In the wake of Sweden’s anniversary of 200 years of peace in 2014, this volume brings for the first time a targeted approach to the concept of claimed Swedish exceptionality. Taking on the nation’s policies of neutrality, 200 Years of Peace centers discussion around what it means for a nation to endure a uniquely long period of time without any pronounced conflict.

Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Peace and Conflict Studies

This collection gathers together, for the first time in English, some of H.G. Adler’s most important scholarly essays on the Shoah and connected themes. Spanning his thought across three decades they focus on the fate of the ‘coerced’ human being and reflect on freedom, enslavement, terror, dread, charisma, loneliness, and ideology.

Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies History: World War II

This groundbreaking study looks at the tension between realism and idealism in Swedish diplomacy during the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and 1975 Helsinki Accords. It offers a compelling counternarrative of this period, showing that Sweden strategically ignored human rights violations in Eastern Europe in its pursuit of national interests.

Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

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

Through ethnographic explorations of the everyday lives of Danish sperm donors, Being a Sperm Donor explores how masculinity and sexuality are reconfigured in a time in which the norms and logics of (reproductive) biomedicine have become ordinary, and examines how the latter’s socio-cultural and political dimensions become intertwined with men’s intimate sense of self.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

Beyond the Border reconstructs the experiences of minority youths living in the Danish-German borderlands from the 1950s to the 1970s. Drawing on a remarkable variety of archival and oral sources, author Tobias Haimin Wung-Sung provides a rich and fine-grained analysis that encompasses political issues from the NATO alliance and European integration to everyday life and popular culture.

Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

This book explores how such struggles unfold in practice at a highly symbolic battlefield site in the Danish/German borderland. Comprised of an ethnography of two profoundly different institutions – a conventional museum and an experience-based heritage center – it analyses the ways in which staff and visitors interfere with, relate to, and literally “make sense” of the war heritage and its national connotations. Borders of Belonging offers a comparative, in-depth analysis of the practices and negotiations through which history is made and manifested at two houses devoted to the interpretation of one event: the decisive battle of the 1864 war in which Otto von Bismarck, on his way to uniting the new German Empire, led the Prussian army to victory over the Danish.

Subjects: Heritage Studies Travel and Tourism Museum Studies Memory Studies

The Nordic concept of “the welfare state” is a well-worn analytical idea that has yet to receive much exploration beyond its postwar emergence. This volume chronicles “the welfare state” from its historical origins to its interpretations, values, and challenges over time in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland.

Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Travel and Tourism

Builders construct certain political sensibilities through their daily work, which come to structure their wider social and political engagement with the encompassing society. Crafting Co-ops in Denmark explores the revival of cooperative craftwork in Denmark, delving into construction sites and political assemblies to reveal the dreams, drives, and desires of a diverse group of builders working in a Copenhagen-based craft co-op.

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

Looking at the crossroads between heritage and religion through the case study of Moravian Christiansfeld, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2015, this anthology reaches back to the eighteenth century when the church settlement was founded, examines its legacy within Danish culture and modern society, and brings this history into the present and the ongoing heritagization processes.

Subjects: Heritage Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

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

Presenting for the first time a comparative and socio-cultural history of queer femininities in Germany and the Netherlands for an English-speaking audience, Different from the Others highlights this submerged history and engages queer authors and activists from the Netherlands to challenge and redress conceptualizations of queer femininity in the interwar period.

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History: World War I History: 20th Century to Present

Hunebedden are the megalithic tombs of the Neolithic Funnel Beaker Culture in the Netherlands. Jan Albert Bakker is one of the few archaeologists in Holland to have excavated a Dutch megalithic tomb, and here he not only draws on and presents the knowledge acquired through excavations, but gives also an overview of the history of Dutch megalithic tomb investigations and an abundantly illustrated compendium of data on all the known megalithic tombs in Holland.

Subject: Archaeology

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

Built around key events, this book explores politics among left radical activists in Northern Europe. The author recasts theoretical concerns about politics and aesthetics, drawing on anthropological literature from Scandinavia and the Amazon to establish analogies between perceptions of the body, autonomy, forests and capitalism.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

Subject: Applied Anthropology

What does it mean when runic stones or medieval churches are transformed from antiquities to monuments to heritage sites? This book argues that the transformations concern more than words alone: They reflect fundamental changes in the way we experience the past, and the way historical objects are assigned meaning and value in the present.

Subjects: Museum Studies Memory Studies Heritage Studies

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

This book provides an inside look at Greenpeace’s decades-long campaign against the Norwegian whaling industry. Combining historical narrative with sophisticated systems-theory analysis, it examines the organization’s failure to end Norwegian whaling, providing valuable lessons for other protest movements.

