Back to the postindustrial future

First ethnography solely focused on the future One of the first ethnographies solely focused on a postindustrial city Theoretical contribution to anthropology of time (presentism) First English language ethnography of a shrinking city

We come as members of the superior race

We Come as Members of the Superior Race discusses the stereotype of Africans as “primitive” and “unintelligent,” exploring how this legacy has enforced contemporary educational and development discourses which view African societies as subordinated in a global geopolitical order, and how it con...

Care across distance

Geographic scope: While the majority of other works focus on one or two regions of the world (e.g., India; Peru and Italy; Australia), this volume is uniquely ambitious in its vast geographical reach, since it includes in-depth, ethnographically collected data from five different (sub-)conti...

Estates and constitution

Estates and Constitution provides a rich account of Hungarian politics during the eighteenth century, restoring the Diet to its rightful place as one of the era’s major innovations in government. István M. Szijártó traces the religious, economic, and partisan forces that shaped the Diet, puttin...

The greek exodus from egypt

First study covering the history of the Greeks in Egypt (the biggest foreign community in that country from the mid 19th to mid 20th centuries). Exhaustive archival research in several countries. Challenging the existing historical narrative claiming Greeks constituted a well off com...

Policy worlds

There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of ...

Inward looking

Inward Looking seeks to understand the relationship between Romani identity, performance and migration. Particularly, it studies the idea of ‘Romanipe’ under the prism of the personal accounts of Romani migrants. The findings are based on qualitative data gathered from Romani migrants from thre...

Other worlds, other bodies

This book proposes a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Epistemological embodiment signals that personal scholarly experience of the “unknown”—be it in the form of trance, or as the embodiment of an “other”—sha...

Shakespeare and biography

The long shore

Authors investigate the multifaceted character of maritime landscapes and maritime oriented communities in California’s equally diverse cultural landscape; viewed through an archaeological lens, and emphasizing social behavior and community as material culture in order to reveal intersections a...

Border interrogations

Under the current cartographies of globalism, where frontiers mutate, vacillate, and mark the contiguity of discourse, questioning the Spanish border seems a particularly urgent task. The volume engages a wide spectrum of ambivalent regions—subjects that currently are, or have been seen in the ...

Facing the crisis

Facing the Crisis brings together ethnographic material from anthropological research projects carried out in various Italian industrial locations during the last economic crisis. With its wide number of locations and industries, the volume looks at all corners of the diverse Italian manufactur...

Things of the house

Focusing on the life stories of a group of European and Catholic Brahmin Goan families of the colonial elite who left Mozambique after their independence in 1975, the book shows how material culture interferes with structuring dimensions of migratory experiences, in the management of family tie...

Polish film and the holocaust

Provides the first detailed monograph (in any language) on the representation of the Holocaust in Polish cinema Incorporates new materials and sources, mostly in the Polish language, obtained through extensive archival research Introduces a multidisciplinary approach drawing on recen...

Fairies, ghosts, and santa claus

Investigating the politics of seeing and its effects, this book draws on Slavoj Žižek’s notion of fetish and Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious to offer new concepts: “tinted glasses”, through which we see the world; “unit-thinking”, which renders the world as consisting of dis...

Advocacy and archaeology

Inspired by the idea of revolution and excitement about the ways archaeology is being used in social justice arenas, this volume seeks to visualize archaeology as part of a movement by redefining what archaeology is and does for the greater good.

Where there is no midwife

In the Sitapurdistrict of Uttar Pradesh, an agricultural region with high rates of infant mortality, maternal health services are poor while family planning efforts are intensive. By following the daily lives of women in this setting, the author considers the women’s own experiences of birth an...

Under the sign of the cross

Based on extensive ethnographic research, this book investigates the construction of the world’s highest Orthodox cathedral in Bucharest, Romania. Through the notion of re-consecration, the book brings together sociological and anthropological scholarship on eastern Christianity, secularization...

Obstetric violence and systemic disparities

The final volume in this landmark 3-volume series on The Anthropology of Obstetrics and Obstetricians looks at the challenges, and even violence, that obstetricians face across the world. This book is a must-read for students, social scientists, and all maternity care practitioners who seek to ...

Imperial culture and colonial projects

In a series of illuminating case studies, Curto follows the history and perception of major Portuguese colonial initiatives while integrating the complex perspectives of participating agents to show how the empire’s life and culture were richly inflected by the operations of imperial expansion.

