Berghahn Books

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

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

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

In the last forty years anthropologists have made major contributions to understanding the heterogeneity of reproductive trends and processes underlying them. Fertility transition, rather than the story of the triumphant spread of Western birth control rationality, reveals a diversity of reproductive means and ends continuing before, during, and after transition. This collection brings together anthropological case studies, placing them in a comparative framework of compositional demography and conjunctural action.  The volume addresses major issues of inequality and distribution which shape population and social structures, and in which fertility trends and the formation and size of families are not decided solely or primarily by reproduction.

From the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, Greeks comprised one of the largest and most influential minority groups in Egyptian society, yet barely two thousand remain there today. This painstakingly researched book explains how Egypt’s once-robust Greek population dwindled to virtually nothing, beginning with the abolition of foreigners’ privileges in 1937 and culminating in the nationalist revolution of 1952. It reconstructs the delicate sociopolitical circumstances that Greeks had to navigate during this period, providing a multifaceted account of demographic decline that arose from both large structural factors as well as the decisions of countless individuals.

This is the first account of studio animation written from an historical-poetic perspective. Focusing on how animated films are created and experienced, Poetics of Animation brings together the study of visual style, performance, storytelling, and sound situating them within their industrial and technological contexts. It traces how animators work within and against convention, and how constraints become sources of invention and style. It also explores the ways in which animation overlaps with, but remains distinct from, live-action filmmaking, revealing how the medium’s unique properties shape its poetic structures. Combining critical depth with accessibility, Poetics of Animation offers an original contribution to animation studies and serves as a valuable teaching resource for students, scholars, and practitioners interested in understanding the art and craft of animation.

Digital media perpetuates every aspect of our lives, including our temporal perceptions. Time and attention have become one of the most precious resources, for users as well as corporate business. This book sheds light on these critical connections and how they influence not only our daily lives, but also how they exist in emerging power structures. It brings advances in the anthropological thinking about time into conversation with theorizations of media to develop an understanding of how media and time affect each other while keeping human experiences at the heart of the conversation.

The question of the human/non-human boundary remains unanswered today. This book explores the relationship between people, society and nature through the lens of robots and robotics research. Blending ethnographic fieldwork with critical analysis and literature, it develops an original interpretation of contemporary technology – that a deeper understanding of the field leads to a greater appreciation for human embodiment and creativity, rather than a belief in imminent machine intelligence.

New approaches to studies of the Antarctic and adjacent ocean regions have emerged in recent years. Challenging the idea of a pristine, uninhabited continent, this book shows how materialities create, transform, and connect Antarctic worlds, revealing the region as a historically layered landscape deeply entangled with global histories, politics, and imaginaries. It explores how objects, infrastructures, and material practices have shaped human relations with Antarctica.

In late imperial China, debates over how virtuosity in medical practice might be cultivated unfolded within a world that connected physicians to scholars, poets, calligraphers, Buddhist monks, Daoist life-cultivation experts and military strategists. This book traces these debates, showing how medicine was imagined as akin to poetry, how clinical insight was shaped through meditative bodily practices and how practitioners pursued empirical investigation. At the same time, medicine and the body became vital conceptual resources for intellectuals seeking to address broader social and philosophical questions

In Mubende Hill, Uganda, African art history lives through its spiritual traditions. Centering the agency of ritual objects and the ancestral Omweyimirize tree, this book reveals how clay pots, calabashes, Bachwezi cups and other artefacts mediate healing, identity, and continuity among the Balyammere. Drawing on oral histories, participatory fieldwork and decolonial critique, the author challenges museum practices that silence sacred objects by stripping them from context. It foregrounds indigenous interpretive authority while highlighting contemporary artistic re-engagements that sustain cultural knowledge, spiritual vitality and African epistemic sovereignty.

Craft and cooperative practices are currently resurging in many European and North American societies. Builders often construct certain political sensibilities through their daily work, which frame their wider social and political engagement with the encompassing society. This book explores the revival of cooperative craftwork in Denmark, delving into construction sites and political assemblies to reveal the dreams, drives, and desires of a diverse group of builders working in a Copenhagen-based craft co-op. It sheds light on the political capacities of cooperative craftwork and on cooperative practitioners’ complicated relation to capitalist practices; practices which they simultaneously refuse, ridicule, and reproduce.

Drawing on the concept of biopower and projecting it into the realm of the city, this book explores a multidisciplinary comparative analysis of two countries – Estonia and Ukraine – from the viewpoint of urban biopolitics, a concept that allows us to see how various groups of urban populations come into life and why their lifestyles matter for political calculations. It dissects the interconnections between the geopolitical conditions of military conflict with Russia in Ukraine and European institutional membership in Estonia, and forms of urban biopolitical governance. In doing so, the book highlights how cities become sites where global pressures and local political management converge.

Drawing on extensive archival records, Business as Usual shows how the legal system in Germany continued to operate with the same personnel, administrative routines, and institutional habits between 1943 and 1948, despite violence, mass murder, bombings, and regime change. This strict adherence to legal formalism acted as a “normalization machine” for mass atrocities, facilitating the compromised but seamless transition into the post-war administration. By tracing everyday judicial work in extraordinary circumstances, it reveals how legal institutions endure, adapt, and serve an inestimable purpose even in moments of profound upheaval. Moreover, only within the framework of the normal, ordinary law could the ideological exception of Nazi law unfold. In other words: besides the banality of evil, there is also evilness in banality.

