Coming of age

In the lean and anxious years following World War II, Munich society became obsessed with the moral condition of its youth. Initially born of the economic and social disruption of the war years, a preoccupation with juvenile delinquency progressed into a full-blown panic over the hypothetical t...

The subject of sovereignty

Seeking new forms of democracy, progressive politics raises a fundamental question: what is the alternative to the allegedly coherent, self-contained liberal subject that represents the project of modernity? Exploring the themes of nature, race, and the divine, this book identifies the more rea...

Vladimir odoevsky and romantic poetics

Vladimir Odoevsky (1804-1869) was a fascinating and encyclopedic figurein nineteenth-century Russian culture, who in his day was mentioned in the same breath as Pushkin and Gogol. Thinker, pedagogue, musicologist, amateur scientist and public servant, he is now undergoing a revival as a virtual...

Engaging with chaucer

Why do we still read and discuss Chaucer? The answer may be simple: he is fun, and he challenges our intelligence and questions our certainties. This collected volume represents an homage to a toweringly great poet, as well as an acknowledgement of the intellectual excitement, challenges, and p...

Culture wars

The relationship between anthropologists’ ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpr...

Configuring contagion

Expanding our understanding of contagion beyond the typical notions of infection and pandemics, this book widens the field to include the concept of biosocial epidemics. The chapters propose varied and detailed answers to questions about epidemics and their contagious potential for specific inf...

Probing the limits of categorization

Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis of the Holocaust—perpetrators, victims, and bystanders—it is the last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. Described by Hilberg as those who were “once a part of this history,” bystanders present unique challeng...

Dismantling the dream factory

The history of postwar German cinema has most often been told as a story of failure, a failure paradoxically epitomized by the remarkable popularity of film throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. Through the analysis of 10 representative films, Hester Baer reassesses this period, looking in parti...

A sea of transience

Transience is found in every meeting and form of coexistence between people and things that live and exist by, or move across or along, the Black Sea. It may come in various forms and guises, from de facto states, tourism, migration, trafficking or military troops, and it needs to be written an...

Where there is no midwife

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

The historical practice of diversity

While multicultural composition of nations has become a catchword in public debates, few educators, not to speak of the general public, realize that cultural interaction was the rule throughout history. Starting with the Islam-Christian-Jewish Mediterranean world of the early modern period, thi...

London eyes

London incessantly generates and incites cultural responses, pre-eminently in the interconnected domains of literature and film. This book demonstrates that those responses have been sustained as vital experiments and engagements in configuring the city and its inhabitants. Including essays by ...

Rethinking and unthinking development

Development has remained elusive in Africa. Through theoretical contributions and case studies focusing on Southern Africa’s former white settler states, South Africa and Zimbabwe, this volume responds to the current need to rethink (and unthink) development in the region. The authors explore h...

Engaging with strangers

The civil conflict in Solomon Islands (1998-2003) is often blamed on the failure of the nation-state to encompass culturally diverse and politically fragmented communities. Writing of Ranongga Island, the author tracks engagements with strangers across many realms of life—pre-colonial warfare, ...

Population, reproduction and fertility in melanesia

Human biological fertility was considered a important issue to anthropologists and colonial administrators in the first part of the 20th century, as a dramatic decline in population was observed in many regions. However, the total demise of Melanesian populations predicted by some never happene...

Recollections of france

Since the 1980s, France has experienced a vigorous revival of interest in its past and cultural heritage. This has been expressed as part of a movement of remembering through museums and festivals as well as via elaborate commemorations, most notably those held to celebrate the bi-centenary of ...

Figurations of the future

Built around key events, from the eviction of a self-managed social centre in Copenhagen in 2007 to the Climate Summit protests in 2009, this book contributes to anthropological literature on contemporary Euro-American politics foreshadowing recent waves of public dissent. Stine Krøijer explore...

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...

The witness as object

In recent years, historical witnessing has emerged as a category of "museum object." Audiovisual recordings of interviews with individuals remembering events of historical importance are now integral to the collections and research activities of museums. They have also become important componen...

America observed

There is surprisingly little fieldwork done on the United States by anthropologists from abroad. America Observed fills that gap by bringing into greater focus empirical as well as theoretical implications of this phenomenon. Edited by Virginia Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, the essays collected h...

Hierarchy

Louis Dumont's concept of hierarchy continues to inspire social scientists. Using it as their starting point, the contributors to this volume introduce both fresh empirical material and new theoretical considerations. On the basis of diverse ethnographic contexts in Oceania, Asia, and the Middl...