Revealing the invisible mine

The Frieda River area in Papua New Guinea is home to one of the biggest undeveloped gold and copper deposits in the Pacific. This book offers an account of local stakeholder strategies as they unfolded at Frieda over forty years and provides a strong and novel commentary on sustainability and s...

Sexscapes of pleasure

Rather than focusing on a distinct, discreet sex market niche, the book unfolds across a continuum of sexscapes in which women consume and sell sexualized fantasies and/or sex acts: from pole dance schools, to strip clubs, to streets and private homes where women sell sex. There are to-d...

The art of fate calculation

The Art of Fate Calculationexplores how conceptions of fate circulate in Chinese and Taiwanese societies while resisting uniformization and institutionalization. This is not only due to the stigma of “superstition” but also to the internal dynamic of fate calculation practice and learning.

The holocaust in bohemia and moravia

This book is the only recent account on the Holocaust in Bohemia Moravia (Last in English 15 years ago) Study is based on tons of new and unknown material , including weekly Jewish community reports to Eichmann, For the first time includes emphasis on individual and collective respon...

Hannah arendt and the uses of history

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) first argued that there were continuities between the age of European imperialism and the age of fascism in Europe in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). She claimed that theories of race, notions of racial and cultural superiority, and the right of ‘superior races’...

An enchantment of digital archaeology

The use of computation in archaeology is a kind of magic, a way of heightening the archaeological imagination. Agent-based modelling allows archaeologists to test the ‘just-so’ stories they tell about the past. These models are one end of a spectrum that ends with video games. This volume explo...

Voices on war and genocide

A magpie’s tale

Telling the story of the author's time living with a Kazakh family in a small village in western Mongolia, this book contextualizes the family’s personal stories within the broader history of the region.

Anthropology, nationalism and colonialism

One of the first in-depth analyses of the Porto School of Anthropology and the work of its central figure – Mendes Correia – during the first half of the twentieth century. There is no single-authored book on this phase of anthropology in Portugal that takes into account aspects of the i...

Concentrationary cinema

It is the first dedicated study of Alain Resnais’s benchmark film that draws together a range of authors across French, film and anti-colonial studies to analyse the political aesthetics of this film It proposes a new perspective on Alain Resnais’s film by shifting it from Holocaust stud...

Invested narratives

Narratives of how nations survive, restructure or even fail during economic crisis not only inform future responses to crisis but also strengthen national theoretical, empirical, and analytical financial discourse. Invested Narratives brings together an interdisciplinary set of scholars to addr...

Money counts

Postsocialism

In many parts of post-socialist Europe the tumultuous political and economic developments have generated strong emotions, ranging from hope and euphoria to disappointment, envy, disillusionment, sorrow, loneliness, and hatred. Yet these aspects have been largely neglected in analyses of the pro...

Different from the others

Presenting for the first time a comparative and socio-cultural history of queer femininities in Germany and the Netherlands for an English-speaking audience, Different from the Others highlights this submerged history and engages queer authors and activists from the Netherlands to challenge and...

Set to see us fail

Examining the interaction between families and professionals in the child welfare system of New York, this book focuses on how inequalities are reproduced, measured, managed, and contested. The book describes how state institutions and neoliberal governance intersect police the groups which are...

On the edges of whiteness

From 1942 to 1950, nearly twenty thousand Poles found refuge from the horrors of World War II in camps within Britain’s African colonies, including Uganda, Tanganyika, and Kenya. On the Edges of Whiteness tells their improbable story, tracing the manifold, complex relationships that developed a...

From bullies to officers and gentlemen

Based on unprecedented access to the Ghanaian military barracks and inspired by the recent resurgence of coups in West Africa, the book assesses why and how the Ghana Armed Forces were transformed from an organisation that actively orchestrated coups into an institution that accepts the authori...

Meaning and representation in history

History has always been more than just the past. It involves a relationship between past and present, perceived, on the one hand, as a temporal chain of events and, on the other, symbolically as an interpretation that gives meaning to these events through varying cultural orientations, charging...

Feeding anxieties

Focusing on the underlying politics behind children’s food, this book highlights the variety of social relationships, expectations and emotions ingrained in feeding children In Poland. With rich ethnographic accounts, including research with children, the book demonstrates how families, schools...

