Multiple medical realities

Nowadays a plethora of treatment technologies is available to the consumer, each employing a variety of concepts of the body, self, sickness and healing. This volume explores the options, strategies and consequences that are both relevant and necessary for patients and practitioners who are man...

The third world in the global 1960s

Decades after the massive student protest movements that consumed much of the world, the 1960s remain a significant subject of scholarly inquiry. While important work has been done regarding radical activism in the United States and Western Europe, events in what is today known as the Global So...

The familial occult

The Familial Occult addresses the presence of occult experiences in some scholars' families and how that has affected their epistemological and ontological worlds, as well as their identities as scholars. Those with backgrounds in the familial occult often experience a series of conflicting rel...

Reluctant intimacies

Based on seventeen months of ethnographic research among Indonesian eldercare workers in Japan and Indonesia, this book is the first ethnography to research Indonesian care workers’ relationships with the cared-for elderly, their Japanese colleagues, and their employers. Through the notion of i...

Ordinary lives and grand schemes

Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a...

Understanding impoverishment

Infrastructure development projects are set to continue into the next century as developing country governments seek to manage population growth, urbanization and industrialization. The contributions in this volume raise many questions about 'development' and 'progress' in the late twentieth ce...

Corporate scandal

When the Enron filed the biggest bankruptcy petition in the history of the United States, if not the world, the immediate response by most politicians and financiers was that this scandal was a “failure of regulatory institutions” that can be corrected and may possibly even be a purely North Am...

State collapse and reconstruction in the periphery

In the 1990s, Yugoslavia, which had once been a role model for development, became a symbol for state collapse, external intervention and post-war reconstruction. Today the region has two international protectorates, contested states and borders, severe ethnic polarization and minority concerns...

Multiple nature-cultures, diverse anthropologies

Over time, the role of nature in anthropology has evolved from being a mere backdrop for social and cultural diversity to being viewed as an integral part of the ontological entanglement of human and nonhuman agents. This transformation of the role of nature offers important insight into the re...

The body in balance

Focusing on practice more than theory, this collection offers new perspectives for studying the so-called “humoral medical traditions,” as they have flourished around the globe during the last 2,000 years. Exploring notions of “balance” in medical cultures across Eurasia, Africa and the America...

Terror from the sky

In this first interdisciplinary study of this contentious subject, leading experts in politics, history, and philosophy examine the complex aspects of the terror bombing of German cities during World War II. The contributors address the decision to embark on the bombing campaign, the moral issu...

The anthropologist as writer

Writing is crucial to anthropology, but which genres are anthropologists expected to master in the 21st century? This book explores how anthropological writing shapes the intellectual content of the discipline and academic careers. First, chapters identify the different writing genres and conte...

Dark trophies

Many anthropological accounts of warfare in indigenous societies have described the taking of heads or other body parts as trophies. But almost nothing is known of the prevalence of trophy-taking of this sort in the armed forces of contemporary nation-states. This book is a history of this type...

The hegemonic male

The construction of masculinity is becoming a field of growing interest because it is opening up new and fascinating perspectives, thus adding a further dimension to Gender Studies. However, so far the analysis has focused mostly on homosexuality. By contrast, the author examines social process...

Beyond inclusion and exclusion

During the First World War, the Jewish population of Central Europe was politically, socially, and experientially diverse, to an extent that resists containment within a simple historical narrative. While antisemitism and Jewish disillusionment have dominated many previous studies of the topic,...

Two lives in uncertain times

Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Wilma and Georg Iggers came from different backgrounds, Wilma from a Jewish farming family from the German-speaking border area of Czechoslovakia, Georg from a Jewish business family from Hamburg. They both escape...

Possessing the world

Based on an impressive body of information and data, this volume recounts the history of five continents over a long stretch of time and in a comparative approach. From the beginning of European expansion the question was posed: what were the "empire tools" that gave Europe its military superio...

Anthropology as ethics

Anthropology as Ethics is concerned with rethinking anthropology by rethinking the nature of reality. It develops the ontological implications of a defining thesis of the Manchester School: that all social orders exhibit basically conflicting underlying principles. Drawing especially on Contine...

Narrating the future in siberia

The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first...

Working the fabric

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 ...