Children of the camp

Chronic violence has characterized Somalia for over two decades, forcing nearly two million people to flee. A significant number have settled in camps in neighboring countries, where children were born and raised. Based on in-depth fieldwork, this book explores the experience of Somalis who gre...

Crossing the aegean

Following the defeat of the Greek Army in 1922 by nationalist Turkish forces, the 1923 Lausanne Convention specified the first internationally ratified compulsory population exchange. It proved to be a watershed in the eastern Mediterranean, having far-reaching ramifications both for the new Tu...

Sentient ecologies

Employing methodological perspectives from the fields of political geography, environmental studies, anthropology, and their cognate disciplines, this volume explores alternative logics of sentient landscapes as racist, xenophobic, and right-wing. While the field of sentient landscapes has gain...

Hitler's war in the east, 1941-1945. (3rd edition)

This volume provides a guide to the extensive literature on the war in the East, including largely unknown Soviet writing on the subject. Indispensable for military historians, but also for all scholars who approach this crucial period in world history from a socio-economic or cultural perspect...

Jaguars of the dawn

The Brazilian Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) is the place where the worlds of the living and the spirits merge and the boundaries between lives are regularly crossed. Drawing upon over a decade of extensive fieldwork in temples of the Amanhecer in Brazil and...

Mediating europe

The on-going constitutionalization of Europe has led to various changes in media and communications, opening up areas of debate regarding the role of traditional and new media in developing a specific European public sphere as part of the wider European Project. This timely volume addresses the...

Echoes of narcissus

In Greek mythology the beautiful Narcissus glimpsed his own reflection in the waters of a spring and fell in love. But his was an impossible passion and, filled with despair, he pined away. Over the years the myth has inspired painters, writers, and film directors, as well as philosophers and p...

Orientpolitik, value, and civilization

This is the first collection of Franz Steiner's keynote papers on comparative economics and the classification of labor,complemented by major unpublished texts on politics, civilization, and cultural criticism. This enables a complete re-evaluation of Steiner's thought. His ideas on truth, valu...

Collaborative happiness

Understudied relative to other forms of intentional community, and under-recognized in policy-making circles, urban cohousing communities situate wellbeing as simultaneously social and subjective, while catering for groups of people so diverse in age. Collaborative Happiness looks at two such u...

Oceanic socialities and cultural forms

In anthropology, theoretical approaches attempting to come to terms with experiences of social interaction, often inspired by phenomenology, have come to the fore in opposition to the previously favored emphasis on symbolic and social structures. These essays attempt a new kind of ethnographic ...

Enacted relations

The Yolngu Indigenous people in the Northeast Arnhem Land of Australia respond to neo-colonial challenges by continuing to affirm their political autonomy and transmit ‘Yolngu Law’, which are ways of knowing and being with the younger generation. They deal with non-indigenous institutions, thro...

Universities remembering europe

Higher education plays a vital role in the sharing of the identity and culture of Europe and therefore receives considerable attention from scholars and policy makers. This volume is different in that it brings a philosophical perspective to the debate on higher education in Europe. As a work o...

Carneiro

Robert L. Carneiro is one of the most influential figures in anthropology in the twentieth century who brought cultural evolutionism from its nineteenth century origins. This book aims to contribute to revitalizing Carneiro’s profound theoretical perspective for current and future generations of ...

Civil enculturation

For several years now, the concepts of 'civil culture' and 'civil society' have been widely discussed in the social sciences. Theoretically innovative and empirically rich, this volume is one of few studies that offer solid and focused ethnographic research on how the tenets and assumptions of ...

Banned in berlin

Imperial Germany’s governing elite frequently sought to censor literature that threatened established political, social, religious, and moral norms in the name of public peace, order, and security. It claimed and exercised a prerogative to intervene in literary life that was broader than that o...

Moral power

Neither power nor morality but both. Moral power is what Sukuma farmers in Tanzania in times of crisis attribute to an unknown figure they call their witch. A universal process is involved, as much bodily as social, which obstructs the patient’s recovery. Healers turn the table on the witch thr...

In god's name

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

All tomorrow's cultures

The first edition of All Tomorrow’s Cultures explored the legacy of futures-thinking in anthropology and marked the beginning of a resurgence of interest in anthropological futures.  The new edition has been updated to reflect some of the outpouring of work since then, particularly in science a...

