia

Comparing first-person ethnographic accounts of young people living, working, and creating relationships in cities across Asia, this volume explores their contemporary lives, pressures, ideals, and aspirations.

Living translation

Examines the way American teachers and students of Chinese medicine search for resonance in translated texts and concepts. Traces the translation from text to practice and considers the social, political, historical, moral, and personal dimensions involved in the transnational production...

Reconstructing homes

Reconstructing Homes takes on a multidisciplinary approach of sensory ethnography, visual methods, and autoethnography methodologies to explore affective engagements with materiality in the context of home and the idea of belonging.

Weaponizing the past

Theorizing and explaining the process of collective memory of Poland’s communist past, Weaponizing the Past explores contemporary politicizations of the past, national belonging and the production of anti-Semitism.

Crime, jews and news

Crimes committed by Jews, especially ritual murders, have long been favorite targets in the antisemitic press. This book investigates popular and scientific conceptualizations of criminals current in Austria and Germany at the turn of the last century and compares these to those in the contempo...

The radical right in switzerland

There has been a tendency amongst scholars to view Switzerland as a unique case, and comparative scholarship on the radical right has therefore shown little interest in the country. Yet, as the author convincingly argues, there is little justification for maintaining the notion of Swiss excepti...

Planning labour

Planning Labour explores the early socialist industrialization and the implementation of central economic planning in Romania between 1945 and 1955. Centered on the city of Cluj, an ethnically mixed city in the northwestern part of Romania, this volume examines the deeply contradictory process ...

The education of nomadic peoples

Educational provision for nomadic peoples is a highly complex, as well as controversial and emotive, issue. For centuries, nomadic peoples educated their children by passing on from generation to generation the socio-cultural and economic knowledge required to pursue their traditional occupatio...

The changing faces of citizenship

Headlines of nation, subtexts of class

Since 1989 neo-nationalism has grown as a volatile political force in almost all European societies in tandem with the formation of a neoliberal European Union and wider capitalist globalizations. Focusing on working classes situated in long-run localized processes of social change, including p...

Soho on screen

Shaping the transnational sphere

An original and innovative collection exploring the role of the expert in shaping culture and society Spans from the second half of the 19th Century, over a variety of landscapes from Western Europe to North America Demonstrates the influence of industrialisation and nation-building ...

Fifty years of peasant wars in latin america

Informed by Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, published in 1969, this book examines selected peasant struggles in seven Latin American countries during the last fifty years and suggests the continuing relevance of Wolf’s approach.

German rule, african subjects

This classic study, now available for the first time in English, explains how German colonial ambitions foundered in present-day Namibia. As it shows, the highly rationalized planning of Wilhelmine authorities could not accommodate the practical, lived realities of both colonizer and colonized.

Belonging in unhomely homelands

Belonging in Unhomely Lands takes a feminist approach to examine the intricate dynamics of gender, national affiliation and belonging in the context of internal displacement and territorial disputes faced by Kosovo Serbs since the ethnic conflict and tensions two decades ago.

Understanding business offenders

Focusing on understanding business offenders through an exploration of workplace deviance and crime, this book closely examines a number of illustrative contemporary case studies and underpins the analysis of original comparative fieldwork, with an interdisciplinary approach, which informs, dev...

French intellectuals against the left

In the latter half of the 1970s, the French intellectual Left denounced communism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics through a critique of left-wing totalitarianism that paved the way for today's postmodern, liberal, and moderate republican political options. Contrary to the dominant understa...

Assembling financialisation

Farmers, Indigenous organisations, government and private-sector intermediaries from remote Northern Australia often negotiate with private finance capital to gain funds for agricultural development.This book demonstrates that while financialisation is a useful signifier of patterns of global c...

Extreme heritage management

Conflicting and competing claims over the actual and imagined use of land and seascapes are exacerbated on islands with high population density. The management of culture and heritage is particularly tested in island environments where space is finite and the population struggles to preserve cu...

Ice and snow in the cold war

This fascinating volume demonstrates that regions such as Alaska, the polar landscapes, and the cold areas of the Soviet periphery were of no small importance during the Cold War. Through histories of these extremely cold environments, this volume makes a novel intervention in Cold War historio...

Liberal imperialism in germany

From fidelity to history

Approaches “literature to film” debates in a new way, focusing upon the historical dimensions of adaptation. Considers historical adaptations as a special kind of reception. Offers rich case studies of historical and transnational film adaptations such as The Third Man (1949) and Sen...

The cultural politics of reproduction

Offers a detailed analysis of the social and cultural experiences of migrant communities Explores arguments seated at the heart of the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences Provides a comparative study of identity and a cultural understanding of the health care system, demonstra...

Shedding light on the darkness

Increasingly, German Studies programs include courses on the Holocaust, but suitable course materials are often difficult to find. Teachers in higher education will therefore very much welcome this volume that examines and reflects both the practical and theoretical aspects of teaching about th...

Elsdon best

This volume is dedicated to the New Zealander ethnographer Elsdon Best (1856-1931) who 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.

The germans and the holocaust

Up-to-Date: Features cutting-edge scholarship about a compelling and very important aspect of the Holocaust. Eminent Authors: All of the chapters have been written by highly accomplished senior scholars who are internationally known in this field of Research Focus on Sources: Several...

