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By Area: Europe
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October 2003
The Abolitions of Slavery
From the L. F. Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848
Dorigny, M. (ed)
These papers are intended to demonstrate the complexity of the historical processes leading up to the abolition of slavery in 1793-1794, and again in 1848, given that Bonaparte had restored the former colonial regime in 1802. Those processes include the slave insurrections and the many forms of resistance to slavery and servile work, the philosophical and political debates of the Enlightenment, the attitude of the Church, the action of anti-slavery associations and the role of revolutionary assemblies, not forgetting the importance of the economic interests that provided the backcloth to philosophical discussions in the matter.
The close interweaving of the colonial spheres of the majority of European powers inexorably raised slavery to an international plane: from then on anti-slavery too became a cosmopolitan movement, and these present studies strive to take account of this important innovation at the end of the eighteenth century.
This work, written in tribute to Léger Félicité Sonthonex, who was responsible for the first abolition in Santo Domingo in 1793, and to Victor Schoelcher, principal architect of the abolition of 1848, is intended to link two highly symbolic dates in the tragic history of the "first colonization": 1793 marks the beginning of the age of abolitions, yet it was not until half a century later that France, now republican once more, renewed links with the heritage of the Enlightenment and of Year II.
Subjects: Colonial History History: 18th/19th Century
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December 2001
Academic Anthropology and the Museum
Back to the Future
Bouquet, M. (ed)
The museum boom, with its accompanying objectification and politicization of culture, finds its counterpart in the growing interest by social scientists in material culture, much of which is to be found in museums. Not surprisingly, anthropologists in particular are turning their attention again to museums, after decades of neglect, during which fieldwork became the hallmark of modern anthropology - so much so that the "social" and the "material" parted company so radically as to produce a kind of knowledge gap between historical collections and the intellectuals who might have benefitted from working on these material representations of culture. Moreover it was forgotten that museums do not only present the "pastness" of things. A great deal of what goes on in contemporary museums is literally about planning the shape of the future: making culture materialize involves mixing things from the past, taking into account current visions, and knowing that the scenes constructed will shape the perspectives of future generations. However, the (re-)invention of museum anthropology presents a series of challenges for academic teaching and research, as well as for the work of cultural production in contemporary museums - issues that are explored in this volume.
Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
November 2019
Access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies
The Case of France and Belgium
Merchant, J. (ed)
Despite France and Belgium sharing and interacting constantly with similar culinary tastes, music and pop culture, access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies are strikingly different. Discrimination written into French law acutely contrasts with non-discriminatory access to ART in Belgium. The contributors of this volume are social scientists from France, Belgium, England and the United States, representing different disciplines: law, political science, philosophy, sociology and anthropology. Each author has attempted, through the prism of their specialties, to demonstrate and analyse how and why this striking difference in access to ART exists.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Sociology
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eBook available
July 2020
After Society
Anthropological Trajectories out of Oxford
Pina-Cabral, J. & Bowman, G. (eds)
In the early 1980s, when the contributors to this volume completed their graduate training at Oxford, the conditions of practice in anthropology were undergoing profound change. Professionally, the immediate postcolonial period was over and neoliberal reforms were marginalizing the social sciences. Analytically, the poststructuralist critique of the notion of ‘society’ challenged a discipline that dubbed itself as ‘social’. Here self-ethnography is used to portray the contributors’ anthropological trajectories, showing how analytical and academic engagements interacted creatively over time.
Subject: Theory and Methodology
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February 2001
Alien Policy in Belgium, 1840-1940
The Creation of Guest Workers, Refugees and Illegal Aliens
Caestecker, F.
Belgium has a unique place in the history of migration in that it was the first among industrialized nations in Continental Europe to develop into an immigrant society. In the nineteenth century Italians, Jews, Poles, Czechs, and North Africans settled in Belgium to work in industry and commerce. They were followed by Russians in the 1920s and Germans in the 1930s who were seeking a safe haven from persecution by totalitarian regimes. In the nineteenth century immigrants were to a larger extent integrated into Belgian society: they were denied political rights but participated on equal terms with Belgians in social life. This changed radically in the twentieth century; by 1940 the rights of aliens were severely curtailed, while those of Belgian citizens, in particular in the social domain, were extended. While the state evolved into a "welfare state" for its citizens it became more of a police state for immigrants. The state only tolerated immigrants who were prepared to carry out those jobs that were shunned by the Belgians. Under the pressure of public opinion, an exception was made in the cases of thousands of Jewish refugees that had fled from Nazi Germany. However, other immigrants were subjected to harsh regulations and in fact became the outcasts of twentieth-century Belgian liberal society.
This remarkable study examines in depth and over a long time span how (anti-) alien policies were transformed, resulting in an illiberal exclusion of foreigners at the same time as democratization and the welfare state expanded. In this respect Belgium is certainly not unique but offers an interesting case study of developments that are characteristic for Europe as a whole.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Refugee and Migration Studies
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January 2003
The Ambivalent Alliance
Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949-1966
Granieri, R.
Whenever asked to name his most significant accomplishment as West Germany's first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer would invariably reply: "The alliance with the free West." Scholars have echoed his assessment, citing the Federal Republic of Germany's successful integration into the American-led West (Westbindung) as the key to its postwar economic and political recovery. Behind this simple success story, however,lies a much more complicated history: Adenauer and the CDU/CSU remained ambivalent about the ultimate relationship between Europe, Germany, and the United States within the West, torn between visions of Continental European integration based on Franco-German reconciliation and of an Atlantic community linking Europe and the "Anglo-Saxons." These differences eventually erupted into a damaging public conflict between "Atlanticists" and "Gaullists," which colored Adenauer's last years and, after his retirement in 1963, led directly to the failure of his successor, Ludwig Erhard.
The opening of various personal and party archives over the past few years has now made the entire Adenauer Era accessible for historians. As one of the first efforts to use that material to re-examine existing conventional wisdom about the period, this book traces the roles of Adenauer and the CDU/CSU in shaping Westbindung. Adenauer emerges as a skilled and resourceful (if also mistrustful and devious) politician, and as a distinctly German statesman, maneuvering between allies and adversaries to shape both the Western community and the German role in it, leaving a legacy that still influences contemporary German-American and European-American relations.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
December 2005
The Americanization of Europe
Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945
Stephan, A (ed)
Recent tensions between the U.S. and Europe seem to have opened up an insuperable rift, while Americanization, deplored by some, welcomed by others, seems to progress unabated. This volume explores, for the first time and in a comparative manner, the role American culture and anti-Americanism play in eleven representative European countries, including major powers like Great Britain, France, (West) Germany, Russia/Soviet Union, and Italy as well as smaller countries like Austria, Denmark, Greece, Spain, Sweden, and Poland. Each contributor to the volume, all of them highly respected experts in their field, was asked to address the following four topics: the role of American public diplomacy, the transfer of American “high culture,” the impact of “popular culture” ranging from Hollywood movies and TV to pop music and life-style issues, and the country specific features and history of anti-Americanism. The volume is enhanced by a substantial introduction by the editor, which looks both at the general “culture clash” between the United States and Europe and at adaptations and blending processes that seem to have occurred in individual countries.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
November 2019
The Anatomy of the Holocaust
Selected Works from a Life of Scholarship
Hilberg, R.
Pehle, W. H. & Schlott, R. (eds)Though best known as the author of the landmark 1961 work The Destruction of the European Jews, the historian Raul Hilberg produced a variety of archival research, personal essays, and other works over a career that spanned half a century. The Anatomy of the Holocaust collects some of Hilberg’s most essential and groundbreaking writings—many of them published in obscure journals or otherwise inaccessible to nonspecialists—in a single volume. Supplemented with commentary and notes from Hilberg’s longtime German editor and his biographer, it not only offers a multifaceted look at the man and the scholar, but also traces the evolution of Holocaust research from a marginal subdiscipline into a diverse and vital intellectual project.
Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies
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eBook available
February 2017
Anthropology and Public Service
The UK Experience
MacClancy, J. (ed)
These days an increasing number of social anthropologists do not find employment within academia. Rather, many find jobs with commercial organizations or in government, where they run research teams and create policy. These scholars provide a much-needed social dimension to government thinking and practice. Anthropology and Public Service shows how anthropologists can set new agendas, and revise old ones in the public sector. Written for scholars and students of various social sciences, these chapters include discussions of anthropologists’ work with the Department for International Development, the Ministry of Defence, the UK Border Agency, and the Cabinet Office, and their contributions to prison governance.
Subject: Applied Anthropology
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January 2006
Anthropology and Sexual Morality
A Theoretical Investigation
Salazar, C.
The history of sexual morality in Ireland has been traditionally associated with repression. In the last two decades, however, repression seems to have given way to its exact opposite. But where did this “repression” originate? And how can we account for this sudden and sweeping transformation in sexual mores? Based on solid ethnographic and historical analysis of sexual morality in rural Ireland, augmented by comparative data from Papua New Guinea, and being informed by from Freud’s emblematic concept of repression, the author draws new conclusions that not only apply to the specific case of his Irish material but shed new light on the specific nature of an anthropological approach to the study of human societies.
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Gender Studies and Sexuality
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December 2014
Anti-liberal Europe
A Neglected Story of Europeanization
Gosewinkel, D. (ed)
The history of modern Europe is often presented with the hindsight of present-day European integration, which was a genuinely liberal project based on political and economic freedom. Many other visions for Europe developed in the 20th century, however, were based on an idea of community rooted in pre-modern religious ideas, cultural or ethnic homogeneity, or even in coercion and violence. They frequently rejected the idea of modernity or reinterpreted it in an antiliberal manner. Anti-liberal Europe examines these visions, including those of anti-modernist Catholics, conservatives, extreme rightists as well as communists, arguing that antiliberal concepts in 20th-century Europe were not the counterpart to, but instead part of the process of European integration.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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May 2014
Asymmetrical Conversations
Contestations, Circumventions, and the Blurring of Therapeutic Boundaries
Naraindas, H., Quack, J., & Sax, W. S. (eds)
Ideas about health are reinforced by institutions and their corresponding practices, such as donning a patient's gown in a hospital or prostrating before a healing shrine. Even though we are socialized into regarding such ideologies as "natural" and unproblematic, we sometimes seek to bypass, circumvent, or even transcend the dominant ideologies of our cultures as they are manifested in the institutions of health care. The contributors to this volume describe such contestations and circumventions of health ideologies, and the blurring of therapeutic boundaries, on the basis of case studies from India, the South Asian Diaspora, and Europe, focusing on relations between body, mind, and spirit in a variety of situations. The result is not always the "live and let live" medical pluralism that is described in the literature.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion
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August 2000
At Home in the Hills
Sense of Place in the Scottish Borders
Gray, J. N.
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 Scottish borderlands provide a vivid case study of how the being-in-place is central to the sense of self and identity. Since the end of the thirteenth century, people living in the Scottish Border hills have engaged in armed raiding on the frontier with England, developed capitalist sheep farming in the newly united kingdom of Great Britain, and are struggling to maintain their family farms in one of the marginal agricultural rural regions of the European Community. Throughout their history, sheep farmers living in these hills have established an abiding sense of place in which family and farm have become refractions of each other. Adopting a phenomenological perspective, this book concentrates on the contemporary farming practices - shepherding, selling lambs and rams at auctions - as well as family and class relations through which hill sheep fuse people, place, and way of life to create this sense of being-at-home in the hills.
Subject: Anthropology (General)
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December 2014
Atlantic Automobilism
Emergence and Persistence of the Car, 1895-1940
Mom, G.
Our continued use of the combustion engine car in the 21st century, despite many rational arguments against it, makes it more and more difficult to imagine that transport has a sustainable future. Offering a sweeping transatlantic perspective, this book explains the current obsession with automobiles by delving deep into the motives of early car users. It provides a synthesis of our knowledge about the emergence and persistence of the car, using a broad range of material including novels, poems, films, and songs to unearth the desires that shaped our present “car society.” Combining social, psychological, and structural explanations, the author concludes that the ability of cars to convey transcendental experience, especially for men, explains our attachment to the vehicle.
Subjects: Mobility Studies History: 20th Century to Present Transport Studies
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March 2008
Austria, Germany, and the Cold War
From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938-1955
Steininger, R.
In the 'Moscow Declaration' of 1943 the Allies officially propagated the notion of Austria as the first victim of Hitlerite aggression and announced their intention to set up a "free and independent Austria" after the war, which finally happened in 1955. By questioning why it took so long to get to this point, the author addresses issues such as the victim thesis, Austrians as perpetrators, Austrian anti-Semitism and official attempts to mitigate its effects after the war. He discusses the various proposals for post-war Austria and connects for the first time the issues of Anschluss, German question, Cold War, and the State Treaty. He makes it clear that the question of Austria was from the very beginning inextricably linked with the more important question of Germany.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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November 1995
Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War
Coetzee, F. & M. (eds)
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 military strategy and tactics or on the cultural legacy of the conflict as transmitted bythe war's most articulate observers. This volume departs from traditional accounts on several scores: by exploring issues barely touched upon in previous works, by deviating from the widespread tendency to treat the experiences of front and homefront isolation, and by employing a thematic treatment that, by considering the construction of authority and identity between 1914 and 1918, illuminates the fundamental question of how individuals, whether in uniform or not, endured the war's intrusion into so many aspects of their public and private lives.
Subject:
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eBook available
February 2011
Avant-garde to New Wave
Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties
Owen, J.
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 explores the avant-garde's influence over the New Wave and considers the political implications of that influence. The close analysis of selected films, ranging from the Oscar-winning Closely Observed Trains to the aesthetically challenging Daisies, is contextualized by an account of the Czech avant-garde and a discussion of the films' immediate cultural and political background.
Subject: Film and Television Studies
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April 2018
Basic and Applied Research
The Language of Science Policy in the Twentieth Century
Kaldewey, D. & Schauz, D. (eds)
The distinction between basic and applied research was central to twentieth-century science and policymaking, and if this framework has been contested in recent years, it nonetheless remains ubiquitous in both scientific and public discourse. Employing a transnational, diachronic perspective informed by historical semantics, this volume traces the conceptual history of the basic–applied distinction from the nineteenth century to today, taking stock of European developments alongside comparative case studies from the United States and China. It shows how an older dichotomy of pure and applied science was reconceived in response to rapid scientific progress and then further transformed by the geopolitical circumstances of the postwar era.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology
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May 2002
Becoming a Subject
Political Prisoners during the Greek Civil War, 1945-1950
Voglis, P.
Focusing on the Greek Civil War (1946-1949), the last major conflict in Europe before the end of the Cold War, this study examines the political prisoners whose fate encapsulates the dramatic conflicts and contradictions of that dark era. New sources such as prisoners' letters, memoirs, and official reports, the author describes the life of the prisoners and the effect the prison administration and the prisoners' collective had on their personality. Drawing comparisons to political prisoners in Germany and Spain, the author sheds new light on our understanding of the ideologies and policies and their effect on individuals, which marked European history in the 20th century.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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December 2016
Between Blood and Gold
The Debates over Compensation for Slavery in the Americas
Beauvois, F.
Today, a century and a half after the abolition of slavery across most of the Americas, the idea of monetary reparations for former slaves and their descendants continues to be a controversial one. Lost among these debates, however, is the fact that such payments were widespread in the nineteenth century—except the “victims” were not slaves, but the slaveholders deprived of their labor. This landmark comparative study analyzes the debates over compensation within France and Great Britain. It lays out in unprecedented detail the philosophical, legal-political, and economic factors at play, establishing a powerful new model for understanding the aftermath of slavery in the Americas.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History (General) Colonial History
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May 2006
Between Bombs and Good Intentions
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Italo-Ethiopian war, 1935-1936
Baudendistel, R.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have highlighted again the precarious situation aid agencies find themselves in, caught as they are between the firing lines of the hostile parties, as they are trying to alleviate the plight of the civilian populations. This book offers an illuminating case study from a previous conflict, the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935-36, and of the humanitarian operation of the Red Cross during this period. Based on fresh material from Red Cross and Italian military archives, the author examines highly controversial subjects such as the Italian bombings of Red Cross field hospitals, the treatment of Prisoners of War by the two belligerents; and the effects of Fascist Italy’s massive use of poison gas against the Ethiopians. He shows how Mussolini and his ruthless regime, throughout the seven-month war, manipulated the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) – the lead organization of the Red Cross in times of war, helped by the surprising political naïveté of its board. During this war the ICRC redefined its role in a debate, which is fascinating not least because of its relevance to current events, about the nature of humanitarian action. The organization decided to concern itself exclusively with matters falling under the Geneva Conventions and to give priority to bringing relief over expressing protest. It was a decision that should have far-reaching consequences, particularly for the period of World War II and the fate of Jews in Nazi concentration camps.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Peace and Conflict Studies
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eBook available
May 2017
Between Empire and Continent
British Foreign Policy before the First World War
Rose, A.
Prior to World War I, Britain was at the center of global relations, utilizing tactics of diplomacy as it broke through the old alliances of European states. Historians have regularly interpreted these efforts as a reaction to the aggressive foreign policy of the German Empire. However, as Between Empire and Continent demonstrates, British foreign policy was in fact driven by a nexus of intra-British, continental and imperial motivations. Recreating the often heated public sphere of London at the turn of the twentieth century, this groundbreaking study carefully tracks the alliances, conflicts, and political maneuvering from which British foreign and security policy were born.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
December 2005
Between Marx and Coca-Cola
Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-1980
Schildt, A. & Siegfried, D. (eds)
In the 1960s and 1970s, Western Europe's "Golden Age" (Eric Hobsbawm), a new youth consciousness emerged, which gave this period its distinctive character. Offering rich and new material, this volume moves beyond the easy conflation of youth culture and "Americanization" and instead sets out to show, for the first time, how international developments fused with national traditions to produce specific youth cultures that became the leading trendsetters of emergent post-industrial Western societies. It presents a multi-faceted portrait of European youth cultures, colored by differences in gender, class, and education, and points out the tension between emerging consumerism and growing politicisation, succinctly expressed by Jean-Luc Godard in his 1967 pairing of "Marx and Coca-Cola."
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies Sociology
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eBook available
June 2011
Between Prague Spring and French May
Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960-1980
Klimke, M., Pekelder, J. & Scharloth, J. (eds)
Abandoning the usual Cold War–oriented narrative of postwar European protest and opposition movements, this volume offers an innovative, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive perspective on two decades of protest and social upheaval in postwar Europe. It examines the mutual influences and interactions among dissenters in Western Europe, the Warsaw Pact countries, and the nonaligned European countries, and shows how ideological and political developments in the East and West were interconnected through official state or party channels as well as a variety of private and clandestine contacts. Focusing on issues arising from the cross-cultural transfer of ideas, the adjustments to institutional and political frameworks, and the role of the media in staging protest, the volume examines the romanticized attitude of Western activists to violent liberation movements in the Third World and the idolization of imprisoned RAF members as martyrs among left-wing circles across Western Europe.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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July 2011
Between the Avant-garde and the Everyday
Subversive Politics in Europe from 1957 to the Present
Brown, T. & Anton, L. (eds)
The wave of anti-authoritarian political activity associated with the term “1968” can by no means be confined under the rubric of “protest,” understood narrowly in terms of street marches and other reactions to state initiatives. Indeed, the actions generated in response to “1968” frequently involved attempts to elaborate resistance within the realm of culture generally, and in the arts in particular. This blurring of the boundary between art and politics was a characteristic development of the political activism of the postwar period. This volume brings together a group of essays concerned with the multifaceted link between culture and politics, highlighting lesser-known case studies and opening new perspectives on the development of anti-authoritarian politics in Europe from the 1950s to the fall of Communism and beyond.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
October 2013
Between Yesterday and Tomorrow
German Visions of Europe, 1926-1950
Bailey, C.
An intellectual and cultural history of mid-twentieth century plans for European integration, this book calls into question the usual pre- and post-war periodizations that have structured approaches to twentieth-century European history. It focuses not simply on the ideas of leading politicians but analyses debates about Europe in “civil society” and the party-political sphere in Germany, asking if, and how, a “permissive consensus” was formed around the issue of integration. Taking Germany as its case study, the book offers context to the post-war debates, analysing the continuities that existed between interwar and post-war plans for European integration. It draws attention to the abiding scepticism of democracy displayed by many advocates of integration, indeed suggesting that groups across the ideological spectrum converged around support for European integration as a way of constraining the practice of democracy within nation-states.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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April 2011
Beyond Pleasure
Cultures of Modern Asceticism
Peeters, E., van Molle, L. & Wils, K. (eds)
Asceticism, so it is argued in this volume, is a modern category. The ubiquitous cult of the body, of fitness and diet equally evokes the ongoing success of ascetic practices and beliefs. Nostalgic memories of hardship and discipline in the army, youth movements or boarding schools remain as present as the fashionable irritation with the presumed modern-day laziness. In the very texture of contemporary culture, age-old asceticism proves to be remarkably alive. Old ascetic forms were remoulded to serve modern desires for personal authenticity, an authenticity that disconnected asceticism in the course of the nineteenth century from two traditions that had underpinned it since classical antiquity: the public, republican austerity of antiquity and the private, religious asceticism of Christianity. Exploring various aspects such as the history of the body, of aesthetics, science, and social thought in several European countries (Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Belgium), the authors show that modern asceticism remains a deeply ambivalent category. Apart from self-realisation, classical and religious examples continue to haunt the ascetic mind.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History (General) Sociology
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October 2015
Beyond the Divide
Entangled Histories of Cold War Europe
Mikkonen, S. & Koivunen, P. (eds)
Cold War history has emphasized the division of Europe into two warring camps with separate ideologies and little in common. This volume presents an alternative perspective by suggesting that there were transnational networks bridging the gap and connecting like-minded people on both sides of the divide. Long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were institutions, organizations, and individuals who brought people from the East and the West together, joined by shared professions, ideas, and sometimes even through marriage. The volume aims at proving that the post-WWII histories of Western and Eastern Europe were entangled by looking at cases involving France, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, and others.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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February 2015
Beyond the Lens of Conservation
Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another
Keller, E.
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 two far-flung places? The study investigates how the Malagasy farmers living at the edge of the park perceive the conservation enterprise and what people in Switzerland see when looking towards Madagascar through the lens of the zoo exhibit. It crystallizes that the stories told in either place have almost nothing in common: one focuses on power and history, the other on morality and progress. Thus, instead of building a bridge, Nature conservation widens the gap between people in the North and the South.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
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August 2013
Bittersweet Europe
Albanian and Georgian Discourses on Europe, 1878-2008
Brisku, A.
From the late nineteenth century to the post-communist period, Albanian and Georgian political and intellectual elites have attributed hopes to “Europe,” yet have also exhibited ambivalent attitudes that do not appear likely to vanish any time soon. Albanians and Georgians have evoked, experienced, and continue to speak of “Europe” according to a tense triadic entity—geopolitics, progress, culture—which has generated aspirations as well as delusions towards it and themselves. This unique dichotomy weaves a nuanced, historical account of a changing Europe, continuously marred by uncertainties that greatly affect these countries’ domestic politics as well as foreign policy decisions. A systematic and rich account of how Albanians and Georgians view Europe, this book offers a fresh perspective on the vast East/West literature and, more broadly, on European intellectual, cultural, and political history.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
January 2013
Blood and Kinship
Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present
Johnson, C. H., Jussen, B., Sabean, D. W., & Teuscher, S. (eds)
The word “blood” awakens ancient ideas, but we know little about its historical representation in Western cultures. Anthropologists have customarily studied how societies think about the bodily substances that unite them, and the contributors to this volume develop those questions in new directions. Taking a radically historical perspective that complements traditional cultural analyses, they demonstrate how blood and kinship have constantly been reconfigured in European culture. This volume challenges the idea that blood can be understood as a stable entity, and shows how concepts of blood and kinship moved in both parallel and divergent directions over the course of European history.
Subjects: History (General) Anthropology (General)
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April 2006
The Body of the Queen
Gender and Rule in the Courtly World, 1500-2000
Schulte R. (ed)
How many “bodies” does a queen have? What is the significance of multiple “bodies”? How has the gendered body been constructed and perceived within the context of the European courts during the course of the past five centuries? These are some of the questions addressed in this anthology, a contribution to the ongoing debate provoked by Ernst H. Kantorowicz in his seminal work from 1957, The King’s Two Bodies. On the basis of both textual self-presentations and visual representations a gradual transformation of the queen appears: A sacred/providential figure in medieval and early modern period, an ideal bourgeois wife during the late-18th and 19th Centuries, and a star-like (re-) presentation of royalty during the past century. Twentieth-century mass media has produced the celebrity and film star queens personified by the contested and enigmatic Nefertiti of ancient Egypt, the mysterious Elizabeth (Sisi) of Austria, Grace Kelly as Queen of both Hollywood and Monaco and Romy Schneider as the invented Empress.
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
October 2013
Border Encounters
Asymmetry and Proximity at Europe's Frontiers
Lauth Bacas, J. & Kavanagh, W. (eds)
Among the tremendous changes affecting Europe in recent decades, those concerning political frontiers have been some of the most significant. International borders are being opened in some regions while being redefined or reinforced in others. The social relationships of those living in these borderland regions are also changing fundamentally. This volume investigates, from a local, ground-up perspective, what is happening at some of these border encounters: face-to-face interactions and relations of compliance and confrontation, where people are bargaining, exchanging goods and information, and maneuvering beyond state boundaries. Anthropological case studies from a number of European borderlands shed light on the questions of how, and to what extent, the border context influences the changing interactions and social relationships between people at a political frontier.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies
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eBook available
May 2008
Border Interrogations
Questioning Spanish Frontiers
Sampedro, B. & Doubleday, S. (eds)
Under the current cartographies of globalism, where frontiers mutate, vacillate, and mark the contiguity of discourse, questioning the Spanish border seems a particularly urgent task. The volume engages a wide spectrum of ambivalent regions—subjects that currently are, or have been seen in the past, as spaces of negotiation and contestation. However, they converge in their perception of the “Spanish” nation-space as a historical and ideological construct that is perpetually going through transformations and reformations. This volume advocates the position that intellectual responsibility must lead us to engage openly in the issues underlying current social and political tensions.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Refugee and Migration Studies History (General)
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June 2020
Borders across Healthcare
Moral Economies of Healthcare and Migration in Europe
Sahraoui, N. (ed)
Examining which actors determine undocumented migrants’ access to healthcare on the ground, this volume looks at what happens in the daily interactions between administrative personnel, healthcare professionals and migrant patients in healthcare institutions across Europe. Borders across Healthcare explores contemporary moral economies of the healthcare-migration nexus. The volume documents the many ways in which borders come to disrupt healthcare settings and illuminates how judgements of a health-related deservingness become increasingly important, producing hierarchies that undermine a universal right to healthcare.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Mobility Studies Sociology
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September 1999
The Brave New World of European Labor
European Trade Unions at the Millennium
Martin, A. & Ross, G. (eds)
European union movements played a central role in promoting a "Europeanmodel of society", a humane industrial relations system, high labor standards, generous welfare states, and collective political representation which reached its pinnacle in the post-World War II era. The recent shift to lower growth, rising unemployment, renewed European integration, neo-liberalism, and globalization has challenged this "European Model" and the unions' place in it. These essays, written by some of the leading scholars in the field, examine responses of six major European union movements to the dramatic changes in economic and political conditions in the last two decades. They are the result of a group research effort and are based on a common framework which lends it quite an exceptional coherence.
Subject: History (General)
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May 2006
Building on Water
Venice, Holland and the Construction of the European Landscape in Early Modern Times
Ciriacono, S.
A fundamental natural resource, water and its use not only reflect "modes of production" but also that complex interplay between resources and their exploitation (and domination) by various social agents, who in their turn are inevitably influenced by the abundance or rarity of water supplies. Focusing on scientific, social and economic issues from the 16th to the 19th century, the author, one of Italy's leading historians in this field, looks at the innumerable conflicts that arose over water resources and the environmental impact of projects intended to control them. Venice and Holland are undoubtedly the two most fascinating cases of societies "built on water," with the conquest of vast expanses of marshland - either inland or on the coast (the Dutch polders or the Venetian lagoon) – not only stimulating agricultural production, but also nurturing a deeply-felt relationship between the local populations and the element of water itself. The author rounds off his study by looking at the influence the hydraulic technology developed in Holland would have on many European countries (France, England and Germany in particular) and at questions raised by contemporaries about the environmental impact of agricultural progress and its effects upon the social-economic equilibria within the communities concerned.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) History: Medieval/Early Modern Urban Studies
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December 2004
Categories of Self
Louis Dumont's Theory of the Individual
Celtel, A.
Drawing on anthropological, socio-psychological, religious, and philosophical material, this book engages in a discussion of what it means to be an ‘individual’ in relation to notions of selfhood, personality, and social role. This theme is explored with reference to the investigations of Louis Dumont into Hindu and other Indian ideologies, and with regard to the dominant threads of Western individualism. Clarifying and at times building upon his analyses, the author follows Dumont in a consideration of Indian ideology (Hindu non-individualism, the ‘dividual’, social personhood); French ideology (sociopolitical individualism); German ideology (subjective individualism); and Western ideology (the Christian beginnings of individualism, political and economic individualism, the philosophical ‘categorisation’ of self).
While most commentators have tended to focus primarily on one aspect of Dumont's work – either his views on Indian hierarchy or writings on modern individualism – the author reveals considerable continuity throughout Dumont’s entire oeuvre based around the notion of 'categories' and the concept of the 'individual’. Dumont’s intellectual background is explored with reference to the Durkheimian tradition, with Marcel Mauss being highlighted as the principal architect in his thinking. In particular, Dumont’s interest in the ‘category of the individual’ is shown to be an extension of Mauss’s concern with the ‘category of the person’. The distinctiveness of Dumont’s structuralist approach is thrown into full relief through comparison with that of others acknowledging an intellectual dept to Mauss, namely, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Fernand Braudel.