In search of salt

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

Alsace to the alsatians?

The region of Alsace, located between the hereditary enemies of France and Germany, served as a trophy of war four times between 1870–1945. With each shift, French and German officials sought to win the allegiance of the local populace. In response to these pressures, Alsatians invoked regional...

That sinking feeling

Emotions, especially those of impoverished migrant families, have long been underrepresented in German social and cultural studies. That Sinking Feeling raises the visibility of the emotional dimensions of exclusion processes and locates students in current social transformations. Drawing from ...

Making better lives

In this ethnographic study, Johannes Lenhard observes the daily practices, routines and techniques of people who are sleeping rough on the streets of Paris. The book focusses on their survival practises, their short-term desires and hopes, how they earn money through begging, how they choose th...

The politics of european citizenship

As the European Union faces the ongoing challenges of legitimacy, identity, and social cohesion, an understanding of the social purpose and direction of EU citizenship becomes increasingly vital. This book is the first of its kind to map the development of EU citizenship and its relation to var...

Foucault's orient

Foucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the “Orient” constitute the “limit” of Western rationality. Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars in T...

The respectable career of fritz k.

Entrepreneur and Nazi functionary Fritz Kiehn lived through almost 100 years of German history, from the Bismarck era to the late Bonn Republic. A successful manufacturer, Kiehn joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and obtained a number of influential posts after 1933, making him one of the most power...

Social bodies

A proliferation of press headlines, social science texts and “ethical” concerns about the social implications of recent developments in human genetics and biomedicine have created a sense that, at least in European and American contexts, both the way we treat the human body and our attitudes to...

Post-ottoman topologies

How are historians and social scientists to understand the emergence, the multiplicity, and the mutability of collective memories of the Ottoman Empire in the political formations that succeeded it? With contributions focussing on several of the nation-states whose peoples once were united unde...

And keep your powder dry

Margaret Mead wrote this comprehensive sketch of the culture of the United States - the first since de Tocqueville - in 1942 at the beginnning of the Second World War, when Americans were confronted by foreign powers from both Europe and Asia in a particularly challenging manner. Mead's work be...

The origins of german self-cultivation

Recent devaluations of a liberal arts education call the formative concept of Bildung, a defining model of self-cultivation rooted in 18th and 19th century German philosophy and culture, into question and force us to reconsider what it once meant and now means to be an “educated” individual. Th...

From storeroom to stage

Departing from an ethnographic collection in London, From Storeroom to Stage traces the journey of its artefacts back to the Romanian villages where they were made 70 years ago, and to other places where similar objects are still in use. The book explores the role that material culture plays in...

Fear in bongoland

Spurred by wars and a drive to urbanize, Africans are crossing borders and overwhelming cities in unprecedented numbers. At the center of this development are young refugee men who migrate to urban areas. This volume, the first full-length study of urban refugees in hiding, tells the story of...

Cinema of collaboration

From their very inception, European cinemas undertook collaborative ventures in an attempt to cultivate a transnational “Film-Europe.” In the postwar era, it was DEFA, the state cinema of East Germany, that emerged as a key site for cooperative practices. Despite the significant challenges that...

Globalized fatherhood

Using an entirely new conceptual vocabulary through which to understand men’s experiences and expectations at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this path-breaking volume focuses on fatherhood around the globe, including transformations in fathering, fatherhood, and family life. It includes ...

Domesticating youth

Most of the Muslim societies of the world have entered a demographic transition from high to low fertility, and this process is accompanied by an increase in youth vis-à-vis other age groups. Political scientists and historians have debated whether such a “youth bulge” increases the potential f...

Different germans, many germanies

As much as any other nation, Germany has long been understood in terms of totalizing narratives. For Anglo-American observers in particular, the legacies of two world wars still powerfully define twentieth-century German history, whether through the lens of Nazi-era militarism and racial hatred...

Europe in 1848

The events of 1989/90 in Europe demonstrated the renewed relevance of the mid-nineteenth century uprisings: both by showing, once again, how a revolutionary initiative could quickly spread through different European countries, but also by calling into question the nature of revolution and the c...

The 1926/27 soviet polar census expeditions

In 1926/27 the Soviet Central Statistical Administration initiated several yearlong expeditions to gather primary data on the whereabouts, economy and living conditions of all rural peoples living in the Arctic and sub-Arctic at the end of the Russian civil war. Due partly to the enthusiasm of ...