Through vivid case studies set in diverse historical and social contexts, Tobias Hof traces the global evolution of right-wing terrorism across time and continents – spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the present day – revealing how terrorist movements have transformed, adapted, and connected through transnational networks. Exploring their shifting ideologies, motivations, and inner workings, he uncovers the uneasy ties between terrorist groups, conservative elites, and state security forces. Both sweeping in scope and rich in detail, he offers readers an unprecedented understanding of the deep historical roots and enduring dynamics of right-wing terrorism.

Linking contemporary concerns about democratic fragility with historical analysis, this volume examines the crisis and failure of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe during the interwar period from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. The contributions explore political culture, constitutional traditions, religion, violence, and crisis discourse in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Rather than focusing narrowly on institutional breakdown, the authors emphasize long-term cultural legacies, narratives of crisis, and exclusionary identities that undermined democratic pluralism. Interwar Europe functioned as a laboratory of democracy whose experiences offer critical insights into the challenges facing liberal democracies today.

Terrorism in Question crafts a political anthropology of post-9/11 “new terrorism” by investigating who needs the category of terrorists and offering a global framework to understand anthropology, Islam and terrorism. In contrast to their depiction as antimodern, barbarian and fanatic, this study theorizes “Muslim terrorists” as radical friends of equality and visionaries of an unrecognized ethical politics. Marshalling fieldwork with media practitioners and refugees, participant observation of counterterrorism conferences in India and Oslo, and encounters with terrorists, it reorients anthropology to elevate its public voice. This book shows how fieldwork, poetry and political theory come together to exemplify decolonized knowledge.

The views of space and place of people living in the Caribbean are different from Northern folk; Inequality is bound to socially constructed traits like race, gender, class, sexual orientation and other aspects of discrimination. Through interconnected perspectives on environment, gender inequality, identity and Caribbean spatial re-colonisation influences on social, cultural and environmental landscapes, The Inequity of Caribbean Spaces and Designed Places: Race, Class and Gender examines socio-spatial (in)justices beyond physical and geographical boundaries that Caribbean societies face.

Through ethnographic research conducted among landfill workers and waste pickers, Europe’s Disappearing Waste explores the inner workings of the Czech waste management system that is underpinned by the belief that waste should disappear. Waste streams give rise to underflows that provide opportunities for those who refuse to be passive witnesses of disposal and loss of value. The normative assumptions about market-based solutions and techno-optimism in waste management are called into question, directing attention to the commitment to salvage that provides an alternative way of relating to waste.

Cesare Lombroso is considered the founder of criminology with his theory distinguishing criminals from noncriminal by physical oddities. This book argues that the study of ethnography in Latin America should give more attention to the Lombroso school and the academic exchange between relatively marginal national anthropologies, such as the Italian and Latin American schools. From racial ideas in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century to Lombroso’s voyages to South America and his legacy after his passing, Cesare Lombroso in Latin America is presented through an anthropologist’s eye through interpretation of many explored and unexplored historical documents.

The Middle East currently dominates the news, often with misleading stories that cast local people as terrorists or oppressed. In Search of Worldviews argues that in-depth anthropological studies are the best data-driven way to provide accurate information from local perspectives on everyday topics such as women’s roles, why Islam is overtaking other major religions, why democracy has difficulty taking hold, how minorities cope, and formal and informal methods of conflict resolution. It also helps us understand ourselves better when we know how other cultures address the same human problems. Using anthropological techniques such as participant observations, historic document research, and institutional analysis, each chapter of this book poses an important question about the Middle East with a focus on local perspectives.

With over 3 billion individuals that play video games worldwide, gamers consume immense amounts of data about the digital worlds they explore. Archaeogaming as Scholarly Play encourages readers to step into the intersection of archaeology and video games to critically examine how these games (re)present the past and those associated with exhuming it, should they be archaeologists or adventurers. In doing so, this volume suggests alternative approaches to archaeological pedagogy and provides new narratives in theoretical discourse.

High-speed trains are an icon of the green revolution in transport and mobility. For more than thirty years, AVE (Alta Velocidad Española, or Spanish HSR (High Speed Rail)) has been an instrument for transforming the public railway company, reshaping labor relations and advancing a model of regional development; yet Spain remains a car-dominated society. Frontiers of Appropriation delves into the history of Europe’s most advanced high-speed rail system to assess the transformations it has brought about. The towering yet marginal position of AVE in the Spanish transport market is not a paradox but an expression of the role of HSR in consolidating the hegemonic mobility paradigm.

Offering an interdisciplinary approach to conceptual history, Concepts of Culture broadens its scope through a series of experimental case studies in ‘applied conceptual history’. Bringing together Contributors from a variety of disciplines—including art history, comparative literature, cultural studies, German studies, and history— it offers a range of theoretically reflected applications of conceptual history that focus on the cultural concepts, and thereby contribute to the methodological development of these particular fields of research.

The idea of culture has become a creative framework in Marshall Islanders’ quest to realise a community based on communality, meaningful work, and self-reliance. These values are consciously pitted against selfishness, wage-labour, and money dependency, which are values commonly deemed to belong to the realm of “the economy”. Culturing Money analyses what sort of conceptual and practical work that the dialectics of culture and economy can do for Marshall Islanders in their quest for a meaningful life where self-reliance is the ultimate goal.

The history of timekeeping has always involved choosing or converting between various ways of representing time, a phenomenon called time pluralism. The Unsettled Clock: The Persistence of Time Pluralism explores time pluralism by documenting historical cases and examining its persistence in present. Drawing examples from medieval York, the Habsburg empire of early modern Europe, Renaissance astronomy, legal time in the US and UK before time zones were adopted, and the persistence of time pluralism in current atomic time metrology, this analysis offers a political and historical look into how timekeeping has been shaped, challenged, and manipulated.