The book covers an assessment of general approaches to the study of individualism, with the relevant perspectives of other thinkers discussed and related to Dumont’s approach as appropriate.
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Sociology
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March 1999
The Chameleon State
Global Culture and Policy Shifts in Britain and Germany, 1914-1933
Liu, T-L.
The role of the state in capitalist societies has been a bone of considerable contention among scholars. The two founding fathers of sociology held radically opposing views on this subject which were reflected in the numerous debates over subsequent decades to this day. Yet, no answer has been found to the vexing question: on whose side is the state in capitalist societies? The author examines current theories and, comparing Britain and Germany, shows that they are unable to explain the contradictory social and industrial policies in these two countries during the twentieth century. Based on in-depth archival and secondary sources the author offers an alternative theoretical framework, one that focuses on the interactions among historical contingencies, the global cultural context, and political processes.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
May 2006
Changing Properties of Property
Benda-Beckmann, K. von, Benda-Beckmann, F. von & Wiber, M. (eds)
As an important contribution to debates on property theory and the role of law in creating, disputing, defining and refining property rights, this volume provides new theoretical material on property systems, as well as new empirically grounded case studies of the dynamics of property transformations. The property claimants discussed in these papers represent a diverse range of actors, including post-socialist states and their citizens, those receiving restitution for past property losses in Africa, Southeast Asia and in eastern Europe, collectives, corporate and individual actors. The volume thus provides a comprehensive anthropological analysis not only of property structures and ideologies, but also of property (and its politics) in action.
Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)
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eBook available
March 2010
Changing the World, Changing Oneself
Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s
Davis, B., Mausbach, W., Klimke, M. & MacDougall, C. (eds)
A captivating time, the 60s and 70s now draw more attention than ever. The first substantial work by historians has appeared only in the last few years, and this volume offers an important contribution. These meticulously researched essays offer new perspectives on the Cold War and global relations in the 1960s and 70s through the perspective of the youth movements that shook the U.S., Western Europe, and beyond. These movements led to the transformation of diplomatic relations and domestic political cultures, as well as ideas about democracy and who best understood and promoted it. Bringing together scholars of several countries and many disciplines, this volume also uniquely features the reflections of former activists.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology
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eBook available
April 2017
Children in the Holocaust and its Aftermath
Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive
Kangisser Cohen, S., Fogelman, E., & Ofer, D. (eds)
The testimonies of individuals who survived the Holocaust as children pose distinct emotional and intellectual challenges for researchers: as now-adult interviewees recall profound childhood experiences of suffering and persecution, they also invoke their own historical awareness and memories of their postwar lives, requiring readers to follow simultaneous, disparate narratives. This interdisciplinary volume brings together historians, psychologists, and other scholars to explore child survivors’ accounts. With a central focus on the Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive’s over 1,500 testimonies, it not only enlarges our understanding of the Holocaust empirically but illuminates the methodological, theoretical, and institutional dimensions of this unique form of historical record.
Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies
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eBook available
March 2011
Children, Families, and States
Time Policies of Childcare, Preschool, and Primary Education in Europe
Hagemann, K., Jarausch, K. H. & Allemann-Ghionda, C. (eds)
Due to the demand for flexible working hours and employees who are available around the clock, the time patterns of childcare and schooling have increasingly become a political issue. Comparing the development of different “time policies” of half-day and all-day provisions in a variety of Eastern and Western European countries since the end of World War II, this innovative volume brings together internationally known experts from the fields of comparative education, history, and the social and political sciences, and makes a significant contribution to this new interdisciplinary field of comparative study.
Subjects: History (General) Educational Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality
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eBook available
July 2012
Cinema of Choice
Optional Thinking and Narrative Movies
Ben Shaul, N.
Standard Hollywood narrative movies prescribe linear narratives that cue the viewer to expect predictable outcomes and adopt a closed state of mind. There are, however, a small number of movies that, through the presentation of alternate narrative paths, open the mind to thoughts of choice and possibility. Through the study of several key movies for which this concept is central, such as Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run, Inglourious Basterds, and Rashomon, Nitzan Ben Shaul examines the causes and implications of optional thinking and how these movies allow for more open and creative possibilities. This book examines the methods by which standard narrative movies close down thinking processes and deliver easy pleasures to the viewer whilst demonstrating that this is not the only possibility and that optional thinking can be both stimulating and rewarding.
Subject: Film and Television Studies
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August 2000
Citizens and Aliens
Foreigners and the Law in Britain and German States 1789-1870
Fahrmeir, A.
From the last decade of the 18th century, European states began to define nationality more rigorously. Regulations covering matters as diverse as passports, residence permits, taxes, and admission to university examinations made clear that nationality mattered more than rank. Drawing on the files of central and regional administrations and on individual case studies and travel accounts, the author offers a detailed examination of the practical consequences of alien status in liberal England and in the comparatively restrictive German states. In the latter all citizens of other German states were considered foreigners, whereas in the United Kingdom Irish immigrants were by law British subjects along with all other persons born on British soil. These differences in legal definition of citizenship should have far-reaching consequences for the development of modern nation states, consequences the effects of which can be felt to this day.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Refugee and Migration Studies
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eBook available
August 2016
'City of the Future'
Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana
Laszczkowski, M.
Astana, the capital city of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan, has often been admired for the design and planning of its futuristic cityscape. This anthropological study of the development of the city focuses on every-day practices, official ideologies and representations alongside the memories and dreams of the city’s longstanding residents and recent migrants. Critically examining a range of approaches to place and space in anthropology, geography and other disciplines, the 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)
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March 2004
Civil Enculturation
Nation-State, School and Ethnic Difference in The Netherlands, Britain, Germany, and France
Schiffauer, W. , Baumann, G., Kastoryano, R. & Vertovec, S, (eds)
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 civil culture are inculcated in schools. The authors examined school curricula, texts and pedagogical practices, observed daily interaction within the schools and outside, and conducted numerous interviews and discussion groups. The experience of students from Turkish backgrounds in the four countries was given special attention, thus offering valuable insights into the changing dynamics of nation-state civil cultures in multicultural societies.
Subject: Educational Studies
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August 2006
Civil Society
Berlin Perspectives
Keane, J. (eds)
At the moment, no other European city attracts so much fascination as the city of Berlin. An unrivalled symbol of modern urban life, Berlin is a dynamic city whose inhabitants, in the course of the past two centuries, have lived through both the rapid growth and the violent destruction of the institutions of civil society, several times over. This volume situates itself within these developments by presenting, for the first time in English, a sample of the best, recently written essays on contemporary civil societies, their structural problems, and their uncertain future, written by scholars with a close, long-standing relationship with the city. They are pre-occupied with a broad sweep of substantive themes, but in each case they focus upon one or other of the key trends that are shaping actually existing civil societies.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Urban Studies
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June 2002
Class and Other Identities
Gender, Religion, and Ethnicity in the Writing of European Labour History
Voss, L. Heerma van & Linden, M. van der (eds)
With the onset of a more conservative political climate in the 1980s, social and especially labour history saw a decline in the popularity that they had enjoyed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This led to much debate on its future and function within the historical discipline as a whole. Some critics declared it dead altogether. Others have proposed a change of direction and a more or less exclusive focus on images and texts. The most constructive proposals have suggested that labour history in the past concentrated too much on class and that other identities of working people should be taken into account to a larger extent than they had been previously, such as gender, religion, and ethnicity. Although class as a social category is still as valid as it has been before, the questions now to be asked are to what extent non-class identities shape working people's lives and mentalities and how these are linked with the class system. In this volume some of the leading European historians of labour and the working classes address these questions. Two non-European scholars comment on their findings from an Indian, resp. American, point of view. The volume is rounded off by a most useful bibliography of recent studies in European labour history, class, gender, religion, and ethnicity.
Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality
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eBook available
March 2012
Cold War Cultures
Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies
Vowinckel, A., Payk, M. M., & Lindenberger, T. (eds)
The Cold War was not only about the imperial ambitions of the super powers, their military strategies, and antagonistic ideologies. It was also about conflicting worldviews and their correlates in the daily life of the societies involved. The term “Cold War Culture” is often used in a broad sense to describe media influences, social practices, and symbolic representations as they shape, and are shaped by, international relations. Yet, it remains in question whether — or to what extent — the Cold War Culture model can be applied to European societies, both in the East and the West. While every European country had to adapt to the constraints imposed by the Cold War, individual development was affected by specific conditions as detailed in these chapters. This volume offers an important contribution to the international debate on this issue of the Cold War impact on everyday life by providing a better understanding of its history and legacy in Eastern and Western Europe.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
March 2010
Comparative and Transnational History
Central European Approaches and New Perspectives
Haupt, H. & Kocka, J. (eds)
Since the 1970s West German historiography has been one of the main arenas of international comparative history. It has produced important empirical studies particularly in social history as well as methodological and theoretical reflections on comparative history. During the last twenty years however, this approach has felt pressure from two sources: cultural historical approaches, which stress microhistory and the construction of cultural transfer on the one hand, global history and transnational approaches with emphasis on connected history on the other. This volume introduces the reader to some of the major methodological debates and to recent empirical research of German historians, who do comparative and transnational work.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
June 2017
Conceptual History in the European Space
Steinmetz, W., Freeden, M., & Fernández-Sebastián, J. (eds)
The result of extensive collaboration among leading scholars from across Europe, Conceptual History in the European Space represents a landmark intervention in the historiography of concepts. It brings together ambitious thematic studies that combine the pioneering methods of historian Reinhart Koselleck with contemporary insights and debates, each one illuminating a key feature of the European conceptual landscape. With clarifying overviews of such contested theoretical terrain as translatability, spatiality, and center-periphery dynamics, it also provides indispensable contextualization for an era of widespread disenchantment with and misunderstanding of the European project.
Subject: History (General)
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eBook available
May 2007
Conflicted Memories
Europeanizing Contemporary Histories
Jarausch, K. H. & Lindenberger, T. (eds)
Despite the growing interest in general European history, the European dimension is surprisingly absent from the writing of contemporary history. In most countries, the historiography on the 20th century continues to be dominated by national perspectives. Although there is cross-national work on specific topics such as occupation or resistance, transnational conceptions and narratives of contemporary European history have yet to be worked out. This volume focuses on the development of a shared conception of recent European history that will be required as an underpinning for further economic and political integration so as to make lasting cooperation on the old continent possible. It tries to overcome the traditional national framing that ironically persists just at a time when organized efforts to transform Europe from an object of debate to an actual subject have some chance of succeeding in making it into a polity in its own right.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies
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eBook available
June 2020
Conservation’s Roots
Managing for Sustainability in Preindustrial Europe, 1100–1800
Dowling, A. P. & Keyser, R. (eds)
The ideas and practices that comprise “conservation” are often assumed to have arisen within the last two centuries. However, while conservation today has been undeniably entwined with processes of modernity, its historical roots run much deeper. Considering a variety of preindustrial European settings, this book assembles case studies from the medieval and early modern eras to demonstrate that practices like those advocated by modern conservationists were far more widespread and intentional than is widely acknowledged. As the first book-length treatment of the subject, Conservation’s Roots provides broad social, historical, and environmental context for the emergence of the nineteenth-century conservation movement.
Subjects: History (General) Environmental Studies (General)
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May 1996
Conservative Radicalism
A Sociology of Conservative Party Youth Structures and Libertarianism 1970-1992
Evans, T.
If you share the commonly-held notions about the New Right, which typically associate it with a reactionary ideology of social and economic change, then you are in for a surprise: this study - the first to be carried out from the inside - shows that, at least so far as its young members are concerned, their core values rest upon a radical agenda that is explicitly internationalist, individualist, culturally relativist and secularist. After examining the social background and political psychology of the young Libertarians, the author comes to the conclusion that in adhering to a world view that has more to do with individualism - or "property-rights anarchism"- than any form of collectivist ideology, such as Fascism; they represent the antithesis of traditional Burkean thought. For, while Conservatives have historically adhered to the authority of religion, prescription, instinct and communitarianism, Libertarians place their faith in the authority of reality, reason, mankind and capitalism. As a school whose epistemology is reason,ethics - self-interest and politics - and anarcho-capitalism, they represent, so the author argues, an important post-modern paradigm shift in both Conservative thought and activism.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
July 2010
Constructing Charisma
Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Berenson, E. & Giloi, E. (eds)
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 phenomenon more evident than in the relationship between celebrity and fan, leader and follower, the famous and the unknown. By mid-century, heroes and celebrities constituted a new and powerful social force, as innovations in print and visual media made it possible for ordinary people to identify with the famous; to feel they knew the hero, leader, or "star"; to imagine that public figures belonged to their private lives. This volume examines the origins and nature of modern mass media and the culture of celebrity and fame they helped to create. Crossing disciplines and national boundaries, the book focuses on arts celebrities (Sarah Bernhardt, Byron and Liszt); charismatic political figures (Napoleon and Wilhelm II); famous explorers (Stanley and Brazza); and celebrated fictional characters (Cyrano de Bergerac).
Subjects: History (General) History: 18th/19th Century
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June 2015
Contemporary Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Europe
Colonialist and Nationalist Impulses
Rountree, K. (ed)
Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners’ beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism—especially in post-Soviet societies—and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
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March 2007
Continental Britons
German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany
Berghahn, M.
Based on numerous in-depth and personal interviews with members of three generations, this is the first comprehensive study of German-Jewish refugees who came to England in the 1930s. The author addresses questions such as perceptions of Germany and Britain and attitudes towards Judaism. On the basis of many case studies, the author shows how the refugees adjusted, often amazingly successfully, to their situation in Britain. While exploring the process of acculturation of the German-Jews in Britain, the author challenges received ideas about the process of Jewish assimilation in general, and that of the Jews in Germany in particular, and offers a new interpretation in the light of her own empirical data and of current anthropological theory.
Subjects: Jewish Studies Refugee and Migration Studies History: 20th Century to Present Sociology
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July 1996
Coping with Tourists
European Reactions to Mass Tourism
Boissevain, J. (ed)
Once content to sunbathe and follow guides and established itineraries, tourists are increasingly seeking authentic culture. This is taking them into the private areas and zones to which the locals retire in order to escape the tourist gaze, creating tensions between the two groups. Based on recent anthropological field studies, this book describes how European communities dependant on tourism have been affected by the commoditization of their culture and explores the ways they cope with the constant attention of outsiders. The collection demonstrates both varied and skillful ways in which individuals and communities react to and cope with the impact of decades of mass tourism on their lives and values, thus throwing new light onto questions of identity, boundary maintenance and cultural adjustment.
Subject: Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)
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April 2012
Cosmos and Colonialism
Alexander von Humboldt in Cultural Criticism
Clark, R. & Lubrich, O. (eds)
Alexander von Humboldt explored the Spanish Empire on the verge of its collapse (1799–1804). He is the most significant German travel writer and the most important mediator between Europe and the Americas of the nineteenth century. His works integrated knowledge from two dozen domains. Today, he is at the center of debates on imperial discourse, postcolonialism, and globalization. This collection of fifty essays brings together a range of responses, many presented here for the first time in English. Authors from Schiller, Chateaubriand, Sarmiento, and Nietzsche, to Robert Musil, Kurt Tucholsky, Ernst Bloch, and Alejo Carpentier paint the historical background. Essays by contemporary travel writers and recent critics outline the current controversies on Humboldt. The source materials collected here will be indispensable to scholars of German, French, and Latin and North American literature as well as cultural and postcolonial studies, history, art history, and the history of science.
Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies
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eBook available
April 2012
Crafting 'The Indian'
Knowledge, Desire, and Play in Indianist Reenactment
Kalshoven, P. T.
In Europe, Indian hobbyism, or Indianism, has developed out of a strong fascination with Native American life in the 18th and 19th centuries. “Indian hobbyists” dress in homemade replicas of clothing, craft museum-quality replicas of artifacts, meet in fields dotted with tepees and reenact aspects of North American Indian lifeworlds, using ethnographies, travel diaries, and museum collections as resources. Grounded in fieldwork set among networks of Indian hobbyists in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Czech Republic, this ethnography analyzes this contemporary practice of serious leisure with respect to the general human desire for play, metaphor, and allusion. It provides insights into the increasing popularity of reenactment practices as they relate to a deeper understanding of human perception, imagination, and creativity.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Museum Studies
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July 2014
Creating Wilderness
A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park
Kupper, P.
The history of the Swiss National Park, from its creation in the years before the Great War to the present, is told for the first time in this book. Unlike Yellowstone Park, which embodied close cooperation between state-supported conservation and public recreation, the Swiss park put in place an extraordinarily strong conservation program derived from a close alliance between the state and scientific research. This deliberate reinterpretation of the American idea of the national park was innovative and radical, but its consequences were not limited to Switzerland. The Swiss park became the prime example of a “scientific national park,” thereby influencing the course of national parks worldwide.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Environmental Studies (General)
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eBook available
December 2008
Crises in European Integration
Challenges and Responses, 1945-2005
Kuehnhardt, L. (ed)
While the major trends in European integration have been well researched and constitute key elements of narratives about its value and purpose, the crises of integration and their effects have not yet attracted sufficient attention. This volume, with original contributions by leading German scholars, suggests that crises of integration should be seen as engines of progress throughout the history of European integration rather than as expressions of failure and regression, a widely held assumption. It therefore throws new light on the current crises in European integration and provides a fascinating panorama of how challenges and responses were guiding the process during its first five decades.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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December 2005
Crossing European Boundaries
Beyond Conventional Geographical Categories
Stacul, J., Moutsou, C., & Kopnina, H. (eds)
At the turn of the millennium the state of Europe is fluid and contested, yet how this affects the everyday lives of European peoples and the ways they experience the social world they live in remains largely unexplored. Drawing upon ethnographic information from diverse European settings, this volume points to the contradictions that the project of a "Europe without boundaries" involves. In illustrating how the removal of political boundaries can create other boundaries, the articles in this volume provide alternatives to recent theorising on complexity, which takes little account of human agency.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)
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eBook available
May 2016
Crown, Church and Constitution
Popular Conservatism in England, 1815-1867
Neuheiser, J.
Much scholarship on nineteenth-century English workers has been devoted to the radical reform politics that powerfully unsettled the social order in the century’s first decades. Comparatively neglected have been the impetuous patriotism, royalism, and xenophobic anti-Catholicism that countless men and women demonstrated in the early Victorian period. This much-needed study of the era’s “conservatism from below” explores the role of religion in everyday culture and the Tories’ successful mobilization across class boundaries. Long before they were able to vote, large swathes of the lower classes embraced Britain’s monarchical, religious, and legal institutions in the defense of traditional English culture.
Subject: History: 18th/19th Century
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eBook available
November 2018
The CSCE and the End of the Cold War
Diplomacy, Societies and Human Rights, 1972-1990
Badalassi, N. & Snyder, S. B. (eds)
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 Cold War: What role did diplomats play in shaping the 1975 Helsinki Final Act? How did that agreement and the CSCE more broadly shape societies in Europe and North America? And how did the CSCE and activists inspired by the Helsinki Final Act influence the end of the Cold War?
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present History: 20th Century to Present Peace and Conflict Studies
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eBook available
August 2017
Cultural Borders of Europe
Narratives, Concepts and Practices in the Present and the Past
Andrén, M., Lindkvist, T., Söhrman, I. & Vajta, K. (eds)
The cultural borders of Europe are today more visible than ever, and with them comes a sense of uncertainty with respect to liberal democratic traditions: whether treated as abstractions or concrete realities, cultural divisions challenge concepts of legitimacy and political representation as well as the legal bases for citizenship. Thus, an understanding of such borders and their consequences is of utmost importance for promoting the evolution of democracy. Cultural Borders of Europe provides a wide-ranging exploration of these lines of demarcation in a variety of regions and historical eras, providing essential insights into the state of European intercultural relations today.
Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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December 2002
Cultural Encounters
European Travel Writing in the 1930s
Burdett, C. & Duncan, D. (eds)
The 1930s were one of the most important decades in defining the history of the twentieth century. It saw the rise of right-wing nationalism, the challenge to established democracies and the full force of imperialist aggression. Cultural Encounters makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ideological and cultural forces which were active in defining notions of national identity in the 1930s. By examining the work of writers and journalists from a range of European countries who used the medium of travel writing to articulate perceptions of their own and other cultures, the book gives a comprehensive account of the complex intellectual climate of the 1930s.
Subjects: Literary Studies History: 20th Century to Present
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May 2003
Culture and International History
Gienow-Hecht, J.E. & Schumacher, F. (eds)
Combining the perspectives of 18 international scholars from Europe and the United States with a critical discussion of the role of culture in international relations, this volume introduces recent trends in the study of Culture and International History. It systematically explores the cultural dimension of international history, mapping existing approaches and conceptual lenses for the study of cultural factors and thus hopes to sharpen the awareness for the cultural approach to international history among both American and non-American scholars.
The first part provides a methodological introduction, explores the cultural underpinnings of foreign policy, and the role of culture in international affairs by reviewing the historiography and examining the meaning of the word culture in the context of foreign relations. In the second part, contributors analyze culture as a tool of foreign policy. They demonstrate how culture was instrumentalized for diplomatic goals and purposes in different historical periods and world regions. The essays in the third part expand the state-centered view and retrace informal cultural relations among nations and peoples. This exploration of non-state cultural interaction focuses on the role of science, art, religion, and tourism. The fourth part collects the findings and arguments of part one, two, and three to define a roadmap for further scholarly inquiry. A group of" commentators" survey the preceding essays, place them into a larger research context, and address the question "Where do we go from here?" The last and fifth part presents a selection of primary sources along with individual comments highlighting a new genre of resources scholars interested in culture and international relations can consult.
Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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June 2004
Culture and Politics
Identity and Conflict in a Multicultural World
Pinxten, R. & Verstraete, G. & Longman, C. (eds)
With "race" being discredited as a rallying cry for populist movements because of the atrocities committed in its name during World War II, "culture" has been adopted by right-wing groups instead, but used in the same exclusionary manner as racism was. This volume examines the essentialism, which is implicit in racial theories and re-emerges in the ideological use of cultural identity in new rightist movements, and presents case studies from different parts of the world where researchers were confronted with racism and worked out ways of coping with it.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Sociology
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February 2004
Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education
Dracklé, D. and Edgar, I. R. (eds)
As Europe becomes more integrated at the economic and political level, attempts are being made to harmonize education policies as well. This volume offers an important contribution in that the authors examine, for the first time,the politics and practices of social anthropology education across Europe. They look at a wide variety of current developments, including new teaching initiatives, the use of participatory teaching materials, film and video, fieldwork studies, applied anthropology, student perspectives, the educational role of museums, distance learning and the use of new technologies.
Subjects: Applied Anthropology Educational Studies
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December 2008
Dances with Spiders
Crisis, Celebrity and Celebration in Southern Italy
Lüdtke, K.
For centuries, the rite of the tarantula was the only cure for those ‘bitten’ or ‘possessed’ by the mythic Apulian spider. Its victims had to dance to the local tarantella or ‘pizzica’ for days on end. Today, the pizzica has returned to the limelight, bringing to the forefront issues of performance, gender, identity and well-being. This book explores how and why the pizzica has boomed in the Salento and elsewhere and asks whether this current popu- larity has anything to do with the historic ritual of tarantism or with the intention of recovering well-being. While personal stories and experiences may confirm the latter, a vital shift has appeared in the Salento: from the confrontation of life crises to the vibrant promotion and celebration of a local sense of identity and celebrity.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Performance Studies
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eBook available
December 2007
Dancing At the Crossroads
Memory and Mobility in Ireland
Wulff, H.
Dancing at the crossroads used to be young people's opportunity to meet and enjoy themselves on mild summer evenings in the countryside in Ireland until this practice was banned by law, the Public Dance Halls Act in 1935. Now a key metaphor in Irish cultural and political life, "dancing at the crossroads" also crystallizes the argument of this book: Irish dance, from Riverdance (the commercial show) and competitive dancing to dance theatre, conveys that Ireland is to be found in a crossroads situation with a firm base in a distinctly Irish tradition which is also becoming a prominent part of European modernity.
Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies
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eBook available
May 2014
The Dark Side of Nation-States
Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe
Ther, P.
Why was there such a far-reaching consensus concerning the utopian goal of national homogeneity in the first half of the twentieth century? Ethnic cleansing is analyzed here as a result of the formation of democratic nation-states, the international order based on them, and European modernity in general. Almost all mass-scale population removals were rationally and precisely organized and carried out in cold blood, with revenge, hatred and other strong emotions playing only a minor role. This book not only considers the majority of population removals which occurred in Eastern Europe, but is also an encompassing, comparative study including Western Europe, interrogating the motivations of Western statesmen and their involvement in large-scale population removals. It also reaches beyond the European continent and considers the reverberations of colonial rule and ethnic cleansing in the former British colonies.
Subjects: Genocide History History (General)
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eBook available
December 2003
Death of the Father
An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority
Borneman, J. (ed)
The death of authority figures like fathers or leaders can be experienced as either liberation or loss. In the twentieth century, the authority of the father and of the leader became closely intertwined; constraints and affective attachments intensified in ways that had major effects on the organization of regimes of authority. This comparative volume examines the resulting crisis in symbolic identification, the national traumas that had crystallized around four state political forms: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and East European Communism. The defeat of Imperial and Fascist regimes in 1945 and the implosion of Communist regimes in 1989 were critical moments of rupture, of "death of the father." What was the experience of their ends, and what is the reconstruction of those ends in memory?
This volume represents is the beginning of a comparative social anthropology of caesurae: the end of traumatic political regimes, of their symbolic forms, political consequences, and probable futures.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies
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eBook available
May 2017
Death of the Public University?
Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy
Wright, S. & Shore, C. (eds)
Universities have been subjected to continuous government reforms since the 1980s, to make them ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘efficient’ and aligned to the predicted needs and challenges of a global knowledge economy. Under increasing pressure to pursue ‘excellence’ and ‘innovation’, many universities are struggling to maintain their traditional mission to be inclusive, improve social mobility and equality and act as the ‘critic and conscience’ of society. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary research project, University Reform, Globalisation and Europeanisation (URGE), this collection analyses the new landscapes of public universities emerging across Europe and the Asia-Pacific, and the different ways that academics are engaging with them.
Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)
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November 2016
Death, Materiality and Mediation
An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland
Graham, B.
In Death, Materiality and Mediation, Barbara Graham analyzes a diverse range of objects associated with remembrance in both the public and private arenas through ethnography of communities on both sides of the Irish border. In doing so, she explores the materially mediated interactions between the living and the dead, revealing the physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual roles of the dead in contemporary communities. Through this study, Graham expands the concept of materiality to include narrative, song, senses, emotions, ephemera and embodied experience. She also examines how modern practices are informed by older beliefs and folk religion.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Anthropology of Religion
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eBook available
October 2018
The Decisionist Imagination
Sovereignty, Social Science and Democracy in the 20th Century
Bessner, D. & Guilhot, N. (eds)
In the decades following World War II, the science of decision-making moved from the periphery to the center of transatlantic thought. The Decisionist Imagination explores how “decisionism” emerged from its origins in prewar political theory to become an object of intense social scientific inquiry in the new intellectual and institutional landscapes of the postwar era. By bringing together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, this volume illuminates how theories of decision shaped numerous techno-scientific aspects of modern governance—helping to explain, in short, how we arrived at where we are today.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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November 2021
Defeating Impunity
Attempts at International Justice in Europe since 1914
Rovetta, O. & Lagrou, P. (eds)
Over the course of the long and violent twentieth century, only a minority of perpetrators of international crime perpetrators ever stood trial, and a central challenge of this era was the effort to ensure that not all these crimes remained unpunished. This required not only establishing a legal record but also courage, determination, and inventiveness in realizing justice. Defeating Impunity moves from the little-known trials of the 1920s to the Yugoslavia tribunal in the 2000s, from Belgium in 1914 to Ukraine in 1943, and to Stuttgart and Düsseldorf in 1975. It illustrates the extent to which the language of law drew an international horizon of justice.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Genocide History
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October 1998
Democracy in Europe
Legitimising Politics in a Non-State Polity
Abromeit, H.
Since the beginning of the European Community students of international politics and of international, resp. Constitutional law, have been wondering what kind of animal it is, and will be, once integration has been completed. Whereas the EC Treaty of 1957 stressed the economic aspects and envisioned a steady and dynamic progress towards a Single Market, it was conspicuously silent about the political implications of integration and the new democratic order. What is needed, so the author argues in this powerful and original contribution to the debate on democratisation of the European Union, is a flexible system that supplements the European decision-making process with various direct democratic instruments such as the use of referenda. These would serve to increase the accountability of the politicians without demanding or requiring a definitive resolution of the exact constitutional status of the Union.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
June 2018
Democracy in Modern Europe
A Conceptual History
Kurunmäki, J., Nevers, J., & te Velde, H. (eds)
As one of the most influential ideas in modern European history, democracy has fundamentally reshaped not only the landscape of governance, but also social and political thought throughout the world. Democracy in Modern Europe surveys the conceptual history of democracy in modern Europe, from the Industrial Revolutions of the nineteenth century through both world wars and the rise of welfare states to the present era of the European Union. Exploring individual countries as well as regional dynamics, this volume comprises a tightly organized, comprehensive, and thoroughly up-to-date exploration of a foundational issue in European political and intellectual history.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
March 2014
The Demons of Modernity
Ingmar Bergman and European Cinema
Orr, J.
Ingmar Bergman’s films had a very broad and rich relationship with the rest of European cinema, contrary to the myth that Bergman was a peripheral figure, culturally and aesthetically isolated from the rest of Europe. This book contends that he should be put at the very center of European film history by chronologically comparing Bergman’s relationship to key European directors such as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and also looks at Bergman’s critical relationship to key movements in film history such as the French New Wave. In so doing, it demonstrates how Ingmar Bergman’s films illustrate the demonic struggle in modernity between faith and secularity through “his intense preoccupation with the malaise of intimacy.”
