Browse
by Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
Through ethnographic research primarily in Bulawayo,Economies of Care addresses the intersection of kinship, state functions and migration in sustaining livelihoods amidst Zimbabwe's economic and political instability.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Refugee and Migration Studies
Terrorism in Question crafts a political anthropology of post-9/11 “new terrorism” by investigating who needs the category of terrorists and offering a global framework to understand anthropology, Islam and terrorism. Marshalling fieldwork, participant observation and encounters with terrorists, this book aims to exemplify knowledge decolonized.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology of Religion Peace and Conflict Studies
Authoritarianism, Displacement and Syrian Family Life analyses how Syrians living in refuge in Lebanon and Turkey during the war in Syria continued to reckon with the Syrian State as a direct and indirect force in their lives. Through an ethnographic account of everyday life in Syrian families with a variety of political standpoints, the book demonstrates how the experience of displacement was shaped by ongoing deliberations and provides new perspectives on displacement in a Middle East context.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies
The historical emergence of centralised mineral resource governance in Ghana can be tied to its failed colonially transplanted legal system. This book offers a reflection of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) formalisation, with a focus on its complex operationalisation in formerly colonized societies, to consider environmental responsibility and accountability in the administration of access to mineral rights.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Colonial History Sustainable Development Goals
Through interconnected perspectives on environment, gender inequality, identity and Caribbean spatial re-colonisation influences on social, cultural and environmental landscapes, The Inequity of Caribbean Spaces and Designed Places: Race, Class and Gender examines socio-spatial (in)justices beyond physical and geographical boundaries that Caribbean societies face.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
Competition is often seen as capitalism’s engine, assigning value and setting people against one another. Yet ethnography shows competition exceeds capitalism: its meanings, aims, and practices are contested and shifting. Rather than enforcing fixed orders, competition produces complex, unexpected effects, enabling new social relations and mediating divergent social worlds globally.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Engaging critically with concepts of race, species, and otherness, Alterity and Human Evolution contributes to current debates on human evolution. Drawing on postcolonial and critical frameworks from the Humanities and Social Sciences, it interrogates key foundational concepts and assumptions underpinning evolutionary discourses.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Archaeology
From commercial networks in Paris to Algerian pilgrimage journeys, The Jewish Maghreb reveals communal North African Jewish navigation of plural sediments of self and history. The heuristic ‘maghrebinicité,’ works to illuminate ongoing negotiations of memory, citizenship, and cultural transmission in postcolonial France, offering fresh insights into diaspora, return, and the persistence of transnational connections.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Jewish Studies Urban Studies
This book addresses the industrial crises, environmental issues, and local attitudes toward energy transitions through case studies in Sardinia and San Pietro. By approaching European transitional politics from an ethnographic perspective, this study focuses on the practices, frameworks and alternative strategies of those who resist the EU Green Deal.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Sociology Sustainable Development Goals
Dutch asylum procedure is a peculiar legal procedure that gathers different people and sensitivities together to make swift, life-altering decisions for those applying for protection. Based on an extensive ethnography, this book examines how the Netherlands engages with asylum procedure and the ways in which suspicious compassion pervades an objective decision-making practice.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Cultural Studies (General)
This book aims to give a faithful presentation of Pahktun reality by investigating the diverse and changing patterns of social relations among Pahktuns and considering the practice of gham khadee to be a manifestation of the code of life.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General) Sociology
This book draws on three decades of ethnographic research to explore the penetration of mafia values in Sicilian society. By exploring rituals through which local society learns deep respect for those values, this study aims to offer a critical perspective on Sicilian modernity.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Anthropology of Religion
In the wake of Greece’s 2008 economic collapse, African women in Athens navigated intensified discrimination shaped by the intersecting forces of gender, race and migration status. This book argues that gendered racialization renders these women not only invisible but also hyper-visible in stereotypical ways that heighten their exposure to discrimination and precarity.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
Based on ethnographic research in Tel Aviv, this book examines how Bitcoin enthusiasts use everyday practices to challenge centralised authority, revealing how decentralised technologies foster both sprawling online crowds and close-knit, libertarian communities rooted in techno-utopian ideals.
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
As climate change accelerates, melting sea ice is fueling the global imagination and geopolitical anticipation of the Arctic region’s accessible transport routes and possibilities for resource extraction. Arctic Silk Roads examines the different conditions under which top-down infrastructural dreams facilitate or constrain individual agencies.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Sustainable Development Goals
Informed by over two decades of anthropological research in Chhattisgarh, this book examines how the marginalized Adivasi (tribal) youth in rural India navigate the contradictory ways in which education represents both a strategy for social mobility and a very tangible risk.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Educational Studies Mobility Studies Sociology
Bringing the anthropologies of disaster, epidemics, and crisis into conversation, A Revelatory Pandemic subjects the hopeful expectations of post-pandemic change to social-scientific scrutiny across Latin America and challenges popular and scholarly assumptions about the causes and outcomes of crisis.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Through six micro-level studies from Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, Facing Discrimination offers insight into the dynamics of religious beliefs and bodily practices among those who are discriminated against. It examines how religion as a source of agency interacts with processes of marginalization.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Political and Economic Anthropology
Lasting traces of the Cold War continue to shape the social landscape in Italy and Greece. Lurking Cold War critiques the connections between global categories and individual experiences, foregrounding Cold War resonances through materiality, imagination, speculation, and affect – in literature, bureaucracy, and the family.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies History: 20th Century to Present
Focusing on the Balkan Route, this volume examines the criminalization of migration and emerging vocabularies of border control and resistance. Through keywords like Autonomy, Route, and Solidarity, contributors from Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia offer ethnographic and interdisciplinary insights into restricted mobility, border violence, and migrant-led struggles.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Prioritising processes not structures based on the general premise that change rather than stasis is what characterises society, this book focuses on social change in a coastal village in Sri Lanka where change was the result of people reacting to processes at work in the wider economic and political context and were in no way passive victims to forces out of their control.
