Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

Through the testimonies of war, defeat, and survival from veterans of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) now exiled in France, Giacomo Mantovan sheds light on the production of self and subjectivity within a revolutionary and authoritarian organisation, and contributes to debates on compliance, resistance, and political agency under authoritarian regimes.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Genocide History History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

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

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology

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

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Theory and Methodology

Comparing first-person ethnographic accounts of young people living, working, and creating relationships in cities across Asia, this volume explores their contemporary lives, pressures, ideals, and aspirations.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies

“This is a compelling and intellectually satisfying volume that offers important new ethnographic work which, I would argue, revitalizes studies of medical pluralism…an important project by some of the most outstanding and well-known scholars in these areas of study — several of whose names readers will recognize and inspire interest in the volume.”  ·  Murphy Halliburton, City University of New York

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Travel and Tourism Development Studies Anthropology (General)

This book illustrates that tuition space acts as an important site for identity formation and placemaking, where students play out their cosmopolitan aspirations whilst acquiring educational capital. It focuses on narratives of female Sinhalese students attending a national school in the Central Province of Sri Lanka.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Educational Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality Sustainable Development Goals

Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City centers on a growing multinational community of ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) devotees in Mayapur, West Bengal. Paying particular attention to devotees’ failure to consistently live up to ISKCON’s ideals, and the ongoing struggle to realize the utopian vision of an ‘ideal Vedic city’.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Following the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of the elite in Pakistan. In doing so, it reveals the daily, even mundane, ways in which elites contribute to and shape the inequality that characterises the modern world.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

In this pioneering ethnographic study of identity, author Philipp Schröder explores integration and urban change in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek. Bishkek Boys offers unique insights into how post-Socialist economic liberalization, rural-urban migration and (state) ethnic nationalism have reshaped social relations among the boys who come of age in this Central Asian urban environment.

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Refugee and Migration Studies Urban Studies

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

This book tells the survival stories of seven Cambodians who endured the Khmer Rouge Genocide, their escape to Thailand, and their difficult resettlement in the United States. It is a collection of first-person oral histories, supplemented by images of documents and photographs, highlighting journeys of resilience, survival, and adaptation while profoundly traumatized.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies

Subject: History (General)

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology

The long-awaited comprehensive account of the rise of Astana, the capital city of Kazakhstan, this book argues for an understanding of space as inextricably material-and-imaginary, and unceasingly dynamic – allowing for a plurality of incompatible pasts and futures materialized in spatial form.

Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General) Geography

Subjects: Museum Studies History (General) Anthropology (General)

The book examines the causes and consequences of infertility and the rapid proliferation of new reproductive technologies in ‘modern India’. The book emerges from an ethnographic inquiry that explains how assisted conception, as a means of bypassing infertility, is being accommodated, understood and used in India today.

Subject: Medical Anthropology

The second edition of this remarkable book updates the immense advances in policy and soft international law with regards to the rights of mobile indigenous peoples in conservation.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Sustainable Development Goals

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

Humans are unique in their ability to create systematic accounts of the world – theories based on guiding cosmological principles. This book is about the role of cognition in creating cosmologies, and explores this through the ethnography and history of Yijing divination in China.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

Through an interdisciplinary conversation with contributors from social anthropology, religious studies, film studies, literary studies, cultural studies, and history, Crafting Chinese Memories is the first volume to address how works of art shape memories, and  offers new ways of conceptualising storytelling, memory-making, art, and materiality. It explores the memories of artists, filmmakers, novelists, storytellers, and persons who come to terms with their own histories even as they reveal the social memories of watershed events in modern China.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Memory Studies Cultural Studies (General)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Peace and Conflict Studies

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 isotope analysis. New directions are provided for discerning archaeologically how pastoralism and agriculture may be integrated in complex economic systems.

Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

“This is an outstanding study of the ‘youth bulge’ in a remote country of Central Asia…Through her extensive field work, the author acquired a deep personal knowledge of the peculiarity of the country and its culture, for which little is available in the academic literature…This work is important not only for understanding the dynamics of the youth bulge in Tajikistan, but also to better grasp the rationale and multiple dimensions of youth movements in other developing countries of the same geographical area, and in particular the so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions.”   ·  Michel Garenne, Institut Pasteur, Paris

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

Informed by over two decades of anthropological research in Chhattisgarh, this book examines how the marginalized Adivasi (tribal) youth in rural India navigate the contradictory ways in which education represents both a strategy for social mobility and a very tangible risk.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Educational Studies Mobility Studies Sociology

Prioritising processes not structures based on the general premise that change rather than stasis is what characterises society, this book focuses on social change in a coastal village in Sri Lanka where change was the result of people reacting to processes at work in the wider economic and political context and were in no way passive victims to forces out of their control.

Subjects: Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, this book focuses on concepts such as domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. By looking into hunting rituals and herding techniques, the ethnography questions the dynamics between people, domesticated reindeer, and wild animals.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

Subject: Medical Anthropology

The Altai Republic in southern Siberia is renowned for excavations of frozen mummies. It also hosts fallout zones for the second stages of rockets launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome. Local inhabitants blame ‘evil spirits’ released by archaeological work and toxic fuel from rocket debris for their misfortunes. This book explores the divergent fates of such claims.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology

In the Himalayas of the Indian part of Kashmir three communities depend on the ecology of the Dal lake: market gardeners, houseboat owners and fishers.  Floating Economies describes for the first time the complex intermeshing economy, social structure and ecology of the area against the background of history and the present volatile socio-political situation.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals

Bringing together empirical research from across India, this volume examines how food intersects with identity, migration, livelihood and media. It offers interdisciplinary insights into the cultural, political and social dimensions of food in contemporary Indian life.

Subjects: Food & Nutrition Sociology Anthropology (General)

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

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

Over the last decade, Nepal has witnessed significant urban growth and an expanding urban middle class. Glimpses of Hope tells the story of the people who enable some of the middle class consumer practices in urban Nepal. The book focuses on workers in modern food-processing, water-bottling, house building, and sand-mining industries and explores how workers see such forms of work, where union organization can help, and how work opportunities emerge along lines of gender and ethnicity.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology

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. God in the Machine explores the Ganesh Yourself experiment, a fascinating exercise in anthropology that leads to a radical deconstruction of religion, politics, and technology.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology Sociology

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Grace after Genocide is the first comprehensive ethnography of Cambodian refugees, charting their struggle to transition from agrarian life to survival in post-industrial America, while still maintaining their Cambodian identities. The ethnography details how America’s mid-twentieth century involvement in Southeast Asia has had enormous consequences on Khmer refugees and their children.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

This volume is unique in that it is dedicated to approaching the analysis of heritage through the concepts of social movements. Adapting the latest developments in the field of social movements, the chapters examine the formation, use and contestation of heritage by various official, non-official and activist players and the spaces where such ongoing negotiations and contestation take place.

Subjects: Heritage Studies Museum Studies Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)

This book builds on more than two decades of ethnographic itinerancy in some twenty countries, bringing the readers from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran to Europe, North America and Australia. It describes the everyday life and transnational circulations of Afghan refugees and expatriates.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

This volume explores the implication of modern law in the seemingly ancient cultural practice of karo kari, which allows male family members to take the lives of female relatives accused of adultery. Drawing connections between local contests over marriage and resources, Nafisa Shah unearths deep historical processes and power relations at work in Upper Sindh, Pakistan.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

Building upon Indigenous research epistemologies, Victoria Peemot engages with the study of how the human-horse relationships interact with each other, experience injustices and develop resilience strategies as multispecies unions.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Sociology

Subject: Theory and Methodology

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Development Studies Anthropology (General)

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Tibetan region of Amdo in northwest China, Illness and Enlightenment examines Tibetan medical and religious texts, to explore the multi-faceted concept of nyoné through key Tibetan concepts of wind, heart, and mind, as well as human-spirit relationships.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

Indigenist Mobilization explores the history of the dynamics between the Communist party in Kerala and indigenist activists, and the subtle ways in which global capitalist restructuring leads to a resonance of indigenist visions in the changed the everyday working lives and future aspirations of subaltern groups in Kerala.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

Between 1933-1942, around 20,000 refugees fled to Shanghai to escape Nazi-occupied Europe, most of them Jewish. Here they spent a decade preserving their culture and enduring Japanese occupation. Hochstadt, whose Viennese grandparents were among those who fled, compiles hundreds of sources and interviews to tell their story.

Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History History: 20th Century to Present Refugee and Migration Studies

Odissi dance has transformed over the centuries from an Indian temple ritual to a transnational genre performed—and consumed—throughout the world. Building on ethnographic research in multiple locations, this book reveals the complexity of odissi as it is practiced today, at the intersection of identity, nationalism, tradition, and neoliberal economics.

Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology Sociology

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology

Subject: History (General)

Regional mental hospitals in India are perceived as colonial artefacts in need of reformation. In the last two decades, there has been discussion around the maltreatment of patients, corruption and poor quality of mental health treatment in these institutions. This ethnography scrutinizes bureaucracy of these asylum-like institutions in the context of national change and the global mental health movement.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

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

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Refugee and Migration Studies

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

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

Subjects: Colonial History Cultural Studies (General) Development Studies

Migration is destructive to the nuclear family and wider village life, but it provides an opportunity for lineages to be mobilized for collective social action that is both local and translocal. This book aims to share experiences of people in Alma, a village in Kyrgyzstan, and how they created a ‘moral economy of migration’ that became territorialised as kinship was de-territorialised.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology

Subject: Medical Anthropology

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.

Subject: Archaeology

Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Theory and Methodology

In this timely and insightful new book, Markus Bell presents the case study of Korean-Japanese – “Zainichi” – who have escaped North Korea in the years following the end of the Cold War. Through building alliances and long-distance relationships, Zainichi returnees resist forced integration and push back against life-threatening political purges to forge new ways of belonging.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

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, focusing primarily on the end of Kailali’s feudal system of bonded labor.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Peace and Conflict Studies

In Bhutan, medical patients engage a variety of healing practices to seek cures for their ailments. The Patient Multiple delves into the context of patients’ daily lives and decision-making processes, showing how these unique mountain cultures are finding paths to health among a changing and multifaceted medical topography.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality Medical Anthropology

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies

This book aims to give a faithful presentation of Pahktun reality by investigating the diverse and changing patterns of social relations among Pahktuns and considering the practice of gham khadee to be a manifestation of the code of life.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

“Nature” as a concept and word is extremely elusive, yet it is commonly taken for granted that “the pristine nature” is “out there.” This book explores the factors that have naturalized the idea of nature as pristine into our psyche, and as something that has a spatial, visual, and temporal dimension for “seasons”.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

Though long-associated with violence, the Caucasus is a region rich with spirituality. Based on fresh ethnographies and studies of sacred sites in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia, Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces discusses vanishing and emerging sacred places in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious post-Soviet Caucasus.
 

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology

Transience is found in every meeting, encounter and form of coexistence between people and things that exist and live by, or move across or along, the Black Sea. With particular attention to poetics, politics and aesthetics, this volume focuses on the scales of transient moments and histories, and enables readers to see and sense the many forms of transience that occur in a given landscape, sea or space.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Environmental Studies (General)

Exploring late imperial China, this book examines how medical virtuosity was cultivated within vibrant intellectual networks linking physicians and scholars. It shows how medicine intersected with poetry, meditation and empirical inquiry, reshaping both clinical practice and broader social and philosophical thought.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Cultural Studies (General)

Subject: History (General)

State Intimacies examines the mundane workings, ambiguity, and fragilities of care in post-colonial rural North India. The experience of reproductive chronicity is grounded in women’s everyday realities and experiences in sterilization camps and other healthcare settings in rural Rajasthan.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

This book explores the interplay of those memories, social networks and state policies which play a role in the ‘construction’ of a Kazakhstani German identity. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Kazakhstan, Rita Sanders shows that social capital, including the power to influence identities, plays a key role in Kazakhstani German attitudes

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology of Religion

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

Focusing on the afterlives of textual traditions, primarily within East Asia, Textual Heritage highlights how textual practices offer a lens for understanding questions of canonization, embodiment, and circulation. In doing so, this volume advances a theory of “humanistic heritage studies” that mediates the overlap between literary and heritage studies.