Subject: Film and Television Studies
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eBook available
February 2016
Desires for Reality
Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film
Halligan, B.
As with many aspects of European cultural life, film was galvanized and transformed by the revolutionary fervor of 1968. This groundbreaking study provides a full account of the era’s cinematic crises, innovations, and provocations, as well as the social and aesthetic contexts in which they appeared. The author mounts a genuinely fresh analysis of a contested period in which everything from the avant-garde experiments of Godard, Pasolini, Schroeter, and Fassbinder to the “low” cinematic genres of horror, pornography, and the Western reflected the cultural upheaval of youth in revolt—a cinema for the barricades.
Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
August 2008
Destination London
German-Speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925-1950
Bergfelder, T. & Cargnelli, C. (eds)
The legacy of emigrés in the British film industry, from the silent film era until after the Second World War, has been largely neglected in the scholarly literature. Destination London is the first book to redress this imbalance. Focusing on areas such as exile, genre, technological transfer, professional training and education, cross-cultural exchange and representation, it begins by mapping the reasons for this neglect before examining the contributions made to British cinema by emigré directors, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, set designers, and composers. It goes on to assess the cultural and economic contexts of transnational industry collaborations in the 1920s, artistic cosmopolitanism in the 1930s, and anti-Nazi propaganda in the 1940s.
Subjects: Film and Television Studies Refugee and Migration Studies History: 20th Century to Present
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January 2009
Developing Skill, Developing Vision
Practices of Locality at the Foot of the Alps
Grasseni, C.
Many people feel that the impact of technology and the pressure of the market economy on alpine communities leads to a loss of biodiversity, authenticity and cultural diversity, affecting animal husbandry, local food production, social networks and traditions. It is undeniable that "progress," "development" and "integration" are transforming working routines, recipes for dairy production and patterns of communication in rural communities. This book explores the many tensions at the core of present local practices and debates in the Italian Alps, highlighting the many transformations undergone within skilled practice and cultural heritage as a result of commoditization, professionalization and technification, with a special focus on the ways in which this also means, quite literally, changing one's vision of locality: of the landscape, of local products and of local animals.
Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)
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eBook available
February 2016
The Devil's Riches
A Modern History of Greed
Poley, J.
A seeming constant in the history of capitalism, greed has nonetheless undergone considerable transformations over the last five hundred years. This multilayered account offers a fresh take on an old topic, arguing that greed was experienced as a moral phenomenon and deployed to make sense of an unjust world. Focusing specifically on the interrelated themes of religion, economics, and health—each of which sought to study and channel the power of financial desire—Jared Poley shows how evolving ideas about greed became formative elements of the modern experience.
Subject: History (General)
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April 2013
Diaspora Online
Identity Politics and Romanian Migrants
Trandafoiu, R.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, millions of Romanians emigrated in search of work and new experiences; they became engaged in an interrogation of what it meant to be Romanian in a united Europe and the globalized world. Their thoughts, feelings and hopes soon began to populate the virtual world of digital and mobile technologies. This book chronicles the online cultural and political expressions of the Romanian diaspora using websites based in Europe and North America. Through online exchanges, Romanians perform new types of citizenship, articulated from the margins of the political field. The politicization of their diasporic condition is manifested through written and public protests against discriminatory work legislation, mobilization, lobbying, cultural promotion and setting up associations and political parties that are proof of the gradual institutionalization of informal communications. Online discourse analysis, supplemented by interviews with migrants, poets and politicians involved in the process of defining new diasporic identities, provide the basis of this book, which defines the new cultural and political practices of the Romanian diaspora.
Subjects: Media Studies Refugee and Migration Studies
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October 2011
Diasporic Generations
Memory, Politics, and Nation among Cubans in Spain
Berg, M. L.
Interpretations of the background to the Cuban diaspora – a political revolution and the subsequent radical transformation of the society and economy towards socialism – are politicised and highly contested. The Miami-based Cuban diaspora has had extraordinary success in putting its case high on the US political agenda and in capturing world media attention, but in the process the multiplicity of experiences within the diaspora has been overshadowed. This book gives voice to diasporic Cubans living in Spain, the former colonial ruler of Cuba. By focusing on their lived experiences of displacement, the book brings to light imaginative, narrative re-creations of the nation from afar. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book argues that the Cuban diaspora in Spain consists of three diasporic generations, generated through distinct migratory experiences. This constitutes an important step forward in understanding the dynamics of memory-making and social differentiation within diasporas, and in appreciating why people within the same diaspora engage in different modes of transnational practices and homeland relations.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Memory Studies
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eBook available
January 2003
Disputed Territories
The Transnational Dynamics of Ethnic Conflict Settlement
Wolff, S.
Ethnic conflicts have shaped the 20th century in significant ways. While the legacy of the last century is primarily one of many unresolved conflicts, the author contends that Western Europe has a track record in containing and settling ethnic conflicts which provides valuable lessons for conflict management elsewhere. Focusing on ethno-territorial crossborder conflicts in Alsace, the Saarland, South Tyrol, and Northern Ireland, Andorra and the New Hebrides, the author develops a four-dimensional analytical framework that synthesizes the distinct factors that influence the complex relationship between host-state, kin-state, actors in the disputed territory, and in the international context.
Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology
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May 2002
Dual Nationality, Social Rights and Federal Citizenship in the U.S. and Europe
The Reinvention of Citizenship
Hansen, R. & Weil, P. (eds)
Dual nationality has become one of the most divisive issues linked with the politics of migration in Germany and the US. This volume, the first one in decades to focus on this issue, examines the history, consequences and arguments for and against dual citizenship, and uses dual nationality as the basis of a reflection on important issues closely related to it: social rights, European citizenship and federal citizenship. It pays particular attention to questions such as: What are the major arguments in favor and against dual nationality? Why has dual nationality provoked such contrasting responses, being a non-issue in the UK, for instance, and an extremely controversial one in Germany? How is dual nationality used by states to influence politics and policy in other states? How does it relate to the aim of integrating ethnic migrants and to broader issues in social policy and European integration?
Subject: History (General)
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eBook available
March 2013
Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe
Langenbacher, E., Niven, B., & Wittlinger, R. (eds)
The collapse of the Iron Curtain, the renationalization of eastern Europe, and the simultaneous eastward expansion of the European Union have all impacted the way the past is remembered in today’s eastern Europe. At the same time, in recent years, the Europeanization of Holocaust memory and a growing sense of the need to stage a more “self-critical” memory has significantly changed the way in which western Europe commemorates and memorializes the past. The increasing dissatisfaction among scholars with the blanket, undifferentiated use of the term “collective memory” is evolving in new directions. This volume brings the tension into focus while addressing the state of memory theory itself.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies
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March 2004
An Earth-colored Sea
'Race', Culture and the Politics of Identity in the Post-Colonial Portuguese-Speaking World
Vale de Almeida, M.
Although the post-colonial situation has attracted considerable interest over recent years, one important colonial power – Portugal – has not been given any attention. This book is the first to explore notions of ethnicity, "race", culture, and nation in the context of the debate on colonialism and postcolonialism. The structure of the book reflects a trajectory of research, starting with a case study in Trinidad, followed by another one in Brazil, and ending with yet another one in Portugal. The three case studies, written in the ethnographic genre, are intertwined with essays of a more theoretical nature. The non-monographic, composite – or hybrid – nature of this work may be in itself an indication of the need for transnational and historically grounded research when dealing with issues of representations of identity that were constructed during colonial times and that are today reconfigured in the ideological struggles over cultural meanings.
Subjects: Colonial History Anthropology (General) Sociology
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February 1996
Education for the New Europe
Benner, D. & Lenzen, D. (eds)
Up to now European unification has primarily been considered a matter of political and economic concern. Very little attention has been paid to education and training, although many resolutions of various treaties, especially regarding the labor market, would remain ineffectual without any synchronization of the various systems of education and training. Moreover, if popular support for political and economic integration is to be secured, the citizens of Europe, in Delors' words, must "genuinely have the feeling that they are involved in this joint adventure (Europe)," whichwill be achieved only through a better understanding of each other's history and also an awareness of common European history and common cultural traditions. This volume presents a selection of papers given at a recent meeting, attended by representatives from about thirty European countries who had come together to take stock after Maastricht and to develop new perspectives for a future European educational system.
Subject: Educational Studies
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June 2003
Educational Histories of European Social Anthropology
Dracklé, D., Edgar, I. R. & Schippers, T. K. (eds)
Aimed at professional anthropologists, their students and academic policy-makers, the contributions to this volume provide an unprecedented array of insights into the current teaching and learning of social anthropology across Europe. With case-studies from eighteen different countries this volume presents a rich panorama of local histories, contexts and experiences, which are essential contributions to current debates on the role and significance of anthropology in an era of converging Higher Education policies. More practically,the volume offers teachers and students the possibility ofdeveloping international exchanges supported by a previously unobtainable knowledge of institutional historiesand differing local contexts.
Subjects: Educational Studies Theory and Methodology
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October 1997
Educational Studies in Europe
Amsterdam and Berlin Compared
Heyting, F., Koppen, J., Lenzen, D. and Thiel, F. (eds)
Reflecting the growing integration of the European Union, this volume presents one of the results of an increasing cooperation between the education departments of Berlin, Amsterdam and London universities. The aim is to achieve a better understanding of the cultural and socio-political differences of the educational sciences and, more generally, the educational consequences and possibilities of both globalizing and pluralist developments in European countries. The areas covered include theoretical discussions of educational developments in contemporary society, education organization and policy, intercultural and integration pedagogics, education for young children as well as higher education.
Subject: Educational Studies
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September 2014
The Emergence of Film Culture
Knowledge Production, Institution Building, and the Fate of the Avant-Garde in Europe, 1919–1945
Hagener, M. (ed)
Between the two world wars, a distinct and vibrant film culture emerged in Europe. Film festivals and schools were established; film theory and history was written that took cinema seriously as an art form; and critical writing that created the film canon flourished. This scene was decidedly transnational and creative, overcoming traditional boundaries between theory and practice, and between national and linguistic borders. This new European film culture established film as a valid form of social expression, as an art form, and as a political force to be reckoned with. By examining the extraordinarily rich and creative uses of cinema in the interwar period, we can examine the roots of film culture as we know it today.
Subject: Film and Television Studies
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eBook available
October 2007
Empire and After
Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective
MacPhee, G. & Poddar, P. (eds)
The growing debate over British national identity, and the place of "Englishness" within it, raises crucial questions about multiculturalism, postimperial culture and identity, and the past and future histories of globalization. However, discussions of Englishness have too often been limited by insular conceptions of national literature, culture, and history, which serve to erase or marginalize the colonial and postcolonial locations in which British national identity has been articulated. This volume breaks new ground by drawing together a range of disciplinary approaches in order to resituate the relationship between British national identity and Englishness within a global framework. Ranging from the literature and history of empire to analyses of contemporary culture, postcolonial writing, political rhetoric, and postimperial memory after 9/11, this collection demonstrates that far from being parochial or self-involved, the question of Englishness offers an important avenue for thinking about the politics of national identity in our postcolonial and globalized world.
Subjects: Colonial History Cultural Studies (General) Memory Studies
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March 2016
Enduring Uncertainty
Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life
Hasselberg, I.
Focusing on the lived experience of immigration policy and processes, this volume provides fascinating insights into the deportation process as it is felt and understood by those subjected to it. The author presents a rich and innovative ethnography of deportation and deportability experienced by migrants convicted of criminal offenses in England and Wales. The unique perspectives developed here – on due process in immigration appeals, migrant surveillance and control, social relations and sense of self, and compliance and resistance – are important for broader understandings of border control policy and human rights.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)
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eBook available
August 2019
Escapees
The History of Jews Who Fled Nazi Deportation Trains in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands
von Fransecky, T.
Of the countless stories of resistance, ingenuity, and personal risk to emerge in the years following the Holocaust, among the most remarkable, yet largely overlooked, are those of the hundreds of Jewish deportees who escaped from moving trains bound for the extermination camps. In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands alone over 750 men, women and children undertook such dramatic escape attempts, despite the extraordinary uncertainty and physical danger they often faced. Drawing upon extensive interviews and a wealth of new historical evidence, Escapees gives a fascinating collective account of this hitherto neglected form of resistance to Nazi persecution.
Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies Mobility Studies
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eBook available
March 2012
Ethical Consumption
Social Value and Economic Practice
Carrier, J. G. & Luetchford, P. G. (eds)
Increasingly, consumers in North America and Europe see their purchasing as a way to express to the commercial world their concerns about trade justice, the environment and similar issues. This ethical consumption has attracted growing attention in the press and among academics. Extending beyond the growing body of scholarly work on the topic in several ways, this volume focuses primarily on consumers rather than producers and commodity chains. It presents cases from a variety of European countries and is concerned with a wide range of objects and types of ethical consumption, not simply the usual tropical foodstuffs, trade justice and the system of fair trade. Contributors situate ethical consumption within different contexts, from common Western assumptions about economy and society, to the operation of ethical-consumption commerce, to the ways that people’s ethical consumption can affect and be affected by their social situation. By locating consumers and their practices in the social and economic contexts in which they exist and that their ethical consumption affects, this volume presents a compelling interrogation of the rhetoric and assumptions of ethical consumption.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
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eBook available
June 2010
Ethnobotany in the New Europe
People, Health and Wild Plant Resources
Pardo-de-Santayana, M., Pieroni, A. & Puri, R. (eds)
The study of European wild food plants and herbal medicines is an old discipline that has been invigorated by a new generation of researchers pursuing ethnobotanical studies in fresh contexts. Modern botanical and medical science itself was built on studies of Medieval Europeans’ use of food plants and medicinal herbs. In spite of monumental changes introduced in the Age of Discovery and Mercantile Capitalism, some communities, often of immigrants in foreign lands, continue to hold on to old recipes and traditions, while others have adopted and enculturated exotic plants and remedies into their diets and pharmacopoeia in new and creative ways. Now in the 21st century, in the age of the European Union and Globalization, European folk botany is once again dynamically responding to changing cultural, economic, and political contexts. The authors and studies presented in this book reflect work being conducted across Europe’s many regions. They tell the story of the on-going evolution of human-plant relations in one of the most bioculturally dynamic places on the planet, and explore new approaches that link the re-evaluation of plant-based cultural heritage with the conservation and use of biocultural diversity.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology
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eBook available
July 2018
Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space
Place-Making in the New Northern Ireland
Komarova, M. & Svašek, M. (eds)
Exploring the complex dynamics of twenty-first century spatial sociality, this volume provides a much-needed multi-dimensional perspective that undermines the dominant image of Northern Ireland as a conflict-ridden place. Despite touching on memories of “the Troubles” and continuing unionist-nationalist tensions, the volume refuses to consider people in the region as purely political beings, or to understand processes of placemaking solely through ethnic or national contestations and territoriality. Topics such as the significance of friendship, gender, and popular culture in spatial practices are considered, against the backdrop of the growing presence of migrants, refugees and diasporic groups.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Urban Studies Cultural Studies (General)
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December 1994
Europe After Maastricht
American and European Perspectives
Lützeler, P. M. (ed)
During the era following the Second World War world peace was largely assured through American-European cooperation on the political, military, and economic level. This status quo was upset by the ratification of the Treaty on the European Union (Maastricht Treaty) which will, whatever obstacles still remain, inevitably lead to closer cooperation among (west)European countries and to a shift in Europe's position within world politics. This raises a number of questions that are discussed in this volume by an international team of experts from Europe (east and west), Russia and the United States.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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January 2001
Europe in 1848
Revolution and Reform
Dowe, D., Haupt, H.-G., Langewiesche, D. & Sperber, J. (eds)
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 criteria for a revolution's success and failure. To commemorate the 1848 revolution in a spirit of renewed critical inquiry, an international team of prominent historians have come together to produce what must be the most comprehensive work on this topic to date and to offer a synthesis that sums up the current state of scholarly research, emphasizing the many new interpretations that have developed over several decades.
Subject: History: 18th/19th Century
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eBook available
October 2012
Europe in Crisis
Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917-1957
Hewitson, M. & D'Auria, M. (eds)
The period between 1917 and 1957, starting with the birth of the USSR and the American intervention in the First World War and ending with the Treaty of Rome, is of the utmost importance for contextualizing and understanding the intellectual origins of the European Community. During this time of 'crisis,' many contemporaries, especially intellectuals, felt they faced a momentous decision which could bring about a radically different future. The understanding of what Europe was and what it should be was questioned in a profound way, forcing Europeans to react. The idea of a specifically European unity finally became, at least for some, a feasible project, not only to avoid another war but to avoid the destruction of the idea of European unity. This volume reassesses the relationship between ideas of Europe and the European project and reconsiders the impact of long and short-term political transformations on assumptions about the continent’s scope, nature, role and significance.
Subject: History (General)
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August 2001
Europe in Exile
European Exile Communities in Britain 1940-45
Conway, M. & Gotovitch, J. (eds)
During World War II, London was transformed into a European city, as it unexpectedly became a place of refuge for many thousands of European citizens who through choice or the accidents of war found themselves seeking refuge in Britain from the military campaigns on the Continent of Europe. In this volume, an international team of historians consider the exile groups from Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway and Czechoslovakia, analysing not merely the relations between the plethora of exile regimes and the British government in terms of its military and social dimensions but also the legacy of this period of exile for the politics of post-war Europe. Particular attention is paid to the Belgian exiles, the most numerous exile population in Britain during World War II.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
August 2017
European Anthropologies
Barrera-González, A., Heintz, M. & Horolets, A. (eds)
In what ways did Europeans interact with the diversity of people they encountered on other continents in the context of colonial expansion, and with the peasant or ethnic ‘Other’ at home? How did anthropologists and ethnologists make sense of the mosaic of people and societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when their disciplines were progressively being established in academia? By assessing the diversity of European intellectual histories within sociocultural anthropology, this volume aims to sketch its intellectual and institutional portrait. It will be a useful reading for the students of anthropology, ethnology, history and philosophy of science, research and science policy makers.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Colonial History
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August 2004
European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, 1920-1945
Kobrak, C. & Hansen, P. (eds)
For much of the twentieth century, the prevalence of dictatorial regimes has left business, especially multinational firms, with a series of complex and for the most part unwelcome choices. This volume, which includes essays by noted American and European scholars such as Mira Wilkins, Gerald Feldman, Peter Hayes, and Wilfried Feldenkirchen, sets business activity in its political and social context and describes some of the strategic and tactical responses of firms investing from or into Europe to a myriad of opportunities and risks posed by host or home country authoritarian governments during the interwar period. Although principally a work of history, it puts into perspective some commercial dilemmas with which practitioners and business theorists must still unfortunately grapple.
Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
June 2012
European Foundations of the Welfare State
Kaufmann, F.-X.
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 former British Commonwealth. The welfare state in the European sense is not simply an administrative arrangement of various measures of social protection but a political project embedded in distinct cultural traditions. Offering the first accessible account in English of the historical development of the European idea of the welfare state, this book reviews the intellectual foundations which underpinned the road towards the European welfare state, formulates some basic concepts for its understanding, and highlights the differences in the underlying structural and philosophical conditions between continental Europe and the English-speaking world.
Subjects: History (General) Sociology
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eBook available
March 2009
European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology
Edwards, J. & Salazar, C. (eds)
Interest in the study of kinship, a key area of anthropological enquiry, has recently reemerged. Dubbed ‘the new kinship’, this interest was stimulated by the ‘new genetics’ and revived interest in kinship and family patterns. This volume investigates the impact of biotechnology on contemporary understandings of kinship, of family and ‘belonging’ in a variety of European settings and reveals similarities and differences in how kinship is conceived. What constitutes kinship for different publics? How significant are biogenetic links? What does family resemblance tell us? Why is genetically modified food an issue? Are ‘genes’ and ‘blood’ interchangeable? It has been argued that the recent prominence of genetic science and genetic technologies has resulted in a ‘geneticization’ of social life; the ethnographic examples presented here do show shifts occurring in notions of ‘nature’ and of what is ‘natural’. But, they also illustrate the complexity of contemporary kinship thinking in Europe and the continued interconnectedness of biological and sociological understandings of relatedness and the relationship between nature and nurture.
Subject: Medical Anthropology
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March 1999
European Memories of the Second World War
Peitsch, H., Burdett, C. & Gorrara, C. (eds)
During the fifty years since the end of hostilities, European literary memories of the war have undergone considerable change, influenced by the personal experiences of writers as well as changing political, social, and cultural factors. This volume examines changing ways of remembering the war in the literatures of France, Germany, and Italy; changes in the subject of memory, and in the relations between fiction, autobiography, and documentary, with the focus being on the extent to which shared European memories of the war have been constructed.
Subjects: Memory Studies
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eBook available
April 2010
A European Memory?
Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance
Pakier, M. & Stråth, B. (eds)
An examination of the role of history and memory is vital in order to better understand why the grand design of a United Europe—with a common foreign policy and market yet enough diversity to allow for cultural and social differences—was overwhelmingly turned down by its citizens. The authors argue that this rejection of the European constitution was to a certain extent a challenge to the current historical grounding used for further integration and further demonstrates the lack of understanding by European bureaucrats of the historical complexity and divisiveness of Europe’s past. A critical European history is therefore urgently needed to confront and re-imagine Europe, not as a harmonious continent but as the outcome of violent and bloody conflicts, both within Europe as well as with its Others. As the authors show, these dark shadows of Europe’s past must be integrated, and the fact that memories of Europe are contested must be accepted if any new attempts at a United Europe are to be successful.
Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General) Memory Studies
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August 2007
The European Puzzle
The Political Structuring of Cultural Identities at a Time of Transition
Demossier, M. (ed)
The twin concepts of “Culture” and “Identity” are inescapable in any discussion of European Integration and yet over the last ten years their meaning has become increasingly contested. By combining an anthropological and political perspective, the authors challenge the traditional boundaries within the issue of the construction of Europe. In the first part, historians and anthropologists from various national traditions discuss the process of the construction of Europe and its implications for cultural identities. The second section examines a number of topics at the core of the process of Europeanization and presents up-to-date information on each of these issues: political parties, regions, football, cities, the Euro, ethnicity, heritage and European cinema. Emphasis is be placed on the political structuring of cultural identities by contrasting top-down and bottom-up processes that define the tensions between the unity and diversity of the European Community.
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology
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eBook available
July 2017
European Regions and Boundaries
A Conceptual History
Mishkova, D. & Trencsényi, B. (eds)
It is difficult to speak about Europe today without reference to its constitutive regions—supra-national geographical designations such as “Scandinavia,” “Eastern Europe,” and “the Balkans.” Such formulations are so ubiquitous that they are frequently treated as empirical realities rather than a series of shifting, overlapping, and historically constructed concepts. This volume is the first to provide a synthetic account of these concepts and the historical and intellectual contexts in which they emerged. Bringing together prominent international scholars from across multiple disciplines, it systematically and comprehensively explores how such “meso-regions” have been conceptualized throughout modern European history.
Subjects: History (General) Mobility Studies
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May 2004
The European Way
European Societies in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Kaelble, H. (ed)
A good social history of Europe has yet to be written though, given the developments over the last few decades, this seems more urgent than ever before. This volume presents an important step forward in that it brings together eight internationally known social historians from Europe and Israel, each of whom offer an overview of some key themes in European history during the last two centuries. While dealing with the great changes of this period, the authors reveal the commonalities that link European societies together but also important differences at a national level.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present
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April 2014
Europeanizing Contention
The Protest Against 'Fortress Europe' in France and Germany
Monforte, P.
What are the consequences of European integration on social movements? Who are the “winners” and the “losers” of Europe’s organized civil society? This book explores the Europeanization of contention through an in-depth, comparative analysis of French and German pro-asylum movements since the end of the 1990s. Through an examination of their networks, discourses, and collective actions, it shows that the groups composing these movements display different degrees and forms of Europeanization, reflected in different fields of protest. More generally, it shows the multiple strategies implemented by activists to Europeanize their scope of mobilization and by doing so participate in the construction of a European public sphere.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
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June 2002
Europe's New Racism
Causes, Manifestations, and Solutions
Evens Foundation
Europe has seen a tremendous rise in popularity of new rightist political parties in the last two decades or so, claiming cultural supremacy of the so-called native Europeans over foreign immigrants. In this volume, European scholars from Russian to Britain have come together to examine the media and social and legal policies in an effort to determine the causes of this resurgence of rightist and anti-democratic ideologies. They furthermore suggest actions that might help combat racism more effectively.
Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology Urban Studies
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November 2003
Evidence, History and the Great War
Historians and the Impact of 1914-18
Braybon, G. (ed)
In the English-speaking world the Great War maintains a tenacious grip on the public imagination, and also continues to draw historians to an event which has been interpreted variously as a symbol of modernity, the midwife to the twentieth century and an agent of social change. Although much 'common knowledge' about the war and its aftermath has included myth, simplification and generalisation, this has often been accepted uncritically by popular and academic writers alike.
While Britain may have suffered a surfeit of war books, many telling much the same story, there is far less written about the impact of the Great War in other combatant nations. Its history was long suppressed in both fascist Italy and the communist Soviet Union: only recently have historians of Russia begun to examine a conflict which killed, maimed and displaced so many millions. Even in France and Germany the experience of 1914-18 has often been overshadowed by the Second World War.
The war's social history is now ripe for reassessment and revision. The essays in this volume incorporate a European perspective, engage with the historiography of the war, and consider how the primary textural, oral and pictorial evidence has been used - or abused. Subjects include the politics of shellshock, the impact of war on women, the plight of refugees, food distribution in Berlin and portrait photography, all of which illuminate key debates in war history.
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eBook available
April 2014
Exhibiting Europe in Museums
Transnational Networks, Collections, Narratives, and Representations
Kaiser, W., Krankenhagen, S. & Poehls, K.
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 Europe. Based on research in nearly 100 museums across the Continent and interviews with cultural policy makers and museum curators, it studies the growing transnational activities of state institutions, societal organizations, and people in the museum field such as attempts to Europeanize collection policy and collections as well as different strategies for making narratives more transnational like telling stories of European integration as shared history and discussing both inward and outward migration as a common experience and challenge. The book thus provides fascinating insights into a fast-changing museum landscape in Europe with wider implications for cultural policy and museums in other world regions.
Subjects: Museum Studies Memory Studies
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July 2003
Exiles From European Revolutions
Refugees in Mid-Victorian England
Freitag, S. & Muhs, R. (eds)
Studies on exile in the 19th century tend to be restricted to national histories. This volume is the first to offer a broader view by looking at French, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Czech and German political refugees who fled to England after the European revolutions of 1848/49. The contributors examine various aspects of their lives in exile such as their opportunities for political activities, the forms of political cooperation that existed between exiles from different European countries on the one hand and with organizations and politicians in England on the other and, finally, the attitude of the host country towards the refugees, and their perceptions of the country which had granted them asylum.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Refugee and Migration Studies
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eBook available
December 2010
Experience and Memory
The Second World War in Europe
Echternkamp, J. & Martens, S. (eds)
Modern military history, inspired by social and cultural historical approaches, increasingly puts the national histories of the Second World War to the test. New questions and methods are focusing on aspects of war and violence that have long been neglected. What shaped people’s experiences and memories? What differences and what similarities existed in Eastern and Western Europe? How did the political framework influence the individual and the collective interpretations of the war? Finally, what are the benefits of Europeanizing the history of the Second World War? Experts from Belgium, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, and Russia discuss these and other questions in this comprehensive volume.
Subjects: Memory Studies
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September 2003
Experiencing Wages
Social and Cultural Aspects of Wage Forms in Europe since 1500
Scholliers, P., & Schwarz, L. (eds)
When discussing wages, historians have traditionally concentrated on the level of wages, much less on how people were paid for their work. Important aspects were thus ignored such as how frequently were wages actually paid, how much of the wage was paid in non-monetary form - whether as traditional perquisites or community relief - especially when there was often insufficient coinage available to pay wages. Covering a wide geographical area, ranging from Spain to Finland, and time span, ranging from the sixteenth century to the 1930s, this volume offers fresh perspectives on key areas in social and economic history such as the relationship between customs, moral economy, wages and the market, changing pay and wage forms and the relationship between age, gender and wages.
Subject: History (General)
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April 2008
Exploring Regimes of Discipline
The Dynamics of Restraint
Dyck, N.
The pursuit and practice of discipline have become near ubiquitous elements of contemporary social life and parlance, as discipline has become a commonplace and ever sought-after social technology. From the celebrated “discipline of the market” proclaimed by neo-liberal politicians, to self-actualizing experiences of embodied discipline proffered by martial arts instructors, this volume showcases highly varied and complex disciplinary practices and relationships in a set of ethnographic studies. Interrogating the respective fields of work, religion, governance, leisure, education and child rearing, together the essays in this volume explore and offer new ways of thinking about discipline in everyday life.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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May 1996
Fascism and Theatre
Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925-1945
Berghaus, G. (ed)
Since the 1920s, an endless flow of studies has analyzed the political systems of fascism, theseizure of power, the nature of the regimes, the atrocities committed, and, finally, the wars waged against other countries. However, much less attention has been paid to the strategies of persuasion employed by the regimes to win over the masses for their cause. Among these, fascist propaganda has traditionally been seen as the key means of influencing public opinion. Only recently has the "fascination with Fascism" become a topic of enquiry that has also formed the guiding interest of this volume: it offers, for the first time, a comparative analysis of the forms and functions of theater in countries governed by fascist or para-fascist regimes. By examining a wide spectrum of theatrical manifestations in a number of States with a varying degree of fascistization, these studies establish some of the similarities and differences between the theatrical cultures of several cultures in the interwar period.
