The paradox of difference

Exploring five paradoxes in how “difference” is constructed and navigated, this book critically examines discourse and practice across race studies, language education, and global mobility, offering fresh insights into the politics of difference and possibilities for alternative engagements.

Parenthood between generations

A focus on the intergenerational transmission of parenthood. Brings together innovative, qualitative research by anthropologists, historians and sociologists.

Not the troubles

Not the Troubles shifts the academic focus from the perception of Belfast as a divided society and reveals alternative narratives of city life. Using storytelling as a leitmotif, it explores the epistemological validity of engaging with strangers in a range of settings, such as street corners, ...

Practicing the faith

Over the past decades, Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity has arguably become the fastest growing religious movement in the world. Distinguishing features of this variant of Christianity include formal ritual activities as well as informal, experiential, and ecstatic forms of worship. This bo...

Tibetans in nepal

Based on eighteen months of field research conducted in exile carpet factories, settlement camps, monasteries, and schools in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, as well as in Dharamsala, India and Lhasa, Tibet, this book offers an important contribution to the debate on the impact of international ...

Medical identities

Illness and misfortune more broadly are ubiquitous; thus, healing roles or professions are also universal. Ironically, however, little attention has been paid to those who heal or promote wellbeing. These come in many different guises: in some societies, healing is highly professional and speci...

Negotiating risk

Drawing on fieldwork with British Pakistani clients of a UK genetics service, this book explores the personal and social implications of a ‘genetic diagnosis’. Through case material and comparative discussion, the book identifies practical ethical dilemmas raised by new genetic knowledge and sh...

Spatial boundaries and social dynamics

The papers in this volume examine the sociocultural, socioeconomic and environmental factors that condition spatial patterning of human behavior in food-producing (both agricultural and pastoral) societies. The spatially patterned material manifestations of that behavior are considered in the l...

Emergent complexity

Serious interest in the evolution and dynamics of intermediate societies has grown by leaps and bounds during the past decade. The purpose of this volume is to suggest new ways to model the many stimuli and processes by which cultural complexity emerges, emphasizing major organizational changes...

Gendered money

As economic citizenship was a pre-condition of full citizenship, the lack of economic autonomy was an important motivation during the early stages of the women’s movement. Independent of their class background, women had less access to not only financial resources but also social and cultural c...

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...

An academic skating on thin ice

Peter Worsley’s studies at Cambridge were interrupted by war service as a communist officer in the colonial forces in Africa and India, and it was here that he developed a keen interest in anthropology. He work in mass education in Tanganyika and then studied with Max Gluckman at Manchester Uni...

Crossing histories and ethnographies

Presents novel combinations of archival and ethnographic methods in the study of colonial historicities; Offers new perspectives on how to critically connect oral accounts, ethnography, and colonial archives; Brings together an international community of scholars who have conducted e...

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.

Existential anthropology

Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic methods, Jackson explores a variety of compelling topics, including 9/11, episodes from the war in Sierra Leone and its aftermath, the marginalization of indigenous Australians, the application of new technologies, mundane forms of rituali...

Haunting ruins

Ruins, rubble and decaying material can foster a more layered theory of time, change and memory. The seven ethnographic case studies in Haunting Ruins trace human engagements with the temporal forces of ruins, which can trace the past and transform the present.

Frontier ethnographies

Frontier Ethnographies explores the ethnographic edges of contemporary anthropological inquiry in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Through examining moments of insecurity, vulnerability, doubt, fear, failure, and daydreaming, the volume reflects on the researchers’ experiences and challenges of doing ...

Above the death pits, beneath the flag

Israeli youth voyages to Poland are one of the most popular and influential forms of transmission of Holocaust memory in Israeli society. Through intensive participant observation, group discussions, student diaries, and questionnaires, the author demonstrates how the State shapes Poland into a...

Women’s empowerment and son preference 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.

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...

Astonishment and evocation

International scholars from the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, and rhetoric explore the spellbinding power of elusive meanings as people experience them in daily life and while gazing at works of art, watching films or studying other cultures. Covers the evocative power of visual ar...

The iron gates mesolithic

The Mesolithic sites in the Iron Gates Gorge of the Danube River, between Yugoslavia and Romania are reviewed in this volume. The author offers fundamental re-analyses and interpretations of stratigraphies, relative and absolute chronologies, architecture and settlement organization, the placem...