Reexamining a classical work of social anthropology, African Political Systems (1940), edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, this book looks at the colonial and academic context from which the work arose, as well as its reception and its subject matter, and looks at how the work can help with analysis of current politics in Africa. This book critically reflects upon the history of anthropology. It also contributes to a political anthropology which is aware of its antecedents, self-reflexive as a discipline, conscious of pitfalls and biases, and able to locate itself in its academic, social and political environment.

The past decades have seen significant urban insurrections worldwide, and this volume analyzes some of them from an anthropological perspective; it argues that transformations of urban class relationships must be approached in a way that is both globally informed and deeply embedded in local and popular histories, and contends that every case of urban mobilization should be understood against its precise context in the global capitalist transformation. The book examines cases of mobilization across the globe, and employs a Marxian class framework, open to the diverse and multi-scalar dynamics of urban politics, especially struggles for spatial justice.

Archaeologists have a history of being prime agents of change, particularly in advocating for protection and preservation of historical resources. As more social issues intersect with archaeology and historical sites, we see archaeologists and others continuing to advocate for not only historic resources, but for the larger social justice issues that threaten the communities in which these resources reside. 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.

Competition often appears to typify capitalist social life as a process that defines relative value and pits people against one another. But capitalism is not all there is to competition. In ethnographic perspective, the outcomes of competition depend on always varied, shifting and contested interpretations of what is worth competing for and how to do so. Hence, even when competition is imaged to engineer pre-defined changes or institute particular social orders, in practice its effects are often complex and unexpected. This book explores how competition is an unruly dynamic that generates unforeseen possibilities for human connection and mediates divergent social orders, rather than imposing one or another.

The mortgaging of land is not just economic and legal but also social and cultural. Here, anthropologists, historians, and economists explore origins, variations, and meanings of the land mortgage, and the risks to homes and livelihoods. Combining findings from archives, printed records, and live ethnography, the book describes the changing and problematic assumptions surrounding mortgage.  It shows how mortgages affect people on the ground, where local forms of mutuality mix with larger bureaucracies. The outcomes of mortgage in Africa, Europe, Asia, and America challenge economic development orthodoxies, calling for a human-centered exploration of this age-old institution.

This volume provides intimate anthropological accounts of Muslim men’s everyday lives in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and diasporic communities in the West. Amid increasing political turmoil and economic precarity, Muslim men around the world are enacting nurturing roles as husbands, sons, fathers, and community members, thereby challenging broader systems of patriarchy and oppression. By focusing on the ways in which Muslim men care for those they love, this volume challenges stereotypes and showcases Muslim men’s humanity.

Archaeological literature has often placed the role of crafting within discourses of craft specialization, anchoring it to questions related to sociopolitical complexity, which linked political processes with productive organization. This book invites us to think differently and discuss crafting as a way of making, knowing, and being in the world. Through utilizing examples from various time periods and across global landscapes, it reimagines questions of being and belonging, and other affective modalities related to how we articulate meaning, in text, image or speech. Importantly, the book considers what it means to make, as a way to produce knowledge about the worlds we inhabit.

From the Napoleonic Wars to the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, via the great world conflicts of the 20th century, Music and Postwar Transitions in the 19th and 20th Centuries is the first book to highlight the significance of ‘postwar transitions’ in the field of music and to demonstrate the influence that musicians, composers, critics, institutions, and publics have had on the period that follows conflict. Leading historians, political scientists, psychologists and musicologists explore the roles of music and culture in demobilization, reconstruction, memory, reconciliation, revenge, and nationalist backlash. Moving beyond the popular conception of music as an agent of peace, this study reveals music’s more complex and ambivalent role in the process of transition from war to peace.

Told through the voices of twenty European Jews who survived the Holocaust, The Hunted presents a micro historical account of persecution and survival under Nazi rule. Drawing on diaries and memoirs, it reconstructs a multiplicity of experiences across national, social, and religious contexts, examining how individual decisions were shaped by family networks, local conditions, and shifting policies. Each chapter traces a single year in the lives of the protagonists, situating their choices within the evolving administrative and legal framework of Nazi persecution. Author-drawn maps place individuals in their evolving landscapes—showing the escape routes they attempted, the barriers they met, and the ghettos, camps, and killing sites they endured. By weaving together meticulously researched historical context and personal testimony, The Hunted offers a vivid human portrait of survival amid one of history’s darkest chapters.

The historical emergence of centralised mineral resource governance in Ghana can be tied to its failed colonially transplanted legal system. This book offers a sobering reflection of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) formalisation, with a focus on its complex operationalisation in formerly colonized societies. Through its thought-provoking analysis, engagement with the archives and emphasis on knowledge co-production, the study crucially examines how sustainability is engendered in indigenous, small-scale mining operations. Its reliance on decolonial legal pluralism and indigenous philosophy seeks to ignite meaningful conversations which are grounded in environmental responsibility, transparency and accountability in the administration of access to mineral rights.

Organized around issues, debates and discussions concerning the various ways in which the concept of nature has been used, this book looks at how the term has been endlessly deconstructed and reclaimed, as reflected in anthropological, scientific, and similar writing over the last several decades. Made up of ten of Roy Ellen’s finest articles, this book looks back at his ideas about nature and includes a new introduction that contextualizes the arguments and takes them forward. Many of the chapters focus on research the author has conducted amongst the Nuaulu people of eastern Indonesia.