Subjects: Performance Studies Literary Studies
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eBook available
May 2017
Fascism without Borders
Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945
Bauerkämper, A. & Rossolińki-Liebe, G. (eds)
It is one of the great ironies of the history of fascism that, despite their fascination with ultra-nationalism, its adherents understood themselves as members of a transnational political movement. While a true “Fascist International” has never been established, European fascists shared common goals and sentiments as well as similar worldviews. They also drew on each other for support and motivation, even though relations among them were not free from misunderstandings and conflicts. Through a series of fascinating case studies, this expansive collection examines fascism’s transnational dimension, from the movements inspired by the early example of Fascist Italy to the international antifascist organizations that emerged in subsequent years.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
May 2016
Fascist Interactions
Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and Its Era, 1919-1945
Roberts, D. D.
Although studies of fascism have constituted one of the most fertile areas of historical inquiry in recent decades, more and more scholars have called for a new agenda with more research beyond Italy and Germany, less preoccupation with definition and classification, and more sustained focus on the relationships among different fascist formations before 1945. Starting from a critical assessment of these imperatives, this rigorous volume charts a historiographical path that transcends rigid distinctions while still developing meaningful criteria of differentiation. Even as we take fascism seriously as a political phenomenon, such an approach allows us to better understand its distinctive contradictions and historical variations.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
April 2008
The Fateful Alliance
German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: The Machtergreifung in a New Light
Beck, H.
On 30 January 1933, Alfred Hugenberg's conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) formed a coalition government with the Nazi Party, thus enabling Hitler to accede to the chancellorship. This book analyzes in detail the complicated relationship between Conservatives and Nazis and offers a re-interpretation of the Nazi seizure of power - the decisive months between 30 January and 14 July 1933. The Machtergreifung is characterized here as a period of all-pervasive violence and lawlessness with incessant conflicts between Nazis and German Nationals and Nazi attacks on the conservative Bürgertum, a far cry from the traditional depiction of the takeover as a relatively bloodless, virtually sterile assumption of power by one vast impersonal apparatus wresting control from another. The author scrutinizes the revolutionary character of the Nazi seizure of power, the Nazis' attacks on the conservative Bürgertum and its values, and National Socialism's co-optation of conservative symbols of state power to serve radically new goals, while addressing the issue of why the DNVP was complicit in this and paradoxically participated in eroding the foundations of its very own principles and bases of support.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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January 2002
Federalism Doomed?
European Federalism between Integration and Separation
Heinemann-Grüder, A. (ed)
The conceptual uncertainty when dealing with processes of integration and disintegration in Europe is striking because traditional notions of the nation-state, constitutionalism, sovereignty, and federalism do not account for emerging realities in either Western or Eastern Europe.
This volume explores the complex inter-relationship between federal arrangements and their effects on integrating multi-ethnic societies in Europe, and takes stock of current debates on the effects of federalism on integration and disintegration in Eastern and Western Europe. For the first time federalism is addressed in a pan-European context and an attempt is made to look for remedies to overcome nationalism in both East and West within a federalist institutional framework.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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July 2015
Figuration Work
Student Participation, Democracy and University Reform in a Global Knowledge Economy
Nielsen, G. B.
What role should students take in shaping their education, their university, and the wider society? These questions have assumed new importance in recent years as universities are reformed to become more competitive in the “global knowledge economy.” With Denmark as the prism, this book shows how negotiations over student participation — influenced by demands for efficiency, flexibility, and student-centered education — reflect broader concerns about democracy and citizen participation in increasingly neoliberalised states. Combining anthropological and historical research, Gritt B. Nielsen develops a novel approach to the study of policy processes and opens a timely discussion about the kinds of future citizens who will emerge from current reforms.
Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)
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November 2009
The 'Final Solution' in Riga
Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941-1944
Angrick, A., Klein, P. & Brandon R.
Ghetto, forced labor camp, concentration camp: All of the elements of the National Socialists’ policies of annihilation were to be found in Riga. This first analysis of the Riga ghetto and the nearby camps of Salaspils and Jungfernhof addresses all aspects of German occupation policy during the Second World War. Drawing upon a broad array of sources that includes previously inaccessible Soviet archives, postwar criminal investigations, and trial records of alleged perpetrators, and the records of the Society of Survivors of the Riga Ghetto, the authors have produced an in-depth study of the Riga ghetto that never loses sight of the Latvian capital’s place within the overall design of Nazi policy and the all-of-Europe dimension of the Holocaust.
Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies
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April 2007
Finding Europe
Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images
Molho, A. & Ramada Curto, D. (eds)
In the last decade or so, many books have been devoted to the history of Europe.Two conceptual axes predominate in a large number of these accounts: a discourse focusing on Europe’s values, and another discourse, fashioned largely in opposition to the first, which emphasizes the process of European “construction.” The first conceives of Europe’s past teleologically, as a process by which certain values (Christian ethics, individualism, capitalism, tolerance, republicanism, due process, etc.) were affirmed and came to define European culture. The second approach rejects the discourse on values emphasizes the post-Enlightenment emergence of the concept of Europe, and the political and ideological implications in its continuous redefinitions (and re elaborations) during the past two or more centuries. This volume offers new approaches that integrate the long temporal dimension of the values-based approach, albeit devoid of its teleological element, with the “constructivist” interpretation.
Subject: History: Medieval/Early Modern
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eBook available
May 2020
Finding Ways Through Eurospace
West African Movers Re-viewing Europe from the Inside
Schapendonk, J.
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.
Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General)
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May 2007
Fire in the Dark
Telling Gypsiness in North East England
Buckler, S.
Anthropologists who are employed to change the worlds they are researching find themselves in a potentially contradictory position. Combining the various roles and expectations involved in working with Gypsies and local government at the same time as conducting anthropological research, provides the overall perspective of this study. It is an unusual and effective balance of insightful ethnography and anthropological theory with the perspective of someone employed to carry out applied work. An effective and creative use of metaphor structures the entire work and allows complex ideas to be conveyed in an accessible way. Drawing upon traditional anthropological approaches such as kinship and story telling and engaging with the works of major social theorists such as Weber, Bourdieu and Foucault as well as the work of contemporary anthropologists, this work demonstrates the use of anthropology in understanding changing situations and in deciding how best to manage such situations.
Subjects: Applied Anthropology Sociology Anthropology (General)
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June 2010
Folk Healing and Health Care Practices in Britain and Ireland
Stethoscopes, Wands and Crystals
Moore, R. & McClean, S. (eds)
Folk, alternative and complementary health care practices in contemporary Western society are currently experiencing a renaissance, albeit with features that are unique to this historical moment. At the same time biomedicine is under scrutiny, experiencing a number of distinct and multifaceted crises. In this volume the authors draw together cutting edge cross-cultural, interdisciplinary research in Britain and Ireland, focusing on exploring the role and significance of healing practices in diverse local contexts, such as the use of crystals, herbs, cures and charms, potions and lotions.
Subject: Medical Anthropology
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November 1996
Forging the Collective Memory
Government and International Historians through Two World Wars
Wilson, K. (ed)
When studying the origins of the First World War, scholars have relied heavily on the series of key diplomatic documents published by the governments of both the defeated and the victorious powers in the 1920s and 1930s. However, this volume shows that these volumes, rather than dealing objectively with the past, were used by the different governments to project an interpretation of the origins of the Great War that was more palatable to them and their country than the truth might have been. In revealing policies that influenced the publication of the documents, the relationships between the commissioning governments, their officials, and the historians involved, this collection serves as a warning that even seemingly objective sources have to be used with caution in historical research.
Subjects: Memory Studies
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October 2014
The Forgotten Majority
German Merchants in London, Naturalization, and Global Trade 1660-1815
Schulte Beerbühl, M.
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 of their migration, the establishment of their businesses in the capital, and the global reach of the enterprises. As the acquisition of British nationality was the admission ticket to Britain’s commercial empire, it investigates the commercial function of British naturalization policy in the early modern period, while also considering the risks of failure and chance for a new beginning in a foreign environment. As more German merchants integrated into British commercial society, they contributed to London becoming the leading place of exchange between the European continent, Russia, and the New World.
Subjects: History (General) History: 18th/19th Century
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October 2004
Foundations of National Identity
From Catalonia to Europe
Llobera, J.
Since it emergence in the 19th century in response to feudalism, nationalism has been a mixed blessing. Originally seen as a positive force, often enough it has resulted in warfare and persecution of minorities, so much so that, over time, it has been considered a social evil whose apparent decline has been greeted as a positive development. The author disputes this or rather, he maintains that the picture that emerges is more complex: nationalism is not disappearing but has taken on a different form. What we are experiencing is an increasing autonomy of ethnonations, i.e. nations without a state, in the wake of a weakening of the multinational states and the transfer of their sovereignty upwards, in the case of Europe to the federation of the European Union, and downwards to the "ethnonations."
Catalonia is the major case study in this book but it is embedded in a comprehensive theoretical framework as well as the historical and contemporary reality of Europe, opening up a new perspective. The author, one of the foremost scholars in this field, brilliantly succeeds in developing an original, clear and comprehensive vision of nationalism that is accessible to a wide readership.
Subject: Anthropology (General)
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eBook available
December 2016
A Fragmented Landscape
Abortion Governance and Protest Logics in Europe
De Zordo, S., Mishtal, J., & Anton. J. (eds)
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 protests and resistance to influence abortion policy. Drawing on case studies from Italy, Spain, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the European Union, it analyses the strategies and discourses of groups seeking to liberalise or restrict reproductive rights. It also illuminates the ways that reproductive rights politics intersect with demographic anxieties, as well as the rising nationalisms and xenophobia related to austerity policies, mass migration and the recent terrorist attacks in Europe.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
December 2007
France and the Construction of Europe, 1944-2007
The Geopolitical Imperative
Sutton, M.
In the second half of the twentieth century France played the greatest role - even greater than Germany’s - in shaping what eventually became the European Union. By the early twenty-first century, however, in a hugely transformed Europe, this era had patently come to an end. This comprehensive history shows how France coupled the pursuit of power and the furtherance of European integration over a sixty-year period, from the close of the Second World War to the hesitation caused by the French electorate’s referendum rejection of the European Union’s constitutional treaty in 2005.
Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
May 2010
Friendly Enemies
Britain and the GDR, 1949-1990
Berger, S. & LaPorte, N.
During the Cold War, Britain had an astonishing number of contacts and connections with one of the Soviet Bloc’s most hard-line regimes: the German Democratic Republic. The left wing of the British Labour Party and the Trade Unions often had closer ties with communist East Germany than the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). There were strong connections between the East German and British churches, women’s movements, and peace movements; influential conservative politicians and the Communist leadership in the GDR had working relationships; and lucrative contracts existed between business leaders in Britain and their counterparts in East Germany. Based on their extensive knowledge of the documentary sources, the authors provide the first comprehensive study of Anglo-East German relations in this surprisingly under-researched field. They examine the complex motivations underlying different political groups’ engagement with the GDR, and offer new and interesting insights into British political culture during the Cold War.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
March 2009
The Frightful Stage
Political Censorship of the Theater in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Goldstein, R. J. (ed)
In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore, drama censorship occupied a great deal of the ruling class’s time and energy, with a particularly focus on proposed scripts that potentially threatened the existing political, legal, and social order. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century political theater censorship at a time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the European population was becoming increasingly politically active.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Performance Studies Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies
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eBook available
January 2015
From Self-fulfilment to Survival of the Fittest
Work in European Cinema from the 1960s to the Present
Mazierska, E.
Contrary to the assumption that Western and Eastern European economies and cinemas were very different from each other, they actually had much in common. After the Second World War both the East and the West adopted a mixed system, containing elements of both socialism and capitalism, and from the 1980s on the whole of Europe, albeit at an uneven speed, followed the neoliberal agenda. This book examines how the economic systems of the East and West impacted labor by focusing on the representation of work in European cinema. Using a Marxist perspective, it compares the situation of workers in Western and Eastern Europe as represented in both auteurist and popular films, including those of Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrzej Wajda, DušanMakavejev, Jerzy Skolimowski, the Dardenne Brothers, Ulrich Seidl and many others.
Subject: Film and Television Studies
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April 1996
Futurism and Politics
Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909-1944
Berghaus, G.
"Futurism was the state of the Fascist regime" - this is the view one encounters in most books written on Futurist art and literature. Whilst there can be no doubt about Futurist involvement with the founding of the fascist movement, little is known about the internal relationship between Futurists and Fascists in the years 1918-22, nor about the reasons for the Futurists' departure from the Fascist movement in 1920, or about Futurist opposition to (and even armed struggle against) the Fascist regime after 1924. Whilst the public documents testifying to Futurist support of Mussolini are well known, little has been written about Futurist anti-fascism camouflaged as official adherence to the regime. This study, based primarily on unknown or unpublished documents discovered in state archives and private collections, presents a new andfar more complex picture of the relationship of the two movements than has previously been shown by critics and historians.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
September 2008
Gender Politics in the Expanding European Union
Mobilization, Inclusion, Exclusion
Roth, S. (ed)
In May 2004, after bringing their legislation into accordance with EU regulations, ten more countries joined the European Union. The contributors to this volume assess the impact of this historical development on gender relations in the new and old EU member states. Instead of focusing on either western or eastern Europe, this book investigates the similarities and differences in diverse parts of Europe. Although initially limited, gender equality was part of the original framework of the European Union, an organization often more open than national governments to feminist demands, as this volume illustrates with case studies from eastern and western Europe. The enlargement process thus provides some important policy instruments for increasing equality between men and women.
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology
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December 2011
Gendered Money
Financial Organization in Women's Movements, 1880-1933
Jonsson, P. & Neunsinger, S.
As economic citizenship was a pre-condition of full citizenship, the lack of economic autonomy was an important motivation during the early stages of the women’s movement. Independent of their class background, women had less access to not only financial resources but also social and cultural capital, i.e., member’s commitment. Resources are therefore of particular interest from a gender perspective, and this book sheds light on the importance of resources for women’s struggles for political rights. Highlighting the financial strategies of the first wave of Swedish middle-class and socialist women’s movements and comparing them with similar organizations in Germany, England, and Canada, the authors show the importance of class, gender, age, and the national context, offering a valuable contribution to the discussion of resource mobilization theories in the context of social movements.
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History (General)
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June 2001
German Minorities in Europe
Ethnic Identity and Cultural Belonging
Wolff, S. (ed)
The study of ethnic minorities and their role in the domestic politics of their host states has long attracted scholars from a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. By contrast, national (or external) minorities, have been under-represented in the literature on ethnic minorities, although the interest has increased since the collapse of communism and more recently since the eruption of violent conflict in Kosovo. Ethnic Germans in particular, although still numbering millions and spread over twenty countries in western, central, and eastern Europe, have attracted only little attention.
This volume addresses the issue of Germany's external minorities, exploring the complex interrelationship between their ethnic identity and sense of cultural belonging on the one hand, and the political, economic, legal, and social situation in their respective societies, on the other. Leading specialists, representing a wide spectrum of viewpoints on the social and political conditions under which German minorities live today, provide case studies of all the major individual minority groups. In this way, a comprehensive picture of Germans and German culture in Europe emerges that provides both historical and contemporary perspectives on a diaspora community with an uncertain future between assimilation, segregation, and emigration.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
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July 2004
Globalization
Some Critical Issues
Chun, A. (ed)
The effects of globalization have led to accentuated social inequality in most first-world countries, above all the U.S. and U.K. International trade and capital flows have tended to redistribute income in ways that aggravate inequality in advanced industrialized nations where relative income levels of the salaried middle class and the working class are being eroded, resulting in a downward mobility of these classes. At the same time, unwaged forms of labor, including forced labor and slavery, in poorer regions more and more replace wage labor in developed countries. Informed by an anthropological, humanistic perspective, the contributors in this provocative volume offer critical analyses and alternative visions.
Subject: Theory and Methodology
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May 2008
God-botherers and Other True-believers
Gandhi, Hitler, and the Religious Right
Bailey, F. G.
When reason fails to guide us in our everyday lives, we turn to faith, to religion; we close our minds; we reject austere reasoning. This rejection, which is a faith-based social and intellectual malignancy, has two unfortunate consequences: it blocks the way to knowledge that might enhance the quality of life and it opens the way to charlatans who exploit the faith of others. Examining two unquestionable malignancies of “the Christian Right” in present-day politics in the United States and the “secular religion” of Hitler’s National Socialism, as well as the third, more complex case of Gandhi, the author asserts that we need religion, but we also need to make sure it does no harm.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
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March 2013
The Golden Chain
Family, Civil Society and the State
Nautz, J., Ginsborg, P., & Nijhuis, T. (eds)
The family can be viewed as one of the links in a “golden chain” connecting individuals, the private sphere, civil society, and the democratic state; as potentially an important source of energy for social activity; and as the primary institution that socializes and diffuses the values and norms that are of fundamental importance for civil society. Yet much of the literature on civil society pays very little attention to the complex relations between civil society and the family. These two spheres constitute a central element in democratic development and culture and form a counterweight to some of the most distressing aspects of modernity, such as the excessive privatization of home life and the unceasing work-and-spend routines. This volume offers historical perspectives on the role of families and their members in the processes of a liberal and democratic civil society, the question of boundaries and intersections of the private and public domains, and the interventions of state institutions.
Subjects: History (General) Sociology
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July 2005
Gray Zones
Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath
Petropolous, J. & Roth, J. (eds)
Few essays about the Holocaust are better known or more important than Primo Levi’s reflections on what he called “the gray zone,” a reality in which moral ambiguity and compromise were pronounced. In this volume accomplished Holocaust scholars, among them Raul Hilberg, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes, and Lynn Rapaport, explore the terrain that Levi identified. Together they bring a necessary interdisciplinary focus to bear on timely and often controversial topics in cutting-edge Holocaust studies that range from historical analysis to popular culture. While each essay utilizes a particular methodology and argues for its own thesis, the volume as a whole advances the claim that the more we learn about the Holocaust, the more complex that event turns out to be. Only if ambiguities and compromises in the Holocaust and its aftermath are identified, explored, and at times allowed to remain--lest resolution deceive us--will our awareness of the Holocaust and its implications be as full as possible.
Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies
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February 2015
The Great Reimagining
Public Art, Urban Space, and the Symbolic Landscapes of a 'New' Northern Ireland
Hocking, B. T.
While sectarian violence has greatly diminished on the streets of Belfast and Derry, proxy battles over the right to define Northern Ireland’s identity through its new symbolic landscapes continue. Offering a detailed ethnographic account of Northern Ireland’s post-conflict visual transformation, this book examines the official effort to produce new civic images against a backdrop of ongoing political and social struggle. Interviews with politicians, policymakers, community leaders, cultural workers, and residents shed light on the deeply contested nature of seemingly harmonized urban landscapes in societies undergoing radical structural change. Here, the public art process serves as a vital means to understanding the wider politics of a transforming public sphere in an age of globalization and transnational connectivity.
Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General)
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March 2003
Group Identities on French and British Television
Scriven, M. & Roberts, E. (eds)
Advances in audiovisual technology, most notably the advent of the popular usage of digital technology in the last few years, have altered the face of popular television. Thanks to cable, satellite and now digital technology, television broadcasts can reach an international audience. The reaction from cultural critics has been mixed. As the debate concerning the effects of new telecommunications and audiovisual technology continues unabated, this book examines the underlying hypothesis that collective allegiances are moving away from the national paradigm towards the global/local model and provides a balanced appraisal of the depiction of a select number of group identities on television in Britain and France.
Subjects: Film and Television Studies Cultural Studies (General) Sociology Media Studies
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April 1998
Haunted by History
Myths in International Relations
Buffet, C. & Heuser, B. (eds)
Europe is a continent weighed down by the shadows of its past, its wars, the traditional enmities, the suspicions of neighbours fuelled by historical memories. This has immediate consequences for the understanding and representation of the past: journalists, politicians, historians often apply simplistic, pre-conceived patterns, i.e., myths, to current events, resulting in distorted and misleading analyses. This volume exposes the way some historical myths, such as Balance of Power, Rapallo, the Special Relationship, the Franco-German Couple, the Peril of Islam, are used to blur, not to clarify our understanding of international affairs, even to manipulate contemporary politics.
Subjects: History (General) Memory Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
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September 2011
Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class
Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe
Kalb, D. & Halmai, G. (eds)
Since 1989 neo-nationalism has grown as a volatile political force in almost all European societies in tandem with the formation of a neoliberal European Union and wider capitalist globalizations. Focusing on working classes situated in long-run localized processes of social change, including processes of dispossession and disenfranchisement, this volume investigates how the experiences, histories, and relationships of social class are a necessary ingredient for explaining the re-emergence and dynamics of populist nationalism in both Eastern and Western Europe. Featuring in-depth urban and regional case studies from Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Italy and Scotland this volume reclaims class for anthropological research and lays out a new interdisciplinary agenda for studying identity politics in the intensifying neoliberal conjuncture.
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
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July 1996
The Hegemonic Male
Masculinity in a Portuguese Town
Vale de Almeida, M.
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 processes and relations that constitute hegemonic masculinity, the central model that attempts to subordinate alternative masculinities, and which is the model of male domination, compulsory monogamy, heterosexuality and reproduction. It is fascinating to follow the author as he gradually unfolds this kind of masculinity in its nearly pure state. Moreover, he involves the reader in his critical reflections on the material and invites him or her to give some thought to such wider questions as whether the hegemonic male is more resistant to change in oral cultures than in urban settings, or up to which point the agents of domination are also its victims. In fact, the author concludes that the hegemonic male is an ideal model practically unattainable by any single man, which exerts over all men a strong controlling power and often forces on them ritualization of everyday behavior that leads to an impoverishment of their lives.
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)
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July 2008
Helsinki 1975 and the Transformation of Europe
Bange, O. & Niedhart, G. (eds)
It was in Europe that the Cold War reached a decisive turning point in the 1960s, leading to the era of détente. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), with its Final Act in Helsinki in August 1975, led to a rapprochement between East and West in the fields of security, economy and culture. This volume offers a pilot study in what the authors perceive as the key issues within this process: an understanding over the ‘German problem’ (balancing the recognition of the post-war territorial status quo against a formula for the eventuality of a peaceful change of frontiers) and the Western strategy of transformation through a multiplication of contacts between the two blocs. Both of these arguments emerged from the findings of an international research project on ‘Détente and CSCE in Europe, 1966-1975’, funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung and headed by the two editors.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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June 2007
Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe
Hildermeier, M. (ed)
More than a decade after the breakdown of the Soviet Empire and the reunification of Europe historiographies and historical concepts still are very much apart. Though contacts became closer and Russian historians joined their Polish colleagues in the effort to take up western discussions and methodologies, there have been no common efforts yet for joint interpretations and no attempts to reach a common understanding of central notions and concepts. Exploring key concepts and different meanings in Western and East-European/Russian history, this volume offers an important contribution to such a comparative venture.
Subject: History (General)
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July 2010
Histories of the Aftermath
The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe
Biess, F. & Moeller, R. G. (eds)
In 1945, Europeans confronted a legacy of mass destruction and death: millions of families had lost their homes and livelihoods; millions of men in uniform had lost their lives; and millions more had been displaced by the war’s destruction, and the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime. From a range of methodological historical perspectives—military, cultural, and social, to film and gender and sexuality studies—this volume explores how Europeans came to terms with these multiple pasts. With a focus on distinctive national experiences in both Eastern and Western Europe, it illuminates how postwar stabilization coexisted with persistent insecurities, injuries, and trauma.
Subject:
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eBook available
June 2018
History and Belonging
Representations of the Past in Contemporary European Politics
Berger, S. & Tekin, C. (eds)
In cultural and intellectual terms, one of the EU’s most important objectives in pursuing unification has been to develop a common historical narrative of Europe. Across ten compelling case studies, this volume examines the premises underlying such a project to ask: Could such an uncontested history of Europe ever exist? Combining studies of national politics, supranational institutions, and the fraught EU-Mideast periphery with a particular focus on the twentieth century, the contributors to History and Belonging offer a fascinating survey of the attempt to forge a post-national identity politics.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
November 2007
A History of Oxford Anthropology
Rivière, P. (ed)
Informative as well as entertaining, this volume offers many interesting facets of the first hundred years of anthropology at Oxford University.
Subjects: Theory and Methodology History (General)
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eBook available
June 2006
History of the Low Countries
Blom, J. C. H. & Lamberts, E. (eds)
The history of the smaller European countries is rather neglected in the teaching of European history at university level. We are therefore pleased to announce the publication of the first comprehensive history of the Low Countries - in English - from Roman Times to the present. Remaining politically and culturally fragmented, with its inhabitants speaking Dutch, French, Frisian, and German, the Low Countries offer a fascinating picture of European history en miniature. For historical reasons, parts of northern France and western Germany also have to be included in the "Low Countries," a term that must remain both broad and fluid, a convenient label for a region which has seldom, if ever, composed a unified whole. In earlier ages it as even more difficult to the region set parameters, again reflecting Europe as a whole, when tribes and kingdoms stretched across expanses not limited to the present states of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.
Nevertheless, its parts did demonstrate many common traits and similar developments that differentiated them from surrounding countries and lent them a distinct character. Internationally, the region often served both as a mediator for and a buffer to the surrounding great powers, France, Britain, and Germany; an important role still played today as Belgium and the Netherlands have increasingly become involved in the broader process of European integration, in which they often share the same interest and follow parallel policies. This highly illustrated volume serves as an ideal introduction to the rich history of the Low Countries for students and the generally interested reader alike.
Subject: History (General)
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October 2010
Hitler's Slaves
Life Stories of Forced Labourers in Nazi-Occupied Europe
Plato, A., Leh, A. & Thonfeld, C. (eds)
During World War II at least 13.5 million people were employed as forced labourers in Germany and across the territories occupied by the German Reich. Most came from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia, the Baltic countries, France, Poland and Italy. Among them were 8.4 million civilians working for private companies and public agencies in industry, administration and agriculture. In addition, there were 4.6 million prisoners of war and 1.7 million concentration camp prisoners who were either subjected to forced labour in concentration or similar camps or were ‘rented out’ or sold by the SS. While there are numerous publications on forced labour in National Socialist Germany during World War II, this publication combines a historical account of events with the biographies and memories of former forced labourers from twenty-seven countries, offering a comparative international perspective.
Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
August 2012
The Holocaust and Historical Methodology
Stone, D. (ed)
In the last two decades our empirical knowledge of the Holocaust has been vastly expanded. Yet this empirical blossoming has not been accompanied by much theoretical reflection on the historiography. This volume argues that reflection on the historical process of (re)constructing the past is as important for understanding the Holocaust—and, by extension, any past event—as is archival research. It aims to go beyond the dominant paradigm of political history and describe the emergence of methods now being used to reconstruct the past in the context of Holocaust historiography.
Subjects: Genocide History
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eBook available
October 2010
The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered
Coy, J.P., Marschke, B., & Sabean, D.W. (eds)
The Holy Roman Empire has often been anachronistically assumed to have been defunct long before it was actually dissolved at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The authors of this volume reconsider the significance of the Empire in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Their research reveals the continual importance of the Empire as a stage (and audience) for symbolic performance and communication; as a well utilized problem-solving and conflict-resolving supra-governmental institution; and as an imagined political, religious, and cultural "world" for contemporaries. This volume by leading scholars offers a dramatic reappraisal of politics, religion, and culture and also represents a major revision of the history of the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period.
Subject: History: Medieval/Early Modern
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August 2001
Ignaz Maybaum
A Reader
Lange, N. de (ed)
Ignaz Maybaum (1897-1976) is widely recognized as one of the foremost Jewish theologians of the post-Holocaust era. Although he is mentioned in most treatments of post-Holocaust Jewish theology, his works are out of print and are only accessible to a small readership.
Nicholas de Lange (who worked closely with Maybaum in his lifetime), has made a representative selection from his writings, under various headings: Judaism in the Modern Age, Trialogue between Jew, Christian, and Muslim, the Holocaust, and Zion. In an Introduction, he sets Maybaum's thoughts against the background of their time, indicates their main lines, and assesses how much of them is still of value today.
Subject: Jewish Studies
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eBook available
August 2017
Images from Paradise
The Visual Communication of the European Union's Federalist Utopia
Salgó, E.
Drawing upon the disciplines of politics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and cinema studies, Salgó presents a new way of looking at the “art of European unification.” The official visual narratives of the European Union constitute the main object of inquiry – the iconography of the new series of euro banknotes and the videos through which the supranational elite seek to generate “collective effervescence,” allow for a European carnival to take place, and prompt citizens to pledge allegiance to the sacred dogma of the “ever closer union,” thereby strengthening the mythical sources of the organization’s legitimacy. The author seeks to illustrate how and why the federalist utopia turned into a political soteriology after the outbreak of the 2008 crisis.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Media Studies
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January 2005
Imperial Germany 1871-1918
Economy, Society, Culture and Politics
Berghahn, V. R.
A comprehensive history of German society in this period, providing a broad survey of its development. The volume is thematically organized and designed to give easy access to the major topics and issues of the Bismarkian and Wilhelmine eras. The statistical appendix contains a wide range of social, economic and political data. Written with the English-speaking student in mind, this book is likely to become a widely used text for this period, incorporating as it does twenty years of further research on the German Empire since the appearance of Hans-Ulrich Wehler's classic work.
Subject: History: 18th/19th Century
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eBook available
October 2007
An Improbable War?
The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914
Afflerbach, H., & Stevenson, D. (eds)
The First World War has been described as the "primordial catastrophe of the twentieth century." Arguably, Italian Fascism, German National Socialism and Soviet Leninism and Stalinism would not have emerged without the cultural and political shock of World War I. The question why this catastrophe happened therefore preoccupies historians to this day. The focus of this volume is not on the consequences, but rather on the connection between the Great War and the long 19th century, the short- and long-term causes of World War I. This approach results in the questioning of many received ideas about the war's causes, especially the notion of "inevitability."
Subject:
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eBook available
June 2019
In Pursuit of Belonging
Forging an Ethical Life in European-Turkish Spaces
Rottmann, S, B.