Kingdom on mount cameroon

The Bakweri people of Mount Cameroon, an active volcano on the coast of West Africa a few degrees north of the equator, have had a varied and at times exciting history which has brought them into contact, not only with other West African peoples, but with merchants, missionaries, soldiers and a...

Cousin marriages

Juxtaposing contributions from geneticists and anthropologists, this volume provides a contemporary overview of cousin marriage and what is happening at the interface of public policy, the management of genetic risk and changing cultural practices in the Middle East and in multi-ethnic Europe. ...

Empire of pictures

In Cold War historiography, the 1960s are often described as a decade of mounting diplomatic tensions and international social unrest. At the same time, they were a period of global media revolution: communication satellites compressed time and space, television spread around the world, and ima...

Keys to the 21st century

Are we prepared for the 21st century? There is room for doubt. The future seems increasingly uncertain, hard to decipher, ambiguous in its very indeterminism, sometime frankly illegible. If it is impossible to predict the future, one can at least help to shape it. To respond in a timely manner ...

Sustainable development

With growing evidence of unsustainable use of the world’s resources, such as hydrocarbon reserves, and related environmental pollution, as in alarming climate change predictions, sustainable development is arguably the prominent issue of the 21st century.  This volume gives a wide ranging intro...

Sight and sound entwined

Notwithstanding the economic hardship Russian people are experiencing, their cultural life is as rich and alive as ever, as Gerald Janecek shows us in this collection of his articles on contemporary Russian poetry, which are especially written for this publication or so far only available in Ru...

Tides of empire

At the forested edge of Cambodia’s development frontier, the infrastructures of global development engulf the land and existing social practices like an incoming tide. Cambodia’s distinctive history of imperial surge and rupture makes it easier to see the remains of earlier tides, which are emb...

Americanization and anti-americanism

The ongoing discussions about globalization, American hegemony and September 11 and its aftermath have moved the debate about the export of American culture and cultural anti-Americanism to center stage of world politics. At such a time, it is crucial to understand the process of culture transf...

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...

Authority, identity and the social history of the great war

The unprecedented scope and intensity of the First World War has prompted an enormous body of retrospective scholarship. However, efforts to provide a coherent synthesis about the war's impact and significance have remained circumscribed, tending to focus either on the operational outlines of m...

The brazilian truth commission

Bringing together some of the world’s leading scholars, practitioners, and human-rights activists, this groundbreaking volume provides the first systematic analysis of the 2012–2014 Brazilian National Truth Commission. While attentive to the inquiry’s local and national dimensions, it offers an...

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...

At home in the hills

To most outsiders, the hills of the Scottish Borders are a bleak and foreboding space - usually made to represent the stigmatized Other, Ad Finis, by the centers of power in Edinburgh, London, and Brussels. At a time when globalization seems to threaten our sense of place, people of the Scottis...

The csce and the end of the cold war

From its inception, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) provoked controversy. Today it is widely regarded as having contributed to the end of the Cold War. Bringing together new and innovative research on the CSCE, this volume explores questions key to understanding the ...

Placing london

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

Agency in transnational memory politics

The dynamics of transnational memory play a central role in modern politics, from postsocialist efforts at transitional justice to the global legacies of colonialism. Yet, the relatively young subfield of transnational memory studies remains underdeveloped and fractured across numerous discipli...

Islam and new kinship

Assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization have provoked global controversy and ethical debate. This book provides a groundbreaking investigation into those debates in the Islamic Middle East, simultaneously documenting changing ideas of kinship and the evolving role of r...

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...

Taking sides

Concerns with research ethics have intensified over recent years, in large part as a symptom of "audit cultures" (M. Strathern) but also as a serious matter of engagement with the ethical complexities in contemporary research fields. This volume, written by a new generation of scholars engaged ...

Christianity, colonialism and indigenous history in french polynesia

This book illustrates how indigenous Christians perceive social change and how their historical perceptions inform the creation of their own Christianity in an increasingly modernised French Polynesian society.

Living on a time bomb

From the bonn to the berlin republic

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of East and West Germany in 1989/90 were events of world-historical significance. The twentieth anniversary of this juncture represents an excellent opportunity to reflect upon the evolution of the new Berlin Republic. Given the on-going significa...

Beyond the veil

Looking at the cultural responses to death and dying, this collection explores the emotional aspects that death provokes in humans, whether it is disgust, fear, awe, sadness, anger, or even joy. Whereas most studies of death and dying treat the subject from an objective viewpoint, the scholars ...