Subjects: Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
This volume explores how race, colonial legacies, and structural inequality are addressed across diverse European contexts – north, central, eastern and southern – as well as in their entanglements with regions beyond Europe. It offers critical, grounded insights into the possibilities and challenges of decolonial thinking today.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Colonial History
In the era of the Anthropocene, tourism represents both the threats of ruthless capitalism and the ideals of a good life. Nothing Without Tourism explores this paradox from the perspective of those who depend on tourism in the Swiss Alps, as they reflect on a long history of ‘touristification’ and face an uncertain future.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Travel and Tourism
Through diverse ethnographic case studies, leading food scholars examine the meaning and making of place and taste. In doing so, the book challenges unsettling terroir-inspired notions of a fixed taste of place and pushes the boundaries of what we think we know about their connections.
Subjects: Food & Nutrition Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
This volume highlights the importance of authentic Indigenous inclusion in governance processes at national and subnational levels worldwide. Through case studies and best-practice models, it examines the opportunities and barriers Indigenous peoples face in collaborative governance. In doing so, it offers recommendations for practice and policy that promote social equity.
Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology Applied Anthropology
Following the 2008 recession in Ireland, its creative economy reflects broader societal shifts, including rising nationalism. This book explores how young activists and artists, facing precarious housing and labour conditions, engaged in campaigns – particularly for reproductive rights and affordable housing.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Urban Studies
This volume analyses conflicts in the Lake Chad Basin based on insights into local dynamics and the lived world of the people themselves.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology
This book tells the survival stories of seven Cambodians who endured the Khmer Rouge Genocide, their escape to Thailand, and their difficult resettlement in the United States. It is a collection of first-person oral histories, supplemented by images of documents and photographs, highlighting journeys of resilience, survival, and adaptation while profoundly traumatized.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies
Language and Political Subjectivity offers an innovative approach to stancemaking as a rhetorical semiotic process that produces truth, beliefs, and certainties about social realities and relations. It considers how Indigenous and diasporic communities, with their political subjectivities, expand over significant sociohistorical changes, debates, and struggles in the transformation of Chilean democracy and Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution.
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
Experience of retirement varies considerably across the globe, from areas where most people cannot afford to retire to places where a multitude of new possibilities are being developed for retirees. This book is an anthropological approach to consider the range of contexts and consequences that impact life beyond work.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
This book reviews the feminist, ethical and legal discourse on sex selective abortions and draws on women’s empowerment as an analytical lens to examine the son preference expressed in the notion of Vansh (lineage) among pregnant women.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Medical Anthropology
This book argues that disasters are intimately linked to historical processes that foster contemporary unequal relationships, and should therefore include both those commonly associated with nature as well as those we consider facets of history and social conflict, such as war and destitution.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Development Studies Sustainable Development Goals
Viewed through an anthropological lens, Automobili Lamborghini, the renowned Italian factory of super cars, presents a compelling case study. As an ethnography spanning three years, the book focuses on the different perspectives of the managers and the workers and the effects of the organization on their lives. It highlights the increasing value of Automobili Lamborghini for the VW Group globally.
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
This book analyses how changing national politics impacted the practices of care, aid and community organizing within two London-based food co-ops at a time of rapid welfare withdrawal. It highlights the tensions between more radical and neoliberal imaginaries that played out within them.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
An enlightening reassessment of migrant moral economies, Transnationalities of Migrant Moral Economies in a Transforming World examines the transformative potential of transnational mobility to create social networks capable of resisting authoritarianism and of rethinking reciprocity in a rapidly changing world.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
This book is a comprehensive feminist examination of women's diverse experience in Israeli society over four decades and analyzes society during this time. As an ethnography, the book emphasizes a commitment to social justice and equality, and challenges prevailing social and gender research approaches.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
The expanding mining industry in the Indigenous Atacameño-Likanantay territories in the hyper-arid Salar de Atacama in Chile are linked to the ecological harm to groundwater. The book addresses recent socioeconomic and political conditions it calls ‘advanced extractivism’ and asks how both ecological harm and mining economies are sustained.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Sustainable Development Goals
Management is everywhere. Schools teach it and professional organisations counsel about it. Books and articles are written for managers and about them. Management is usually understood in terms of styles of management, management policies and successful management but few tend to think about management in an abstract sense. This book addresses this gap.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Applied Anthropology Sociology
In this enlightening ethnography of the Manangi, a Buddhist trading community from northern Nepal, Prista Ratanapruck highlights the way social institutions have boosted Manangi trade opportunities. Examining how capital production and accumulation interacts with the Manangi’s pursuit of social and spiritual aspirations, Market and Monastery illuminates an intriguing form of capitalism.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Anthropology (General)
Colonial Intervention and Destabilization of African Identities takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine how external forces and African elite impose trusteeship practices on Africans to construct and consolidate hierarchical power relations in African societies that infantilize Africans and dispossess them off their resources.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Development Studies
Against a background marked by endless ordinary crises, widespread precarity, and disrupting critical events, Queer and Trans Life charts queer investments in futurity. It presents emerging queer and trans anthropological research in and about European contexts.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality
Traveling Models and Practical Norms examines how different modes of governance that deliver services of general interest experience significant gaps between explicit rules of the game and implicit practices, between planned actions and daily routines.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies
Advocating for an interdisciplinary Marxist anthropology of the present, this book uses historical and global anthropology to engage with history, theory, unevenness, and comparison, while using “global ethnography” and “hidden histories” as the keys to social discovery.
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
An illuminating examination of activism networks run for, by, and with girls and young women globally, Girls Take Action highlights the myriad ways girls and young women are exercising their agency in the face of injustice, considering especially the role collaboration plays in creating a more transnational understanding of girlhood.
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology 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
With contributions from scholars within and outside the region, this book promotes new thinking on protection of refugees and on resolving tensions between states, actors and institutions involved in humanitarian action in Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
An illuminating and geographically wide-ranging reassessment of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, this volume reconsiders how this watershed treaty gave rise to new dynamics of global power and politics, reshaping the ideas of imperiality and nationality that have continued to shape the geopolitical landscape.