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

The 2008 economic collapse in Iceland sent its residents into a destabilising crisis with far-reaching, temporal and affective consequences. Haunting Futures explores how the complex relationships of this unstable past and the anticipatory modes of the ongoing present keep Icelanders and the Polish migrant community in their midst alert to looming futures in crisis.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology History: 20th Century to Present Sustainable Development Goals

The Russian minority in Finland is imbued with ’being hidden‘ or ’hiding oneself‘. The book explores informants’ reflections, together with the author, on the mental and physical crossing of national borders. Perceptions of belonging and/or Otherness and lived experience reveal a complex relationship of embodied memory, history, time and a multi-national social space.

Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

This collected volume explores the complex impact of E.P. Thompson’s monumental book, The Making of the English Working Class, both as an intellectual project and material object, relating it to the social and cultural history of the book form itself—an enduring artifact of English history.

Subject: Cultural Studies (General)

The global trend of declining fertility rates and an increasingly ageing population has serious implications for individuals and institutions alike. Childless men are mostly excluded from ageing, social science and reproduction scholarship and almost completely absent from most national statistics. This book examines the lived experiences of a hidden and disenfranchised population: men who wanted to be fathers.

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

The Amber Film collective has been part of the British and European documentary scene since the late 1960s. Situating the work within wider social, political and historical contexts, In Fading Light interrogates how their critically acclaimed body of work—which includes documentaries, feature films, television films, and other experimental and campaigning projects—relates to other filmmakers in Britain and Europe.

Subjects: Film and Television Studies Media Studies Cultural Studies (General)

Individually Ourselves addresses the process of identity and community building through an examination of individuality and group dynamics during a formative juncture of life (based on ethnographic fieldwork in a London high school).

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Educational Studies Sociology

Subject: History (General)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Educational Studies Sociology

Notwithstanding Nordic countries’ reputation for strong labour movements, the fortunes of organized labour have varied widely throughout the region and across different historical periods. Together, the essays collected here explore themes such as work, unions, politics and migration in the Nordic states from the early modern period to the twenty-first century.

Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

An ethnographic account of daily life in Durham Cathedral, this book examines the processes of negotiation and change between a community and their cathedral.

Subjects: Heritage Studies Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

Lullabies and Battle Cries examines the relationship between music, emotion, memory, and identity in Northern Irish republican parading bands, exploring how rebel parade music provides a foundational idiom of national and republican expression, acting as a critical medium for shaping new political identities.

Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

Is there a “Nordic history”? If so, what are its origins, its scope, and its defining features? In this definitive volume, scholars from all five Nordic nations tackle a notoriously problematic historical concept. Each contribution takes a deliberately transnational approach while grounding itself in careful research, yielding rich, nuanced perspectives on shifting and contested historical terrain.

Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present

Once one of the leading lights of Swedish cinema, director Hasse Ekman is today virtually unknown outside of Sweden, eclipsed by the iconic Ingmar Bergman. This first-ever English-language book on the subject provides an engaging, comprehensive survey of Ekman’s career, combining explorations of historical context with insightful analyses of styles and themes.

Subject: Film and Television Studies

Drawing on extended ethnographic studies of management consultancies in the Oslo region of Norway, this book seeks to find a richer understanding of their role in contemporary work life and the attraction their practices exert on people. The author shows that management consultancy is an arena of meaning that should be analysed as a ‘cultural space’.

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

Eleven chapters, organized regionally, explore the origins of state forestry policy in Northern Europe from the early modern period to the present. Topics include fundamental policy aims, the functioning and organisations of forestry, forest management, wood supply, regulations, forest statistics, wood depletion, growing stock, forest conservation, and landscape protection.

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) History: Medieval/Early Modern History: 18th/19th Century Sustainable Development Goals

This handy, concise biography describes the life and intellectual contribution of Max Gluckman (1911-75) who was one the most significant social anthropologists of the twentieth century.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology

The Museum of Mankind was an innovative and popular showcase for minority cultures from around the non-Western world from 1970 to 1997, as the devolved Ethnography Department of the British Museum. This memoir of over forty years’ service with the Department is a critical appreciation of its achievements in the various roles of a national museum, of the personalities of its staff and of the issues raised in the representation of exotic cultures.