Conservation’s roots

The guardians of concepts

Since 1945, German and British intellectuals and politicians have struggled to define the term “conservative” throughout its complicated history. The Guardians of Concepts rigorously uncovers the changes in the idea of conservatism and its national and transnational political language history.

Punching back

It is the only full ethnographic treatment of Muslim women in combat sports. This book fills a gap in multiple distinct bodies of literature: literature on women’s practices in sport, literature on Muslims in Europe, anthropology of learning and knowledge, and feminist anthropology and i...

Cultural resource management

Stressing the interdisciplinary, public-policy oriented character of Cultural Resource Management (CRM), which is not merely “applied archaeology,” this short, relatively uncomplicated introduction is aimed at emerging archaeologists.

Polarized pasts

When questions of belonging enter the forefront of political debates, so too does heritage. From different ends at the political spectrum, people invoke the past to validate their stance on immigration, equality and security. Together, the texts pave the way for a better understanding of the ro...

Timber, sail, and rail

Permeable borders

This boldly interdisciplinary volume explores the ways that historical and contemporary actors in the U.S. have crossed such borders—whether national, cultural, ethnic, racial, or conceptual. These essays suggest new ways to understand borders while encouraging connection and exchange, even as ...

German–jewish studies

Applying current and evolving interdisciplinary scholarship to bring an original and comprehensive assessment of why German-Jewish studies as a field is vital to further our understanding of antisemitism, racism, and coloniality, German-Jewish Studies: Next Generations grounds the field’s neces...

Friendship and exchange along the north coast of new guinea

Anthropologists working in Papua New Guinea have typically focused on a single ethnic community and what goes on within that community. This study considers how people in more than one hundred villages interact with people in other communities up and down the coast. These communities spe...

Brewing socialism

Taking an uncommonly focused lens against the deep and active role coffee had in connecting East Germans to a global market, Brewing Socialism uncovers the significance of East German efforts to democratize coffee and how that focus on material cultural informed the everyday life of the Social ...

Total atheism

Sexual self-fashioning

Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, this book provides an ethnographic account of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. It argues that by embracing, rejecting, and questioning modernity in stories about sexuality, the Iranian Dutch actively engage in proce...

Crossroads of heritage and religion

Looking at the crossroads between heritage and religion through the case study of Moravian Christiansfeld, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2015, this anthology reaches back to the eighteenth century when the church settlement was founded, examines its legacy within Danish cul...

The roma and their struggle for identity in contemporary europe

Thirty years after the collapse of Communism, and at a time of radically diverse kinds of identity politics, including anti-migrant, anti-Roma, anti-Muslim and anti-establishment movements, this book analyses how Roma identity is expressed in contemporary Europe.

State practices and zionist images

Although the Israeli state subscribes to the principles of administrative fairness and equality for Jews and Arabs before the law, the reality looks very different. Focusing on Arab land loss inside Israel proper and the struggle over development resources, this study explores the interaction b...

Navigating miscarriage

This collected volume explores miscarriage in diverse historical and cultural settings with contributions from anthropologists, historians and medical professionals. The book considers meanings attached to miscarriage and how religious, cultural, medical and legal forces impact the way miscarri...

Heritage, gentrification and resistance in the neoliberal city

What happens when versions of the past become silenced, suppressed or privileged due to urban restructuring? In this volume, the authors explore a variety of attempts to interrupt and interrogate urban restructuring, and to imagine alternative forms of urban organization, produced by diverse co...

Credit and debt in an unequal society

Investigates the political reasons for South Africa adopting an allegedly self-regulating market despite its disastrous effects and identifies the colonialist ideas of property rights as a mainstay of the existing social order.

Reconstruction of the pakhtun code of life in a changing pakistan

Since the 1970s, the transformation of Pakhtun areas has brought far-reaching changes to all aspects of society. This book investigates evolving patterns of social relations among Pakhtuns, focusing on the practice of gham khadee (participation in sorrows and joys) as a key mode of social and p...

Media practices and changing african socialities

Deriving from innovative new work by six researchers, this book questions what the new media's role is in contemporary Africa. The focus is on media-related practices, which require engagement with different perspectives and concerns while situating these in a wider analytical context.

Medicine and medical ethics in nazi germany

The participation of German physicians in medical experiments on innocent people and mass murder is one of the most disturbing aspects of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Six distinguished historians working in this field are addressing the critical issues raised by these murderous experiments, ...