Repair, brokenness, breakthrough

Exploring some of the ways in which repair practices and perceptions of brokenness vary culturally, Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough argues that repair is both a process and also a consequence which is sought out—an attempt to extend the life of things as well as an answer to failures, gaps, wr...

Moral economy at work

The idea of a moral economy has been explored and assessed in numerous disciplines. The anthropological studies in this volume provide a new perspective to this idea by showing how the relations of workers, employees and employers, and of firms, families and households are interwoven with local...

Sustaining russia's arctic cities

Urban areas in Arctic Russia are experiencing unprecedented social and ecological change. This collection outlines the key challenges that city managers will face in navigating this shifting political, economic, social, and environmental terrain. In particular, the volume examines how energy pr...

A fragmented landscape

Since World War II, abortion policies have remained remarkably varied across European nations, with struggles over abortion rights at the forefront of national politics. This volume analyses European abortion governance and explores how social movements, political groups, and individuals use pr...

Spatial boundaries and social dynamics

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

Advancing refugee protection in south africa

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

The spirit of the laws

Pertinent to contemporary demands for reparations from Turkey is the relationship between law and property in connection with the Armenian Genocide. This book examines the confiscation of Armenian properties during the genocide and subsequent attempts to retain seized Armenian wealth. Through t...

The social life of achievement

What happens when people “achieve”? Why do reactions to “achievement” vary so profoundly? And how might an anthropological study of achievement and its consequences allow us to develop a more nuanced model of the motivated agency that operates in the social world? These questions lie at the hea...

Changing identifications and alliances in north-east africa

Forms of group identity play a prominent role in everyday lives and politics in north-east Africa. These volumes provide an interdisciplinary account of the nature and significance of ethnic, religious, and national identity in north-east Africa. Case studies from Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, and K...

The legacies of a hawaiian generation

Through the voices and perspectives of the members of an extended Hawaiian family, or `ohana, this book tells the story of North American imperialism in Hawai`i from the Great Depression to the new millennium. The family members offer their versions of being “Native Hawaiian” in an American sta...

Homo itinerans

Afghan society has been marked in a lasting way by war and the exodus of part of its population. While many have emigrated to countries across the world, they have been matched by the flow of experts who arrive in Afghanistan after having been in other war-torn countries such as the Democratic ...

State practices and zionist images

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

Discerning palates of the past

This book analyzes the agricultural and pastoral infrastructure of the Mature and Late Harappan cultures (ca. 2500-1700 BC) of northwest India. The economic role of drought-resistant millet crops is reconstructed using ethnographic studies of crop processing, palaeoethnobotany, and carbon isoto...

Ethics in the field

In recent years ever-increasing concerns about ethical dimensions of fieldwork practice have forced anthropologists and other social scientists to radically reconsider the nature, process, and outcomes of fieldwork: what should we be doing, how, for whom, and to what end? In this volume, practi...

Engendering forced migration

At the turn of the new millenium, war, political oppression, desperate poverty, environmental degradation and disasters, and economic underdevelopment are sharply increasing the ranks of the world's twenty million forced migrants. In this volume, eighteen scholars provide a wide-ranging, interd...

Natufian foragers in the levant

This large volume presents virtually all aspects of the Epipalaeolithic Natufian culture in a series of chapters that cover recent results of field work, analyses of materials and sites, and synthetic or interpretive overviews of various aspects of this important prehistoric culture.

Names and nunavut

On the surface, naming is simply a way to classify people and their environments. The premise of this study is that it is much more — a form of social control, a political activity, a key to identity maintenance and transformation. Governments legislate and regulate naming; people fight to take...

Recovered territory

Upper Silesia, one of Central Europe’s most important industrial borderlands, was at the center of heated conflict between Germany and Poland and experienced annexations and border re-drawings in 1922, 1939, and 1945. This transnational history examines these episodes of territorial re-national...

Exhibiting europe in museums

Museums of history and contemporary culture face many challenges in the modern age. One is how to react to processes of Europeanization and globalization, which require more cross-border cooperation and different ways of telling stories for visitors. This book investigates how museums exhibit E...

Berlin, alexanderplatz

A benchmark study in the changing field of urban anthropology, Berlin, Alexanderplatz is an ethnographic examination of the rapid transformation of the unified Berlin. Through a captivating account of the controversy around this symbolic public square in East Berlin, the book raises acute quest...