Belonging is a not a state that we achieve, but a struggle that we wage. The struggle for belonging is more difficult if one is returning to a homeland after many years abroad. In Pursuit of Belonging is an ethnography of Turkish migrants’ struggle for understanding, intimacy and appreciation when they return from Germany to their Turkish homeland. Drawing on an established tradition of life story writing in anthropology, Rottmann conveys the struggle to forge an ethical life by relating the experiences of a second-generation German-Turkish woman named Leyla.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
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eBook available
August 2019
In Search of European Liberalisms
Concepts, Languages, Ideologies
Freeden, M., Fernández-Sebastián, J. & Leonhard, J. (eds)
Since the Enlightenment, liberalism as a concept has been foundational for European identity and politics, even as it has been increasingly interrogated and contested. This comprehensive study takes a fresh look at the diverse understandings and interpretations of the idea of liberalism in Europe, encompassing not just the familiar movements, doctrines, and political parties that fall under the heading of “liberal” but also the intertwined historical currents of thought behind them. Here we find not an abstract, universalized liberalism, but a complex and overlapping configuration of liberalisms tied to diverse linguistic, temporal, and political contexts.
Subject: History (General)
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eBook available
October 2016
Incarceration and Regime Change
European Prisons during and after the Second World War
De Vito, C. G., Futselaar, R., & Grevers, H. (eds)
Political instability is nearly always accompanied by fuller prisons, and this was particularly true during the “long” Second World War, when military mobilization, social disorder, wrenching political changes, and shifting national boundaries swelled the ranks of the imprisoned and broadened the carceral reach of the state. This volume brings together theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich studies of key transitional moments that transformed the scope and nature of European prisons during and after the war. It depicts the complex interactions of both penal and administrative institutions with the men and women who experienced internment, imprisonment, and detention at a time when these categories were in perpetual flux.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present
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May 2009
Indispensable Eyesores
An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings
Hoorn, M. v der
Collapsing concrete colossuses, run-down overgrown skeletons, immutable architectural misfits: the outcasts from our built environment, which we are dying to dispose of — and yet cannot do without — have inspired many ghost stories, crime novels and urban legends. Such narratives reveal the significance of architectural eyesores for the people who live or work in or near them. After exploring various approaches to building lives and deaths, the author presents a rich variety of undesired edifices in Germany, Hungary, Austria and Bosnia-Herzegovina and investigates the different methods used to dispose of them: eliminating, damaging, transforming or ‘reframing’ them, abandoning them to progressive dilapidation or virtually rejecting them. Discarding an edifice, however, need not bring its social life to an end. This analysis continues with a reflection on the afterlife of unwanted buildings, and concludes with a discussion on the life expectancy of buildings, their multi-sensory materiality and ‘thingly’ agency.
Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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February 2004
International Adventures
German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s
Bergfelder, T.
West German cinema of the 1960s is frequently associated with the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers, collectively known by the 1970s as the "New German Cinema." Yet for domestic and international audiences at the time, German cinema primarily meant popular genres such as exotic adventure films, Gothic crime thrillers, westerns, and sex films, which were dismissed by German filmmakers and critics of the 1970s as "Daddy's Cinema."
International Adventures provides the first comprehensive account of these genres, and charts the history of the West German film industry and its main protagonists from the immediate post-war years to its boom period in the 1950s and 1960s. By analyzing film genres in the context of industrial practices, literary traditions, biographical trajectories, and wider cultural and social developments, this book uncovers a forgotten period of German filmmaking that merits reassessment.
International Adventures firmly locates its case studies within the wider dynamic of European cinema. In its study of West German cinema's links and co-operations with other countries including Britain, France, and Italy, the book addresses what is perhaps the most striking phenomenon of 1960s popular film genres: the dispersal and disappearance of markers of national identity in increasingly international narratives and modes of production.
Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
October 2019
Inward Looking
The Impact of Migration on Romanipe from the Romani Perspective
Marinov, A. G.
At present, Roma are an integral part of Europe, though they face structural and social inequalities and different forms of exclusion and discrimination. Inward Looking seeks to understand the relationship between Romani identity, performance and migration. Particularly, it studies the idea of ‘Romanipe’ through the prism of the personal accounts of Romani migrants. It also seeks to understand the relationships between the Romani groups in Europe, due to their increased travel and convergence, and predict the effects of migration on (new) Romani consciousness. The findings are based on qualitative data gathered from Romani migrants from three towns in Bulgaria.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
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eBook available
April 2013
Irish/ness Is All Around Us
Language Revivalism and the Culture of Ethnic Identity in Northern Ireland
Zenker, O.
Focusing on Irish speakers in Catholic West Belfast, this ethnography on Irish language and identity explores the complexities of changing, and contradictory, senses of Irishness and shifting practices of 'Irish culture' in the domains of language, music, dance and sports. The author’s theoretical approach to ethnicity and ethnic revivals presents an expanded explanatory framework for the social (re)production of ethnicity, theorizing the mutual interrelations between representations and cultural practices regarding their combined capacity to engender ethnic revivals. Relevant not only to readers with an interest in the intricacies of the Northern Irish situation, this book also appeals to a broader readership in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history and political science concerned with the mechanisms behind ethnonational conflict and the politics of culture and identity in general.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Cultural Studies (General)
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November 2010
Je T’Aime... Moi Non Plus
Franco-British Cinematic Relations
Mazdon, L. & Wheatley, C. (eds)
A series of limiting definitions have tended to delineate the Franco-British cinematic relationship. As this collection of essays reveals, there is much more to it than simple oppositions between British critical esteem for the films of France and French dismissal of ‘le cinéma British’, or the success of Ken Loach et al. at the French box office and the relative dearth of French movies on British screens. In fact, there has long been a rich and productive dialogue between these two cultures in which both their clear differences and their shared concerns have played a vital role. This book provides an overview of the history of these relations from the early days of sound cinema to the present day. The chapters, written by leading experts in the history of French, British and European cinema, provide insights into relations between French and British cinematic cultures at the level of production, exhibition and distribution, reception, representation and personnel. The book features a diverse range of studies, including: the exhibition of French cinema in Britain in the 1930s, contemporary ‘extreme’ French cinema, stars such as Annabella, David Niven and Jane Birkin and the French Resistance on British screens.
Subject: Film and Television Studies
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September 2014
Jewish Histories of the Holocaust
New Transnational Approaches
Goda, N. J. W. (ed)
For many years, histories of the Holocaust focused on its perpetrators, and only recently have more scholars begun to consider in detail the experiences of victims and survivors, as well as the documents they left behind. This volume contains new research from internationally established scholars. It provides an introduction to and overview of Jewish narratives of the Holocaust. The essays include new considerations of sources ranging from diaries and oral testimony to the hidden Oyneg Shabbes archive of the Warsaw Ghetto; arguments regarding Jewish narratives and how they fit into the larger fields of Holocaust and Genocide studies; and new assessments of Jewish responses to mass murder ranging from ghetto leadership to resistance and memory.
Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies
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September 2014
Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust
Grodin, M. A. (ed)
Faced with infectious diseases, starvation, lack of medicines, lack of clean water, and safe sewage, Jewish physicians practiced medicine under severe conditions in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust. Despite the odds against them, physicians managed to supply public health education, enforce hygiene protocols, inspect buildings and latrines, enact quarantine, and perform triage. Many gave their lives to help fellow prisoners. Based on archival materials and featuring memoirs of Holocaust survivors, this volume offers a rich array of both tragic and inspiring studies of the sanctification of life as practiced by Jewish medical professionals. More than simply a medical story, these histories represent the finest exemplification of a humanist moral imperative during a dark hour of recent history.
Subjects: Genocide History
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eBook available
March 2021
Jewish Self-Hate
Lessing, T.
The diagnosis of Jewish self-hatred has become almost a commonplace in contemporary cultural and political debates, but the concept’s origins are not widely appreciated. In its modern form, it received its earliest and fullest expression in Theodor Lessing’s 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthaß. Written on the eve of Hitler’s ascent to power, Lessing’s hotly contested work has been variously read as a defense of the Weimar Republic, a platform for anti-Weimar sentiments, an attack on psychoanalysis, an inspirational personal guide, and a Zionist broadside. This new edition makes a seminal text in Jewish thought accessible to English readers for the first time.
Subject: Jewish Studies
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March 2001
The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800
Bernardini, P. & Fiering, N. (eds)
Jews and Judaism played a significant role in the history of the expansion of Europe to the west as well as in the history of the economic, social, and religious development of the New World. They played an important role in the discovery, colonization, and eventually exploitation of the resources of the New World. Alone among the European peoples who came to the Americas in the colonial period, Jews were dispersed throughout the hemisphere; indeed, they were the only cohesive European ethnic or religious group that lived under both Catholic and Protestant regimes, which makes their study particularly fruitful from a comparative perspective. As distinguished from other religious or ethnic minorities, the Jewish struggle was not only against an overpowering and fierce nature but also against the political regimes that ruled over the various colonies of the Americas and often looked unfavorably upon the establishment and tleration of Jewish communities in their own territory. Jews managed to survive and occasionally to flourish against all odds, and their history in the Americas is one of the more fascinating chapters in the early modern history of European expansion.
Subjects: Jewish Studies History: Medieval/Early Modern Colonial History Refugee and Migration Studies
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eBook available
August 2013
The Journey of G. Mastorna
The Film Fellini Didn't Make
Fellini, F.
Federico Fellini’s script for perhaps the most famous unmade film in Italian cinema, The Journey of G. Mastorna (1965/6), is published here for the first time in full English translation. It offers the reader a remarkable insight into Fellini’s creative process and his fascination with human mortality and the great mystery of death. Written in collaboration with Dino Buzzati, Brunello Rondi, and Bernardino Zapponi, the project was ultimately abandoned for a number of reasons, including Fellini’s near death, although it continued to inhabit his creative imagination and the landscape of his films for the rest of his career.
Marcus Perryman has written two supporting essays which discuss the reasons why the film was never made, compare it to the two other films in the trilogy La Dolce Vita and 8½, and analyze the script in the light of It’s a Wonderful Life and Fredric Brown’s sci-fi novel What Mad Universe. In doing so he opens up an entire world of connections to Fellini’s other films, writers and collaborators. It should be essential reading for students and academics studying Fellini’s work.
Subject: Film and Television Studies
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eBook available
October 2007
Kinship in Europe
Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300-1900)
Sabean, D. W., Teuscher, S., & Mathieu, J. (eds)
Since the publication of Philippe Ariès’s book, Centuries of Childhood, in the early 1960s, there has been great interest among historians in the history of the family and the household. A central aspect of the debate relates the story of the family to implicit notions of modernization, with the rise of the nuclear family in the West as part of its economic and political success. During the past decade, however, that synthesis has begun to break down. Historians have begun to examine kinship - the way individual families are connected to each other through marriage and descent - finding that during the most dynamic period in European industrial development, class formation, and state reorganization, Europe became a “kinship hot” society. The essays in this volume explore two major transitions in kinship patterns - at the end of the Middle Ages and at the end of the eighteenth century - in an effort to reset the agenda in family history.
Subjects: History: Medieval/Early Modern Anthropology (General) History: 18th/19th Century
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November 2015
Language and Identity Politics
A Cross-Atlantic Perspective
Späti, C. (ed)
In an increasingly multicultural world, the relationship between language and identity remains a complicated and often fraught subject for most societies. The growing political salience of questions relating to language is evident not only in the expanded implementation of new policies and legislation, but also in heated public debates about national unity, collective identities, and the rights of linguistic minorities. By taking a comprehensive approach that considers both the inclusive and exclusive dimensions of linguistic identity across Europe and North America, the studies assembled here provide a sophisticated look at one of the global era’s defining political dynamics.
Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General)
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eBook available
August 2011
The Legacies of Two World Wars
European Societies in the Twentieth Century
Kettenacker, L. & Riotte, T. (eds)
The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was done mainly, if one is to believe US policy at the time, to liberate the people of Iraq from an oppressive dictator. However, the many protests in London, New York, and other cities imply that the policy of “making the world safe for democracy” was not shared by millions of people in many Western countries. Thinking about this controversy inspired the present volume, which takes a closer look at how society responded to the outbreaks and conclusions of the First and Second World Wars. In order to examine this relationship between the conduct of wars and public opinion, leading scholars trace the moods and attitudes of the people of four Western countries (Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy) before, during and after the crucial moments of the two major conflicts of the twentieth century. Focusing less on politics and more on how people experienced the wars, this volume shows how the distinction between enthusiasm for war and concern about its consequences is rarely clear-cut.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present
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September 2008
Liberal Imperialism in Germany
Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848-1884
Fitzpatrick, M. P.
In a work based on new archival, press, and literary sources, the author revises the picture of German imperialism as being the brainchild of a Machiavellian Bismarck or the "conservative revolutionaries" of the twentieth century. Instead, Fitzpatrick argues for the liberal origins of German imperialism, by demonstrating the links between nationalism and expansionism in a study that surveys the half century of imperialist agitation and activity leading up to the official founding of Germany’s colonial empire in 1884.
Subject: History: 18th/19th Century
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December 1999
The Lion and the Eagle
German-Spanish Relations Over the Centuries: An Interdisciplinary Approach
Kent, C., Wolber, T. & Hewitt, C. (eds)
The German and Spanish-speaking worlds have, over the centuries, developed an intrinsic relationship, one which predates the Habsburg dynasty and the Renaissance and baroque periods. The cross-fertilization and challenges have been both fruitful and complex with novel inventions surfacing in one culture often achieving their greatest prosperity in the other: Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation stimulated a response in Spain that was to define the European Counter Reformation; Spanish Baroque writers were seminal in the development of German Romanticism; Carl Christian Friedrich Krause and other nineteenth-century liberals provided the foundation for Spanish reformist efforts on the one hand, while German conservatives like Novalis and Adam Müller inspired conservatvies on the other; the music of Richard Wagner transformed Spanish music and the Spanish stage at the turn of the twentieth century; Pablo Picasso and other artists of the Spanish avant-garde sparkled the enthusiasm of the Germans before the Nazi era. Today, German and Spanish intellectuals and writers share a similar commitment to the creation of a European culture in the face of resistance from other members of the European Union.
Viewed from a variety of disciplines this volume explores the relentlessly consistent, albeit often forgotten connections between the two linguistic and cultural groups revealing the myriad of ways in which they have shared and transformed literature, art, culture, politics, and history.
Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General)
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August 2021
Living Like a Girl
Agency, Social Vulnerability and Welfare Measures in Europe and Beyond
Vogel, M. & Arnell, L. (eds)
In recent decades, large-scale social changes have taken place in Europe. Ranging from neoliberal social policies to globalization and the growth of EU, these changes have significantly affected the conditions in which girls shape their lives. Living Like a Girl explores the relationship between changing social conditions and girls’ agency, with a particular focus on social services such as drug rehabilitation programs and compulsory institutional care. The contributions in this collected volume seek to expand our understanding of contemporary European girlhood by demonstrating how social problems are managed in different cultural contexts, political and social systems.
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
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December 2007
London Eyes
Reflections in Text and Image
Cunningham, G. & Barber, S. (eds)
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 prominent cultural, literary and film historians this volume forms an original and incisive contribution to ongoing debates about the city’s intricate cultural history and its construction through both language and image, as a crucial site of identity, desire, exile and displacement.
Subjects: Literary Studies Film and Television Studies Media Studies
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December 2015
The Long Aftermath
Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936-2016
Bragança, M. & Tame, P. (eds)
In its totality, the “Long Second World War”—extending from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War to the end of hostilities in 1945—has exerted enormous influence over European culture. Bringing together leading historians, sociologists, and literary and film scholars, this broadly interdisciplinary volume investigates Europeans’ individual and collective memories and the ways in which they have shaped the continent’s cultural heritage. Focusing on the major combatant nations—Spain, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, and Russia—it offers thoroughly contextualized explorations of novels, memoirs, films, and a host of other cultural forms to illuminate European public memory.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)
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March 2009
Made in Sheffield
An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics
Mollona, M.
In 1900, Sheffield was the tenth largest city in the world. Cutlery “made in Sheffield” was used across the globe, and the city built armored plate for the navy in the run-up to the First World War. Today, however, Sheffield’s derelict Victorian shop floors and industrial buildings are hidden behind new leisure developments and shopping centers.
Based on an extended period of research in two local steel factories, this book combines a lively, descriptive account with a wide-ranging critique of post-industrial capitalism. Its central argument is that recent government attempts to engineer Britain’s transition to a post-industrial and classless society have instead created volatile post-industrial spaces marked by informal labor, industrial sweatshops and levels of risk and deprivation that divide citizens along lines of gender, age, and class. The author discovers a link between production and reproduction, and demonstrates the centrality of kinship relations, child and female labor, and intra-household exchanges to the economic process of de-industrialization. Paradoxically, government policies have reinvigorated working-class militancy, spawned local industrial clusters and re-embedded the economy in the spatial and social structure of the neighborhood.
Subjects: Urban Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
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September 2006
The Manchester School
Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology
Evens, T. M. S. & Handelman, D. (eds)
Pioneered by Max Gluckman to demonstrate the way in which social practice and structure together constitute and are themselves constituted by the situational flow of social life, the extended case method became diagnostic of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology. Anticipating practice theory, and implicitly politically charged, it was developed as a tool to bring into account what orthodox structural functionalism was ill-equipped to address, namely, problems such as change, conflict, deviance, and individual choice.
Edited by two students of Gluckman, the volume comprises reprinted pieces by Gluckman and his colleague Clyde Mitchell, a Coda by Mitchell’s student, Bruce Kapferer, contributions by Gluckman’s students and/or friends and colleagues, including Ronnie Frankenberg, Kapferer, Evens, Handelman, and Sally Falk Moore, as well as a number of contributions from other practitioners of the extended case. Apart from the reprinted pieces by Gluckman and Mitchell, all the contributions have been written for this volume. These essays, historical, theoretical, and ethnographical, serve to highlight and critically examine the fundamental features of the extended-case method, in order to advance its substantial, continuing merits.
Subject: Theory and Methodology
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eBook available
July 2009
Markets and Civil Society
The European Experience in Comparative Perspective
Perez-Diaz, V. (ed)
The nature of the currently emerging European society, which includes the economic and social transformation of Eastern and Central European countries, has been hotly debated. At its center is the relationship between markets and civil society within political and social contexts. The contributors to this volume offer perspectives from various disciplines (the social sciences, conceptual history, law, economics) and from several European countries in order to explore the ways in which markets influence various forms of civil society, such as individual freedom, social cohesion, economic effectiveness and democratic governance, and influence the construction of a civil society in a broader sense.
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
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eBook available
December 2020
The Meanings of a Disaster
Chernobyl and Its Afterlives in Britain and France
Kalmbach, K.
The disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was an event of obviously transnational significance—not only in the airborne particulates it deposited across the Northern hemisphere, but in the political and social repercussions it set off well beyond the Soviet bloc. Focusing on the cases of Great Britain and France, this innovative study explores the discourses and narratives that arose in the wake of the incident among both state and nonstate actors. It gives a thorough account of the stereotypes, framings, and “othering” strategies that shaped Western European nations’ responses to the disaster, and of their efforts to come to terms with its long-term consequences up to the present day.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Environmental Studies (General) Media Studies
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eBook available
July 2009
Mediating Europe
New Media, Mass Communications, and the European Public Sphere
Harrison, J. & Wessels, B. (eds)
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 little understood relationship between old and new media, communications policy at the European level, issues of regulation and competition within the EU, the role of the European Parliament in media policymaking, and the questions emerging about the sustainability of traditional public service broadcasting. To understand the concrete significance of these debates two contributions address specific practical areas, i.e. the potential of online environments and specific developments in European media contexts, such as channel strategies, web-related services, iDTV and community networks. Consequently, Mediating Europe provides an original and important contribution to understanding the role of the media in shaping a European public sphere.
Subjects: Media Studies Sociology
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November 2021
Medieval Intersections
Gender and Status in Europe in the Middle Ages
Weikert, K. & Woodacre, E. (eds)
Status and gender are two closely associated concepts within medieval society, which tended to view both notions as binary: elite or low status, married or single, holy or cursed, male or female, or as complementary and cohesive as multiple parts of a societal whole. With contributions on topics ranging from medieval gynecology to clerical masculinity, this interdisciplinary collection highlights the various ways “status” can be interpreted relative to gender, and what these two interlocked concepts can reveal about the construction of gendered identities in the Middle Ages.
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History: Medieval/Early Modern
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August 2002
Memory and Amnesia
The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy
Aguilar, P.
Using a rich variety of sources such as official newsreels, school textbooks, the work of contemporary historians, memoirs, official documents, legislation, and monuments, this book explores how the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) influenced the transition to democracy in Spain after Franco's death in 1975. The author traces the development of official discourse on the War throughout the Franco period and describes the régime's attempts to achieve political legitimacy. Although there was no universal consensus regarding the events of the Civil War, general agreement did exist concerning the main lesson which should be drawn from it: never again should Spaniards become embroiled in a fratricidal conflict.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies
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eBook available
April 2021
Merchant Kings
Corporate Governmentality in the Dutch Colonial Empire, 1815–1870
Schrauwers, A.
In the nineteenth century, the Netherlands and its colonial holdings in Java were the sites of dramatically increased industrialization. Led by a group of “merchant kings” who exemplified gentlemanly capitalism, this ambitious trading project transformed the small, economically moribund Netherlands into a global power. Merchant Kings offers a fascinating interdisciplinary exploration of this episode and reveals not only the distinctive nature of the Dutch state, but the surprising extent to which its nascent corporate innovations were rooted in early welfare initiatives. By placing colony and metropole into a single analytical frame, this book offers a bracing new approach to understanding the development of modern corporations.
Subjects: Colonial History History: 18th/19th Century Political and Economic Anthropology
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eBook available
February 2018
Messy Europe
Crisis, Race, and Nation-State in a Postcolonial World
Loftsdóttir, K., Smith, A. L., & Hipfl, B. (eds)
Using the economic crisis as a starting point, Messy Europe offers a critical new look at the issues of race, gender, and national understandings of self and other in contemporary Europe. It highlights and challenges historical associations of Europe with whiteness and modern civilization, and asks how these associations are re-envisioned, re-inscribed, or contested in an era characterized by crises of different kinds. This important collection provides a nuanced exploration of how racialized identities in various European regions are played out in the crisis context, and asks what work “crisis talk” does, considering how it motivates public feelings and shapes bodies, boundaries and communities.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
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eBook available
December 2016
Microhistories of the Holocaust
Zalc, C. & Bruttmann, T. (eds)
How does scale affect our understanding of the Holocaust? In the vastness of its implementation and the sheer amount of death and suffering it produced, the genocide of Europe’s Jews presents special challenges for historians, who have responded with work ranging in scope from the world-historical to the intimate. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a willingness to study the Holocaust at scales as focused as a single neighborhood, family, or perpetrator. This volume brings together an international cast of scholars to reflect on the ongoing microhistorical turn in Holocaust studies, assessing its historiographical pitfalls as well as the distinctive opportunities it affords researchers.
Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies
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eBook available
November 2013
Migration, Settlement and Belonging in Europe, 1500–1930s
Comparative Perspectives
King, S. & Winter, A. (eds)
The issues around settlement, belonging, and poor relief have for too long been understood largely from the perspective of England and Wales. This volume offers a pan-European survey that encompasses Switzerland, Prussia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain. It explores how the conception of belonging changed over time and space from the 1500s onwards, how communities dealt with the welfare expectations of an increasingly mobile population that migrated both within and between states, the welfare rights that were attached to those who “belonged,” and how ordinary people secured access to welfare resources. What emerged was a sophisticated European settlement system, which on the one hand structured itself to limit the claims of the poor, and yet on the other was peculiarly sensitive to their demands and negotiations.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies History (General)
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March 2013
Militant Lactivism?
Attachment Parenting and Intensive Motherhood in the UK and France
Faircloth, C.
Following networks of mothers in London and Paris, the author profiles the narratives of women who breastfeed their children to full term, typically a period of several years, as part of an 'attachment parenting' philosophy. These mothers talk about their decision to continue breastfeeding as 'the natural thing to do': 'evolutionarily appropriate', 'scientifically best' and 'what feels right in their hearts'. Through a theoretical focus on knowledge claims and accountability, the author frames these accounts within a wider context of 'intensive parenting', arguing that parenting practices – infant feeding in particular – have become a highly moralized affair for mothers, practices which they feel are a critical aspect of their 'identity work'. The book investigates why, how and with what implications some of these mothers describe themselves as 'militant lactivists' and reflects on wider parenting culture in the UK and France. Discussing gender, feminism and activism, this study contributes to kinship and family studies by exploring how relatedness is enacted in conjunction to constructions of the self.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
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eBook available
May 2017
The Mirror of the Medieval
An Anthropology of the Western Historical Imagination
Fazioli, K. P.
Since its invention by Renaissance humanists, the myth of the “Middle Ages” has held a uniquely important place in the Western historical imagination. Whether envisioned as an era of lost simplicity or a barbaric nightmare, the medieval past has always served as a mirror for modernity. This book gives an eye-opening account of the ways various political and intellectual projects—from nationalism to the discipline of anthropology—have appropriated the Middle Ages for their own ends. Deploying an interdisciplinary toolkit, author K. Patrick Fazioli grounds his analysis in contemporary struggles over power and identity in the Eastern Alps, while also considering the broader implications for scholarly research and public memory.
Subjects: History: Medieval/Early Modern Theory and Methodology Archaeology
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eBook available
October 2020
The Mobility of Memory
Migrations and Diasporas across European Borders
Passerini, L., Trakilović, M., & Proglio, G. (eds)
Migration is most concretely defined by the movement of human bodies, but it leaves indelible traces on everything from individual psychology to major social movements. Drawing on extensive field research, and with a special focus on Italy and the Netherlands, this interdisciplinary volume explores the interrelationship of migration and memory at scales both large and small, ranging across topics that include oral and visual forms of memory, archives, and artistic innovations. By engaging with the complex tensions between roots and routes, minds and bodies, The Mobility of Memory offers an incisive and empirically grounded perspective on a social phenomenon that continues to reshape both Europe and the world.
Subjects: Mobility Studies Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology Memory Studies
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August 2006
Modernity and Secession
The Social Sciences and the Political Discourse of the lega nord in Italy
Huysseune, M.
The northern Italian, ‘Padanian’ identity, fostered by the Lega Nord, is rooted in the long-standing tradition, in political and scholarly discourse, of casting regional differences within Italy in terms of a North-South geographic divide. Trying to come to terms, in the late 1980s and 1990s, with Italy’s (real or presumed) inadequacies – such as inefficient government, corruption, and organized crime – this imagined geography acquired political centrality in that the North became associated with the virtues of modernity and the South with the vices of un-modernity. It was not only politicians but also social scientists, who fostered and perpetuated this conceptualization of the North-South divide, thus imposing a normative hierarchy between the two parts of the country.
In response to this discourse many scholars, both in Italy and abroad, have started to question this perception of the South as a “backward” and implicitly inferior society. Starting from this critical tradition, Michel Huysseune provides a new, systematic, and interdisciplinary approach that re-interprets the premises behind Italy’s imagined geography of modernity. He moves beyond an understanding of the South as a “backward” and implicitly inferior society and problematizes normative notions of modernity, thus offering a new perspective on the North-South divide, which has a significance well beyond the case of Italy.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Peace and Conflict Studies
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December 1994
Montaigne Amongst the Moderns
Receptions of the Essays
Marchi, D.
Montaigne is one of the most cross-cultural writers ever – both in the assimilation of writings from other cultures into his own work and in the subsequent translations, critical receptions, and creative adaptations of the Essais by other writers throughout the world for the last four hundred years. His work is generally considered as exemplary of the European Renaissance, yet also demonstrates a remarkable relevance to the literary and intellectual activity at the present time. However, whereas there has been an abundance of commentary on Montaigne during the first centuries after his death, much less attention has been paid to his impact on writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly those outside France. This study redresses the imbalance.
By establishing a stylistic and ideological relationship between Montaigne’s work and that of such writers as Emerson, Nietzsche, Pater, Woolf, and Sollers, we not only gain a greater appreciation of the richness of the Essays, but also of some of the roots of modernist and postmodernist writing.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies
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March 2008
Museums, the Media and Refugees
Stories of Crisis, Control and Compassion
Goodnow, K, Lohman, J. & Marfleet, P. (eds)
Across countries and time, asylum-seekers and refugees have been represented in a variety of ways. In some representations they appear negatively, as dangers threatening to ‘over-run’ a country or a region with ‘floods’ of incompatible strangers. In others, the same people are portrayed positively, with compassion, and pictured as desperately in need of assistance. How these competing perceptions are received has significant consequences for determining public policy, human rights, international agreements, and the realization of cultural diversity, and so it is imperative to understand how these images are perpetuated. To this end, this volume reflects on museum practice and the contexts, stories, and images of asylum seekers and refugees prevalent in our mass media.
Based on case studies from Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, the overall findings are illustrative of narratives and images common to museums and the media throughout the world. They aim to challenge political rhetoric and populist media imagery and consider what forms of dissent are likely to be sustained and what narratives ultimately break through and can lead to empathy and positive political change.
Subjects: Museum Studies Refugee and Migration Studies
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eBook available
October 2008
Narrating the Nation
Representations in History, Media and the Arts
Berger, S., Eriksonas, L. & Mycock, A. (eds)
A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of states is highly topical and extremely relevant in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanization and globalization. However, as demonstrated in this volume, histories have not, of course, only been written by professional historians. Drawing on studies from a number of different European nation states, the contributors to this volume present a systematic exploration, of the representation of the national paradigm. In doing so, they contextualize the European experience in a more global framework by providing comparative perspectives on the national histories in the Far East and North America. As such, they expose the complex variables and diverse actors that lie behind the narration of a nation.