Empire and eduards volters

The book addresses topical issues such as imperialism, war, decolonialism, and teaches about modern man. Eduards Volters’ ethnography of Lithuania and Latvia is a new page in the history of European anthropology, interesting from a theoretical point of view. It retells the story of h...

History of the low countries

The history of the smaller European countries is rather neglected in the teaching of European history at university level. We are therefore pleased to announce the publication of the first comprehensive history of the Low Countries - in English - from Roman Times to the present. Remaining polit...

The anatomy of the holocaust

Historian Raul Hilberg produced a variety of archival research, personal essays, and other works over a career that spanned half a century. The Anatomy of the Holocaust collects some of Hilberg’s most essential and groundbreaking writings—many of them published in obscure journals or otherwise ...

Theorizing relations in indigenous south america

Whether invented, discovered, implicit, or directly addressed, relations remain the main focus of most anthropological inquiries. These relations, once conceptualized in ethnographic fieldwork as self-evident connections between discrete social units, have been increasingly explored through loc...

Shakespeare and the modern novel

As the Shakespearean novel and long prose narrative form undergo a renaissance today, distinguished Shakespeare critics demonstrate that the diversity and flexibility of interactions between Shakespeare and the modern novel are very much alive.

Moving frames

Through an intermedial approach combining studies on cinema and photography, Moving Frames addresses precise historical moments uniquely in a German context. Across films both in and outside the canon, this volume tackles those specific historical moments experienced in media forms to gauge the...

Humboldt revisited

Humboldt Revisited offers a fresh perspective on the contemporary discourse surrounding reform of European universities. Drawing from a rich selection of historical sources, this volume challenges the conventional historical narratives on the Humboldt University, providing new insight into the ...

Contested holdings

Covering a range of case studies and a global geography, authors aim to historicize and bring depth to contemporary debates in relation to both the return of material culture and human remains. Defined as contested holdings, differing museum collections ranging from fine arts to physical anthro...

Anti-americanism in latin america and the caribbean

Whether rising up from fiery leaders such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro or from angry masses of Brazilian workers and Mexican peasants, anti U.S. sentiment in Latin America and the Caribbean today is arguably stronger than ever. It is also a threat to U.S. leadership in the...

Zora neale hurston

Uniquely Positioned & Freshly Celebrated: Standing out as the only short biography dedicated to Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological contributions, this accessible volume brings renewed visibility to a vital yet long overlooked figure in the social sciences. Courageous Trailbla...

Raising citizens in the 'century of the child'

Brings a transatlantic perspective to the history of child-rearing and education Applies T.H. Marshall’s concept of citizenship to the history of child-rearing and education Takes a long-term view in exploring the complex relationship between the family, experts, and the state from t...

One sound, two worlds

Through extensive archival research and conversations with renowned publicists, musicians and insiders, author Michael Rauhut examines more than fifty texts to give an in-depth overview of the historical development of blues music in East and West Germany during the postwar period.

The world beyond the west

Exploring the evolution of Eastern European discourses in Asia, Africa and Latin America in nineteenth and twentieth century, this volume locates the mechanisms and strategies that diverse Eastern European social actors adopted when discussing the non-European world. The Eastern European perspe...

The cracked art world

This book presents a nuanced view of Northern Ireland, a place at once deeply mired in its past and seeking to forge a new future for itself as a ‘post-post-conflict’ place within the context of a changing United Kingdom, a disintegrating Europe, and a globalized world.

Political networks and social movements

The use of the concept of ‘political networks’ is new in the field, and offers theoretical insights into the way politics function and on how more stable political contexts (that favour democratic rule) could be built. To my knowledge, the first scholarly work (in English) to cover the...

Civil–military entanglements

A unique set of ethnographic material and anthropological perspectives in contrast to previous work that has been in other disciplines (primarily sociology and political science). Explicit addition of transnational communities and non-Western cases in addition to Western cases, as well...

Decolonizing ourselves

A memoir, by a woman anthropologist, appealing to those who want to read about interesting women’s lives, their chronology. Portrays the changes in global expectations, assumptions, and interests in development as these have evolved over time. Most fundamentally, and pragmatically, ...

Magical house protection

First world-wide survey of this topic in book form. The latest theories and thoughts about magical house protection archaeology. The result of 20 years research on the topic. Contains a gazeteer of discoveries in Britain and America showing the geographical distribution of th...