For the last five decades, the Dani of the central highlands of West Papua, along with other Papuans, have struggled with the oppressive conditions of Indonesian rule. Formal education holds the promise of escape from stigmatization and violence. Dreams Made Small offers an in-depth, ethnographic look at journeys of education among young Dani men and women, asking us to think differently about education as a trajectory for transformation and belonging, and ultimately revealing how dreams of equality are shaped and reshaped in the face of multiple constraints.

Our modern culture is increasingly expressed in the form of digital artifacts, yet archaeology is in its infancy when it comes to researching and understanding them. The study and reverse engineering of digital artifacts is no longer the exclusive domain of computer scientists. Presented by way of analogy to the process of archaeological fieldwork familiar to readers, the 1986 Electronic Arts game Amnesia is used as a vehicle to explain the procedure and thought process required to reverse engineer a digital artifact. As a go-to reference to learn how to begin studying the digital, Amnesia is shown to be a multi-layered artifact with a complex backstory; through it, topics in data compression, copy protection, memory management, and programming languages are covered.

Audiences for contemporary German film and television are becoming increasingly transnational, and depictions of German cultural history are moving beyond the typical post-war focus on Germany’s problematic past. Entertaining German Culture explores this radical shift, building on recent research into transnational culture to argue that a new process of internal and external cultural reabsorption is taking place through areas of mutually assimilating cultural exchange such as streaming services, an increasingly international film market, and the import and export of Anglo-American media formats.

There is a call in Heritage Studies to democratize heritage practices and place local communities at the forefront; heritage plays an important role in identity formation, and therefore in social inclusion and exclusion. Public participation is often presented as the primary means to prioritize communities. However, studies focusing on public participation are typically descriptive in nature and lack a strong analytical framework that enables us to understand participation. The essays in this volume apply Public Administration theory to collaborative governance and thus contribute to a better understanding of public participation in the heritage sector.

Studying the im/mobility trajectories of West Africans in the EU, this book presents a new approach to West African migrants in Europe. It argues that a migration lens is not necessarily the best starting point to understand these dynamic im/mobility processes. Rather than seeing migrancy as the primary marker of their lives, this book positions these trajectories in a wider social script of mobility and discusses how African migrants are confronted with rigid mobility regimes, but also how they manage to transgress and circumvent them.

Syrians living in refuge in Lebanon and Turkey during the war in Syria continued to reckon with the Syrian State as a direct and indirect force in their lives. Through an ethnographic account of everyday life in Syrian families with a variety of political standpoints, this book demonstrates how the experience of displacement was shaped by ongoing deliberations on the ways in which the Syrian State had and continued to intersect people’s lives. It provides new perspectives on the co-constitution of authoritarian rule and displacement in a Middle East context.

Claudia Roth's work on Bobo-Dioulasso, a city of half a million residents in Burkina Faso, provides uniquely detailed insight into the evolving life-world of a West African urban population in one of the poorest countries in the world. Closely documenting the livelihood strategies of members of various neighbourhoods, Roth’s work calls into question established notions of “the African family” as a solidary network, documents changing marriage and kinship relations under the impact of a persistent economic crisis, and explores the increasingly precarious social status of young women and men.

German studies scholars from various disciplines often use and reference ethnography, yet do not often present ethnography as a core methodology and research approach. Former Neighbors, Future Allies? emphasizes how German studies engages in methods and theories of ethnography. Through a variety of topics and from multiple perspectives including literature, folklore, history, sociology, and anthropology, this volume draws attention to how ethnography bridges transdisciplinary and international research in German studies.

A range of meaningful objects—exhibits of human remains or live people, fetishes, objects in a Catholic Museum, exotic photographs, commodities, and computers—demonstrate a subordinate modern consciousness about powerful objects and their ‘life’. The Spirit of Matter discusses these objects that move people emotionally but whose existence is often denied by modern wishful thinking of ‘mind over matter’. It traces this mindset back to Protestant Christian influences that were secularized in the course of modern and colonial history.

A maverick photographer who travelled the world in search of otherness, over time Verger became a prominent ethnographer, botanist and historian. He devoted fifty years of research to the black cultures of Brazil and Africa and to the transatlantic world of the Orisha and Vodun deities. Living in the field, initiated into diverse religious societies, he was reborn under the name of Fatumbi. A go-between of the Yoruba diaspora, Verger practiced an anti-colonial ethnology avant la lettre. This book is an anthropological essay, but also a cross-cultural portrait and the story of an extraordinary life. It provides a detailed analysis of the artistic and scientific work of Pierre Fatumbi Verger (1902-1996).

Following the transformations and conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century, Austria’s emergence as an independent democracy heralded a new era of stability and prosperity for the nation. Among the new developments was mass tourism to the nation’s cities, spa towns, and wilderness areas, a phenomenon that would prove immensely influential on the development of a postwar identity. Revisiting Austria incorporates films, marketing materials, literature, and first-person accounts to explore the ways in which tourism has shaped both international and domestic perceptions of Austrian identity even as it has failed to confront the nation’s often violent and troubled history.

Though long-associated with violence, the Caucasus is a region rich with religious conviviality. Based on fresh ethnographies in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Russian Federation, Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces discusses vanishing and emerging sacred places in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious post-Soviet Caucasus. In exploring the effects of de-secularization, growing institutional control over hybrid sacred sites, and attempts to review social boundaries between the religious and the secular, these essays give way to an emergent Caucasus viewed from the ground up: dynamic, continually remaking itself, within shifting and indefinite frontiers.