Ruptures in the everyday

During the twentieth century, Germans experienced a long series of major and often violent disruptions in their everyday lives. Such chronic instability and precipitous change made it difficult for them to make sense of their lives as coherent stories—and for scholars to reconstruct them in ret...

Power and society in the gdr, 1961-1979

The communist German Democratic Republic, founded in 1949 in the Soviet-occupied zone of post-war Germany is, for many people, epitomized by the Berlin Wall; Soviet tanks and surveillance by the secret security police, the Stasi, appear to be central. But is this really all there is to the GDR¹...

Learning democracy

Scholarship on the history of West Germany’s educational system has traditionally portrayed the postwar period of Allied occupation as a failure and the following decades as a time of pedagogical stagnation. Two decades after World War II, however, the Federal Republic had become a stable democ...

The forgotten majority

The “forgotten majority” of German merchants in London between the end of the Hanseatic League and the end of the Napoleonic Wars became the largest mercantile Christian immigrant group in the eighteenth century. Using previously neglected and little used evidence, this book assesses the causes...

European foundations of the welfare state

While social welfare programs, often inspired by international organizations, are spreading throughout the world, the more far-reaching notion of governmental responsibility for the basic well-being of all members of a political society is not, although it remains a feature of Europe and the fo...

Rampart nations

The “bulwark” or antemurale myth—whereby a region is imagined as a defensive barrier against a dangerous Other—has been a persistent strand in the development of Eastern European nationalisms. While historical studies of the topic have typically focused on clashes and overlaps between sociocult...

An enchantment of digital archaeology

The use of computation in archaeology is a kind of magic, a way of heightening the archaeological imagination. Agent-based modelling allows archaeologists to test the ‘just-so’ stories they tell about the past. It requires a formalization of the story so that it can be represented as a simulati...

Public anthropology in a borderless world

Anthropologists have acted as experts and educators on the nature and ways of life of people worldwide, working to understand the human condition in broad comparative perspective. As a discipline, anthropology has often advocated — and even defended — the cultural integrity, authenticity, and a...

Samizdat, tamizdat, and beyond

In many ways what is identified today as “cultural globalization” in Eastern Europe has its roots in the Cold War phenomena of samizdat (“do-it-yourself” underground publishing) and tamizdat (publishing abroad). This volume offers a new understanding of how information flowed between East and W...

Disrupted landscapes

The fall of the Soviet Union was a transformative event for the national political economies of Eastern Europe, leading not only to new regimes of ownership and development but to dramatic changes in the natural world itself. This painstakingly researched volume focuses on the emblematic case o...

Television's moment

Television was one of the forces shaping the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when a blockbuster TV series could reach up to a third of a country’s population. This book explores television’s impact on social change by comparing three sitcoms and their audiences. The shows in focus –...

Voices in the dark

Kristeva in focus

Dealing with some of the major themes in film narratives, this book draws on the theories of French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. It looks at how narratives have changed over time, and considers the sources of our variable reactions to themes and representations of horror, strangers, and love. ...

Drinking

Over the last decades quite a few studies have been devoted to drinking. Most of these were concerned with alcohol and written by social anthropologists. This book presents multidisciplinary aspects of the ingestion of liquids at large, addressing many of the overt and covert meanings of drinki...

Deadly contradictions

As US imperialism continues to dictate foreign policy, Deadly Contradictions is a compelling account of the American empire. Stephen P. Reyna argues that contemporary forms of violence exercised by American elites in the colonies, client state, and regions of interest have deferred imperial pro...

The myth of self-reliance

For many refugees, economic survival in refugee camps is extraordinarily difficult. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative research , this volume challenges the reputation of a ‘self-reliant’ model given to Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana and sheds light on considerable economic inequalit...

The colours of the empire

The Portuguese Colonial Empire established its base in Africa in the fifteenth century and would not be dissolved until 1975. This book investigates how the different populations under Portuguese rule were represented within the context of the Colonial Empire by examining the relationship betwe...

Villages in the steppe

In this book, Akkermans provides a systematic overview of the Halaf culture in the Syrian portion of the valley of the Balikh River, a tributary of the Euphrates. Following a broad exposition of the geography of the region, excavation results, definition of chronological periods within the Hala...

Ultimate ambiguities

Periods of transition are often symbolically associated with death, making the latter the paradigm of liminality. Yet, many volumes on death in the social sciences and humanities do not specifically address liminality. This book investigates these “ultimate ambiguities,” assuming they can pose ...

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