Subjects: History: World War I Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies
This book is an anthropological account of a group of middle and upper-class Gitanos and their ways of creating a ‘society within society’ based upon distinct cultural, moral and ideological values, notions and practices.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
This book illustrates that tuition space acts as an important site for identity formation and placemaking, where students play out their cosmopolitan aspirations whilst acquiring educational capital. It focuses on narratives of female Sinhalese students attending a national school in the Central Province of Sri Lanka.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Educational Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality Sustainable Development Goals
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
A fastidious investigation into the nature of self-identity, Silent Dilemmas of Project Managers uses the context of project management to challenge the perceived separation of objective experience from subjective perception, highlighting how these adopted self-notions act as the object of existential anxiety.
Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology
For decades, the heartland of Myanmar has been configured as a pacified space under military surveillance. A closer look reveals how politics is enacted at distance with the state. Calibrated Engagement weaves together ethnography and history to chronicle the transformation of rural politics in Anya, the dry lands of central Myanmar.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies
Tactical Citizenships is a testament to the tenacity and resourcefulness of marginalized individuals in directing their relations with the state. It explores the troubled relationship between a state and its citizens across four different kinds of social spaces in Limassol, Cyprus.
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
In refugee camps all over the world, refugees are forced to secure their own access to energy and are provided with limited cooking resources and minimal electricity. Voices in the Dark draws upon a decade of original research to provide evidence on the energy lives of refugees.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Polarizing images of China’s authoritarian, socialist or culturalist otherness limit state analyses but produce political effects. In an ecological village in Sichuan, potential supporters saw citizen participation as Western liberalism, Maoism or traditional rural culture. This book shows how contrasting judgments emerged from diverse repertoires through which multiple boundaries between state and non-state were performed.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
After the end of the Second World War, major federally funded industries in Australia depended on the employment of large numbers of refugees displaced by the war. This book aims to bring to the foreground post-war industry and immigration to comprehensively document a uniquely Australian shaping of the built environment.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
In exploring the insights that the Australian case has for theorising civil-military relations, the book serves as a model for other country case studies. This antipodean contribution to the field includes analysis of the changing demographics, new domestic and international responsibilities, Industry-Defence cooperation, women in the armed forces and contemporary veteran wellbeing.
Subjects: Sociology Peace and Conflict Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Based on ethnographic studies in various geographical and bureaucratic contexts, this collection shows how civil servants produce statehood, restrict migrants’ movements and engage with migrants’ strategies to make themselves legible. It contributes to the study of the state as documentary practice and highlights the role of paperwork as powerful practice of migration control.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
The State Otherwise examines the difficult predicament of Beirut’s public green spaces from the vantage point of the civic campaign to reopen Horsh al Sanawbar, the city’s largest public park. It asks questions about the nature of privatisation of public property, civic society’s potential to mobilise individuals and the role of public authorities in promoting the public good.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
The construction of the Merowe Dam along the Nile in northern Sudan flooded local villages and forced thousands of inhabitants to flee to higher ground. This book follows the Manasir people’s attempts to resist state-run resettlement schemes, preserve their homeland, and try out meaningful ways of life along the emerging reservoir.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
This book heralds an exciting new frontier by bringing together some of the leading ethnographers of Italy and placing together their contributions into the broader realm of anthropological history, culture and new perspectives in Europe.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
The Global Life of Mines provides a comprehensive framework examining the spatial and temporal relationships between mining and postmining as interrelated and coexisting features within the global minescape.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Development Studies
Lives in Limbo gives voice to the dreams of Syrian youth who have little hope of returning to their devastated homeland and explains why this generation’s future will shape how the region will develop. It explores how refugee youth create futures from the liminality of exile.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Rethinking the contributions of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology for political ethnography, the Politics of Relations elaborates its relational approach to the state along four interlaced axes of research – embeddedness, boundary work, modalities and strategic selectivity – that enable thick comparisons across spatio-temporal scales of power.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Malinowski’s pioneering work remains critical for anthropology in a postcolonial age. This volume uses ethnographic studies from around the world to contextualize the work politically and intellectually, examining its gestation and influence from multiple perspectives.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
Discussing the notions around social dynamics, Crypto Crowds explores how crowd and community formations manifest empirically in cryptocurrency sociality online. Pioneering in its approach to the increasing digitalization and datafication of everyday life, the volume encourages scholars explore further how ‘decentralized’ and ‘trustless’ technologies take part in the construction of postmodern crowds.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
The industrial workers of Ukraine have a contradictory and complex political lifeworld. Based on three years of fieldwork in the city of Kryvyi Rih, this book focuses on the everyday politics and moral economy that constitute the working-class and structures its relations with other social groups.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Urban Studies
Syria’s massive displacement (2012–present) is one of the largest, most complex and intractable humanitarian emergencies today. Urban Displacement examines multiple dimensions of this crisis from political and socioeconomic predicaments to questions of social belonging, the complexity of the international, regional and national responses and how they affect urban spaces.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Embodying Exchange addresses the infrastructural, legal and moral complexities in contemporary world trade through an ethnographic analysis of the interface of multinational brand manufacturers and popular traders in the Bolivian Andes.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies
In a global perspective of fast transforming social spaces that moves from East to West, Insidious Capital explores the struggles around the exploitation and valuation of labor, environmental politics, expansion of the ground rent, new hierarchies, the contradictions of higher education, the off-shoring of ‘immaterial’ labor, the illiberal right, and the mobilizations against it.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Sustainable Development Goals
Exploring compliance from an anthropological perspective, this book offers a varied selection of chapters covering taxation, corporate governance, medicine, development, carbon offsetting, irregular migration and the building trade, compliance emerges as more than the opposite of resistance.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Sustainable Development Goals
Through detailed archaeological case study, a multiregional approach and a theoretical approach around agencies and individuality, this volume focuses on the diversity of the population that participated in the maritime network of France through the 17th to the 19th century and whose agency and importance is often overlooked.