Jean Quataert redefined the boundaries of at least five historical fields including European socialism, women’s history and gender history, and international law and human rights. In this volume dedicated to her pioneering work, established and emerging scholars showcase the signature ways in which Quataert, as one of the discipline’s first women’s historians, has influenced how subsequent generations think about history writing as a form of intellectual activism. Gender in Germany and Beyond presents cutting edge historiographical commentary alongside new work which address subjects such as the history of German colonialism and women’s colonial leagues, human rights advocacy during the Cold War, and the complexities of turn of the century gay and lesbian rights organizing.

Crises and displacement have shaped practices and relations of care among Zimbabwean migrants and their families upon their return from South African urban areas. Through ethnographic research primarily in Bulawayo,Economies of Care addresses the intersection of kinship, state functions and migration in sustaining livelihoods amidst Zimbabwe's economic and political instability. It offers an in-depth analysis of how bureaucratic and intimate care structures intertwine, making it an essential resource for scholars of migration, anthropology and African studies.

From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation’s social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan’s past, showing how they have reinforced personal and collective narratives while also formulating new cultural meanings, both on a local scale and in the context of transnational media production and consumption. Drawing upon diverse disciplinary insights and methodologies, these studies collectively offer a nuanced account in which mass media function as much more than a simple ideological tool.

Pedagogies of Value explores how China is reshaping global hierarchies of worth. Through ethnographic research among marketers, consultants, and brokers who promote foreign goods in Shanghai, Beijing, and beyond, this book investigates how value is taught, contested, and transformed in everyday encounters. From luxury brands and consumer ethnography to real estate, wine, and organic food, the book reveals how foreign intermediaries attempt to ‘educate’ Chinese consumers, only to confront shifting power dynamics that challenge Western authority. Blending vivid narratives with sharp analysis, this study argues that China has become a central arena for reimagining the very meaning of value. 

Anthropologists have long explained social behaviour as if people always do what they think is best. But what if most of these explanations only work because they are premised upon ignoring what philosophers call 'akrasia' – that is, the possibility that people might act against their better judgment? The contributors to this volume turn an ethnographic lens upon situations in which people seem to act out of line with what they judge, desire and intend. The result is a robust examination of how people around the world experience weaknesses of will, which speaks to debates in both the anthropology of ethics and moral philosophy.

Located in the far-western Tarai region of Nepal, Kailali has been the site of dynamic social and political change in recent history. The Partial Revolution examines Kailali in the aftermath of Nepal’s Maoist insurgency, critically examining the ways in which revolutionary political mobilization changes social relations—often unexpectedly clashing with the movement’s ideological goals. Focusing primarily on the end of Kailali’s feudal system of bonded labor, Hoffmann explores the connection between politics, labor, and Mao’s legacy, documenting the impact of changing political contexts on labor relations among former debt-bonded laborers.

The year 1968 has widely been viewed as the only major watershed moment during the latter half of the twentieth century. Rethinking Social Movements after ’68 takes on this conventional approach, exploring the spaces, practices, organization, ideas and agendas of numerous activists and movements across the 1970s and 1980s. From the Maoist Communist League to the women’s movement, youth center movement, and gay liberation movement, established and emerging scholars across Europe and North America shed new light on the development of modern European popular politics and social change.

Between 1898 and 1939, Spain saw the emergence of political and social identities shaped by the concepts of Hispanidad, Catholicism, race, tradition and the Spanish language. Rooted in 19th-century conservative thought, these ideas evolved through intellectual debate and ideological conflict with liberal and left-wing currents. This book explores how such identities were reshaped during Spain’s major political shifts and how they intersected with Latin American discourses. By examining both state-led initiatives and grassroots movements, it offers a dual perspective on the nationalization of the masses and the construction of Spanish and Iberian social and political identities.

A unique study on the relationship between state administration and politics, examining how the office of the Czech Landsmannminister became the primary vehicle for the politicization of the Habsburg state. Through case studies in Vienna, Prague, and České Budějovice, it chronicles the Young Czech Party’s systematic campaign to gain control of selected key positions within the administration of the multinational monarchy. The narrative details how ministers used personnel policy to embed loyalists within the bureaucracy, consistently bypassing merit in favor of national and political allegiance to successfully “Czechize” the formally supranational administration.

More than a century has passed since the arrival of British, French, and Italian forces in Istanbul in 1918, marking the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. The almost five-year-long occupation of the city that followed remains largely ignored in history writing in the former occupying powers, and is often marginalised in Anatolia-centric narratives of the Turkish War of Independence. The book brings together many of the scholars working to redress this neglect in recent years. Chapters cover issues as diverse as policing, commerce, fashion, labour, infrastructure, justice, and housing, revealing the impact of the occupation on all aspects of social, cultural, and political life. By bringing this tumultuous period back into focus, the book makes a significant contribution to First World War studies, research on European imperialism, and the modern history of Istanbul, Turkey, and the Middle East.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States and Germany were seen as rivals in a “race for modernity,” each pursuing distinct visions of the future. America’s image as a technological pioneer reshaped European self-perception, while Germany asserted its own path through science, engineering, and a far-reaching reform of design, architecture, and applied arts. This book explores the cultural encounters and confrontations between 1880 and the 1930s, moving beyond familiar narratives of Fordism and Taylorism to reveal technology as a dynamic cultural force. By tracing the adoption of German science in the United States, the American endeavors of conceptualizing technology in the search for a genuine American culture, and the German fascination and critique of “Americanism” in the Weimar republic, it offers new perspectives on transatlantic modernity.

Through reference to one of its most canonical figures: Bronislaw Malinowski, this volume de-centres anthropology seemingly in a paradox. Considering Malinowski as a disciplinary metonym, this de-centring addresses current debates on world anthropologies and the decolonization of anthropological knowledge, production, and careers. Despite (and because of) the publication of his diaries (Malinowski 1967), Malinowski remains part of an equivocal global anthropological tradition. Featuring scholars across various locations, genders and generations, this book neither celebrates nor “cancels” Malinowski. Instead, it offers an eccentric space of reconsideration and a prism for reflecting on power configurations in anthropology today.