The european puzzle

The twin concepts of “Culture” and “Identity” are inescapable in any discussion of European Integration and yet over the last ten years their meaning has become increasingly contested. By combining an anthropological and political perspective, the authors challenge the traditional boundaries wi...

A venetian island

Since the extensive floods of 1966, inhabitants of Venice's laguna areas have come to share in, and reflect upon, concerns over pressing environmental problems. Evidence of damage caused by industrial pollution has contributed to the need to recover a common culture and establish a sense of con...

Bush bound

Its empirical and theoretical treatment of immobility and sedentariness as neglected aspects in migration and mobility studies. No book-length work dedicated to immobility exists as yet. Unique in the analytical extent to which immobility and migration are shown to be intertwined and per...

Ethnographies of power

Energetic infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnogra...

Conservation and mobile indigenous peoples

Wildlife conservation and other environmental protection projects can have tremendous impact on the lives and livelihoods of the often mobile, difficult-to-reach, and marginal peoples who inhabit the same territory. The contributors to this collection of case studies, social scientists as well ...

Urban violence in the middle east

Aims to foster a new understanding of violence beyond that of a meaningless and destructive social and political act, countering notions of a violent Middle East. Explores processes sparked by the transition from empires to the formation of nation states, and the resulting changes in cit...

A jewish understanding of the world

In this second volume of Liberal Jewish sermons spanning the greater part of the second half ofthe twentieth century, the author again combines a radically progressive stance with Jewish commitment and seeks to understand contemporary history from a "prophetic" point of view. His comments cover...

Comrades in arms

Burgundy

Burgundy Wine Heritage Terroir Anthropology

Georgian women on the move

Makes excellent use of ethnographic research, written by an author who is intimately familiar with the history of the places she depicts and the theoretical concepts from which she draws. Timely focus on Georgian migrant women in Greece, and their struggle with the long-term economic cri...

Powers of good and evil

A key theme in the anthropology of beliefs is the relationship between socio-economic change and changes in the belief system. It has been widely argued that rapid economic change, particularly the introduction of capitalism, leads to an increase in beliefs in, and representations of, evil and ...

The making of modern eating

Offers an important contribution to the history of food and food practices in German-speaking countries during the long 19th Century. Reveals fresh insights into the development of the middle classes in Europe. Integrates the development of German food into transnational narratives f...

Symbiosis and ambivalence

In Poland and elsewhere there has been a noticeable increase of interest in various aspects of the Polish-Jewish past which can be explained, the author argues, in terms of a broader intellectual need to explore the "blank spots" of Poland's national history. This quest begins and ends with Pol...

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...

Belonging in oceania

The book evaluates contemporary life in Oceanic societies through an examination of formations of place, self and community The ethnographic case studies in the text explore the meaning of belonging in Oceania The contributors apply the multi-dimensions concepts of place-making and c...

Food and families in the making

Food and Families in the Making looks at knowledge reproduction about how we know cooking and its role in the making of everyday family life. It also examines a political economy of cooking that situates Marrakchi women’s lived experience in the broader context of persisting poverty and food in...

Tangled mobilities

Increasingly, scholarly works are approaching the challenges of peoples’ spatial movements across state frontiers as tied to various forms of mobilities that people experience. Using a plural and comparative lens with case studies, Tangled Mobilities brings fresh insight to the wider social phe...

Economy and ritual

An innovative contribution to the thinking about economic anthropology. The ethnographies illiuminate economic and ritual changes in countries emerging from socialism and re-entering market society. Pioneering investigations of transformations of the domestic economy in postsocia...

Immigrant industry

After the end of the Second World War, major federally funded industries in Australia depended on the employment of large numbers of refugees displaced by the war. This book aims to bring to the foreground post-war industry and immigration to comprehensively document a uniquely Australian shapi...

Food beyond terroir

Through diverse ethnographic case studies, leading food scholars examine the meaning and making of place and taste. In doing so, the book challenges unsettling terroir-inspired notions of a fixed taste of place and pushes the boundaries of what we think we know about their connections.