Subjects: History (General) Media Studies Literary Studies Film and Television Studies
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June 2008
A Narrow Bridge to Life
Jewish Forced Labor and Survival in the Gross-Rosen Camp System, 1940-1945
Gutterman, B
By 1944 a large part of Eastern Europe had already been liberated by the Red Army, and the Allied forces were continuing to move in from the west after success at Normandy. Yet, in Lower Silesia, Germany more than sixty new forced labor camps were established, adding to the approximately forty camps that already existed. The inmates were Jews from Hungary and Poland who had been deported from the Lodz ghetto or who had been included on the infamous "Schindler’s List." These camps became satellites of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and were the last to be liberated. Throughout their existence, the Gross-Rosen camp and its satellites had a special relationship. This is why, although the process of genocide was proceeding at top speed, some Jews were diverted from the gas chambers and sent to work at Gross-Rosen. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the main provider of inmate slave laborers for the Gross-Rosen armaments, munitions, and other factories owned by giant private enterprises, such as Krupp, I.G. Farben, and Siemens. Jewish inmates were also used in the construction of Hitler’s secret headquarters in the local Eulen Mountains and the secret underground tunnels used to store weapons. This book adds greatly to our knowledge of the complexity of German policy toward the Jews and forced labor. It not only describes the daily life of Jewish slave laborers but also traces Reich economic policy and the big corporations that used forced labor.
Subjects: Jewish Studies
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April 2005
The Nation, Europe, and the World
Textbooks and Curricula in Transition
Schissler, H. & Soysal, Y.N. (eds)
Textbooks in history, geography and the social sciences provide important insights into the ways in which nation-states project themselves. Based on case studies of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Turkey Bulgaria, Russia, and the United States, this volume shows the role that concepts of space and time play in the narration of ‘our country’ and the wider world in which it is located. It explores ways in which in western European countries the nation is reinterpreted through European lenses to replace national approaches in the writing of history. On the other hand, in an effort to overcome Eurocentric views,’world history’ has gained prominence in the United States. Yet again, East European countries, coming recently out of a transnational political union, have their own issues with the concept of nation to contend with. These recent developments in the field of textbooks and curricula open up new and fascinating perspectives on the changing patterns of the re-positioning process of nation-states in West as well as Eastern Europe and the United States in an age of growing importance of transnational organizations and globalization.
Subjects: Educational Studies History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
June 2013
The Nazi Genocide of the Roma
Reassessment and Commemoration
Weiss-Wendt, A. (ed)
Using the framework of genocide, this volume analyzes the patterns of persecution of the Roma in Nazi-dominated Europe. Detailed case studies of France, Austria, Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, and Russia generate a critical mass of evidence that indicates criminal intent on the part of the Nazi regime to destroy the Roma as a distinct group. Other chapters examine the failure of the West German State to deliver justice, the Romani collective memory of the genocide, and the current political and historical debates. As this revealing volume shows, however inconsistent or geographically limited, over time, the mass murder acquired a systematic character and came to include ever larger segments of the Romani population regardless of the social status of individual members of the community.
Subjects: Genocide History
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eBook available
September 2019
Nearly the New World
The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945
Newman, J.
In the years leading up to the Second World War, increasingly desperate European Jews looked to far-flung destinations such as Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica in search of refuge from the horrors of Hitler’s Europe. Nearly the New World tells the extraordinary story of Jewish refugees who overcame persecution and sought safety in the West Indies from the 1930s through the end of the war. At the same time, it gives an unsparing account of the xenophobia and bureaucratic infighting that nearly prevented their rescue—and that helped to seal the fate of countless other European Jews for whom escape was never an option.
Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History Refugee and Migration Studies
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January 2009
Negotiating Risk
British Pakistani Experiences of Genetics
Shaw, A.
Drawing on fieldwork with British Pakistani clients of a UK genetics service, this book explores the personal and social implications of a ‘genetic diagnosis’. Through case material and comparative discussion, the book identifies practical ethical dilemmas raised by new genetic knowledge and shows how, while being shaped by culture, these issues also cross-cut differences of culture, religion and ethnicity. The book also demonstrates how identifying a population-level elevated ‘risk’ of genetic disorders in an ethnic minority population can reinforce existing social divisions and cultural stereotypes. The book addresses questions about the relationship between genetic risk and clinical practice that will be relevant to health workers and policy makers.
Subject: Medical Anthropology
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August 2006
Neo-nationalism in Europe and Beyond
Perspectives from Social Anthropology
Gingrich, A. & Banks, M. (eds)
By the early twenty-first century neo-nationalist forces have established themselves in a number of the world’s large regions and subcontinents. From Australia to South Asia, in Eastern and Western Europe, comparable parties and movements have positioned themselves in national parliaments and governments, with some considerable impact on state power. In contrast to right-wing extremist parties in the past, these recent movements mostly operate within legal parliamentary channels, using essentialized notions of local culture to mobilize against real and alleged threats to local identities of status, gender, religion, nationhood and ethnicity.
Prompted by this near-simultaneous rise to political influence of more than a dozen apparently similar parties across Western Europe, this collection offers a range of European case studies with selected global examples, such as the Front National, the late Pim Fortuyn, India and the BJP, and Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party in Australia. It takes up the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by this phenomenon and asks what distinctive contributions anthropology might make to its study.
Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Theory and Methodology
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eBook available
December 2004
Networks of Nazi Persecution
Bureaucracy, Business and the Organization of the Holocaust
Feldman, G. & Seibel, W. (eds)
The persecution and mass-murder of the Jews during World War II would not have been possible without the modern organization of division of labor. Moreover, the perpetrators were dependent on human and organizational resources they could not always control by hierarchy and coercion. Instead, the persecution of the Jews was based, to a large extent, on a web of inter-organizational relations encompassing a broad variety of non-hierarchical cooperation as well as rivalry and competition. Based on newly accessible government and corporate archives, this volume combines fresh evidence with an interpretation of the governance of persecution, presented by prominent historians and social scientists.
Subjects: Genocide History
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January 2001
The New Age in Glastonbury
The Construction of Religious Movements
Prince, R. & Riches, D.
The New Age movement is a twentieth-century socio-cultural phenomenon in the Western world with Glastonbury as one of its major centers. Through experimenting with a number of ways of analyzing this movement, the authors were able to develop a novel theory of social religious movements of broad applicability. Based around contradictions relating to such central anthropological concepts as communitas, egalitarianism, individualism, holism, and autonomy, it reveals the processes by which, having abandoned a mainstream lifestyle, people come to build up a counter-culture way of life. Drawing on their own work on tribal shamanistic religions, the authors are able to point out interesting similarities between the latter and the Glastonbury New Age movement. Not only that: their model allows them to explain such wide-ranging social and religious movements as the Hutterites, the Kibbutz, and Green communes. In fact, the authors argue, these movements may be regarded as variations of the Glastonbury type.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology
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October 2010
New Dangerous Liaisons
Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century
Passerini, L., Ellena, L., & Geppert, A. (eds)
In Europe, love has been given a prominent place in European self-representations from the Enlightenment onwards. The category of love, stemming from private and personal spheres, was given a public function and used to distinguish European civilisation from others. Contributors to this volume trace historical links and analyse specific connections between the two discourses on love and Europe over the course of the twentieth century, exploring the distinctions made between the public and private, the political and personal. In doing so, this volume develops an innovative historiography that includes such resources as autobiographies, love letters, and cinematic representations, and takes issue with the exclusivity of Eurocentrism. Its contributors put forth hypotheses about the historical pre-eminence of emotions and consider this history as a basis for a non-Eurocentric understanding of new possible European identities.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies
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November 2021
Nothing New in Europe?
Israelis Look at Antisemitism Today
Haviv-Horiner, A.
Today, more than 75 years after the Holocaust and World War II, antisemitism remains a poisonous force in European culture and politics, whether cloaked in the garb of reactionary nationalism or manifested in outright physical violence. Nothing New in Europe? provides a sobering look at the persistence of European antisemitism today through fifteen interviews with Jewish Israelis living in Germany, Poland, France, and other countries, supplemented with in-depth scholarly essay. The interviewees draw upon their lived experiences to reflect on anti-Jewish rhetoric, the role of Israel, and the relationship between antisemitism and the persecution of other minorities.
Subject: Sociology
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December 2006
Nursing Stories
Life and Death in a German Hospice
Eschenbruch, N.
At a time, when the section of the older population is increasing in all western societies, more and more attention needs to be paid to the growing number of people who live with and die of drawn-out terminal illnesses, cancer being one of the most common ones. This study focuses on terminally ill people in a German hospice and addresses the question how meaningful experience is constructed for these patients in an attempt to preserve their dignity as persons. It is based on detailed and sometimes moving material from diary texts and active participation of the author in the role of a nurse, which allowed him to watch closely the behaviour of patients and nurses in routine situations and to look at the underlying emotions, values, and assumptions within such interaction. This book goes well beyond this particular case and reaches conclusions about death narratives that are significant for the social sciences more generally.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology
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October 2007
On Perpetual Peace
A Timely Assessment
Senghaas, D.
Dieter Senghaas today is the world's leading figure in the field of conflict research, conflict management research, and the study of the prerequisites of lasting peace. The fact that virulent conflict within what Senghaas calls the OECD world, essentially the European Union, has become unthinkable over the past half-century encourages him in the face of violent conflict in many parts of the world to be reasonably optimistic about the prospect for our planet as a whole.
Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Development Studies
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October 1999
Orientpolitik, Value, and Civilization
Adler, J. & Fardon, R. (eds) (Steiner, F.)
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, value, and civilization are highly critical of Western culture and offer perhaps the earliest critique of Orientalism in British anthropology. Equally significant is the inclusion of Steiner's unpublished lectures on Aristotle and Simmel, the latter probably being the first lecture series devoted to Simmel's ideas by a British-based anthropologist, as well as hitherto unedited political writings.
Another side to Steiner's thought is shown by his aphorisms, often caustic texts and newly translated from the German, as well as by verse translations of his poems relevant to his scholarship. These include an extract from his autobiographical poem, "Conquest", that places his anthropological writings into a personal and ultimately religious framework.A detailed introduction, based on new research, provides a thorough study of Steiner's ideas and establishes the wider intellectual context, thus rounding off a most remarkable collection of texts by one of the most remarkable anthropologists of this century.
Subjects: Theory and Methodology
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March 1999
An Outline of European History From 1789 to 1989
Romano, S.
In the wake of the revival of European nationalism in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Romano's essay explores the origin of the idea of the modern nation state between 1789 and 1848 when the citizen and the plebiscite replaced the subject as the legitimizing mechanism for national and multinational associations, and its subsequent evolution. He then traces its development to its zenith in 1919, its death in 1945, and its resurrection in 1989. Viewed through the political necessities of the nation state, the tumultuous events of the twentieth century and the recent rekindling of sentiments at the heart of those events take on a fresh perspective.
Subject: History (General)
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January 2000
Paradoxes of Civil Society
New Perspectives on Modern German and British History
Trentmann, F. (ed)
"Civil Society" has been experiencing a global renaissance among social movements and political thinkers during the last two decades. This collection of original papers by junior and senior scholars offers an important comparative-historical dimension to the debate by examining the historical roots of civil society in Germany and Britain from the seventeenth-century revolutions to the beginning of the welfare state.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History (General)
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eBook available
January 2018
Parallel Lives Revisited
Mediterranean Guest Workers and their Families at Work and in the Neighbourhood, 1960-1980
Bock, J. De
Originally coined in 2001 in a report on racial tensions in the United Kingdom, the concept of “parallel lives” has become familiar in the European discourse on immigrant integration. There, it refers to what is perceived as the segregation of immigrant populations from the rest of society. However, the historical roots of this presumed segregation are rarely the focus of discussion. Combining quantitative analysis, archival research, and over one hundred oral history interviews, Parallel Lives Revisited explores the lives of immigrants from six Mediterranean countries in a postwar Belgian city to provide a fascinating account of how their experiences of integration have changed at work and in their neighborhoods across two decades.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies History: 20th Century to Present Sociology
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eBook available
January 2016
Parliament and Parliamentarism
A Comparative History of a European Concept
Ihalainen, P., Ilie, C., & Palonen, K. (eds)
Parliamentary theory, practices, discourses, and institutions constitute a distinctively European contribution to modern politics. Taking a broad historical perspective, this cross-disciplinary, innovative, and rigorous collection locates the essence of parliamentarism in four key aspects—deliberation, representation, responsibility, and sovereignty—and explores the different ways in which they have been contested, reshaped, and implemented in a series of representative national and regional case studies. As one of the first comparative studies in conceptual history, this volume focuses on debates about the nature of parliament and parliamentarism within and across different European countries, representative institutions, and genres of political discourse.
Subject: History (General)
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June 1998
Partners in Production?
Women, Farm, and Family in Ireland
O'Hara, P.
In Ireland, family farming retains enormous ideological and cultural significance. As a social form it is one of the last preserves of male dominance in which women's contributions and concerns are largely overlooked. This book breaks new ground as the first major study of Irish farm families in which women are the focus of attention. Little is known of how gender relations actually work themselves out within farm families, or of farm women's understanding of their situation, but even a casual observer would conclude that Irish farm women are not without influence. This volume reveals how contemporary farm women experience life on the family farm (often through their own voices) and how they have managed to create their own spheres of influence, despite their apparent unequal status and invisibility in the male world of agricultures.
This study not only makes farm women's subordination explicit, but in discerning the sources and force of their influence within and outside the farm family, it offers a challenge to existing explanations of the evolution of Irish rural social structures. It also suggests that feminist theories of the family need to pay closer attention to the mother's influence on social reproduction.
Subjects: History (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality
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eBook available
March 2019
Party Responses to Social Movements
Challenges and Opportunities
Piccio, D. R.
Across the West, the explosion of social movement activity since the late 1960s has constituted a “participatory revolution” that has posed profound challenges for formal political parties. Through an analysis of new interviews, institutional documents, and a host of other largely unexploited sources, Daniela R. Piccio provides a rich and empirically grounded exploration of the wide-ranging responses to these movements. Focusing on Italy and the Netherlands since the 1970s, Party Responses to Social Movements demonstrates how political parties have incorporated the demands of movements to a surprising extent, even as both have grappled with fundamental and inevitable tensions between their respective roles and aims.
Subjects: Sociology Peace and Conflict Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
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October 2000
Patterns of Provocation
Police and Public Disorder
Bessel, R. & Emsley, C. (eds)
Over the past thirty years social scientists and particularly social historians have stressed the need to take popular protest seriously. The corollary of this, the need to take the policing of protest seriously, seems to have been less well acknowledged. The aim of this volume is to redress this situation by probing, in depth, a limited number of incidents of public disorder and focusing particularly on the role of the police. In doing so, this collection will draw out general patterns of police provocation and public responses and suggest general hypotheses. The incidents explored range across Europe and the United States, involve different kinds of political regime, and are drawn from both the interwar and the postwar years. They pose important questions about the effects of riot training and specialist equipment for the police, about the reality and roles of "agitators" and of "rotten apples" amongst the police, and about the role of the media and the courts in fostering certain kinds of undesirable and counterproductive police behavior.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology
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January 2003
Peace At Last?
The Impact of the Good Friday Agreement on Northern Ireland
Neuheiser, J. & Wolff, S. (eds)
Spanning more than thirty years, and costing over 3000 lives, the conflict in Northern Ireland has been one of the most protracted ethnic conflicts in Western Europe. After several failed attempts to resolve the fundamental differences over national belonging between the two communities in Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 seemed to offer the long awaited chance of sustainable peace and reconciliation.
By looking at the various dimensions and dynamics of post conflict peace-building in the political system, the economy, and society of this deeply divided society, the contributors to this volume offer a comprehensive analysis of Northern Irish politics and society in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement and conclude that this is probably the best chance for a stable and long-term peace that Northern Ireland has had but that the difficulties that still lie ahead must not be underestimated.
Subjects: History (General) Sociology
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eBook available
August 2019
Perestroika and the Party
National and Transnational Perspectives on European Communist Parties in the Era of Soviet Reform
Di Palma, F. (ed)
Countless studies have assessed the dramatic reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, but their analysis of the impact on European communism has focused overwhelmingly on the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc nations. This ambitious collection takes a much broader view, reconstructing and evaluating the historical trajectories of glasnost and perestroika on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Moving beyond domestic politics and foreign relations narrowly defined, the research gathered here constitutes a transnational survey of these reforms’ collective impact, showing how they were variably received and implemented, and how they shaped the prospects for “proletarian internationalism” in diverse political contexts.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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March 2021
Peripheries at the Centre
Borderland Schooling in Interwar Europe
Venken, M.
Following the Treaty of Versailles, European nation-states were faced with the challenge of instilling national loyalty in their new borderlands, in which fellow citizens often differed dramatically from one another along religious, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic lines. Peripheries at the Centre compares the experiences of schooling in Upper Silesia in Poland and Eupen, Sankt Vith, and Malmedy in Belgium — border regions detached from the German Empire after the First World War. It demonstrates how newly configured countries envisioned borderland schools and language learning as tools for realizing the imagined peaceful Europe that underscored the political geography of the interwar period.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Educational Studies
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eBook available
February 2012
Peter Lorre: Face Maker
Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe
Thomas, S.
Peter Lorre described himself as merely a ‘face maker’. His own negative attitude also characterizes traditional perspectives which position Lorre as a tragic figure within film history: the promising European artist reduced to a Hollywood gimmick, unable to escape the murderous image of his role in Fritz Lang’s M. This book shows that the life of Peter Lorre cannot be reduced to a series of simplistic oppositions. It reveals that, despite the limitations of his macabre star image, Lorre’s screen performances were highly ambitious, and the terms of his employment were rarely restrictive. Lorre’s career was a complex negotiation between transnational identity, Hollywood filmmaking practices, the ownership of star images and the mechanics of screen performance.
Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present
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June 2000
Placing London
From Imperial Capital to Global City
Eade, J.
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 knowledge is constructed in the diverse attempts to represent places and people. On the contrary: a gulf has opened up between analysis of contemporary London as a global, postcolonial city, on the one hand, and historical accounts of the imperial capital on the other. The author shows how the gap can be bridged by combining an analysis of the representation over time by various experts of London and certain localities with an investigation of the ways in which residents have represented their communities through struggles over symbolic and material resources.
Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General)
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February 2002
Plural Identities - Singular Narratives
The Case of Northern Ireland
Nic Craith, M.
Northern Ireland is frequently characterized in terms of a "two traditions" paradigm, representing the conflict as being between two discrete cultures. Proceeding from an analysis of the historical and religious context, this study demonstrates the reductionist nature of the "two traditions" model, highlighting instead the complexity of ethnic identities and cultural traditions.
It thus shows why attempts at reconciliation like the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which seeks to promote the concept of a "parity of esteem" based on this identity model., are fraught with difficulties. Reflecting on the applicability of the concept of multiculturalism in the context of Northern Ireland, the author proposes a re-conceptualisation of Northern Irish culture along lines that steer clear of binary oppositions.
From the Contents: 'Webs of Significance'; Dis-membering the Past; Divided by Common Cosmologies; A Discourse in Difference; The Process if 'Cruthinitude'; Un Unclaimed Tradition; Ethnic Nationality; The 'Fuzzy Frontier'; The 'Common Ground'
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present
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October 2013
Points of Passage
Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880-1914
Brinkmann, T. (ed)
Between 1880 and 1914 several million Eastern Europeans migrated West. Much is known about the immigration experience of Jews, Poles, Greeks, and others, notably in the United States. Yet, little is known about the paths of mass migration across “green borders” via European railway stations and ports to destinations in other continents. Ellis Island, literally a point of passage into America, has a much higher symbolic significance than the often inconspicuous departure stations, makeshift facilities for migrant masses at European railway stations and port cities, and former control posts along borders that were redrawn several times during the twentieth century. This volume focuses on the journeys of Jews from Eastern Europe through Germany, Britain, and Scandinavia between 1880 and 1914. The authors investigate various aspects of transmigration including medical controls, travel conditions, and the role of the steamship lines; and also review the rise of migration restrictions around the globe in the decades before 1914.
Subjects: Jewish Studies History (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
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February 2002
Policy Concertation and Social Partnership in Western Europe
Lessons for the Twenty-first Century
Berger, S. & Compston, H. (eds)
Policy concertation - the determination of public policy by means of agreements struck between governments, employers and trade unions - continues to thrive in Western Europe despite the impact of liberalizing trends that were expected to lead to its demise.
This volume brings together a team of 23 experts with the aim to undertake paired historical and political studies of policy concertation in ten West European countries, which were then subjected to systematic comparative analysis. It shows that overall the incidence of broad policy concertation in Western Europe can be explained by the changing configurations of just three variables.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
January 2015
The Political Economy of Border Drawing
Arranging Legality in European Labor Migration Policies
Paul, R.
The conditions for non-EU migrant workers to gain legal entry to Britain, France, and Germany are at the same time similar and quite different. To explain this variation this book compares the fine-grained legal categories for migrant workers in each country, and examines the interaction of economic, social, and cultural rationales in determining migrant legality. Rather than investigating the failure of borders to keep unauthorized migrants out, the author highlights the different policies of each country as “border-drawing” actions. Policymakers draw lines between different migrant groups, and between migrants and citizens, through considerations of both their economic utility and skills, but also their places of origin and prospects for social integration. Overall, migrant worker legality is arranged against the backdrop of the specific vision each country has of itself in an economically competitive, globalized world with rapidly changing welfare and citizenship models.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies
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eBook available
October 2018
The Politics of Authenticity
Countercultures and Radical Movements across the Iron Curtain, 1968-1989
Häberlen, J. C., Keck-Szajbel, M., & Mahoney, K. (eds)
Following the convulsions of 1968, one element uniting many of the disparate social movements that arose across Europe was the pursuit of an elusive “authenticity” that could help activists to understand fundamental truths about themselves—their feelings, aspirations, sexualities, and disappointments. This volume offers a fascinating exploration of the politics of authenticity as they manifested themselves among such groups as Italian leftists, East German lesbian activists, and punks on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Together they show not only how authenticity came to define varied social contexts, but also how it helped to usher in the neoliberalism of a subsequent era.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology History: 20th Century to Present
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March 1996
The Politics of Cultural Performance
Parkin, D., Caplan, L. & Fisher, H. (eds)
The line between what is regarded by people as "traditional" and "modern" is constantly being altered by new configurations of power. These essays examine the ways in which such changes are both communicated and created through cultural performances in diverse ethnographic settings. Examples are drawn from a wide range of forms and expressions: divinatory sequences, spirit possession rites, state ceremonials, village feasts, pilgrimages, language-use and craft specialisms. It was Abner Cohen, to whom this volume is dedicated, who first suggested that a dialectical relationship existed between power and symbolism. This concept, as developed in his seminal work, has since become a growing area of study as reflected in this important collection. By questioning some of the directions, the authors make a major interdisciplinary contribution to the study of cultural performance as a key factor in power relationships. The principal stage is Africa, but comparative ethnographic data are drawn from Ireland, Italy, South Asia, and the United Kingdom.
Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
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eBook available
July 2010
The Politics of European Citizenship
Deepening Contradictions in Social Rights and Migration Policy
Hansen, P. & Hager, S. B.
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 various localities of EU governance. From a critical political economy perspective, the authors argue for an integrated analysis of EU citizenship, one that considers the interrelated processes of migration, economic transformation, and social change and the challenges they present.
Subject: Refugee and Migration Studies
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eBook available
December 2010
Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Cultural Meanings, Social Practices
Paletschek, S. (ed)
Popular presentations of history have recently been discovered as a new field of research, and even though interest in it has been growing noticeably very little has been published on this topic. This volume is one of the first to open up this new area of historical research, introducing some of the work that has emerged in Germany over the past few years. While mainly focusing on Germany (though not exclusively), the authors analyze different forms of popular historiographies and popular presentations of history since 1800 and the interrelation between popular and academic historiography, exploring in particular popular histories in different media and popular historiography as part of memory culture.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)
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July 2007
Possessing the World
Taking the Measurements of Colonisation from the 18th to the 20th Century
Etemad, B.
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 superiority, even before the industrial revolution? What was it that enabled Europeans to withstand life-threatening tropical diseases and to control indigenous populations? This book gives a fresh and wide-ranging view of the construction and collapse of the modern colonial empires of Europe, the United States of America and Japan.
Subjects: Colonial History History: Medieval/Early Modern Refugee and Migration Studies
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eBook available
August 2012
Post-cosmopolitan Cities
Explorations of Urban Coexistence
Humphrey, C. & Skvirskaja, V. (eds)
Examining the way people imagine and interact in their cities, this book explores the post-cosmopolitan city. The contributors consider the effects of migration, national, and religious revivals (with their new aesthetic sensibilities), the dispositions of marginalized economic actors, and globalized tourism on urban sociality. The case studies here share the situation of having been incorporated in previous political regimes (imperial, colonial, socialist) that one way or another created their own kind of cosmopolitanism, and now these cities are experiencing the aftermath of these regimes while being exposed to new national politics and migratory flows of people.
Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
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eBook available
March 2016
Post-Ottoman Coexistence
Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict
Bryant, R. (ed)
In Southeast Europe, the Balkans, and Middle East, scholars often refer to the “peaceful coexistence” of various religious and ethnic groups under the Ottoman Empire before ethnonationalist conflicts dissolved that shared space and created legacies of division. Post-Ottoman Coexistence interrogates ways of living together and asks what practices enabled centuries of cooperation and sharing, as well as how and when such sharing was disrupted. Contributors discuss both historical and contemporary practices of coexistence within the context of ethno-national conflict and its aftermath.
Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology
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March 1997
Post-war Women's Writing in German
Feminist Critical Approaches
Weedon, C. (ed)
Women in the Federal Republic, the former GDR, Switzerland and Austria have initiated a remarkable literary movement, especially after 1968, which is also attracting growing attention elsewhere. Informed by critical feminist and literary theory, this broad-ranging collection, the first of its kind, examines the history of these writings in the context of the social and political developments in the respective countries. It combines survey chapters with detailed studies of prominent authors whose work is often unavailable in English.
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies
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eBook available
May 2012
Postcolonial Migrants and Identity Politics
Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States in Comparison
Bosma, U., Lucassen, J. & Oostindie, G. (eds)
These transfers of sovereignty resulted in extensive, unforeseen movements of citizens and subjects to their former countries. The phenomenon of postcolonial migration affected not only European nations, but also the United States, Japan and post-Soviet Russia. The political and societal reactions to the unexpected and often unwelcome migrants was significant to postcolonial migrants’ identity politics and how these influenced metropolitan debates about citizenship, national identity and colonial history. The contributors explore the historical background and contemporary significance of these migrations and discuss the ethnic and class composition and the patterns of integration of the migrant population.
Subjects: History (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
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eBook available
November 2018
Probing the Limits of Categorization
The Bystander in Holocaust History
Morina, C. & Thijs, K. (eds)
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 challenges for those seeking to understand the decisions, attitudes, and self-understanding of historical actors who were neither obviously the instigators nor the targets of Nazi crimes. Combining historiographical, conceptual, and empirical perspectives on the bystander, the case studies in this book provide powerful insights into the complex social processes that accompany state-sponsored genocidal violence.
Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies History: 20th Century to Present
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August 2007
Professional Identities
Policy and Practice in Business and Bureaucracy
Ardener, S. & Moore, F. (eds)
In both professional and academic fields, there is increasing interest in the way in which white-collar workers engage with institutions and networks which are complex social constructions. Covering a wide variety of countries and types of organization, this volume examines the diverse ways in which individuals’ ethnic, gender, corporate and professional identities interact. This book brings together fields often viewed in isolation: ethnographies of groups traditionally studied by anthropologists in new organisational contexts, and examinations of the role of identity in corporate life, opening up new perspectives on central areas of contemporary human activity. It will be of great interest to those concerned with practical management of institutions, as well as those of us who find ourselves working within them.
Subjects: Applied Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
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eBook available
March 2011
Protest Beyond Borders
Contentious Politics in Europe since 1945
Kouki, H. & Romanos, E. (eds)
The protest movements that followed the Second World War have recently become the object of study for various disciplines; however, the exchange of ideas between research fields, and comparative research in general, is lacking. An international and interdisciplinary dialogue is vital to not only describe the similarities and differences between the single national movements but also to evaluate how they contributed to the formation and evolution of a transnational civil society in Europe. This volume undertakes this challenge as well as questions some major assumptions of post-1945 protest and social mobilization both in Western and Eastern Europe. Historians, political scientists, sociologists and media studies scholars come together and offer insights into social movement research beyond conventional repertoires of protest and strictly defined periods, borders and paradigms, offering new perspectives on past and present processes of social change of the contemporary world.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
April 2020
Protest, Youth and Precariousness
The Unfinished Fight against Austerity in Portugal
Carmo, R. M. & Vasconcelos Simões, J. A. (eds)
After over a decade of the austerity measures that followed the 2008 financial crisis—entailing severe, unpopular policies that have galvanized opposition and frayed social ties—what lies next for European societies? Portugal offers an interesting case for exploring this question, as a nation that was among the hardest hit by austerity and is now seeking a fresh path forward. This collection brings together sociologists, social movement specialists, political scientists, and other scholars to look specifically at how Portuguese youth have navigated this politically and economically difficult period, negotiating uncertain social circumstances as they channel their discontent into protest and collective action.
Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology History (General)
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November 2003
Radical Ethnic Movements in Contemporary Europe
Daftary, F. & Troebst, S. (eds)
Nation states and minorities resort more and more to violence when safeguarding their political interests. Although the violence in the Middle East has been dominating world politics for some time now, European governments have had their share of ethnic violence to contend with as this volume demonstrates. And as the case studies show, ranging as they do from the Basque Country to Chechnya, from Northern Ireland to Bosnia-Herzegovina, this applies to western Europe as much as to eastern Europe. However, in contrast to other parts of the world, instances where political struggles for power and social inclusion between minorities and majorities lead to full-fledged inter-ethnic warfare are still the exception; in the majority of cases conflicts are successfully de-escalated and even resolved. In a comprehensive conclusion, the volume offers a theoretical framework for the development of strategies to deal with violent ethnic conflict.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
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September 2009
The Radical Right in Switzerland
Continuity and Change, 1945-2000
Skenderovic, D.