A teleoperated robot roaming in the streets of Mumbai enables anyone to put oneself in the place of the Hindu god Ganesha and have a conversation. Initially conceived as an anthropological experiment, the machine was launched in 2014 and became a collective, political and metaphysical experience. Can a machine make a good divine interface? Likewise, what might be the virtues of hacking a god to understand our relation to machines? The Ganesh Yourself experiment is not only a fascinating exercise in anthropology by design, the first of this kind, but it also leads to a radical deconstruction of religion, politics and technology, opening unthinkable possibilities.

The complexities of the relationship between food and kinship are highlighted in eating disorders. This book is an in-depth ethnographic account of a public treatment centre for eating disorders in Italy. By examining the practices and ethics of care that attempt to reconcile the patients’, family carers’, and the professionals’ conflicting notions about eating disorders, this book explores how bodies are both material in their sociality and social in their materiality. Food and family emerge aligned in the production and treatment of these conditions, as healthcare professionals tackle the patient’s kinship relationships for intervention. Ultimately, kinship makes and unmakes people through food.

Single motherhood, a new family form, demonstrates an accomplishment of paradoxical synergies between 2nd wave feminism and neoliberalism. Single Mother by Choice chronicles the journey of Ann, a 41-year-old woman throughout her intensive mothering of three donor-conceived children from infancy to tween years. The Christian Right’s embrace of neoliberalism provided a permission structure for this and other emerging families, while simultaneously influencing progressive parents with trickle down neoliberal values that weaken the moral architecture of childhood and the nation. This fine-grained analysis of one family’s life illuminates the complexities of twenty-first century, middle-class American motherhood, whether single or not.

In an increasingly modernised French Polynesian society, some Christians have been tackling contemporary social issues and repatriate traditional indigenous values . Pursuing the past in the present means grappling with ongoing existential issues as an indigenous people, such as the dismantling of the kinship community, the decline of domestic agriculture and the loss of indigenous cultural heritage. Māòhi Christians strive to reconnect with a perceived Indigenous, sacred past within a present they consider to be alienating. This book illustrates how indigenous Christians perceive social change and how their historical perceptions inform the creation of their own Christianity.

Travel writing appears to be the most oxymoronic of genres: the practice of writing and reading typically requires stasis and travel writing emerges from movement. From the concurrent physical and emotional journeys of Ella Maillart and Annemarie Schwarzenbach to the instantaneous digital discourses of contemporary urban travellers, and from the challenges of writing in the extreme conditions of the Antarctic to those of updating guidebooks via Google Streetview, this book examines the tensions between actual journeys and their resultant texts. Writing on the Move asks questions about the meaning of ‘movement’ – and what counts as ‘travel writing’ – in an age of virtual journeying and enforced immobility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being prejudiced is usually taken to mean having hasty and poorly founded feelings and opinions, usually negative, that are based on too little real knowledge and careful consideration. Definitions, however, are not explanations. The Origins of Prejudice is a short and unconventional book that shows you step-by-step both how and why all of us who are human often rely uncritically on what we believe to be true about the people, things, and events shaping our lives outside the hidden world of our bony skull. This book aims to show how we can learn from our possibly unintentional acts and self-serving misdeeds to live together in supportive, less conflicted ways.

Education is arguably the central arena where the discipline of anthropology is reproduced, challenged, and renewed. This volume examines how anthropology is taught and transformed in diverse institutional and socio-political contexts worldwide. Covering themes such as multimodal teaching, research-led learning, and disciplinary boundaries, the book offers new insights into the changing role of teaching within anthropology.  This book compiles ethnographically grounded case studies to explore how educators respond to technological advancements, neoliberal influences, and calls for decolonising pedagogy. By highlighting content-specific strategies and comparative reflection, this study views anthropological education as a vibrant and critical space where anthropology is reimagined and revitalised.

Anthropology has an important role in articulating people’s engagements with water at different spatial and temporal scales, and in showing how local relationships with waterways and marine areas translate into larger anthropogenic impacts on regional and global ecosystems. This volume explores diverse relationships with waterbodies, and considers how these are expressed in art, material culture and infrastructures. Focusing on the multiple and overlapping scales at which people relate to water in contexts including wave science, Indigenous cosmology, extractive industries and environmental activism, it suggests that efforts to achieve more sustainable and equitable engagements with water must also be multi-scalar.

Amaravati, the new capital of Andhra Pradesh, exemplifies India’s policy thrust on urbanization. Tracing the rise, abandonment and revival of Amaravati, Urbanizing the Future delves into the ambitious plan to build a brand-new city in an agrarian landscape. The book unpacks the entanglements of caste, capital, and state power in shaping development through a regional lens. Urbanizing the Future highlights the disruptions and conflicts engendered by mega-projects as agricultural land is converted into urban real estate. Combining political economy and history with long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the Amaravati story offers a compelling critique of planned urbanization as a contested and uneven process in contemporary India.

While Psychology and Anthropology share certain overlapping interests, there is no agreed schema or paradigm for this area. Rejecting both psychoanalysis and the biopsychosocial model as insufficient, this collection brings together studies on Hasidic concepts of illness, the religious origins of schizophrenia, Christian stigmata, the “third sex” in Albania, jinn possession among European immigrants, and reincarnation among the Druze. The volume argues for plural models integrating biological, psychodynamic, and sociocultural perspectives. It highlights the enduring tension between Psychiatry’s naturalistic explanations and Anthropology’s personalistic approach, suggesting that both offer partial yet essential insights into human experience.