Between the forest and the road

During the past two decades Ecuadorians have engaged in a national debate around Buen Vivir (living well). This ethnography discusses one of the ways in which people experience well-being or aspire to live well in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Waponi Kewemonipa (living well) is a Waorani notion that emb...

The rhetorical emergence of culture

“Just as rhetoric is founded in culture, culture is founded in rhetoric” - the first half of this central statement from the International Rhetoric Culture Project is abundantly evidenced. It is the latter half that this volume explores: how does culture emerge out of rhetorical action, out of ...

Growing artefacts, displaying relationships

Ethnographic study of artefacts from Papua New Guinea Provides detailed examination of how these artefacts acquire their specific properties Engages with contemporary anthropological topics such as aesthetics and rituals Provides detailed discussion of the study of "technology" i...

Towards an anthropology of psychology

Challenging contemporary enthusiasm for interdisciplinarity, the book calls for rethinking ‘psychology’ as an anthropological inquiry. It provides ethnographic studies of talking therapies, subjects, institutions, professionals and psychological persuasions, suggesting how anthropology can impr...

Between marx and coca-cola

In the 1960s and 1970s, Western Europe's "Golden Age" (Eric Hobsbawm), a new youth consciousness emerged, which gave this period its distinctive character. Offering rich and new material, this volume moves beyond the easy conflation of youth culture and "Americanization" and instead sets out to...

Public anthropology in a borderless world

Articulates how public engagement is transforming the discipline of anthropology. Includes perspectives from contributors on their personal and professional transformations.

Ways of knowing

Evidence, ethos and experiment

Medical research has been central to biomedicine in Africa for over a century, and Africa, along with other tropical areas, has been crucial to the development of medical science. At present, study populations in Africa participate in an increasing number of medical research projects and clinic...

Archaeologies of rules and regulation

How can we study the impact of rules on the lives of past people using archaeological evidence? To answer this question, Archaeologies of Rules and Regulation presents case studies drawn from across Europe and the United States, exploring the use of archaeological evidence in understanding the ...

Anthropology and ethnography are not equivalent

Tim Ingold has raised many questions which are crucial for anthropology as a discipline, such as whether ethnography is central to the subject, and how imagination, reality and truth are joined in anthropological enterprises. His interventions have impacted anthropologists and scholars at large...

Technology and the common good

Building on the work of Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons) the author examines how the different shared goods of a democratic society are shaped by technology and  demonstrates how club goods, common pool resources, and public goods are supported, enhanced, and disrupted by technology.

The state otherwise

The State Otherwise examines the difficult predicament of Beirut’s public green spaces from the vantage point of the civic campaign to reopen Horsh al Sanawbar, the city’s largest public park. It asks questions about the nature of privatisation of public property, civic society’s potential to m...

Black lisbon

The first book-length study to analyse the politics of anticolonialism in Portugal between 1910 and 1940. Reconstructs the culture of black anticolonial struggles particularly in Lisbon, a city crisscrossed by black Lusophone Africans from Portugal’s colonies. Illuminates the place o...

Breast feeding and sexuality

Whereas in western countries breastfeeding is an uncontroversial, purely personal issue, in most parts of the world mother and baby form part of a network of interpersonal relations with its own rules and expectations. In this study, the author examines the cultural and social context of breast...

Contemporary pagan and native faith movements in europe

The first book to focus on modern Pagan and Native Faith movements throughout Europe, from the Irish Republic to Siberia, and from Scandinavia to Iberia. The first work of any kind to address the twin themes of neo-colonialism and neo-nationalism within these movements. Through detai...

The everyday politics of food co-ops

This book analyses how changing national politics impacted the practices of care, aid and community organizing within two London-based food co-ops at a time of rapid welfare withdrawal. It highlights the tensions between more radical and neoliberal imaginaries that played out within them.

Starstruck

We live in an era of exploding scientific knowledge about the universe, and our place and future within it. Much of this new knowledge conflicts with earlier wisdom, and some has frightening implications. Cosmic evolution, space exploration, the search for extraterrestrial life, and concerns ab...

Participating in the global enterprise

Viewed through an anthropological lens, Automobili Lamborghini, the renowned Italian factory of super cars, presents a compelling case study. As an ethnography spanning three years, the book focuses on the different perspectives of the managers and the workers and the effects of the organizatio...