There has been a tendency amongst scholars to view Switzerland as a unique case, and comparative scholarship on the radical right has therefore shown little interest in the country. Yet, as the author convincingly argues, there is little justification for maintaining the notion of Swiss exceptionalism, and excluding the Swiss radical right from cross-national research. His book presents the first comprehensive study of the development of the radical right in Switzerland since the end of the Second World War and therefore fills a significant gap in our knowledge. It examines the role that parties and political entrepreneurs of the populist right, intellectuals and publications of the New Right, as well as propagandists and militant groups of the extreme right assume in Swiss politics and society. The author shows that post-war Switzerland has had an electorally and discursively important radical right since the 1960s that has exhibited continuity and persistence in its organizations and activities. Recently, this has resulted in the consolidation of a diverse Swiss radical right that is now established at various levels within the political and public arena.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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December 2002
Rebellious Families
Household Strategies and Collective Action in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Kok, J. (ed)
Why do people rebel? This is one of the most important questions historians and social scientists have been grappling with over the years. It is a question to which no satisfactory answer has been found, despite more than a century of research. However, in most cases the research has focused on what people do if they rebel but hardly ever, why they rebel.
The essays in this volume offer an alternative perspective, based on the question at what point families decided to add collective action to their repertoires of survival strategies, In this way this volume opens up a promising new field of historical research: the intersection of labour and family history. The authors offer fascinating case studies in several countries spanning over four continents during the last two centuries. In an extensive introduction the relevant literature on households and collective action is discussed, and the volume is rounded off by a conclusion that provides methodological and theoretical suggestions for the further exploration of this new field in social history.
Subjects: History (General) History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Sociology
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August 2008
Rebirth of a Culture
Jewish Identity and Jewish Writing in Germany and Austria today
Herzog, H. H., Herzog, T. & Lapp, B. (eds)
After 1945, Jewish writing in German was almost unimaginable—and then only in reference to the Shoah. Only in the 1980s, after a period of mourning, silence, and processing of the trauma, did a new Jewish literature evolve in Germany and Austria. This volume focuses on the re-emergence of a lively Jewish cultural scene in the German-speaking countries and the various cultural forms of expression that have developed around it. Topics include current debates such as the emergence of a post-Waldheim Jewish discourse in Austria and Jewish responses to German unification and the Gulf wars. Other significant themes addressed are the memorialization of the Holocaust in Berlin and Vienna, the uses of Kafka in contemporary German literature, and the German and American-Jewish dialogue as representative of both the history of exile and the globalization of postmodern civilization. The volume is enhanced by contributions from some of the most significant representatives of German-Jewish writing today such as Esther Dischereit, Barbara Honigmann, Jeanette Lander, and Doron Rabinovici. The result is a lively dialogue between European and North American scholars and writers that captures the complexity and dynamism of Jewish culture in Germany and Austria at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Subjects: Jewish Studies Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies
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eBook available
December 2020
Recognizing the Past in the Present
New Studies on Medicine before, during, and after the Holocaust
Hildebrandt, S., Offer, M., & Grodin, M. A. (eds)
Following decades of silence about the involvement of doctors, medical researchers and other health professionals in the Holocaust and other National Socialist (Nazi) crimes, scholars in recent years have produced a growing body of research that reveals the pervasive extent of that complicity. This interdisciplinary collection of studies presents documentation of the critical role medicine played in realizing the policies of Hitler’s regime. It traces the history of Nazi medicine from its roots in the racial theories of the 1920s, through its manifestations during the Nazi period, on to legacies and continuities from the postwar years to the present.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Genocide History Jewish Studies
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October 2015
Recovered Territory
A German-Polish Conflict over Land and Culture, 1919-1989
Polak-Springer, P.
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-nationalization and their cumulative impacts on the region and nations involved, as well as their use by the Nazi and postwar communist regimes to legitimate violent ethnic cleansing. In their interaction with—and mutual influence on—one another, political and cultural actors from both nations developed a transnational culture of territorial rivalry. Architecture, spaces of memory, films, museums, folklore, language policy, mass rallies, and archeological digs were some of the means they used to give the borderland a “German”/“Polish” face. Representative of the wider politics of twentieth-century Europe, the situation in Upper Silesia played a critical role in the making of history’s most violent and uprooting eras, 1939–1950.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
January 2010
Refugees From Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States
Caestecker, F. & Moore, B. (eds)
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 historiography of Europe and the Second World War, the issues surrounding the flight of people from Nazi Germany prior to 1939 have been seen as Vorgeschichte (pre-history), implicating the Western European democracies and the United States as bystanders only in the impending tragedy. Based on a comparative analysis of national case studies, this volume deals with the challenges that the pre-1939 movement of refugees from Germany and Austria posed to the immigration controls in the countries of interwar Europe. Although Europe takes center-stage, this volume also looks beyond, to the Middle East, Asia and America. This global perspective outlines the constraints under which European policy makers (and the refugees) had to make decisions. By also considering the social implications of policies that became increasingly protectionist and nationalistic, and bringing into focus the similarities and differences between European liberal states in admitting the refugees, it offers an important contribution to the wider field of research on political and administrative practices.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies
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March 1997
Regime Changes
Macroeconomic Policy and Financial Regulation in Europe from the 1930s to the 1990s
Forsyth, D. & Notermans, T. (eds)
During the 1930s and 1940s, and again in the 1970s and 1980s, most European nations, indeed most industrial nations, undertook major changes in macroeconomic policy orientation and financial regulation. The contributors to this volume, historians, political scientists, and economists, identify the forces which drove these major policy shifts, and explore their implications for other areas of economic and social policy.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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October 2004
Religion and Nation
Iranian Local and Transnational Networks in Britain
Spellman, K.
An estimated 75,000 Iranians emigrated to Britain after the 1979 revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic. They are politically, religiously, socio-economically and ethnically heterogeneous, and have found themselves in the ongoing process of settlement. The aim of this book is to explore facets of this process by examining the ways in which religious traditions and practices have been maintained, negotiated and rejected by Iranians from Muslim backgrounds and how they have served as identity-building vehicles during the course of migration, in relation to the political, economic, and social situation in Iran and Britain. While the ethnographic focus is on Iranians, this book touches on more general questions associated with the process of migration, transnational societies, Diasporas, and religious as well as ethnic minorities.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
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October 1999
Religion in English Everyday Life
An Ethnographic Approach
Jenkins, T.
Starting from an ethnographic appraisal of the place of religious practices, and thereby returning to an approach more recently neglected, this book offers a detailed understanding of English everyday life. Three contemporary case studies - the life of a country church, an annual procession by the churches in a Bristol suburb, a range of linked "spiritualist" beliefs - disclose the complex patterns and compulsion of ordinary lives, including both moral and historical dimensions: the distribution of reputation and conflict, and the continuities of place and identity. At the same time, the approach revises previous accounts of English social life by giving a nuanced description of the construction of local lives in interaction with their wider setting. It demonstrates the creation of local particularity under an outside gaze, showing how actors create and cope with the forces of "modernity." In addition to the original ethnographic descriptions, the book also contributes to the history and theory of the study of complex societies.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology
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October 2009
Remaking Home
Reconstructing Life, Place and Identity in Rome and Amsterdam
Korac, M.
Rather than emphasising boundaries and territories by examining the ‘integration’ and ‘acculturation’ of the immigrant or the refugee, this book offers insights into the ideas and practices of individuals settling into new societies and cultures. It analyses their ideas of connecting and belonging; their accounts of the past, the present and the future; the interaction and networks of relations; practical strategies; and the different meanings of ‘home’ and belonging that are constructed in new sociocultural settings. The author uses empirical research to explore the experiences of refugees from the successor states of Yugoslavia, who are struggling to make a home for themselves in Amsterdam and Rome. By explaining how real people navigate through the difficulties of their displacement as well as the numerous scenarios and barriers to their emplacement, the author sheds new light on our understanding of what it is like to be a refugee.
Subject: Refugee and Migration Studies
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eBook available
May 2016
Rescuing the Vulnerable
Poverty, Welfare and Social Ties in Modern Europe
Althammer, B., Raphael, L., & Stazic-Wendt, T. (eds)
In many ways, the European welfare state constituted a response to the new forms of social fracture and economic turbulence that were born out of industrialization—challenges that were particularly acute for groups whose integration into society seemed the most tenuous. Covering a range of national cases, this volume explores the relationship of weak social ties to poverty and how ideas about this relationship informed welfare policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By focusing on three representative populations—neglected children, the homeless, and the unemployed—it provides a rich, comparative consideration of the shifting perceptions, representations, and lived experiences of social vulnerability in modern Europe.
Subjects: History (General) Sociology
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eBook available
June 2020
Resisting Persecution
Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust
Pegelow Kaplan, T. & Gruner, W. (eds)
Since antiquity, European Jewish diaspora communities have used formal appeals to secular and religious authorities to secure favors or protection. Such petitioning took on particular significance in modern dictatorships, often as the only tool left for voicing political opposition. During the Holocaust, tens of thousands of European Jews turned to individual and collective petitions in the face of state-sponsored violence. This volume offers the first extensive analysis of petitions authored by Jews in nations ruled by the Nazis and their allies. It demonstrates their underappreciated value as a historical source and reveals the many attempts of European Jews to resist intensifying persecution and actively struggle for survival.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Jewish Studies Genocide History
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eBook available
June 2016
Rethinking Antifascism
History, Memory and Politics, 1922 to the Present
García, H., Yusta, M., Tabet, X., & Climaco, C. (eds)
Bringing together leading scholars from a range of nations, Rethinking Antifascism provides a fascinating exploration of one of the most vibrant sub-disciplines within recent historiography. Through case studies that exemplify the field’s breadth and sophistication, it examines antifascism in two distinct realms: after surveying the movement’s remarkable diversity across nations and political cultures up to 1945, the volume assesses its postwar political and ideological salience, from its incorporation into Soviet state doctrine to its radical questioning by historians and politicians. Avoiding both heroic narratives and reflexive revisionism, these contributions offer nuanced perspectives on a movement that helped to shape the postwar world.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies
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eBook available
March 2020
Rethinking the Age of Emancipation
Comparative and Transnational Perspectives on Gender, Family, and Religion in Italy and Germany, 1800–1918
Baumeister, M., Lenhard, P., & Nattermann, R. (eds)
Since the end of the nineteenth century, traditional historiography has emphasized the similarities between Italy and Germany as “late nations”, including the parallel roles of “great men” such as Bismarck and Cavour. Rethinking the Age of Emancipation aims at a critical reassessment of the development of these two “late” nations from a new and transnational perspective. Essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars examine the discursive relationships among nationalism, war, and emancipation as well as the ambiguous roles of historical protagonists with competing national, political, and religious loyalties.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Jewish Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology
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August 2014
A Revolution of Perception?
Consequences and Echoes of 1968
Gilcher-Holtey, I. (ed)
The year “1968” marked the climax of protests that simultaneously captured most industrialized Western countries. The protesters challenged the institutions of Western democracies, confronting powerful, established parties and groups with an opposing force and public presence that negated traditional structures of institutional authority and criticized the basic assumptions of the post-war order. Exploring the effects the protest movement of 1968 had on the political, social, and symbolic order of the societies they called into question, this volume focuses on the consequences and echoes of 1968 from different perspectives, including history, sociology, and linguistics.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)
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October 2000
Reynard the Fox
Cultural Metamorphoses and Social Engagement in the Beast Epic from the Middle Ages to the Present
Varty, K. (ed)
There are many stories featuring the villainous hero Reynard the Fox in many languages told over many centuries, goingback as far as the early 12th century. All these stories are comic and much of the humour depends on parody and satire resulting in mockery, sometimes the subversion of certain kinds of serious literature, of political and religious institutions and practices, of scholarly argument and moralizing, and of popular beliefs and customs. The contributors to this volume, all of them experts in one or more of the Reynard stories and their backgrounds, focus on the transformation of these tales through various media and to what extent they reflect differences in the cultural, class, and generational background of their tellers.
Subjects: Literary Studies History (General)
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eBook available
February 2010
Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Creation of an American Elite
Schaeper, T. & Schaeper, K.
Each year thirty-two seniors at American universities are awarded Rhodes Scholarships, which entitle them to spend two or three years studying at the University of Oxford. The program, founded by the British colonialist and entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes and established in 1903, has become the world's most famous academic scholarship and has brought thousands of young Americans to study in England. Many of these later became national leaders in government, law, education, literature, and other fields. Among them were the politicians J. William Fulbright, Bill Bradley, and Bill Clinton; the public policy analysts Robert Reich and George Stephanopoulos; the writer Robert Penn Warren; the entertainer Kris Kristofferson; and the Supreme Court Justices Byron White and David Souter.
Based on extensive research in published and unpublished documents and on hundreds of interviews, this book traces the history of the program and the stories of many individuals. In addition it addresses a host of questions such as: how important was the Oxford experience for the individual scholars? To what extent has the program created an old-boy (-girl since 1976) network that propels its members to success? How many Rhodes Scholars have cracked under the strain and failed to live up to expectations? How have the Americans coped with life in Oxford and what have they thought of Britain in general? Beyond the history of the program and the individuals involved, this book also offers a valuable examination of the American-British cultural encounter.
Subjects: Educational Studies History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
December 2013
The Rise of Market Society in England, 1066-1800
Eisenberg, C.
Focusing on England, this study reconstructs the centuries-long process of commercialization that gave birth to the modern market society. It shows how certain types of markets (e.g. those for real estate, labor, capital, and culture) came into being, and how the social relations mediated by markets were formed. The book deals with the creation of institutions like the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange, and Lloyd’s of London, as well as the way the English dealt with the uncertainty and the risks involved in market transactions. Christiane Eisenberg shows that the creation of a market society and modern capitalism in England occurred under circumstances that were utterly different from those on the European continent. In addition, she demonstrates that as a process, the commercialization of business, society, and culture in England did not lead directly to an industrial society, as has previously been suggested, but rather to a service economy.
Subjects: History (General) History: Medieval/Early Modern History: 18th/19th Century
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May 2007
Robbery and Restitution
The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe
Dean, M., Goschler, C. & Ther, P. (eds)
The robbery and restitution of Jewish property are two inextricably linked social processes. It is not possible to understand the lawsuits and international agreements on the restoration of Jewish property of the late 1990s without examining what was robbed and by whom. In this volume distinguished historians first outline the mechanisms and scope of the European-wide program of plunder and then assess the effectiveness and historical implications of post-war restitution efforts. Everywhere the solution of legal and material problems was intertwined with changing national myths about the war and conflicting interpretations of justice. Even those countries that pursued extensive restitution programs using rigorous legal means were unable to compensate or fully comprehend the scale of Jewish loss. Especially in Eastern Europe, it was not until the collapse of communism that the concept of restoring some Jewish property rights even became a viable option. Integrating the abundance of new research on the material effects of the Holocaust and its aftermath, this comparative perspective examines the developments in Germany, Poland, Italy, France, Belgium, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History
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eBook available
August 2018
Roma Activism
Reimagining Power and Knowledge
Beck, S. & Ivasiuc, A. (eds)
Exploring contemporary debates and developments in Roma-related research and forms of activism, this volume argues for taking up reflexivity as practice in these fields, and advocates a necessary renewal of research sites, methods, and epistemologies. The contributors gathered here – whose professional trajectories often lie at the confluence between activism, academia, and policy or development interventions – are exceptionally well placed to reflect on mainstream practices in all these fields, and, from their particular positions, envision a reimagining of these practices.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
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eBook available
February 2020
The Roma and Their Struggle for Identity in Contemporary Europe
Baar, H. van & Kóczé, A. (eds)
Thirty years after the collapse of Communism, and at a time of increasing anti-migrant and anti-Roma sentiment, this book analyses how Roma identity is expressed in contemporary Europe. From backgrounds ranging from political theory, postcolonial, cultural and gender studies to art history, feminist critique and anthropology, the contributors reflect on the extent to which a politics of identity regarding historically disadvantaged, racialized minorities such as the Roma can still be legitimately articulated.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
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July 2014
Sacral Kingship Between Disenchantment and Re-enchantment
The French and English Monarchies 1587-1688
Asch, R. G.
France and England are often seen as monarchies standing at opposite ends of the spectrum of seventeenth-century European political culture. On the one hand the Bourbon monarchy took the high road to absolutism, while on the other the Stuarts never quite recovered from the diminution of their royal authority following the regicide of Charles I in 1649. However, both monarchies shared a common medieval heritage of sacral kingship, and their histories remained deeply entangled throughout the century. This study focuses on the interaction between ideas of monarchy and images of power in the two countries between the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and the Glorious Revolution. It demonstrates that even in periods when politics were seemingly secularized, as in France at the end of the Wars of Religion, and in latter seventeenth- century England, the appeal to religious images and values still lent legitimacy to royal authority by emphasizing the sacral aura or providential role which church and religion conferred on monarchs.
Subject: History: Medieval/Early Modern
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December 2004
Science, Magic and Religion
The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic
Bouquet, M. & Porto, N. (eds)
For some time now, museums have been recognized as important institutions of western cultural and social life. The idea of the museum as a ritual site is fairly new and has been applied to the art museums in Europe and the United States so far. This volume expands it by exploring a range of contemporary museums in Europe and Africa. The case studies examine the different ways in which various actors involved in cultural production dramatize and ritualize such sites. It turns out that not only museum specialists, but visitors themselves are engaged in complex performances and experiences that make use of museums in often unexpected ways.
Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)
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July 1996
A Sentimental Economy
Commodity and Community in Rural Ireland
Salazar, C.
On the fringe of western Europe, yet fully integrated into the capitalist market, the rural economy of the west of Ireland seems to provide a fascinating object of analysis to the student of European folk cultures. This book concentrates on a particular aspect of that rural economy: the social organization and cultural construction of work in a community of family farms. The concept of work, which is primarily farm work, is taken here as a very elementary set of ideas, images and experiences that enable us to penetrate in the different cultural spheres that intersect life on an Irish family farm. Work, the author concludes, is to this farming community what the Kula ring is to the Trobriand islanders - a kind of Maussian "total social fact" the analysis of which incorporates a comprehensive description of a particular social system.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
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February 1996
Sexual Politics and the European Union
The New Feminist Challenge
Elman, R. A.
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. With the creation of the European super-state, feminist scholars will have to enhance their understanding of the European Union while activists will increasingly focus their efforts upon its institutions. This volume provides a comprehensive examination of EU policy implications for some of the most burning issues concerning women. This is the first book to transcend the emphasis on economics, the conventional basis for EU public policy discussions, thus providing a basis upon which one can begin to assess the politics of European integration from a feminist perspective.
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology
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eBook available
March 2011
Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300-1900
Johnson, C. H. & Sabean, D. W. (eds)
Recently considerable interest has developed about the degree to which anthropological approaches to kinship can be used for the study of the long-term development of European history. From the late middle ages to the dawn of the twentieth century, kinship - rather than declining, as is often assumed - was twice reconfigured in dramatic ways and became increasingly significant as a force in historical change, with remarkable similarities across European society. Applying interdisciplinary approaches from social and cultural history and literature and focusing on sibling relationships, this volume takes up the challenge of examining the systemic and structural development of kinship over the long term by looking at the close inner-familial dynamics of ruling families (the Hohenzollerns), cultural leaders (the Mendelssohns), business and professional classes, and political figures (the Gladstones)in France, Italy, Germany, and England. It offers insight into the current issues in kinship studies and draws from a wide range of personal documents: letters, autobiographies, testaments, memoirs, as well as genealogies and works of art.
Subjects: History (General) Sociology
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eBook available
December 2017
Singing Ideas
Performance, Politics and Oral Poetry
Ní Shíocháin, T.
Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire (Yellow Mary O’Leary; 1774–1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song. As an oral arts practitioner, Máire Bhuí composed songs whose ecstatic, radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenth-century Irish anti-colonial thought. This provocative and richly theorized study explores the re-creative, liminal aspect of song, treating it as a performative social process that cuts to the very root of identity and thought formation, thus re-imagining the history of ideas in society.
Subjects: Performance Studies History: 18th/19th Century Anthropology (General) Literary Studies
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December 2001
Social Democracy and Monetary Union
Notermans, T. (ed)
Since the late 1960s social democrats have become the dominant political force in the European Union. In fact, Social Democrats govern in no less than 11 of the 15 member states. Simultaneously, the EU has embarked on its most far-reaching project yet, namely Economic and Monetary Union (EMU); a project that was designed mainly by non-Social Democratic governments. This volume provides the first in-depth and comparative analysis of the views and policies of nine European Social Democratic parties concerning economic governance under Europe's new single currency and of the impact of the new political and institutional constellation in the EU on the process of economic integration and European social democracy.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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January 2013
A Social History of Europe, 1945-2000
Recovery and Transformation after Two World Wars
Kaelble, H.
Since 1945 Europe has experienced many periods of turmoil and conflict and as many moments of peace and integration: from the devastation felt in the aftermath of World War II to the recovery in the 1950s and 1960s; to the new challenges in the 1970s and 1980s when neoliberal policies led to fundamental social and economic changes, marked by the effects of the oil shock and widespread unemployment; and then 1989 and after when the existing world order experienced new convulsions. In this brilliant and comprehensive work, the author, one of the best known social historians of Europe, discusses a wide range of subjects, not shying away from controversial topics: family structure, work, consumption, values, migration, inequality, elites, civil society, social movements, media, welfare state, education, and urban policies. He focuses on the fundamental changes European societies underwent in the second half of the twentieth century but also explores what divides Europeans, what unites them, and what sets them apart from the rest of the world. This major historical work will be an important and highly sought-after addition for library collections as well as an important volume for course adoptions.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
March 2016
Social Movement Studies in Europe
The State of the Art
Fillieule, O. & Accornero, G. (eds)
Bringing together over forty established and emerging scholars, this landmark volume is the first to comprehensively examine the evolution and current practice of social movement studies in a specifically European context. While its first half offers comparative approaches to an array of significant issues and movements, its second half assembles focused national studies that include most major European states. Throughout, these contributions are guided by a shared set of historical and social-scientific questions with a particular emphasis on political sociology, thus offering a bold and uncommonly unified survey that will be essential for scholars and students of European social movements.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology
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December 2011
Social Policy in the Smaller European Union States
Cohen, G. B., Ansell, B. W., Cox, R. H. & Gingrich, J. (eds)
In Europe and around the world, social policies and welfare services have faced increasing pressure in recent years as a result of political, economic, and social changes. Just as Europe was a leader in the development of the welfare state and the supportive structures of corporatist politics from the 1920s onward, Europe in particular has experienced stresses from globalization and striking innovation in welfare policies. While debates in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France often attract wide international attention, smaller European countries—Belgium, Denmark, Austria, or Finland—are often overlooked. This volume seeks to correct this unfortunate oversight as these smaller countries serve as models for reform, undertaking experiments that only later gain the attention of stymied reformers in the larger countries.
Subject: History (General)
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eBook available
September 2014
Sounds of Modern History
Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe
Morat, D. (ed)
Long ignored by scholars in the humanities, sound has just begun to take its place as an important object of study in the last few years. Since the late 19th century, there has been a paradigmatic shift in auditory cultures and practices in European societies. This change was brought about by modern phenomena such as urbanization, industrialization and mechanization, the rise of modern sciences, and of course the emergence of new sound recording and transmission media. This book contributes to our understanding of modern European history through the lens of sound by examining diverse subjects such as performed and recorded music, auditory technologies like the telephone and stethoscope, and the ambient noise of the city.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Media Studies
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September 1999
Spain in International Context, 1936-1959
Leitz, C. & Dunthorn, D. (eds)
This collection of articles covers a crucial period of Spain's history, from the rise of Franco to the crucial Stabilization Plan of 1959. Separated into four chronologically divided sections, it focuses largely on the international reactions to and the involvement of other powers in the Spanish Civil War, including an examination of French and British reactions to the situation in Spain, and Soviet, German and Italian involvement and the period of the Second World War, with a particular focus on Spain's relations to the Axis and Vichy France especially during the period of 1940/41 when a Spanish entry in to the war was most likely. The fate of the Spanish refugees and exiles in Britain and France is also highlighted, as is Spain's international position in the aftermath of the Second World War and particularly the attitude of the former Allies, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the USA. The volume ends with Spain's response to the unfolding economic co-operation and integration in Western Europe.
Subject: History (General)
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eBook available
August 2016
Staying at Home
Identities, Memories and Social Networks of Kazakhstani Germans
Sanders, R.
Despite economic growth in Kazakhstan, more than 80 per cent of Kazakhstan’s ethnic Germans have emigrated to Germany to date. Disappointing experiences of the migrants, along with other aspects of life in Germany, have been transmitted through transnational networks to ethnic Germans still living in Kazakhstan. Consequently, Germans in Kazakhstan today feel more alienated than ever from their ‘historic homeland’. 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.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)
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December 2003
Studying Contemporary Western Society
Method and Theory
Mead, M.
Few anthropologists today realize the pioneering role Margaret Mead played in the investigation of contemporary cultures. This volume collects and presents a variety of her essays on research methodology relating to contemporary culture. Many of these essays were printed originally in limited circulation journals, research reports and books edited by others. They reflect Mead's continuing commitment to searching out methods for studying and extending the anthropologist's tools of investigation for use in complex societies. Essays on American and European societies, intergenerational relations, architecture and social space, industrialization, and interracial relations are included in this varied and exciting collection.
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
November 2017
Subjects, Citizens, and Others
Administering Ethnic Heterogeneity in the British and Habsburg Empires, 1867-1918
Gammerl, B.
Bosnian Muslims, East African Masai, Czech-speaking Austrians, North American indigenous peoples, and Jewish immigrants from across Europe—the nineteenth-century British and Habsburg Empires were characterized by incredible cultural and racial-ethnic diversity. Notwithstanding their many differences, both empires faced similar administrative questions as a result: Who was excluded or admitted? What advantages were granted to which groups? And how could diversity be reconciled with demands for national autonomy and democratic participation? In this pioneering study, Benno Gammerl compares Habsburg and British approaches to governing their diverse populations, analyzing imperial formations to reveal the legal and political conditions that fostered heterogeneity.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Colonial History History: 20th Century to Present
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August 2009
Supervision and Authority in Industry
Western European Experiences, 1830-1939
Eeckhout, P. Van den (ed)
The number of studies discussing the labour relationship under industrial capitalism is overwhelming, but the literature on labour and its concrete, day-today shop-floor practices is much less abundant. How and by whom workers were supervised is one of the neglected aspects in the history of labour relations. After an insightful introductory chapter discussing the different forms of supervision in the United States, Britain, France and Germany before the First World War, the case studies in this volume focus on foremen: vital, but largely unstudied figures in the history of factory life, labour relations and management. Illustrating the multiple faces of the foreman, the contributors examine the artisanal sector, textiles, mining, printing, engineering, heavy manufacturing and car industries in Western Europe and show that the foreman was a multifaceted character who possessed technical expertise in addition to educational and organizational qualities. This comprehensive volume is further enhanced by comparisons with practices of supervision in Russia, Japan, China and India.
Subjects: History (General) History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present
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February 2003
Switzerland: National Socialism and the Second World War
Final Report of the Independent Commission of Experts
Independent Commission of Experts
In continuation of a long-standing national self-image, Switzerland saw itself after 1945 as a "small neutral state," which because of its will to resist and a clever policy managed not to be drawn into the Second World War. However, this self-image has been the subject of an increasingly heated debate since the 1970s. The argument that Switzerland had above all been a "victim of developments in world politics," was increasingly confronted with the counter-argument that this country had aided the perpetrators in important – mainly economic – areas. More recently, dealings in looted gold and the issue of dormant bank accounts and stolen cultural assets have come into focus, in addition to inquiries into the mysterious disappearance of the assets of victims of persecution and extermination.
In this situation, the Swiss Parliament and Government set up, at the end of 1996, an internationally composed Independent Commission of Experts whose five-year assignment was to investigate these allegations in their historical and legal context. Thanks to the unique privilege of access to archives, it was possible for the first time to overcome the obstacle of Swiss banking secrecy – believed to be insurmountable until then – and to extend the research to the archives of banks and other companies. A crucial document on 20th-centruy European history, this volume presents the full and final report of the Commission, illustrating Switzerland's predicament as a country not only with strong economic, but also close cultural ties to Germany, the neighbor that threatened the country's very survival. A multifaceted picture emerges of the challenges of those dark years – challenges that Switzerland met with varying degrees of success.
Distributed for Pendo Verlag, Switzerland
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October 1999
Taboo, Truth and Religion
Adler, J. & Fardon, R. (eds) (Steiner, F.)
Franz Steiner's study of Taboo is internationally recognized as a classic in its field. In a newly researched introductory chapter, based on a thorough study of Steiner's unpublished papers, this edition for the first time places the book in its context and offers a new reading of the text. More than just a critique of existing taboo theories, as it has often been seen, this study offers a profound analysis of danger behavior and pollution in "non-civilized" societies. This provided an important starting-point for Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger. A key aspect of Steiner's achievement lies in his attempt to reconcile detailed, faithful ethnographic analysis with anthropological comparison. His analysis of taboo thus provides a case study with wide-ranging ramifications.
This new edition makes a classic text available once again to students and general readers. A major new introduction based on archival research offers, for the first time, a biography and critical study of Franz Steiner; it not only places him in the context of British and European thought but also shows his importance for contemporary debates, among them deconstruction and Orientalism.
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology of Religion
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eBook available
August 2014
Talking Stones
The Politics of Memorialization in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland
Viggiani, E.
If memory was simply about past events, public authorities would never put their ever-shrinking budgets at its service. Rather, memory is actually about the present moment, as Pierre Nora puts it: “Through the past, we venerate above all ourselves.” This book examines how collective memory and material culture are used to support present political and ideological needs in contemporary society. Using the memorialization of the Troubles in contemporary Northern Ireland as a case study, this book investigates how non-state, often proscribed, organizations have filled a societal vacuum in the creation of public memorials. In particular, these groups have sifted through the past to propose “official” collective narratives of national identification, historical legitimation, and moral justifications for violence.