Engaging critically with concepts of race, species, and otherness, Alterity and Human Evolution contributes to current debates on human evolution. In a political climate marked by movements such as Black Lives Matter and policies like Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14168 against ‘gender ideology’, this volume brings together a group of leading scholars in archeology, paleoanthropology and human evolution to examine how narratives of human origins intersect with issues of race, gender, and anthropocentrism. Drawing on postcolonial and critical frameworks from the Humanities and Social Sciences, it interrogates key foundational concepts and assumptions underpinning evolutionary discourses.

Homogenization, monochromatic rendering, and the process of schematic imposition is readily apparent in modern mainstream Jewish French politics. The Jewish Maghreb explores complex self and communal understandings of Maghrebi Jewish populations and their descendants in France through ethnography across generations. This study examines how colonial history, migration, and geopolitics shape ongoing Maghrebi belonging. From commercial networks in Paris to Algerian pilgrimage journeys, the book reveals communal North African Jewish navigation of plural sediments of self and history. The heuristic ‘maghrebinicité,’ works to illuminate ongoing negotiations of memory, citizenship, and cultural transmission in postcolonial France, offering fresh insights into diaspora, return, and the persistence of transnational connections.

Eduards Volters was a Latvian linguist, renowned early ethnographer, and archeologist with the Russian Imperial Geographical Society. He studied the Lithuanians and Latvians in the Northwest Krai of the Russian Empire and Lithuania from 1882 to 1941. As Volters began his research at a time when the printing of Lithuanian and Latgalian publications in the Latin alphabet was forbidden, this book aims to uncover his role as one of the founders of literate Lithuanian and Latvian communities. This study compares various historical and theoretical contexts in anthropology and decolonization to reveal how Volters reconciled his ethnographic work within the political goals of the empire.

In Black Lisbon, Richard Cleminson traces the local and transnational intersections between peoples in Portugal and across the Portuguese African empire, in order to interrogate the development of movements based in Lisbon that resisted or sought to reconfigure colonialism. He analyses how ‘race’ and nation were conceptualised, mobilised and lived by colonised black Africans in Lisbon and in the Portuguese colonies across time. Integral to this inquiry is the siting of ‘colonial-questioning’ movements in Portugal as part of organizations and publications within other racialised and imperial spaces. To what degree did movements in Black Lisbon accommodate their demands to Portuguese colonial prerogatives? How far did organizations adopt visions of a decentralised ‘Greater Portugal’ or a federal Africa?

Ernst Kitzinger was one of the great art historians of the twentieth century, and a refugee incarcerated in Hay, New South Wales during WWII. As a German Jew he had sought refuge in Britain in 1935, but in 1940 was one of 2,500 men arrested as ‘enemy aliens’ and deported to Australia aboard the HMT Dunera. Kitzinger rallied his fellow internees to communicate their peculiar circumstances. In powerful and often deeply moving prose and poetry, they mused on their lot and the misfortunes of refugees. Never before published, their words remain strikingly relevant today.

The Greek Revolution of 1821 was not merely a national uprising—it was a transnational event that reshaped the Eastern Mediterranean and reverberated across the globe. Moving beyond traditional nationalist historiography, this study draws on recent transnational and Ottoman-centered scholarship to examine how diaspora networks, European Philhellenes, and great power rivalries transformed a regional revolt into an international cause. The Ottoman context is treated not as a passive or declining backdrop, but as a dynamic, multiethnic polity grappling with reform, resistance, and the challenges of maintaining imperial cohesion. Drawing on multilingual and cross-regional sources, the Contributors explore how the Revolution was perceived, contested, and reshaped across diverse cultural and political spaces, embedding 1821 within the broader currents of nineteenth-century revolution, diplomacy, and state formation.

The Social Survey in Global Perspective traces the evolution of social surveys beyond celebrated metropolitan examples, exploring their worldwide impact across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors examine surveys in diverse contexts—from colonial territories to grassroots women’s organizations—to reveal methodological challenges and profound social influence. The collection illuminates how surveys shaped state power, social movements, and individual identity while often reproducing existing hierarchies. By exploring the double-sided legacy of social surveying—as an engine of both progressive reform and state surveillance—this book offers a critical reassessment of empirical practices that continue to determine how we understand ourselves, our societies and our world.

Between 1933 and 1942, around 20,000 refugees fled to Shanghai to escape Nazi-occupied Europe, most of them Jewish. Unable to assimilate into Chinese culture, the Jewish community spent a decade preserving their own culture and enduring harsh Japanese occupation in Shanghai, before dispersing around the world after the end of World War II. Steve Hochstadt, whose Viennese grandparents were among those who fled, tells their story by weaving together hundreds of sources and dozens of interviews into a series of compelling essays on this unique, but little-known rescue.

Pandemics spread throughout early modern Germany on a regular basis and profoundly affected public policy and private lives. While plague was central, other diseases such as French pox, which appeared in the 1490s, were of concern as well. This volume examines both historical data and textual evidence to explore how early modern states, communities, and individuals responded to such outbreaks, how they dealt with ensuing political, ethical, intellectual, social, and pragmatic issues, and how they handled arising conflicts. The focus is on the period between 1480 and 1720, between the onset of printed plague literature and the end of periodic outbreaks of plague.