Postwar soldiers

In Postwar Soldiers, Jörg Echternkamp analyzes three themes in the early history of West Germany: interpretations of the war during its conclusion and the occupation period; military veteran communities’ self-perceptions; and the public rehabilitation of the image of the German soldier.

Sofia coppola

Scientific internationalism in cold war central and eastern europe

Brings together eminent experts in the history of science of East Central Europe. Challenges the dominant perception of state institutions and international projects as the driving forces of scientific cooperation. Contributes to a more complex understanding of socialist hierarchies ...

The sound of silence

Combining Sámi perspectives and other Indigenous archaeologies Offers new perspectives for understanding the role of material culture in transformation of indigenous cultures in colonial contact Emphasizes local and indigenous histories and interpretations over Eurocentric ones

Indeterminacy

What happens to people, places, and things that do not fit the progressive, ordering narratives of capitalism and modernity? This volume explores the indeterminacy left behind by conventional understandings of progress and shows how totalizing forward movement may be resisted by fragments, open...

Hazardous chemicals

(1) The long period of analysis: Unique is the approach to present several substance biographies which analyze the handling of various hazardous chemicals in different countries during the course of two centuries. (2) The comparative approach applied to several different substances, and...

The global life of austerity

Austerity and structural adjustment programs are just the latest forms of neoliberal policy to have a profoundly damaging impact on the targeted populations. Yet, as the contributors to this collection argue, the recent austerity-related European crisis is not a breach of erstwhile development ...

Not even past

Unmatched list of contributors – combination of very high-profile scholars and emerging voices. Comparative work illustrating the connections between Vietnam and contemporary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unique focus on what is left behind, and the local consequences of US actions. ...

When will we talk about hitler?

Observation of history classes to analyze student’s relationship to German history Adolescents appropriation of history within peer groups Taking adolescents political position seriously Analyzing schools, families and peer groups together, overstepping disciplinary frontiers ...

Shakespeare and creative criticism

What kinds of critical insights are made possible only or especially via creative strategies? This volume examines how creative modes of writing might facilitate or inform new ways to critically engage with Shakespeare.

Marketing hope

Looks at how get-rich-quick schemes manifest themselves in a Siberian town. By focusing on the social dynamics of these popular economies, Leonie Schiffauer provides insights into how capitalist logic is learned and negotiated, and how it affects local realities in a post-Soviet environment.

Shakespeare and the ethics of war

How does Shakespeare represent war? This volume reviews scholarship to date on the question and introduces new perspectives, looking at contemporary conflict through the lens of the past.

Pacific realities

The reconsideration of the notions of resilience and resistance in the light of social change Tackling resilience and resistance as complementary processes Relocating social change in terms of resilience from a system perspective back to the actor-perspective

Roma activism

Exploring contemporary debates and developments and gathering together contributors from activism, academia, and the worlds of policy and development, this volume argues for taking up reflexivity as practice in in Roma-related research and forms of activism, and advocates a necessary renewal of...

Economy, crime and wrong in a neoliberal era

Covers a wide range of industry practice and economic activity Challenges common views of neoliberalism Shows the difficulty of defining right and wrong and of assigning responsibility for wrongful activity

At the edge of the wall

The neighboring boroughs of Friedrichschain and Kreuzberg shared a history and identity until their fortunes diverged dramatically following the construction of the Berlin Wall, which placed them within opposing political systems. This revealing account of the two towns during and after the Col...

Shakespeare and the arab world

Selfhood and recognition

The disciplines of philosophy and cultural anthropology have one thing in common: human behavior. Yet surprisingly, dialogue between the two fields has remained largely silent until now. Selfhood and Recognition combines philosophical and cultural anthropological accounts of the perception of i...

Being a sperm donor

First book length ethnography on (Danish) sperm donors Bringing medical anthropology/sociology in dialogue with queer-feminist analyses of gender and sexuality In depth insights into the interplay between male identity and (reproductive) biomedicine

Experiencing materiality

Representing a cutting-edge study on the junction between theoretical anthropology, material culture studies, religious studies and museum anthropology, this study highlights the contradictions of museum practices and, at the same time, the potentialities that contemporary museums could offer f...

The camino de santiago

Comprises an interpretative synthesis of heritage planning and management and gives critical attention to the contributions of church, state and civil society in this endeavour. The author is very well-known among Camino enthuisiasts and has walked every route that leads to Santiago (Fra...