Subjects: Memory Studies Heritage Studies Anthropology (General)
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August 1996
A Tamil Asylum Diaspora
Sri Lankan Migration, Settlement and Politics in Switzerland
McDowell, C.
During twelve years of ethno-nationalist secessionist violence in the north and east of Sri Lanka, insurrection in the south, and island-wide state repression, many Tamils were forced to seek political asylum overseas. At least 200,000 Tamils, primarily from the Jaffna Peninsula, have escaped to Europe of whom ca. 25,000 (the largest group relative to the population) have settled in Switzerland, the focus of this study. The author examines the conditions in Sri Lanka that led to the flight, the phases and technicalities of the emigration and resettlement in Switzerland. Based on anthropological fieldwork and on completely new archival material, the author not only looks at the development of the Tamil community in all its diversity but also at the impact of federal and cantonal policy and practice, at the economic situation and broader changes in Switzerland which led to demands for reforms to the country's asylum and immigration rules. In this respect, Switzerland set an example that other governments were soon to follow.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)
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eBook available
December 2019
Teaching Modernization
Spanish and Latin American Educational Reform in the Cold War
Martín García, Ó. J. & Gómez-Escalonilla, L. D. (eds)
In the 1960s and 1970s, the educational systems in Spain and Latin America underwent comprehensive and ambitious reforms that took place amid a "revolution of expectations" arising from decolonization, global student protests, and the antagonism between capitalist and communist models of development. Deploying new archival research and innovative perspectives, the contributions to this volume examine the influence of transnational forces during the cultural Cold War. They shed new light on the roles played by the United States, non-state actors, international organizations and theories of modernization and human capital in educational reform efforts in the developing Hispanic world.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Educational Studies
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April 1999
Television Broadcasting in Contemporary France and Britain
Scriven, M. & Lecomte, M. (eds)
The importance of contemporary television broadcasting for the shaping and development of national cultures and identities is increasingly evident. Television as the privileged medium for the dissemination of information and for mass entertainment has irreversibly altered the manner in which nations perceive themselves and each other. This volume explores the multiple and complex ways in which audiovisual developments in two important European states have impacted on the life styles and attitudes of the population at large and its governing elites.
This is the first study that is devoted to the highly significant roles played by France and Britain in the formulation of European audiovisual policy and that provides a truly comparative analysis of the contemporary audiovisual scene in the two countries. It consists of four complementary sections: an overview of the audiovisual landscapes in Britain and France; an analysis of television programming; an account of the new cable and satellite media, and an assessment of European audiovisual integration. Overall, this volume offers a constructive contribution to the continuing debate on national and European broadcasting.
Subjects: Film and Television Studies Sociology Media Studies
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July 2015
Television's Moment
Sitcom Audiences and the Sixties Cultural Revolution
Hodenberg, C. von
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 – Till Death Us Do Part in Britain, All in the Family in the United States, and One Heart and One Soul in West Germany – centered on a bigoted anti-hero and his family. Between 1966 and 1979 they saturated popular culture, and managed to accelerate as well as deradicalize value changes and collective attitudes regarding gender roles, sexuality, religion, and race.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Media Studies Film and Television Studies
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August 2021
Territory, State and Nation
The Geopolitics of Rudolf Kjellén
Björk, R. & Lundén, T. (eds)
Rudolf Kjellén, regularly referred to as “the father of geopolitics,” developed in the first decade of the twentieth century an analytical model for calculating the capabilities of great-power states and promoting their interests in the international arena. It was an ambitious intellectual project that sought to bring politics into the sphere of social science. Bringing together experts on Kjellén from across the disciplines, Territory, State and Nation explores the century-long international impact, analytical model, and historical theories of a figure immensely influential in his time who is curiously little-known today.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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October 2001
Theatre and War 1933-1945
Performance in Extremis
Balfour, M.
On an April evening in 1934, on the River Arno in Florence, an air squadron, an infantry, a cavalry brigade, fifty trucks, four field and machine gun batteries, ten field radio stations, and six photoelectric units presented a piece of theatre. The mass spectacle, 18 BL involved over two thousand amateur actors and was performed before an audience of twenty thousand.
18 BL is one of eleven extraordinary essays collected together for the first time. The essays have been selected and edited from a wide range of publications dating from the 1940s to the 1990s. The authors are academics, cultural historians, and theatre practitioners - some with direct experience of the harsh conditions of Europe during the war. Each author critically assesses the function of theatre in times of world crisis, exploring themes of Fascist aesthetic propaganda in Italy and Germany, of theatre re-education programmes in the Gulags of Russia, of cultural "sustenance" for the troops at the front and interned German refugees in the UK, or cabaret shows as a currency for survival in Jewish concentration camps.
Subjects: Performance Studies Literary Studies
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eBook available
April 2017
Theoretical Scholarship and Applied Practice
Pink, S., Fors, V., & O'Dell, T. (eds)
Academics across the globe are being urged by universities and research councils to do research that impacts the world beyond academia. Yet to date there has been very little reflection amongst scholars and practitioners in these fields concerning the relationship between the theoretical and engaged practices that emerge through such forms of scholarship. Theoretical Scholarship and Applied Practice investigates the ways in which theoretical research has been incorporated into recent applied practices across the social sciences and humanities. This collection advances our understanding of the ethics, values, opportunities and challenges that emerge in the making of engaged and interdisciplinary scholarship.
Subject: Applied Anthropology
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January 2008
Time and History
The Variety of Cultures
Rüsen, J. (ed)
This series aims at bridging the gap between historical theory and the study of historical memory as well as western and non-western concepts, for which this volume offers a particularly good example. It explores cultural differences in conceptualizing time and history in countries such as China, Japan, and India as well as pre-modern societies.
Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General) Memory Studies
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eBook available
August 2015
Topographies of Suffering
Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice
Rapson, J.
Commentary on memorials to the Holocaust has been plagued with a sense of “monument fatigue”, a feeling that landscape settings and national spaces provide little opportunity for meaningful engagement between present visitors and past victims. This book examines the Holocaust via three sites of murder by the Nazis: the former concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany; the mass grave at Babi Yar, Ukraine; and the razed village of Lidice, Czech Republic. Bringing together recent scholarship from cultural memory and cultural geography, the author focuses on the way these violent histories are remembered, allowing these sites to emerge as dynamic transcultural landscapes of encounter in which difficult pasts can be represented and comprehended in the present. This leads to an examination of the role of the environment, or, more particularly, the ways in which the natural environment, co-opted in the process of killing, becomes a medium for remembrance.
Subjects: Genocide History Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
July 2016
The Total Work of Art
Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations
Imhoof, D., Menninger, M. E., & Steinhoff, A. J. (eds)
For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk’s lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea’s evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.
Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General) Performance Studies
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January 1995
Toward a Global Civil Society
Walzer, M. (ed)
The demise of Communism has not only affected Eastern Europe but also the countries of the West where a far-reaching examination of political and economic systems has begun. This collection of essays by internationally renowned scholars of political theory from Europe and the United States explores both the concept and the reality of civil society and its institutions.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
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August 2021
Tracing Slavery
The Politics of Atlantic Memory in The Netherlands
Balkenhol, M.
Looking at the ways in which the memory of slavery affects present-day relations in Amsterdam, this ethnographic account reveals a paradox: while there is growing official attention to the country’s slavery past (monuments, festivals, ritual occasions), many interlocutors showed little interest in the topic. Developing the notion of “trace” as a seminal notion to explore this paradox, this book follows the issue of slavery in everyday realities and offers a fine-grained ethnography of how people refer to this past – often in almost unconscious ways – and weave it into their perceptions of present-day issues.
Subjects: Memory Studies Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies
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January 2001
Trade Unions, Immigration, and Immigrants in Europe, 1960-1993
A Comparative Study of the Actions of Trade Unions in Seven West European Countries
Penninx, R. & Roosblad, J. (eds)
European trade unions are among the most influential and powerful institutions within Western economies, in many cases cooperating with the government and employers' associations in socio-economic decision-making processes. Consequently they also play an important role in the formulation of policies relating to immigration and the migrant workers, who are arriving and becoming part of the workforce the unions are representing and protecting against employers and other authorities. However, trade unions have not always fulfilled their role as the most obvious organization to defend the interests of foreign workers to the extent they could be expected. The reasons for this are complex and due to conflicts of interests that arise from their intermediary position between employers, government authorities, and indigenous workers.
This volume offers a rich analysis of the situation in seven major European countries but also a comparison of the data found and an attempt to account for the differences established. It ends with some conclusions on the prospects of trade unions within the European Union, and on the lessons to be learned from the present analysis.
Subject: History (General)
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December 1999
Transactions, Transgressions, Transformation
American Culture in Western Europe and Japan
Fehrenbach, H. & Poiger, U. (eds)
American culture has been one of the most controversial exports of the United States: greeted with enthusiasm by some, with hostility by others. Yet, few societies escape its influence. However, not all changes should be interpreted simply as "Americanization." The shaping of the postwar world has been much more complex than this term implies as is shown in this volume that explores the links between Americanization and modernity in Western Europe and Japan. In considering the impact of products and images ranging from movies and music to fashion and architecture, a multi-disciplinary group of contributors asks how American culture has been employed internationally in the articulation of postwar identities - be they national or subnational,socially sanctioned or socially transgressive. Their essays on France, Italy, Germany and Japan move beyond the simple paradigms of colonization and democratic modernization, yet retain a sensitivity to the asymmetries in the postwar power relationships between these countries and the United States. An extensive introduction historically locates changing interpretations of American influences abroad and suggests the problems and promises of "Americanization" as an analytical tool. Its comparative focus and interdisciplinary scope will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars of cold war and post-cold war history.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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April 2012
Transatlantic Echoes
Alexander von Humboldt in World Literature
Clark, R. & Lubrich, O. (eds)
Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was a world traveler, bestselling writer, and versatile researcher, a European salon sensation, and global celebrity. Yet the enormous literary echo he generated has remained largely unexplored. Humboldt inspired generations of authors, from Goethe and Byron to Enzensberger and García Márquez, to reflect on cultural difference, colonial ideology, and the relation between aesthetics and science. This collection of one-hundred texts features tales of adventure, travel reports, novellas, memoirs, letters, poetry, drama, screenplays, and even comics—many for the first time in English. The selection covers the foundational myths and magical realism of Latin America, the intellectual independence of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman in the United States, discourses in Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, East, and West Germany, as well as recent films and fiction. This documented source book addresses scholars in cultural and postcolonial studies as well as readers in history and comparative literature.
Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies
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October 2021
Transcending the Nostalgic
Landscapes of Postindustrial Europe beyond Representation
Jaramillo, G. S. & Tomann, J. (eds)
Even as the global economy of the twenty-first century continues its dramatic and unpredictable transformations, the landscapes it leaves in its wake bear the indelible marks of their industrial past. Whether in the form of abandoned physical structures, displaced populations, or ecological impacts, they persist in memory and lived experience across the developed world. This collection explores the affective and “more-than-representational” dimensions of post-industrial landscapes, including narratives, practices, social formations, and other phenomena. Focusing on case studies from across Europe, it examines both the objective and the subjective aspects of societies that, increasingly, produce fewer things and employ fewer workers.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Heritage Studies
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September 2010
The Transnational Condition
Protest Dynamics in an Entangled Europe
Teune, S. (ed)
During the last two decades Europe has experienced a rise in transnational contention. Citizens are crossing borders to advance alternative visions of Europe. They spread protest concepts and tactics and explore new ways of organizing dissent. Far from being a recent phenomenon, transnational protest is obviously more salient in a world of international corporations and global political interaction, compounded by electronic communication and cheap travel. The transnational condition permeates all aspects of protest organization and dynamics – from individual biographies to activist networks to cycles of contention. The contributors offer insight into this multifaceted condition by combining rich empirical evidence with reflections on the problems of transnational research.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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November 2016
Transnational Struggles for Recognition
New Perspectives on Civil Society since the 20th Century
Gosewinkel, D. & Rucht, D. (eds)
Now more than ever, “recognition” represents a critical concept for social movements, both as a strategic tool and an important policy aim. While the subject’s theoretical and empirical dimensions have usually been studied separately, this interdisciplinary collection focuses on both to examine the pursuit of recognition against a transnational backdrop. With a special emphasis on the efforts of women’s and Jewish organizations in 20th-century Europe, the studies collected here show how recognition can be meaningfully understood in historical-analytical terms, while demonstrating the extent to which transnationalization determines a movement’s reach and effectiveness.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology
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August 2011
Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond
Experiences Since the Middle Ages
Johnson, C. H., Sabean, D. W., Teuscher, S. & Trivellato, F. (eds)
While the current discussion of ethnic, trade, and commercial diasporas, global networks, and transnational communities constantly makes reference to the importance of families and kinship groups for understanding the dynamics of dispersion, few studies examine the nature of these families in any detail. This book, centered largely on the European experience of families scattered geographically, challenges the dominant narratives of modernization by offering a long-term perspective from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. Paradoxically, “transnational families” are to be found long before the nation-state was in place.
Subjects: History (General) Refugee and Migration Studies
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eBook available
June 2018
Travelling with the Argonauts
Informal Networks Seen without a Vertical Lens
Irek, M.
Drawing on rich ethnographic materials from longitudinal fieldwork on informal trading routes across Europe, Travelling with the Argonauts offers a new perspective in the research of the social space, reflecting on how best to investigate amorphous social phenomena, such as informal networks. Breaking with much current theory, the approach detailed here – the ‘Restricted Verticality Perspective’ – examines the horizontal dimension of social relations, and understands informality not as marginal or substandard, but as life itself, as the real experience of ordinary people.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Mobility Studies
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May 2011
Turks in Europe
From Guest Worker to Transnational Citizen
Abadan-Unat, N.
One of the foremost scholars on Turkish migration, the author offers in this work the summary of her experiences and research on Turkish migration since 1963. During these forty years her aim has been threefold: to explain the journeys made by thousands of Turkish men and women to foreign lands out of choice, necessity, or invitation; to shed light on the difficulties they faced; and to elaborate on how their lives were affected by the legal, political, social, and economic measures in the countries where they settled. The extensive research done both in Turkey and in Europe into the lives of individuals directly and indirectly affected by the migration phenomenon and the examination of these research results further enhances the value of this wide-ranging study as a definitive reference work.
Subject: Refugee and Migration Studies
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May 2006
Turning the Kaleidoscope
Perspectives on European Jewry
Lustig, S. & Leveson, I. (eds)
Far from being a blank space on the Jewish map, or a void in the Jewish cultural world, post-Shoah Europe is a place where Jewry has continued to develop, even though it is facing different challenges and opportunities than elsewhere. Living on a continent characterized by highly diverse patterns of culture, language, history, and relations to Jews, European Jewry mirrors that kaleidoscopic diversity. This volume explores such key questions as the new roles for Jews in Europe; models of Jewish community organization in Europe; concepts of diaspora and galut; a European-Jewish way of life in the era of globalization; and European Jews' relationship to Israel and to non-Jews. Some contributions highlight experiences of Jews in Britain, Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. Helping us to understand the special and common characteristics of European Jewry, this collection offers a valuable contribution to the continued rebuilding of Jewish life in the postwar era.
Subjects: Jewish Studies Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
November 2009
Turning the Tune
Traditional Music, Tourism, and Social Change in an Irish Village
Kaul, A.
The last century has seen radical social changes in Ireland, which have impacted all aspects of local life but none more so than traditional Irish music, an increasingly important identity marker both in Ireland and abroad. The author focuses on a small village in County Clare, which became a kind of pilgrimage site for those interested in experiencing traditional music. He begins by tracing its historical development from the days prior to the influx of visitors, through a period called "the Revival," in which traditional Irish music was revitalized and transformed, to the modern period, which is dominated by tourism. A large number of incomers, locally known as "blow-ins," have moved to the area, and the traditional Irish music is now largely performed and passed on by them. This fine-grained ethnographic study explores the commercialization of music and culture, the touristic consolidation and consumption of “place,” and offers a critique of the trope of "authenticity," all in a setting of dramatic social change in which the movement of people is constant.
Subjects: Performance Studies Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)
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May 2021
A Twisted Style
The Culture of Dreadlocks in “Western” Societies
Jerrentrup, M. T.
In "western" cultures, some people have chosen a dreadlock hairstyle, despite many in mainstream society looking at it in a negative light. This book deals with contradictions surrounding the hairstyle such as often representing a protest against the prevailing right-wing political systems, yet also emphasizing the white person’s power to appropriate any style. Based on interviews and close observations in social media, the book offers insights into the culture(s) surrounding dreadlocks and ultimately interprets the phenomenon as a postmodern form of individuality.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
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eBook available
October 2017
Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future
Colin Mackenzie, the Early Colonial State, and the Comprehensive Survey of India
Wolffhardt, T.
For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company consolidated its rule over India, evolving from a trading venture to a colonial administrative force. Yet its territorial gains far outpaced its understanding of the region and the people who lived there, and its desperate efforts to gain knowledge of the area led to the 1815 appointment of army officer Colin Mackenzie as the first Surveyor General of India. This volume carefully reconstructs the life and career of Mackenzie, showing how the massive survey of India that he undertook became one of the most spectacular and wide-ranging knowledge production initiatives in British colonial history.
Subjects: Colonial History History: 18th/19th Century
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November 2000
Universities Remembering Europe
Nations, Culture and Higher Education
Crawley, F., Smeyers, P. & Standish, P. (eds)
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 of applied philosophy, it reflects on changes in European identity with the development of the European Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall and considers the reciprocal relationship between these changes and higher education. By uncovering the unavoidable philosophical problems embedded in policies, the book sets out both to provide a clearer understanding of the current situation of higher education in Europe and to contribute to its development. It attempts to redefine the democratic basis of higher education in the light of social and political change in the evolving European society.
Subject: Educational Studies
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eBook available
January 2019
Views of Violence
Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials
Echternhamp, J. & Jaeger, S. (eds)
Twenty-first-century views of historical violence have been immeasurably influenced by cultural representations of the Second World War. Within Europe, one of the key sites for such representation has been the vast array of museums and memorials that reflect contemporary ideas of war, the roles of soldiers and civilians, and the self-perception of those who remember. This volume takes a historical perspective on museums covering the Second World War and explores how these institutions came to define political contexts and cultures of public memory in Germany, across Europe, and throughout the world.
Subjects: Museum Studies Memory Studies
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eBook available
March 2012
Visions of the End of the Cold War in Europe, 1945-1990
Bozo, F., Rey, M.-P., Ludlow, N. P., & Rother, B. (eds)
Exploring the visions of the end of the Cold War that have been put forth since its inception until its actual ending, this volume brings to the fore the reflections, programmes, and strategies that were intended to call into question the bipolar system and replace it with alternative approaches or concepts. These visions were associated not only with prominent individuals, organized groups and civil societies, but were also connected to specific historical processes or events. They ranged from actual, thoroughly conceived programmes, to more blurred, utopian aspirations — or simply the belief that the Cold War had already, in effect, come to an end. Such visions reveal much about the contexts in which they were developed and shed light on crucial moments and phases of the Cold War.
Subject: History: 20th Century to Present
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August 2008
Voices of the Valley, Voices of the Straits
How Protest Creates Communities
Porta, D. della & Piazza, G.
Protest campaigns against large-scale public works usually take place within a local context. However, since the 1990s new forms of protest have been emerging. This book analyses two cases from Italy that illustrate this development: the environmentalist protest campaigns against the TAV (the building of a new high-speed railway in Val de Susa, close to the border with France), and the construction of the Bridge on the Messina Straits (between Calabria and Sicily). Such mobilizations emerge from local conflicts but develop as part of a global justice movement, often resulting in the production of new identities. They are promoted through multiple networks of different social and political groups, that share common claims and adopt various forms of protest action. It is during the protest campaigns that a sense of community is created.
Subject: Sociology
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eBook available
May 2012
Walls, Borders, Boundaries
Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe
Silberman, M., Till, K. E. & Ward, J. (eds)
How is it that walls, borders, boundaries—and their material and symbolic architectures of division and exclusion—engender their very opposite? This edited volume explores the crossings, permeations, and constructions of cultural and political borders between peoples and territories, examining how walls, borders, and boundaries signify both interdependence and contact within sites of conflict and separation. Topics addressed range from the geopolitics of Europe’s historical and contemporary city walls to conceptual reflections on the intersection of human rights and separating walls, the memory politics generated in historically disputed border areas, theatrical explorations of border crossings, and the mapping of boundaries within migrant communities.
Subjects: History (General) Urban Studies Refugee and Migration Studies Memory Studies
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June 2014
Weary Warriors
Power, Knowledge, and the Invisible Wounds of Soldiers
Moss, P. & Prince, M. J.
As seen in military documents, medical journals, novels, films, television shows, and memoirs, soldiers’ invisible wounds are not innate cracks in individual psyches that break under the stress of war. Instead, the generation of weary warriors is caught up in wider social and political networks and institutions—families, activist groups, government bureaucracies, welfare state programs—mediated through a military hierarchy, psychiatry rooted in mind-body sciences, and various cultural constructs of masculinity. This book offers a history of military psychiatry from the American Civil War to the latest Afghanistan conflict. The authors trace the effects of power and knowledge in relation to the emotional and psychological trauma that shapes soldiers’ bodies, minds, and souls, developing an extensive account of the emergence, diagnosis, and treatment of soldiers’ invisible wounds.
Subjects: Sociology History (General) Peace and Conflict Studies
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July 2001
Whatever Happened to Asylum in Britain?
A Tale of Two Walls
Pirouet, L.
Refugees and asylum-seekers are high up on many people's political agenda. Even so, there is a remarkable lack of information. Who are these asylum-seekers? Aren't they almost all "bogus"? How do western immigration authorities decide whether or not they are genuine? Is the UN convention on Refugees out of date and in need of renegotiation?
This book brings insider knowledge to the study of asylum in Britain today. It is based on visits to places where asylum seekers are detained, on working with lawyers representing asylum-seekers and on a close knowledge of many of the refugee organisations. It argues passionately that Britain shall not throw away, through ignorance and misunderstanding, a reputation for providing a place of safety for the persecuted, and the chance of welcoming people who have much to contribute to national life and culture.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)
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eBook available
April 2017
When Things Become Property
Land Reform, Authority and Value in Postsocialist Europe and Asia
Sikor, T., Dorondel, S., Stahl, J. & Xuan To, P.
Governments have conferred ownership titles to many citizens throughout the world in an effort to turn things into property. Almost all elements of nature have become the target of property laws, from the classic preoccupation with land to more ephemeral material, such as air and genetic resources. When Things Become Property interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, and finds that property reforms are no longer, if they ever were, miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
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eBook available
February 2010
When Women Held the Dragon's Tongue
and Other Essays in Historical Anthropology
Rebel, H.
“Peasants tell tales,” one prominent cultural historian tells us (Robert Darnton). Scholars must then determine and analyze what it is they are saying and whether or not to incorporate such tellings into their histories and ethnographies. Challenging the dominant culturalist approach associated with Clifford Geertz and Marshall Sahlins among others, this book presents a critical rethinking of the philosophical anthropologies found in specific histories and ethnographies and thereby bridges the current gap between approaches to studies of peasant society and popular culture. In challenging the methodology and theoretical frameworks currently used by social scientists interested in aspects of popular culture, the author suggests a common discursive ground can be found in an historical anthropology that recognizes how myths, fairytales and histories speak to a universal need for imagining oneself in different timescapes and for linking one’s local world with a “known” larger world.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General) Literary Studies Cultural Studies (General)
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eBook available
April 2016
Witches and Demons
A Comparative Perspective on Witchcraft and Satanism
La Fontaine, J.
Devil worship, black magic, and witchcraft have long captivated anthropologists as well as the general public. In this volume, Jean La Fontaine explores the intersection of expert and lay understandings of evil and the cultural forms that evil assumes. The chapters touch on public scares about devil-worship, misconceptions about human sacrifice and the use of body parts in healing practices, and mistaken accusations of children practicing witchcraft. Together, these cases demonstrate that comparison is a powerful method of cultural understanding, but warns of the dangers and mistaken conclusions that untrained ideas about other ways of life can lead to.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion
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December 2008
Women and Men in Love
European Identities in the Twentieth Century
Passerini, L.
It has often been assumed that Europeans invented and had the exclusive monopoly over courtly and romantic love, commonly considered to be the highest form of relations between men and women. This view was particularly prevalent between 1770 and the mid-twentieth century, but was challenged in the 1960s when romantic love came to be seen as a universal sentiment that can be found in all cultures in the world. However, there remains the historical problem that the Europeans used this concept of love as a fundamental part of their self-image over a long period (traces of it still remain) and it became very much caught up in the concept of marriage. This book challenges the underlying Eurocentrism of this notion while exploring in a more general sense the connection between identity and emotions.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality
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January 1998
Women and Socialism - Socialism and Women
Europe Between the World Wars
Gruber, H. & Graves, P. (eds)
Until recently, histories of women tended to be segregated from the larger historical context. This pioneering volume places the role of women within the history of the interwar years, whenboth the women's and socialist movements became prominent, and raises the key question of how power was distributed between the genders in a historical setting. The emblematic title of this volume highlights the fundamental conception of this comparative study of eleven West European countries: that in the interwar decades two great movements gained in strength, converged, diverged, competed, and cooperated. Each of these movements is viewed as acomplex matrix of organized and unorganized participants. However, by far the most provocative questions deal with gender relations. Central to these are definitions of femininity and masculinity in terms of mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at the workplace, in the home, and in the political arena. The mystique of the "new woman" in the 1920s and the 1930s challenged traditional notions of gender identity and relations, not the least of which was the redefinition of the role of men. The main issue addressed in this volume is not how male socialists "dealt with" the woman question or how women functioned in or outside left-wingparties; it rather centers on illustrating the power distribution between the sexes in specific political and cultural contexts. This rigorously focused and coherent volume, to which some of the best-known scholars in the field have contributed, will no doubt establish itself as the standard reference work for years to come.
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History: 20th Century to Present
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eBook available
November 2007
Women Migrants From East to West
Gender, Mobility and Belonging in Contemporary Europe
Passerini, L., Lyon, D., Capussotti, E. & Laliotou, I. (eds)
Based on the oral histories of eighty migrant women and thirty additional interviews with ‘native’ women in the ‘receiving’ countries, this volume documents the contemporary phenomenon of the feminisation of migration through an exploration of the lives of women, who have moved from Bulgaria and Hungary to Italy and the Netherlands. It assumes migrants to be active subjects, creating possibilities and taking decisions in their own lives, as well as being subject to legal and political regulation, and the book analyses the new forms of subjectivity that come about through mobility.
Part I is a largely conceptual exploration of subjectivity, mobility and gender in Europe. The chapters in Part II focus on love, work, home, communication, and food, themes which emerged from the migrant women’s accounts. In Part III, based on the interviews with ‘native’ women – employers, friends, or in associations relevant to migrant women – the chapters analyse their representations of migrants, and the book goes on to explore forms of intersubjectivity between European women of different cultural origins. A major contribution of this book is to consider how the movement of people across Europe is changing the cultural and social landscape with implications for how we think about what Europe means.
Cover image: Painting by Carla Accardi. Reproduced with the kind permission of Luca Barsi of the Galleria Accademia, Via Accademia Albertina 3/e, 10123 Torino.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality Mobility Studies History: 20th Century to Present
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March 1995
Women, Family and Society in Medieval Europe
Historical Essays, 1978-1991
Herlihy, D.
Until his untimely death in 1991, David Herlihy, Professor of History at Brown University, was one of the most prolific and best-known American historians of the European Middle Ages. Author of books on the history of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy, Herlihy published, in 1978, his best-known work in collaboration with Christine Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles (Translated into English in 1985, and Italian in 1988). For the last dozen or so years of his life, Herlihy launched a series of ambitious projects, on the history ofwomen and the family, and on the collective behavior of social groups in medieval Europe. While he completed two important books - on the family (1985) and on women's work (1991) - he did not find the time to bring these other major projects to a conclusion.
This volume contains essays he wrote after 1978. They convey a sense of the enormous intellectual energy and great erudition that characterized David Herlihy's scholarly career. They also chart a remarkable historian's intellectual trajectory, as he searched for new and better ways of asking a set of simple and basic questions about the history of the family, the institution within which the vast majority of Europeans spent so much of their lives. Because of his qualities as a scholar and a teacher, during his relatively brief career Herlihy was honored with Presidencies of the four major scholarly associations with which he was affiliated: the Catholic Historical Association, the Medieval Academy of America, the Renaissance Society of America,and the American Historical Association.
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History: Medieval/Early Modern
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April 2002
Writing Mothers and Daughters
Renegotiating the Mother in Western European Narratives by Women
Giorgio, A. (ed)
The psychoanalytic discovery of the importance of the pre-oedipal mother-daughter bond in the 1970s generated a vast amount of feminist theory attempting to identify the specificity of, and give value to, the daughter's relationship to her mother. At the same time women writers engaged in the complex task of representing this highly conflictual relationship which had been largely absent in women's narrative until then. Although much criticism has been written on individual texts, no systematic study of the development of this theme in Western European fiction exists.
This book offers the first comparative assessment of the subject-matter in England, France, Germany and Austria, Ireland, Italy, and Spain in the second half of last century. The six main chapters explore the interplay between narrative strategies, psychic structures, and socio-political and cultural processes in the textual representation of the relationship in each country, thus providing original interpretations both of classic texts by established writers and of more recent narratives by new or emerging authors. Among the writers featured are Steedman, Diski, Winterson, Tennant, de Beauvoir, Leduc, Djura, Wolf, Jelinek, Mitgutsch, Novak, Lavin, O'Brien, O'Faoláin, Morante, Sanvitale, Ramondino, Chacel, Rodoreda, Martín Gaite.
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General)