The making and unmaking of the ukrainian working class

The industrial workers of Ukraine have a contradictory and complex political lifeworld. Based on three years of fieldwork in the city of Kryvyi Rih, this book focuses on the everyday politics and moral economy that constitute the working-class and structures its relations with other social groups.

Sustaining russia's arctic cities

One of the first books to deal with urban sustainability in the Arctic Careful analysis of the development of the Russian Arctic and the consequences of that development model A multi-disciplinary analysis of Arctic urban development Integrative analysis of Arctic resource develo...

Mobile pastoralist households

Mobile pastoralist activities occur at different scales across the landscape, including local, regional, and supra-regional scales. This research brings together the work of archaeologists currently engaged in mobile pastoralist household research in different regions of the world to highlight ...

On the nervous edge of an impossible paradise

The voice of prophecy

Edwin Ardener - a new expanded edition of the collected works of one of the most important social anthroplogists in Britian of his time. Ardener worked on social, economic, demographic and political problems, and was particularly influential in his sustained effort to bring together social anth...

Making things happen

Making Things Happen is about the sociocultural side of post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction, drawing on one project, the Pakistan Earthquake Reconstruction and Recovery Project (PERRP). As disasters are increasing in number and intensity so too will be the need for reconstruction, for w...

Edges, fringes, frontiers

Based on an ethnographic account of subsistence forest use by Wapishana people in Guyana and developing an original analytical framework, Edges, Frontiers, Fringes examines the social, cultural and behavioral bases for sustainability and resilience in indigenous resource use.

The problem of money

Based on long-term medical anthropological research in northern Ghana, the author analyses issues of health and healing, of gender, and of the control and use of money in a changing rural African setting. He describes the culture of medical pluralism, so typical for neo-colonial states, and peo...

The return of polyandry

This book describes the surprising increase in polyandry in Panam valley during the 1980s. It explores married lives in polyandrous houses and develops a theory of a flexible kinship of potentiality through the lens of a farming village in Tibet Autonomous Region.

Managing reproductive life

Throughout history human societies have sought to manage their reproductive lives to make them fit in with their social, economic and biological conditions. But the different ways communities regulate their fertility, penetrating every aspect of their social life, are so varied and specific tha...

Transnational nomads

There is a tendency to consider all refugees as 'vulnerable victims': an attitude reinforced by the stream of images depicting refugees living in abject conditions. This groundbreaking study of Somalis in a Kenyan refugee camp reveals the inadequacy of such assumptions by describing the rich ...

Robbery and restitution

The robbery and restitution of Jewish property are two inextricably linked social processes. It is not possible to understand the lawsuits and international agreements on the restoration of Jewish property of the late 1990s without examining what was robbed and by whom. In this volume distingui...

Beyond the lens of conservation

Truly dual-sited study giving equal weight to a society in the global North and the global South. Comparison of perceptions of non-experts both in the North and the South (as opposed to Northern experts vis-à-vis non-experts in the South as is usually the case). Focus on imaginations...

Calibrated engagement

For decades, the heartland of Myanmar has been configured as a pacified space under military surveillance. A closer look reveals how politics is enacted at distance with the state. Calibrated Engagement weaves together ethnography and history to chronicle the transformation of rural politics in...

Fracturing resemblances

Western societies draw crucially on concepts of the 'individual' in constructing their images of the ethnic group and nation and define these in terms of difference. This study explores the implications of these constructs for Western understanding of social order and ethnic conflicts. Comparin...

Current policies and practices in european social anthropology education

As Europe becomes more integrated at the economic and political level, attempts are being made to harmonize education policies as well. This volume offers an important contribution in that the authors examine, for the first time,the politics and practices of social anthropology education across...

Cryptopolitics

Focusing on African societies, Crypolitics brings together empirically grounded studies of digital media to draw out the significance of hidden information, double meanings, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages in negotiations of power relations.

Adventures in aidland

Concerned with the construction and transmission of knowledge about global poverty and its reduction Describes the social life of development professionals, the capacity of ideas to mediate relationships, the networks of experts and communities of aid workers, and the dilemmas of maintai...

The power of perspective

Focusing on different forms of agency in North Ambrym social life, the author demonstrates the potency of outsiders at different times and in different situations in Ambrym society. This model challenges the premises of much Western thinking about reciprocity, and suggests new directions in the...