Food, culture and society in india

Bringing together empirical research from across India, this volume examines how food intersects with identity, migration, livelihood and media. It offers interdisciplinary insights into the cultural, political and social dimensions of food in contemporary Indian life.

The bressonians

In its methodology, the book combines an aesthetics of film authorship with a sociological approach. Takes into account the juridical dimension of film authorship. Provides an in-depth analysis of the work of renowned filmmakers Jean Eustache and Maurice Pialat, putting them in dialo...

Silence, screen, and spectacle

Takes on an innovative focus on “spectacular memory,” asking how spectacle functions in processes of memory, countermemory, and silencing. Breaks new ground in the discussion of absence, both in terms of the ‘absent,’ missing dialogues, texts, monuments and communities, as well as the “d...

African crossroads

Cameroon is characterized by an extraordinary geographical, cultural, and linguistic diversity. This collection of essays by eminent historians and anthropologists summarizes three generations of research in Cameroon that began with the collaboration of Phyllis Kaberry and E. M. Chilver soon af...

Lost objects of desire

This first book-length critical study of Jeremy Irons concentrates on his key performances and acting style. Through the analysis of some of the major screen roles in Irons’s career, such as Brideshead Revisited, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Reversal of Fortune, Swann in Love, Dead Ringers an...

Braving the street

As homelessness continues to plague North America and also becomes more widespread in Europe, anthropologists turn their attention to solving the puzzle of why people in some of the most advanced technological societies in the world are found huddled in a subway tunnel, squatting in a vacant bu...

The nation, europe, and the world

Textbooks in history, geography and the social sciences provide important insights into the ways in which nation-states project themselves. Based on case studies of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Turkey Bulgaria, Russia, and the United States, this volume shows the role that c...

Who owns the past?

In the decades since the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe, time has been a central resource under negotiation. Focusing on a local community that was considered a "model" in the socialist period, the author explores a variety of state-sponsored and unofficial pasts - history, folklore, a...

Configuring contagion

Expanding our understanding of contagion further than typical notions of infection and pandemics, this book widens the field to include biosocial epidemics. The chapters propose varied and detailed answers to questions about the epidemic and contagious potential of specific infections and non-i...

Echoes of surrealism

Echoes of Surrealism surveys areas of surrealist art throughout the entire lifespan of the GDR and explores analyses of the interaction and reciprocal influences of various art forms. Focusing on individual authors, visual artists, film directors and musicians who have taken a surrealist perspe...

Fatness and the maternal body

Obesity is a rising global health problem. On the one hand a clearly defined medical condition, it is at the same time a corporeal state embedded in the social and cultural perception of fatness, body shape and size. Focusing specifically on the maternal body, contributors to the volume examine...

Evil eye in christian orthodox society

Evil eye is a phenomenon observed globally and has to do with the misfortune and calamities that we can cause to someone else out of jealousy of their possessions. The book engages with evil eye beliefs in Corfu and investigates the Christian Orthodox influences on the phenomenon and how it aff...

The masculine woman in weimar germany

first comprehensive study of the "masculinized" modern woman in post-World War I Germany compares mainstream media and "queer" subcultural representations to showcase the significance and complexity of female masculinities within Weimar German culture an interdisciplinary cultural hi...

Animal genocide and its aftermath

An exacting assessment of the bounty policies that facilitated the extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger and the Newfoundland Wolf, Animal Genocide and its Aftermath re-evaluates the legal, political, and social definition of animal killing, proposing it constitutes a form of genocide that requires...

A matter of belief

Explores Christian Conversion and Healing Examines the interplay of personal and communal ritual Describes religious resistance and nationalism among the Naga in North-Eastern India A focus on British colonialism and American Baptist missionaries

Patterns of provocation

Over the past thirty years social scientists and particularly social historians have stressed the need to take popular protest seriously. The corollary of this, the need to take the policing of protest seriously, seems to have been less well acknowledged. The aim of this volume is to redress th...

Where humans and spirits meet

Zanzibar, an island off the East African coast, with its Muslim and Swahili population, offers rich material for this study of identity, religion, and multiculturalism. This book focuses on the phenomenon of spirit possession in Zanzibar Town and the relationships created between humans and spi...

Crime stories

The Weimar Republic (1918–1933) was a crucial moment not only in German history but also in the history of both crime fiction and criminal science. This study approaches the period from a unique perspective - investigating the most notorious criminals of the time and the public’s reaction to th...

Culturing the body

The human body is both the site of lived experiences and a means of communicating those experiences to a diverse audience. Hominins have been culturing their bodies, that is adding social and cultural meaning through the use pigments and objects, for over 100,000 years. There is archaeological ...

Gender history in a transnational perspective

The transnational approach sheds new light on international women´s history by bringing up new topics beyond the level of official state interaction By questioning universal claims, the transnational approach unfolds a critical potential Has a huge comparative range that covers not o...

Pc worlds

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 as specific critical historical conjunctures ...

Pathways to heaven

How does global Christianity relate to processes of globalisation and modernization and what form does it take in different local settings? These questions have lately proved to be of increasing interest to many scholars in the social sciences and humanities. This study examines the tensions, a...

Weathering the world

The Asian tsunami in December 2004 severely affected people in coastal regions all around the Indian Ocean. This book provides the first in-depth ethnography of the disaster and its effects on a fishing village in Tamil Nadu, India. The author explores how the villagers have lived with the tsun...