Reassessing the nuremberg military tribunals

For decades the history of the US Military Tribunals at Nuremberg (NMT) has been eclipsed by the first Nuremberg trial—the International Military Tribunal or IMT. The dominant interpretation—neatly summarized in the ubiquitous formula of “Subsequent Trials”—ignores the unique historical and leg...

Sexual politics and the european union

Just as feminist scholars began to develop an analysis of "the state" and women in Europe gained access to its political, legal and bureaucratic arenas, increased attention and reliance on European institutions have begun to take precedence over the more parochial concerns of the nation state. ...

Slavery and antislavery in spain's atlantic empire

African slavery was pervasive in Spain’s Atlantic empire yet remained in the margins of the imperial economy until the end of the eighteenth century when the plantation revolution in the Caribbean colonies put the slave traffic and the plantation at the center of colonial exploitation and confl...

The end of the refugee cycle?

At the start of the 1990s, there was great optimism that the end of the Cold War might also mean the end of the "refugee cycle" - both a breaking of the cycle of violence, persecution and flight, and the completion of the cycle for those able to return to their homes. The 1990s, it was hoped, w...

State and civil society in northern europe

In the current neo-liberal political and economic climate, it is often suggested that a large and strong state stands in opposition to an autonomous and vibrant civil society. However, the simultaneous presence in Sweden of both a famously large public sector and an unusually vital civil societ...

Ethnoarchaeology of andean south america

Andean South America offers significant anthropological insights into highland and arid zone adaptations, including pastoralist economy and ecology, settlement patterns, site formation processes, tool manufacture, and the cultural meanings of landscapes. The papers in this volume present detail...

News as culture

At the turn of the millennium, Indian journalism has undergone significant changes. The rapid commercialization of the press, together with an increase in literacy and political consciousness, has led to swift growth in the newspaper market but also changed the way news makers mediate politics....

Subsistence-settlement systems and intersite variability in the moroiso phase of the early jomon period of japan

This book examines the settlement patterns and intersite variability in lithic assemblages of Early Jomon (ca. 5000 BP) hunter-gatherers in Japan. A model is proposed that links regional settlement patterns and intersite lithic assemblage variability to residential mobility. The results of this...

Beyond the lens of conservation

The global agenda of Nature conservation has led to the creation of the Masoala National Park in Madagascar and to an exhibit in its support at a Swiss zoo, the centerpiece of which is a mini-rainforest replica. Does such a cooperation also trigger a connection between ordinary people in these ...

On violence in history

Is global violence on the decline? Scholars argue that Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s proposal that violence has declined dramatically over time is flawed. This highly-publicized argument that human violence across the world has been dramatically abating continues to influence discourse...

From peace to war

The German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 represents one of the major caesuras in European history. Its consequences could still be felt fifty years later. Thirty-five historians from nine different countries (including the former Soviet Union) offer a comprehensive survey of the origi...

Things of the house

Discussing multiple aspects of material culture and domestic consumption, this book tackles the relationship between the trajectories and biographies of people, families, houses and objects and how they intertwine and produce each other. Focusing on the life stories of a group of European and C...

Mythology, spirituality, and history

The Arakmbut are an indigenous people who live in the Madre de Dios region of thesoutheastern Peruvian rain forest. Since their first encounters with missionaries in the 1950s,they have shown resilience and a determination to affirm their identity in the face of many difficulties. During the la...

The nomads of mykonos

This is the ethnography of the Mykoniots d’élection, a ‘gang’ of romantic adventurers who have been visiting the island of Mykonos for the last thirty-five years and have formed a community of dispersed friends. Their constant return to and insistence on working, acting and creating in a touris...

Constructing charisma

Railroads, telegraphs, lithographs, photographs, and mass periodicals—the major technological advances of the 19th century seemed to diminish the space separating people from one another, creating new and apparently closer, albeit highly mediated, social relationships. Nowhere was this phenomen...

Broken glass, broken class

Based on a long-term study of the everyday postsocialist politics of labour in the wider context of intense socio-economic transformation in Bulgaria, this book tells the story of the flexibilization of production, the precaritization of work, shifting managerial practices, and ways in which pe...