Remembering a vanished world

Theodore Hamerow, a prominent historian, was born in Warsaw in 1920 and spent his childhood in Poland and Germany. His parents were members of the best-known Yiddish theater ensemble, the Vilna Company. They were part of an important movement in the Jewish community of Eastern Europe which soug...

Ethnographies of deservingness

Claims around 'who deserves what and why' moralise inequality in the current global context of unprecedented wealth and its ever more selective distribution. Ethnographies of Deservingness explores this seeming paradox and the role of moralized assessments of distribution by reconnecting dispar...

Contested mediterranean spaces

Houses transformed

Houses Transformed explores the intersection of house biographies and social change, the politics of housing design, the social fabrication of aspirational houses, the domestication of concrete and the intersection of materiality and ontology, and the rhetoric of the vernacular.

Turning the kaleidoscope

Far from being a blank space on the Jewish map, or a void in the Jewish cultural world, post-Shoah Europe is a place where Jewry has continued to develop, even though it is facing different challenges and opportunities than elsewhere. Living on a continent characterized by highly diverse patter...

Facing discrimination

Through six micro-level studies from Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, Facing Discrimination offers insight into the dynamics of religious beliefs and bodily practices among those who are discriminated against. It examines how religion as a source of agency interacts with processes of margin...

How is a man supposed to be a man?

The global trend of declining fertility rates and an increasingly ageing population has serious implications for individuals and institutions alike. Childless men are mostly excluded from ageing, social science and reproduction scholarship and almost completely absent from most national statist...

Migration past, migration future

The United States is an immigrant country. Germany is not. This volume shatters this widely held myth and reveals the remarkable similarities (as well as the differences) between the two countries. Essays by leading German and American historians and demographers describe how these two countrie...

Flight of fantasy

During the Nazi era many German writers chose, or were forced into, exile. Many others stayed and, after the end of this period, claimed to have retreated into "Inner Emigration". The nature of this kind of emigration and the underlying motives of these writers have been hotly debated to this d...

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 ...

The body in asia

The past few decades have seen growing interest in the study of the body. However, the increasing number of exciting and influential publications has primarily, if not exclusively, focused on the body in Western cultures. The various works produced by Asian scholars remain largely unknown to We...

Bodies of evidence

In the course of hostilities between Greek and Turkish Cypriots between 1963 and 1974, over 2000 persons, both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, went "missing" in Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean with a population distribution of 80% Greeks and 18% Turks. This represents a significant number fo...

Practical archaeogaming

As a sequel to Archaeogaming: an Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games, the author focuses on the practical and applied side of the discipline, collecting recent digital fieldwork together in one place for the first time to share new methods in treating interactive digital built env...

Ethnography in the raw

Ethnography in the Raw describes the author’s encounters with a Philippine family into which he has married, his wife’s friends and acquaintances, and their lives in a remote rural village in the rice basin of Luzon, about 130 miles north east of Manila. It is both anthropological fieldwork ‘in...

Resisting radicalisation?

Offering a critical perspective on the concept of radicalisation, this volume views it from the perspective of social actors who engage in radicalising milieus but have not crossed the threshold into violent extremism. The volume brings together contributions based on extensive empirical resear...

Asian lives in anthropological perspective

Asian Lives in Anthropological Perspective draws together essays that trace historical and contemporary realities in India and Vietnam about a variety of compelling topics such as the experience of the Indian caste system and the ethical challenges faced by Vietnamese working women.

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...

Religion and nation

An estimated 75,000 Iranians emigrated to Britain after the 1979 revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic. They are politically, religiously, socio-economically and ethnically heterogeneous, and have found themselves in the ongoing process of settlement. The aim of this book is ...

Rest in plastic

Rest in Plastic gives an insight into local entanglements of death, synthetic materials and power in Ewe community. It shows how different materials and things that come to shape power relations, exist in a delicate balance between state and local governance, kin and outsiders, death and life, ...

Great expectations

The negotiation of expectations in tourism is a complex and dynamic process – one that is central to the imagination of cultural difference. Expectations not only affect the lives and experiences of tourists, but also their hosts, and play an important part in the success or failure of the over...