The Afterlives of Tamil Tigers explores the experience of war, defeat, and exile among former fighters—both men and women—of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), through the testimonies of veterans now living in France. Moving beyond the organisation’s reputation for violence, Giacomo Mantovan sheds light on the everyday lives, emotions, and ideological commitment of its combatants. By tracing their life trajectories—from military training to exile, through combat, torture, loss, and survival—he examines how these experiences have left a lasting imprint on their identities and ways of being in the world.

From August 1942 to April 1945, Siemens & Halske AG maintained its own so-called production facility adjacent to the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp, where up to 2,300 female prisoners were deployed in forced labor. This volume contains excerpts from letters, witness statements, arrest reports, diaries, compensation claims, autobiographies and interviews from Ravensbrück survivors who were forced to work in the armaments factory. The texts shed light on the system of forced labor in the context of the concentration camp, questions of discouragement and hope as well as the women's will for self-assertion and resistance

The existence and achievements of Jewish “self-rescuers” within Nazi-occupied Hungary remains, in spite of their significance, historically underexplored. In this illuminating chronicle of the life and work of Jewish couple, László and Eugenia Szamosi, Remembering Resistance seeks to address this lacunae, offering an unique insight into a family’s personal history of resistance under the Nazi regime. Combining oral testimony from fellow survivors, with a previously-unpublished translation of László’s memoir, this book foregrounds the remarkable work of the Szamosis and their network, in rescuing Jews from the Death Marches and reuniting displaced families. Through doing so, this book offers a powerful framework for mediating how we remember Jewish experiences of the Holocaust.

Addressing polarized narratives of authoritarian control and societal resistance, this volume reconsiders the totalitarianism paradigm in the study of the Soviet Bloc. Historians, philosophers, and literary scholars explore both its enduring explanatory power and its conceptual limits, drawing on insights from social epistemology and the history of social sciences. Case studies on Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the former GDR, Ukraine and the Soviet Union reveal how education, publishing, and cultural production shaped institutional life and intra-bloc interactions. The contributions develop new historiographical standards for understanding the complex interplay between imperial influence and local agency across the diverse societies of the former socialist world, while exploring the potential of various social-theoretical frameworks.

Emplaced Belief is an innovative interdisciplinary volume that explores the conceptual and lived relations between the academic fields of religion and heritage. The Contributors adopt a wholistic approach to consider emplacement — a broad interrelation of objects, peoples, histories and places — in the analysis of relations between religion and heritage. To be ‘emplaced’ is to be situated, yet such positioning is the result of multiple conscious and unconscious forces, agencies, discourses, and epistemologies. The volume’s title refers not only to physical locations of import, but also to the role of cultural practices and religious epistemologies in the establishment of religious heritage: the act of emplacement. That is, the religious, social, political and cultural practices that denote ‘heritage’ and the dynamics that revise, reinforce, or remove any such attribution.

Nineteenth-century Germany invented the way we eat. Women experimenting in households, French chefs fleeing guillotines, and one of the most rapidly evolving food industries in the world forged recognizably modern eating practices between 1780 and 1910. While central Europeans merely aimed to survive long winters, experiment with translated recipes and curious ingredients from abroad, and embrace the conveniences of industrial life, their consumption habits and cooking practices created a new product landscape. Throughout this transitional era of history, individuals visibly communicated their self-understandings through food. This study of central European food modernity and middle-class identity aims to provide fresh footing for discussions in our own changing global era.

The lens of life stories allows us to identify contested memories and counter-narratives, thus offering new ways of interpreting the social dynamics that led to acts of genocidal violence and their remembrance, yet also to their denial.  Lives in Fragments focuses on life stories that were fragmented and shattered through the historical violence of the Armenian genocide, and offers a nuanced understanding of genocide’s complex historical and social dimensions. Diverse ego-documents and self-narrative sources become subject of analysis in chapters that investigate the historiography and remembrance of the Armenian genocide. By drawing attention to biographical trajectories and manifestations, Lives in Fragments reflects on the history and memory of genocidal violence. 

Raul Hilberg (1926-2007) was a pioneer of Holocaust historiography. After sifting through tens of thousands of perpetrators documents, he published The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961, with two revised editions to follow in 1985 and 2003. Hilberg’s magnum opus describes the persecution as a complex bureaucratic process involving the entire German society. The book has served as a foundational text and intellectual companion to the field of Holocaust historiography since its first publication.

The contributions in this volume explore the origins of Hilberg’s pioneering study, map out the debates in which it was implicated, highlight its unprecedented accomplishments as well as disturbing blind spots, and use “The Destruction” as a prism for an appraisal of eight decades of Holocaust research.

From Reddit and YouTube to collector forums and live auctions, the avenues through which cultural heritage can be bought and sold are rapidly growing alongside new digital technologies. Considering anew the implications of this digital expansion for the online trafficking of cultural property and human remains, Investigating Online Heritage Crime conducts an exacting examination of these relatively under-researched "sites" of heritage crime. The chapters address how networks operate within and because of the interconnected social media and e-commerce landscape. Through doing so, this volume highlights where markets for online heritage are headed, especially given the ever-prevalent adoption of AI and LLM (Large Language Models) technology that is profoundly reshaping all aspects of online life, including licit and illicit commerce.

Practice Theory and the Biosocial - Microbes, Matter and Milieu shows what recent developments in social theory bring to questions about how bacteria, viruses, microscopic materials and societies develop in tandem. The examples discussed – from urban infrastructures to the medieval plague and from antibiotic resistance to epigenetics –develop an account of how previous and present arrangements make some futures more likely than others and how unequal patterns of exposure and entanglement arise. This book aims to demonstrate the relevance of social and practice theories by overcoming classic distinctions between the very small and the very large, between agency and structure, and between nature and culture.