Theater and political process

The Argonauts in the Pacific, famous through Malinowski's work, have not been exempt from general historical developments in the world around them. By focusing on two plays performed by the Tokelau Te Ata, a theater group, the author reveals the self-perceptions of the Tokelau and highlights th...

The greek military dictatorship

From 1967 to 1974, the military junta ruling Greece attempted a dramatic reshaping of the nation, implementing ideas and policies that left a lasting mark on both domestic affairs and international relations. Bringing together leading scholars from a range of disciplines, The Greek Military Dic...

Childbirth, midwifery and concepts of time

All cultures are concerned with the business of childbirth, so much so that it can never be described as a purely physiological or even psychological event. This volume draws together work from a range of anthropologists and midwives who have found anthropological approaches useful in their wor...

Patients and agents

Sylhet, the area of Bangladesh most closely associated with overseas migration, has seen an increase in remittances sent home from abroad, introducing new inequalities.  Social change has also been mediated by the global forces of Western biomedicine and orthodox Islam.  This book examines the ...

Biography between structure and agency

While bookstore shelves around the world have never ceased to display best-selling “life-and-letters” biographies in prominent positions, the genre became less popular among academic historians during the Cold War decades. Their main concern then was with political and socioeconomic structures,...

Between reform and revolution

The powerful impact of Socialism and Communism on modern German history is the theme which is explored by the contributors to this volume. Whereas previous investigations have tended to focus on political, intellectual and biographical aspects, this book captures, for the first time, the method...

Space and spatiality in modern german-jewish history

What makes a space Jewish? This wide-ranging volume revisits literal as well as metaphorical spaces in modern German history to examine the ways in which Jewishness has been attributed to them both within and outside of Jewish communities, and what the implications have been across different er...

Raising citizens in the 'century of the child'

The 20th century, declared at its start to be the “Century of the Child” by Swedish author Ellen Key, saw an unprecedented expansion of state activity in and expert knowledge on child-rearing on both sides of the Atlantic. Children were seen as a crucial national resource whose care could not b...

From weimar to hitler

Though often depicted as a rapid political transformation, the Nazi seizure of power was in fact a process that extended from the appointment of the Papen cabinet in the early summer of 1932 through the Röhm blood purge two years later. Across fourteen rigorous and carefully researched chapters...

Animals, plants and afterimages

The sixth mass extinction or Anthropocene extinction is one of the most pervasive issues of our time. Animals, Plants and Afterimages brings together leading scholars in the humanities and life sciences to explore how extinct species are represented in art and visual culture, with a special emp...

Cooling down

Climate change is a slowly advancing crisis sweeping over the planet and affecting different habitats in strikingly diverse ways. While nations have signed treaties and implemented policies, most actual climate change assessments, adaptations, and countermeasures take place at the local level. ...

Contemplating historical consciousness

The last several decades have witnessed an explosion of new empirical research into representations of the past and the conditions of their production, prompting claims that we have entered a new era in which the past has become more “present” than ever before. Contemplating Historical Consciou...

At home on the waves

Contemporary public discourses about the ocean are routinely characterized by scientific and environmentalist narratives that imagine and idealize marine spaces in which humans are absent. In contrast, this collection explores the variety of ways in which people have long made themselves at hom...

Virtualism, governance and practice

Many people investigating the operation of large-scale environmentalist organizations see signs of power, knowledge and governance in their policies and projects. This collection indicates that such an analysis appears to be justified from one perspective, but not from another. The chapters in ...

Modern crises and traditional strategies

The 1990s have seen a growing interest in the role of local ecological knowledge in the context of sustainable development, and particularly in providing a set of responses to which populations may resort in times of political, economic and environmental instability. The period 1996-2003 in isl...

Resettlers and survivors

In the name of the great work

Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” Intended to increase agricultural yields dramatically, this utopian impulse quickly spread to the newly communist states of Eastern Europ...

The return of politics

By the spring of 1998, it had become clear that Italy, after considerable effort, had succeeded in bringing its public finances into line with the Maastricht parameters for joining the European Monetary Union. This was generally viewed as an important success of the Olive Tree coalition governm...

Estates and constitution

Across eighteenth-century Europe, political power resided overwhelmingly with absolute monarchs, with notable exceptions including the much-studied British Parliament as well as the frequently overlooked Hungarian Diet, which placed serious constraints on royal power and broadened opportunities...