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

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

“The anthology provides careful analysis based on rich empirical material that illuminates the complexity of the region (and of the migration processes that have occurred in the last thirty years) represented and acted upon as the Nordic…[Its] strength lies in its ability to pose central research questions at the crossroad between the making of the ‘Nordic’ and the original ways through which diasporic communities create gendered forms of belonging that transcend the nation-state. This ability to move between the local and the global through original and reflexive methodologies locates the anthology’s work within a broader international scholarship.”  ·  Diana Mulinari, Center for Gender Studies, University of Lund

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Refugee and Migration Studies

Subjects: Development Studies History (General) Sociology

Nordic War Stories explores the commonalities and divergences among the five Nordic countries, examining formal and informal national historiographies alongside representations of the second world war in canonical literary works, memoirs, and films. Together, they comprise a valuable companion that challenges the myth of Scandinavian homogeneity while demonstrating the powerful influence that the war continues to exert on national self-conceptions.

Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

In thisexacting re-examination of paramilitary violence upon border Protestants within Northern Ireland, The Northern Ireland Conflict on the Margins of History illuminates the understudied impact the Troubles had upon the Protestant community’s physical, economic, and cultural presence within the border counties.

Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Peace and Conflict Studies Heritage Studies

Not the Troubles shifts the academic focus from the perception of Belfast as a divided society and reveals alternative narratives of city life. Using storytelling as a leitmotif, it explores the epistemological validity of engaging with strangers in a range of settings, such as street corners, a hairdresser’s, a storytelling evening and considers how creative writers represent life in Belfast.

Subject: Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

This book places the patient-centred practices of a single clinic in a national context where ARTs are highly regulated (‘Dutch IVF’) and examines how this form of medicine co-shapes the experiences, views and decisions of the women and men using these technologies.

Subject: Medical Anthropology

The development of political rhetoric during the Reformation period through to the outbreak of the English Civil War was based on more varied sources than just the political language of civic humanism and republicanism. The Power of Scripture uncovers how biblical scripture directly shaped a national religious politics, forming a lasting impression on the socio-political structural development of Stuart England.

Subject: History: Medieval/Early Modern

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Medical Anthropology

Against the backdrop of an alienating, technologizing and ever-accelerating world of material production, this book tells an intimate story: one about a community of woodworkers training at an historic institution in London’s East End during the present ‘renaissance of craftsmanship’.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

Through detailed ethnographic analysis, this book shows how religious sensibilities inform the health practices, issues of sexuality and well-being of the Ghanian-Dutch and Somali-Dutch communities residing in the Randstad area of the Netherlands.

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

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

Subject: Museum Studies

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General)

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

How do you make taxpayers comply? This ethnography is a vivid account of one of the most esteemed Swedish bureaucracies – the Swedish Tax Agency. Shaping Taxpayers focuses on how fiscal strategies and relationships, as well as diverse knowledge claims – legal, economic, cultural – compete to shape taxpayer behaviour. 

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

Subject: Sociology

Between 1939 and 1945 some 80,000 Finnish children were sent to Sweden, Denmark, and elsewhere, ostensibly to protect them from danger while their nation’s soldiers fought superior Soviet and German forces. This is the first English-language account of Finland’s war children and their experiences, told through the survivors’ own words.

Subjects: History: World War II Memory Studies

Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

In order to affect domestic politics, Scandinavian populist parties must cross the threshold to the national parliament while earning the nation’s trust. While the Progress Party in Norway and the Danish People’s Party have, the Sweden Democrats has not. The fissures in public opinion lead to a polarized public debate that raises the question of national identity, of what we are.

Subjects: Sociology History: 20th Century to Present

Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

The Virago Story provides a comprehensive history of classic feminist publisher Virago, along with an up-to-date analysis of the four waves of feminism, new strands of feminist analysis and praxis, and publishing trends.

Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present

Making a comeback in Northern Europe and North America, wolf populations cause conflicts by affecting the livelihoods of rural peoples. However, their arrivals also become embedded in more general societal tensions. Wolf Conflicts reveals how conflicts over land use and conservation intertwine with patterns of hegemony and resistance in modern societies.

Subjects: Sociology Environmental Studies (General)

Trademark-protected since 1910, the famous woollen cloth known as Harris Tweed can only be produced in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland – yet it is exported to over 50 countries around the world. Examining contemporary experiences of work and life, this book is the first in-depth anthropological study of the renowned textile industry, complementing and updating existing historical and ethnographic research.

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

The Norwegian Constitution is the oldest functioning constitution in Europe. Its bicentenary in 2014 has inspired the analyses in this volume, where contributors focus on the Constitution as a text to explore new ways of analyzing democratic development. Writing Democracy examines the framing of the Norwegian Constitution, its transformations, and its interpretations during the last two centuries.

Subject: History (General)