Subjects: Heritage Studies Literary Studies Cultural Studies (General)

In Thailand, infertility remains a source of stigma for couples using assisted reproductive technologies in the quest for a child. This ethnographic account of public and private clinics explores this experience of infertility and the pursuit of assisted reproductive technologies by Thai couples.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Development Studies

Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General) Memory Studies

Exploring lived atheism in the South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this book offers a unique insight into India’s rapidly transforming multi-religious society and develops an alternative to Eurocentric accounts of secularity and critically revisits central themes of South Asianist scholarship from the hitherto marginalized vantage point of radically secular and explicitly irreligious atheists in India.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

“...an excellent and engaging commentary on the tourism industry, postcolonial societies and environmental governance. Its strength lies in the nuance and intricacy of its portrayals of social life and the way that it opens up a difficult yet much needed theoretical space in which to contemplate issues such as how we should investigate tourist subjectivity, how collective imaginaries are formed and sustained, and how dynamics of affect and desire constitute tourism as a social practice. Its readability and the vividness of characterisations in Picard’s accounts of his ethnographic observations will make the book an accessible and appealing text to students of tourism studies and social anthropology, and to these fields it makes a notable contribution.”  ·  Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change

Subjects: Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)

An illuminating investigation into the ‘professionalization’ of classical Indian dance forms in Britain, Towards a British Natyam critically analyzes the cultural, social, and political frameworks that make a ‘profession’ within the arts possible, highlighting the transformational power of classical Indian dance within society to decenter white supremacy and recenter pluriversality.

Subjects: Performance Studies Heritage Studies Sociology

Traumatic Pasts in Asia extends Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, explores how these new terrains of investigation inform and enrich earlier understandings.

Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies Medical Anthropology

An insightful and wide-ranging study of the colonial history of conservation projects, Tropical Nature seeks to provide a much-needed history of the Global South from its own perspective. In doing so, this volume collection spotlights a “small-scale global history” that deciphers the relations binding human societies to the non-human world.

Subjects: Colonial History Environmental Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present

During the 1800s, the East India Company consolidated its rule in India. In desperate need of knowledge about this territory and its population, the company appointed Colin Mackenzie as the first Surveyor General of India. Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future explores the life and career of Mackenzie, and his massive survey of India.

Subjects: Colonial History History: 18th/19th Century

Though the number of people living with dementia in India will rise with increased life expectancy, little is known about how people in India cope with dementia. Unforgotten offers a rich ethnographic account of how middle-class families in urban India care for their relatives with dementia—illuminating idioms on dementia and aging, the experience of care-giving, and the social and cultural barriers in accessing support.

Subject: Medical Anthropology

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General)

“…a meticulous study of ethnic groups faring in different regions of contemporary Uzbekistan. Nowadays, when there are so many unjustifiable restrictions imposed by the Karimov regime for foreign students who are eager to study Uzbek society, this book is a lucky example of a scholar who managed, in spite all restrictions, to conduct and complete substantial fieldwork research in four regions of Uzbekistan.” · Alisher Ilkhamov, Independent Scholar

Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General) Sociology

Subject: Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General)

After the USSR collapsed, Kyrgyzstan followed a path of economic liberalization, but after a few years, they produced little, and the country’s principal industry of sheep breeding was decimated. This led to dependence on international aid, and ensuing comical encounters between the local population and well-meaning foreigners who help them.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

This book reviews the feminist, ethical and legal discourse on sex selective abortions and draws on women’s empowerment as an analytical lens to examine the son preference expressed in the notion of Vansh (lineage) among pregnant women.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Medical Anthropology

There is a World Heritage Craze in China. China claims to have the longest continuous civilization in the world and is seeking the recognition from UNESCO. With a sociological lens, this book offers comprehensive insights into World Heritage, as well as China’s deep social, cultural, and political structures.

Subjects: Heritage Studies Archaeology Sociology Travel and Tourism