Jewish religious law

This is the first major work on the interrelationship between Liberal Judaism and Rabbinic Law (Halachah) ever to have been produced in Britain, and in Europe since the nineteenth century. It represents a plea for a positive yet forthrightly critical approach to Rabbinic Law in general aswell a...

Sofia coppola

A feminist study of the mood, texture, tone, and multifaceted meaning of director Sofia Coppola’s aesthetic through her most influential and well-known films. A Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2019 “With this book Rogers has produced a sophisticated and impassioned analysis of Coppola’s w...

Methodologies of mobility

Research into mobility is an exciting challenge for the social sciences that raises novel social, cultural, spatial and ethical questions. At the heart of these empirical and theoretical complexities lies the question of methodology: how can we best capture and understand a planet in flux? Meth...

Refugees from nazi germany and the liberal european states

The exodus of refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s has received far more attention from historians, social scientists, and demographers than many other migrations and persecutions in Europe. However, as a result of the overwhelming attention that has been given to the Holocaust within the hi...

Envisioning eden

As tourism service standards become more homogeneous, travel destinations worldwide are conforming yet still trying to maintain, or even increase, their distinctiveness. Based on more than two years of fieldwork in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Arusha, Tanzania, this book offers an in-depth investi...

Being bedouin around petra

Petra, Jordan became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1985, and the semi-nomadic Bedouin inhabiting the area were resettled as a consequence. The Bedouin themselves paradoxically became UNESCO Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage in 2005 for the way in which their oral traditions and eve...

Planning labour

Ethnography and the corporate encounter

Businesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The nature of such work, as described in this volume, raises crucial questions about potential implications to disciplines of...

Too jewish or not jewish enough

Displays of Jewish ritual objects in public, non-Jewish settings by Jews are a comparatively re-cent phenomenon. So too is the establishment of Jewish museums. This volume explores the origins of the Jewish Museum of New York and its evolution from collecting and displaying Jewish ritual object...

On the order of chaos

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

Navigating colonial orders

Norwegians in colonial Africa and Oceania had varying aspirations and adapted in different ways to changing social, political and geographical circumstances in foreign, colonial settings. They included Norwegian shipowners, captains, and diplomats; traders and whalers along the African coast an...

Food in zones of conflict

The availability of food is an especially significant issue in zones of conflict because conflict nearly always impinges on the production and the distribution of food, and causes increased competition for food, land and resources Controlling the production of and access to food can also be use...

Durkheim, the durkheimians, and the arts

Using a broad definition of the Durkheimian tradition, this book offers the first systematic attempt to explore the Durkheimians’ engagement with art. It focuses on both Durkheim and his contemporaries as well as later thinkers influenced by his work. The first five chapters consider Durkheim’s...

Metaphors of spain

The history of twentieth-century Spanish nationalism is a complex one, placing a set of famously distinctive regional identities against a backdrop of religious conflict, separatist tensions, and the autocratic rule of Francisco Franco. And despite the undeniably political character of that sto...

A dramatic reinvention

Following World War II, Germany was faced not only with the practical tasks of reconstruction and denazification, but also with the longer-term mission of morally “re-civilizing” its citizens—a goal that persisted through the nation’s 1949 split. One of the most important mediums for effecting ...

Avant-garde to new wave

The cultural liberalization of communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s produced many artistic accomplishments, not least the celebrated films of the Czech New Wave. This movement saw filmmakers use their new freedom to engage with traditions of the avant-garde, especially Surrealism. This book ex...

Revealing the invisible mine

Exploring the social complexities of the Frieda River Project in Papua New Guinea, this book tells the story of local stakeholder strategies on the eve of industrial development, largely from the perspective of the Paiyamo – one of the project’s so-called ‘impact communities’. Engaging ideas of...

Emotions, ethics, and cinematic experience

Since the early 1990s, phenomenology and cognitivism have become two of the most influential approaches to film theory. Yet far from being at odds with each other, both approaches offer important insights on our subjective experience of cinema. Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience explore...

Genocide and settler society

Colonial Genocide has been seen increasingly as a stepping-stone to the European genocides of the twentieth century, yet it remains an under-researched phenomenon. This volume reconstructs instances of Australian genocide and for the first time places them in a global context. Beginning with th...