Subjects: Archaeology Colonial History Political and Economic Anthropology
Offering a critical perspective on the concept of radicalisation, this volume views it from the perspective of social actors who engage in radicalising milieus but have not crossed the threshold into violent extremism. The volume brings together contributions based on extensive empirical research conducted as part of a cross-European study of young people's engagement in ‘extreme right’ and ‘Islamist’ milieus.
Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Today the UNHCR is present in more than 130 countries and takes care of some 90 million people. This book looks at how it is deployed and who its agents are. By taking the reader through the offices in charge of the Afghan refugee crisis during the 2000s, in Geneva and in Kabul, the book shows the internal functioning of this international organization.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies
Acknowledging that low economic development and high climate costs do not equitably coexist, this collected volume interrogates the challenge for disaster-prone territories to determine supplemental strategies for restructuring and redesigning their environment.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Sustainable Development Goals
Paperback available
The Poor Laws in the United Kingdom left a built and material legacy of over two centuries of legislative provision for the poor and infirm. Workhouses represent the first centralized, state-organized system for welfare. This volume forms a social archaeology of the lived experience of poverty and health in the nineteenth century.
Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Of Hoarding and Housekeeping provides an anthropological, global, and comparative angle to the understanding of hoarding and decluttering. Focusing on the house, with careful attention to material flows in and out, this book examines practices of accumulation, storage, decluttering, and waste as practices of kinship and the objects themselves as material kin.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Cultural Studies (General)
Farmers, Indigenous organisations, government and private-sector intermediaries from remote Northern Australia often negotiate with private finance capital to gain funds for agricultural development.This book demonstrates that while financialisation is a useful signifier of patterns of global change, it is assembled by a diverse range of often contradictory work.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Sustainable Development Goals
Paying close attention to how people speak about themselves and their acceptance and rejection by others, this book provides an intimate account of the challenges faced by the millions of people in France—and throughout Western Europe—who fully participate in the life of their country but are often not seen as belonging there.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
Paperback available
Exploring the themes of nature, race, and the divine, this book identifies the more realistic alternative in the “relational subject”: a subject that is inseparable from the global field of relations through which it emerges and yet distinct from that field because it lives a life that no one else ever has.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Paperback available
People buy and sell human remains online. Most of this trade these days is over social media. In a study of this ‘bone trade’, how it works, and why it matters, the authors review and use a variety of methods drawn from the digital humanities to analyze the sheer volume of social media posts in search of answers to questions regarding this online bone trade.
Subjects: Archaeology Heritage Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
All over the world, people deliberately disappear from their families, communities and the state’s bureaucratic gaze, as victims of oppressive regimes or while migrating along clandestine routes. This edited volume brings together scholars who engage ethnographically with such disappearances in various cultural, social and political contexts.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Memory Studies
During the past two decades Ecuadorians have engaged in a national debate around Buen Vivir (living well). This ethnography discusses one of the ways in which people experience well-being or aspire to live well in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Waponi Kewemonipa (living well) is a Waorani notion that embraces ideas of good conviviality, health and certain ecological relations.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Paperback available
Tax and taxation are conventionally understood as the embodiment of social contract. This ground-breaking collection of essays challenges this truism, examining what tax might tell us about the limits of social-contract thinking.
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Based on a long-term study of the everyday postsocialist politics of labour in the wider context of intense socio-economic transformation in Bulgaria, this book tells the story of the flexibilization of production, the precaritization of work, shifting managerial practices, and ways in which people with different employment statuses live and work together.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality
Bringing together new research by leading scholars, this volume rethinks the role played by militaries in politics. The volume introduces new theories of military politics, arguing against the inherited theories and practices of civil-military relations, and presents rich new data on senior officership and on the intersection of military politics and military operations.
Subjects: Sociology Peace and Conflict Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Studying the German-Polish ethnic relations, this book analyses the people and region through their respective borderlands, migration, official cooperation and unofficial suspicions across the border.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology History: 20th Century to Present
Presenting a new interpretation of entrepreneurial behaviour, this book focuses on how entrepreneurs consider the future. The study theorizes entrepreneurial behaviour as ‘future-work’: the social practices, language and rituals through which entrepreneurs neutralize or smoothen future unknowns.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Through a series of case studies in diverse regions of the world, this book explores how transnational Norwegian energy and extractive industries handle corporate social responsibility (CSR) when operating abroad.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Paperback available
The idea of an informal economy emerged from, and is a critique of, the ideology of ‘economic development’. It originated from Keith Hart’s recognition of informal economic activity in 1960s Ghana. In the context of four colonialisms – German, British, Australian and Dutch – this book recounts Hart’s effort in 1972 to introduce the informal ‘sector’ into development planning in Papua New Guinea.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Colonial History
Drawing on an ethnography of Sherbro coastal communities in Sierra Leone, this book analyses the politics and practice of identity through the lens of the reciprocal relations that exist between socio-ethnic groups. Anaïs Ménard examines the implications of the social arrangement that binds landlords and strangers in a frontier region, the Freetown Peninsula, characterized by high degrees of individual mobility and social interactions.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies
Paperback available
A cross-disciplinary volume that combines and puts into dialogue perspectives on disasters, this book includes contributions from anthropology, history, cultural studies, sociology, and literary studies. Offering a rich and diverse set of arguments and analyses on the ever-relevant theme of catastrophe in the circum-Caribbean, it will encourage debate and collaboration between scholars working on disasters from a range of disciplinary perspectives.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General) Sociology
Paperback available
Inspired by the idea of revolution and excitement about the ways archaeology is being used in social justice arenas, this volume seeks to visualize archaeology as part of a movement by redefining what archaeology is and does for the greater good.
Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Examining the interaction between families and professionals in the child welfare system of New York, this book focuses on how inequalities are reproduced, measured, managed, and contested. The book describes how state institutions and neoliberal governance intersect police the groups which are most represented in the child welfare system, including low income, female-headed families living in racialized neighborhoods.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Contributing to the history of anthropology, this book looks at the Porto School of Anthropology and analyses the life and work of its main mentor – Mendes Correia (1888-1960). Focused on Portugal, the analysis is also comparative with other international contexts.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
The global pandemic has offered extraordinary opportunities for extremists and terrorists to mobilize themselves and revive as more powerful actors in the security landscape. But could these threat groups actually capitalize on the coronavirus crisis and advance their malevolent agendas? This book provides, for the first time, a true picture of novel trends since the pandemic outbreak.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology of Religion
Paperback available
The American war against Iraq has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and displaced millions of people. Between 2003 and 2017, more than 172,000 Iraqis resettled in the United States. This book explores the experiences of fifteen of them and presents insights into the core experience of life as a refugee from war.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
As violent conflict has declined in northern Uganda, tensions and mistrust concerning land have increased. Residents try to deal with acquisitions by investors and exclusions from forests and wildlife reserves. Using extended case studies, collaborating researchers analyze the principles and practices that shape access to land. Contributors examine the multiplicity of land claims, the nature of transactions, and the management of conflicts.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Sociology
Paperback available
Over the last decade, Nepal has witnessed significant urban growth and an expanding urban middle class. Glimpses of Hope tells the story of the people who enable some of the middle class consumer practices in urban Nepal. The book focuses on workers in modern food-processing, water-bottling, house building, and sand-mining industries and explores how workers see such forms of work, where union organization can help, and how work opportunities emerge along lines of gender and ethnicity.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology
Tap water enables the development of cities in locations with insufficient natural resources to support such populations. This archaeological examination of the New York City watershed reveals the cultural costs of urban water systems. Urban water systems do more than reroute water from one place to another. At best, they redefine communities. At worst, they erase them.
Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Paperback available
Leading us beyond current narratives on the decline of kinship which assume kinship’s existence since the dawn of civilization, The Politics of Making Kinship interrogates kinship’s geneses, constructions, elaborations, implementations, and enforcing agents across a long view of European history, and demonstrates how kinship is woven through modern societies.
Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
Employing methodological perspectives from the fields of political geography, environmental studies, anthropology, and their cognate disciplines, this volume explores alternative logics of sentient landscapes as racist, xenophobic, and right-wing.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Paperback available
Drawing on his research in five Latin American countries, Steve Gudeman describes his anthropological fieldwork, bringing to life the excitement of gaining an understanding of the practices and ideas of others as well as the frustrations. He weaves into the text some of his findings as well as reflections on his own background that led to better fieldwork but also led him astray.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology
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Dealing with the dynamics of identification and conflict, this book uses theoretical orientations ranging from political ecology to rational choice theory, interpretive approaches, Marxism and multiscalar analysis. Case studies set in Africa, Europe and Central Asia are grouped in three sections devoted to pastoralism, identity and migration.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies
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With the growing numbers of displaced populations and the rise in the politics of fear and hate, we are facing challenges to our very ‘species-being’. Papers in the volume include ethnographic studies on the ‘refugee crisis’, the ‘financial crisis’ and the ‘rule of law’ crisis in the Mediterranean as well as the crisis of violence and hunger in South America.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies
Claims around 'who deserves what and why' moralise inequality in the current global context of unprecedented wealth and its ever more selective distribution. Ethnographies of Deservingness explores this seeming paradox and the role of moralized assessments of distribution by reconnecting disparate discussions in the anthropology of migration, economic anthropology and political anthropology.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology Sustainable Development Goals
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Based on ethnographic work in a Moldovan winemaking village, Wine Is Our Bread shows how workers in a prestigious winery have experienced the country’s recent entry into the globalized wine market and how their productive activities at home and in the winery contribute to the value of commercial terroir wines.
Subjects: Food & Nutrition Political and Economic Anthropology
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Set in the resource frontier of northeastern Turkey, Bulldozer Capitalism studies the rise and decline of an anti-dam/anti-displacement campaign and the political responses to other extractive projects that it helped to shape in its aftermath.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Sustainable Development Goals
Through a wide range of ethnographic contexts this book explores how practices and moralities of thrift are intertwined with austerity, debt, welfare, and patronage across various social and temporal scales and are constantly re-negotiated at the nexus of socio-economic, religious, and kinship ideals and praxis.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Reexamining a classical work of Social Anthropology, African Political Systems (1940), edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, this book looks at the colonial and academic context from which the work arose, as well as its reception and its subject matter and looks at how the work can help with analysis of current politics in Africa.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Colonial History Development Studies
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Climate change is a slowly advancing crisis sweeping over the planet and affecting different habitats in strikingly diverse ways. While nations have signed treaties and implemented policies, most actual climate change assessments, adaptations, and countermeasures take place at the local level. This book portrays the diversity of explanations and remedies as expressed at the community level.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Urban Studies Sustainable Development Goals
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Refugees on the Move highlights and explores the profound complexities of the current refugee issue by focusing specifically on Syrian refugees in Turkey and other European countries and responses from the host countries involved. The book examines the causes of the movement of refugee populations, and host governments’ attempts to manage and overcome the so-called “refugee crisis”.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
The mortgaging of land is not just economic and legal but also social and cultural. Here, anthropologists, historians, and economists explore origins, variations, and meanings of the land mortgage, and the risks to homes and livelihoods.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
Understanding the Islamic State’s ideologues as ‘entrepreneurs of identity’, this book explores how the group defined categories of social identity and used these categories as tools of communicative and cognitive structuring.
Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies
To tackle the vast numbers of internally displaced people, a UN regime has emerged that seeks to replicate the long-established regime of refugee protection by applying international law and humanitarian assistance to citizens within their own borders. This book looks at the origins, structure and impact of this new UN regime and whether it is fit for purpose.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies
While it is widely acknowledged that climate change is among the greatest global challenges of our times, it has local implications too. This volume forefronts these, giving anthropology a voice in this great debate, which natural scientists and policy makers have dominated thus far.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Urban Studies Sustainable Development Goals
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The idea of a moral economy has been explored and assessed in numerous disciplines. The anthropological studies in this volume provide a new perspective to this idea by showing how the relations of workers, employees and employers, and of firms, families and households are interwoven with local notions of moralities.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
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Primarily on the basis of ethnographic case-studies from around the world, this volume links investigations of work to questions of personal and professional identity and social relations. The authors uncover complex entanglements between the drudgery and exploitation experienced by most people in the course of making a living and ideals of emancipated personhood.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Looking at refugee protection in Latin America, this landmark edited collection assesses what the region has achieved in recent years. The book analyses Latin America’s main documents in refugee protection, evaluates the particular aspects of different regimes, and reviews their emergence, development and effect, to develop understanding of refugee protection in the region.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
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Reviewing current policies and practices, the book assesses the financial, economic and physical risk of building in hazardous areas, and looks at how societies are trying to create a more resilient built environment in spite of the dangers.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Paperback available
At a time of rising global economic precarity and social inequality, the field of economic anthropology offers solutions through the study of local and contextualized economic practices. This book is made up of an exciting collection of succinct essays authored by leading scholars primarily from the field of economic anthropology.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Sustainable Development Goals
Paperback available
Sovereignty is a significant force regarding the ownership, use, protection and management of natural resources. By placing an emphasis on the complex intertwined relationship between natural resources and diverse claims to resource sovereignty, this book reveals the backstory of contemporary resource contestations in Latin America and their positioning within a more extensive history of extraction in the region.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies Sustainable Development Goals
Paperback available
Merchant Kings offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the rapid industrialization of the Netherlands and its colonial holdings in Java during the nineteenth century. By placing colony and metropole into a single analytical frame, it offers a bracing new approach to understanding the development of modern corporations within the context of empire.
Subjects: Colonial History History: 18th/19th Century Political and Economic Anthropology
Energetic infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Paperback available
This is the first comprehensive economic history of the Basotho people of Southern Africa and spans from the 1820s to the present day. The book documents what the Basotho have done on their own account, focusing on their systematic exclusion from trade and their political efforts to insert themselves into their country’s commerce.
Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Colonial History
The Frieda River area in Papua New Guinea is home to one of the biggest undeveloped gold and copper deposits in the Pacific. This book offers an account of local stakeholder strategies as they unfolded at Frieda over forty years and provides a strong and novel commentary on sustainability and social accountability of the mining industry operating in indigenous territories.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Facing the Crisis brings together ethnographic material from anthropological research projects carried out in various Italian industrial locations during the last economic crisis. With its wide number of locations and industries, the volume looks at all corners of the diverse Italian manufacturing system.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Beginning with an original historical vision of financialization in human history, this volume then continues with a rich set of contemporary ethnographic case studies from Europe, Asia and Africa. Authors explore how finance influences social and economic structures in different environments.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology History (General)
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Germany has one of the most lively and well-developed punk scenes in the world. However, punk in this country is not just a style-based music community. This book provides an anthropological examination of how punk reflects the larger changes and contradictions in post-reunification Germany.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
From credit cards to cryptocurrencies, online and mobile money, remittances, and demonetization policies, cashless infrastructures are becoming increasingly common around the world. Who’s Cashing In? explores how different modes of cashlessness impact, transform and challenge the everyday lives and livelihoods of local communities in multiple regional contexts.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sustainable Development Goals
After the revolution of 2011, the electoral victory of the Islamist party ‘Ennahdha’ allowed previously silenced religious and conservative ideas about women’s right to abortion. This book explores the changes and continuity in the local discourses and practices related to the body in Tunisia during this time.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology
Moshe Shokeid narrates his experiences as a member of AD KAN (NO MORE), a protest movement of Israeli academics at Tel Aviv University, who fought against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, founded during the first Palestinian intifada/uprising (1987-1993).
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Jewish Studies Anthropology (General) Educational Studies
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After over a decade of austerity in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, what lies next for European societies? This edited 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.
Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology History (General) Sustainable Development Goals
The left-wing Pink Tide movement that swept across Latin America seems to now be overturned, as a new wave of free-market thinkers emerge across the continent. This book analyses the emergence of corporate power within Latin America and the response of egalitarian movements across the continent trying to break open the constraints of the state.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
Investigates the political reasons for South Africa adopting an allegedly self-regulating market despite its disastrous effects and identifies the colonialist ideas of property rights as a mainstay of the existing social order.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology
Thirty years after the collapse of Communism, and at a time of radically diverse kinds of identity politics, including anti-migrant, anti-Roma, anti-Muslim and anti-establishment movements, this book analyses how Roma identity is expressed in contemporary Europe.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Traditionally viewed as an abstraction, the quantative nature of money is essential in evaluating the relationship between monetary systems and society. Money Counts moves beyond abstraction, exploring the conceptual diversity and everyday enactment of money’s quantity.
Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Informed by Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, published in 1969, this book examines selected peasant struggles in seven Latin American countries during the last fifty years and suggests the continuing relevance of Wolf’s approach.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
Following the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of the elite in Pakistan. In doing so, it reveals the daily, even mundane, ways in which elites contribute to and shape the inequality that characterises the modern world.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
How do states become donors? Why do individuals decide to share their wealth with others through foreign aid? Using examples from Poland, Elżbieta Drążkiewicz demonstrates how the concept of foreign aid requires the establishment of a specific moral economy which links national ideologies and local cultures of charitable giving with broader ideas about the global political economy.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sustainable Development Goals
By drawing parallels between the past and present – for example, the coal mines of the nineteenth-century northeastern Pennsylvania and the sweatshops of the twenty-first century in Bangladesh – we can have difficult conversations about the past and advance our commitment to address social justice issues.
Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getúlio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. Brazilian Steel-Town tells the story of the people tied to this ailing giant – of their fears, hopes, and everyday struggles.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Urban Studies Sociology
How have African moral worlds changed since the 1990s? Regimes of Responsibility in Africa analyses the transformations that discourses and practices of responsibility have undergone in Africa. The work enters into a dialogue with the emerging corpus of studies in the field of ethics, providing to it a set of analytical perspectives that can help further enlarge its theoretical and geographical scope.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
Water, Life, and Profit offers a holistic analysis of the people, economies, cultural symbolism, and material culture involved in the management, production, distribution, and consumption of drinking water in the urban context of Niamey, Niger. Keough and Youngstedt offer new insights into the lived experiences of gender, ethnicity, class, and spatial structure in Niamey’s water economies today.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Paperback available
Since the Colonial era, gambling has come to dominate nighttime activity in Papua New Guinea. This richly detailed ethnography intersects with theories of money, value, play, money, exchange, informal economy, materiality, social change, leadership, and the anthropology of Melanesia.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General)
Based on ethnographic research conducted during several years, Market Frictions examines the tensions and frictions that emerge from the interaction of global market forces, urban planning policies, and small-scale trading activities in the Vietnamese border city of Lào Cai.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology
Political Networks and Social Movements examines the relationship between the State and social movements under the administration of current Bolivian president Evo Morales. Author Soledad Valdivia Rivera analyzes how this linkage has come to transform the essence of the Bolivian political process as we know it.
Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology History (General)
Looks at how get-rich-quick schemes manifest themselves in a Siberian town. By focusing on the social dynamics of these popular economies, Leonie Schiffauer provides insights into how capitalist logic is learned and negotiated, and how it affects local realities in a post-Soviet environment.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology
Planning Labour explores the early socialist industrialization and the implementation of central economic planning in Romania between 1945 and 1955. Centered on the city of Cluj, an ethnically mixed city in the northwestern part of Romania, this volume examines the deeply contradictory process required for achieving socialist accumulation.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Political and Economic Anthropology
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Through theoretical contributions and case studies focusing on South Africa and Zimbabwe, this volume attempts to rethink (and unthink) development discourses and practices in southern Africa. The authors explore the ways in which legacies of colonialism impact development, as well as other factors such as regional politics, corruption, and socio-economic and cultural barriers.
Subjects: Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Paperback available
Focusing on Italy and the Netherlands since the 1970s, Party Responses to Social Movements demonstrates how political parties have incorporated the demands of social movements to a surprising extent, even as both have grappled with fundamental and inevitable tension between their respective roles and aims.
Subjects: Sociology Peace and Conflict Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Combining in-depth anthropological studies with more long-term analyses, this volume examines the responses to and implications of the arrival in 2015 and 2016 of over one million asylum seekers and refugees in Germany – widely seen as the most major and contested social change in the country since reunification.
Subjects: Sociology Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
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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
Paperback available
This book explores the “associational revolution” in post-socialist, post-conflict Serbia. It traces the boom of local NGOs since the 1990s in the context of the global political economy of Aid, neoliberal state restructuring, and shifting post-Cold War hegemonies, and unpacks the various forms of dispossession and inequality entailed in the democracy-promotion project.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
This volume brings together new empirical research into how the process of European integration has played out in Sweden. Europeanization in Sweden not only offers insights into how Europeanization is enacted on the ground, but also addresses the question of whether and how the “Swedish model” can guide European integration.
Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
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In the context of dramatic changes and processes of “glocalization” across the Pacific region, and avoiding conventional “local-global” dichotomies, this volume explores the new and multifaceted forms of resistance and resilience through which communities attempt to regain their original social, political, and economic status and structure after disruption or displacement.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
What happens to people, places, and things that do not fit the progressive, ordering narratives of capitalism and modernity? This volume explores the indeterminacy left behind by conventional understandings of progress and shows how totalizing forward movement may be resisted by fragments, open-endedness, and the possibility of going nowhere at all.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
An ethnography of elite polygamy in urban Malaysia, this volume explores the impact this growing practice has on Malay gender relations, examining the varied and often-conflicted polygamy narratives of elite Malay women, who manage their lives and loves under the “threat” of husbands able to marry another woman without their knowledge or consent.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Cash transfer programs have become the preferred channel for delivering emergency aid or tackling poverty in low-and middle-income countries. This book sheds light on their unpredicted consequences worldwide, detailing how they are used by actors to pursue their own strategies and how local populations relate to the external norms they impose.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
This volume examines the relationship between corporate and economic wrongdoing and the neoliberal policies and practices that have been influential in Western societies since around 1980, considering whether neoliberalism has affected the likelihood that people and firms will act in ways that many would consider wrong – and even fragmented our very ideas of economic right and wrong.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Drawing on ethnographic data from fairs in the Southern Andes involving highland herders and lowland cultivators, Barter and Social Regeneration in the Argentinean Andesadvances an anthropology of the practice of barter, contributing to a fuller understanding of how social groups create themselves through material circulation.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Exploring contemporary debates and developments and gathering together contributors from activism, academia, and the worlds of policy and development, this volume argues for taking up reflexivity as practice in in Roma-related research and forms of activism, and advocates a necessary renewal of research sites, methods, and epistemologies.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Branding in Modern History draws from a variety of international case studies, ranging from Austria and Switzerland to Chile, the US, China, Spain, Suriname, and Poland to investigate the nexus between cultural marketing, self-representation and political power by looking at current nation branding campaigns as well as its historical predecessors.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Political and Economic Anthropology Media Studies
Paperback available
All or None is a social history and anthropological study of the world’s oldest voluntary collective farms in Ravenna, Italy, addressing the question of the viability of cooperative enterprise as a potential solution for displaced workers, and as a more humane alternative to capitalist agribusiness.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
The first of its kind, this volume explores refugee resettlement as a form of humanitarian governance; it offers a detailed understanding of resettlement practices, from the selection of refugees to their long-term integration in resettling states, and highlights the relevance of a lifespan approach to resettlement analysis.
Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Since its sovereign debt crisis in 2009, Greece has been living under austerity. This volume explores the effects of austerity policies on politics, health care, education, media, and other areas, and examines the crisis as the context for changing attitudes in Greek society regarding immigration, crime, minorities, consumption and more.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Pilgrimage has always had a tendency to follow – and sometimes create – trade routes. This volume explores how wider factors behind transnational and global mobility have impacted on pilgrimage activity across the world, and examines the ways in which pilgrimage relates to migration, diaspora, and political cooperation or conflict across nation-states.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Political and Economic Anthropology
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Frontiers of Civil Society is a historical anthropological analysis of the roles of ‘civil society’ in Serbia’s postsocialist and postauthoritarian transformation, focusing mainly on a set of interventions through which various civil society forces supported neoliberalization and transnational integration as part of a hegemonic project of social transformation after the rule of Slobodan Milošević.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology History: 20th Century to Present
The first in-depth ethnographic monograph on the New Right in Central and Eastern Europe, The Revolt of the Provinces explores the making of right-wing hegemony in Hungary over the last decade, focusing on interaction between social antagonisms emerging on the local level and struggles waged within the political public sphere.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Paperback available
Viewing the significant urban insurrections of past decades with an anthropological eye, Worldwide Mobilizations argues that transformations of urban class relationships must be approached in a way that is both globally and locally informed, and contends that every case of urban mobilization should be understood against its precise context in the global capitalist transformation.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Urban Studies
Despite high degrees of cultural and ethnic diversity as well as prevailing political instability, Guinea-Bissau’s population has developed a strong sense of national belonging. By examining contemporary and historical perspectives, A Creole Nation explores how creole identity, culture, and political leaders have influenced postcolonial nation-building processes in Guinea-Bissau.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Oil and Sovereignty explores the national and international strategies formulated to deal with the first oil crises in 1973-1974, as steadily increasing prices and reduced production raised the specter of an uncertain future for many.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Mobile money, e-commerce, cash cards, retail credit cards, and more — as new monetary technologies become increasingly available, the global South has embraced these mediums as a simple solution to the issue of financial inclusion. Money at the Margins is a groundbreaking exploration of the uses and socio-cultural impact of new forms of money and financial services.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General)
Paperback available
Bringing together ethnographic case studies of industrial labor from different parts of the world, Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism explores the increasing casualization of workforces and the weakening power of organized labor. By exploring this relationship, these essays question the claim that neoliberal ideology has become the new ‘commonsense’ of our times.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Over world history, Southeast Asia’s contribution to the world economy (during the late prehistoric and early historic periods) has not been given much attention. This book attempts to recalibrate these interactions of Southeast Asia with other parts of the world economy, and gives the region its due instead of treating it as little more than a region of peripheral entrepôts.
Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Messy Europe links theoretical insights to current discussions of crisis – economic and otherwise – showing how these shape the creation of subjectivities and identities. The chapters theorize “Europe” as a contested and fluid construction, and, by focusing on particular case studies, analyze how specific understandings of self and others occur in the crisis context.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Located in the far-western Tarai region of Nepal, Kailali has been the site of dynamic social and political change in recent history. The Partial Revolution examines Kailali in the aftermath of Nepal’s Maoist insurgency, focusing primarily on the end of Kailali’s feudal system of bonded labor.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies Peace and Conflict Studies
Paperback available
By exploring interactions and negotiations of local actors in different institutional settings, the contributors explore state transformations in relation to social security in a variety of locations spanning from Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans to the United Kingdom and France. Fusing grounded empirical studies with rigorous theorizing, the volume provides new perspectives to broader related debates in social research and political analysis.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
From Clans to Co-ops explores the social, political, and economic relations that enable the constitution of cooperatives through antimafia transformation of landholdings. The volume is the first monograph on Sicily’s rural antimafia movement, contributing to the anthropology and sociology of cooperatives, as well as to broader debates about small-scale democratic institutions, food movements and agrarian activism.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Food & Nutrition
Paperback available
This volume assembles detailed, empirically grounded studies of eleven former Soviet states and current EU members. Each chapter analyzes the political, economic, and social transformation processes that have taken place in a given nation, identifying structural similarities and assessing outcomes compared to one another as well as the rest of Europe.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
As global economic and population growth continues to skyrocket, increasingly strained resources have ignited the search for an alternative to capitalism. Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia outlines the urgent need to reevaluate the current system, and replace it with one capable of mobilizing people globally to prevent on-going human socio-economic, environmental degradation, and anthropogenic climate change.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
Paperback available
In the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro was not only home to the largest population of enslaved laborers in the Americas, but it was also the site of an incipient working-class consciousness across seemingly distinct social categories. This volume analyzes the diverse labor arrangements and associative life of Rio’s working class, from which emerged the strategies that workers free and unfree pursued against oppression.
Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Across thirteen case studies, this volume investigates the 1970s/80s “deregulatory moment” from a variety of historical perspectives, including transnational, comparative, pan-European, and national approaches. Collectively, they challenge an interpretive framework that treats individual decades in isolation and ignores broader trends that extend to the end of the Second World War.
Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology History: 20th Century to Present
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” and to highlight the mythical sources of the federalist project.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Media Studies
As critical voices question the quality, authenticity, and value of people, goods, and words in post-Mao China, accusations of emptiness render things open to new investments of meaning, substance, and value. Exploring the production of lack and desire through fine-grained ethnography, this volume examines how diagnoses of emptiness operate in a range of very different domains in contemporary China.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
In contrast to a social scientific literature that characterizes Polish civil society as weak and passive, this volume focuses on forms of collective action that researchers too often ignore due to their theoretical and methodological blind spots. It constitutes a powerful critique of a model of civil society that is ‘made from above’ by elites, media, and public institutions.
Subjects: Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Contributors to this volume attempt to think about money as a category of thought, offer theories on luxury and sex in capitalist development, and follow the evolution of money today from the role of the global South in shaping its future, to cross-border investment in China, to Bitcoin as politics. Money in a Human Economy offers multiple perspectives on capital’s central role in the formation of world society, as well as in the shaping of its current discontents.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Indigenist Mobilization explores the history of the dynamics between the Communist party in Kerala and indigenist activists, and the subtle ways in which global capitalist restructuring leads to a resonance of indigenist visions in the changed the everyday working lives and future aspirations of subaltern groups in Kerala.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
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
Paperback available
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 examines postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, finding that property reforms are not miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
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
There is surprisingly little fieldwork done in and on the United States by anthropologists from abroad. America Observed seeks to fill that gap by bringing into greater focus empirical as well as theoretical implications of this phenomenon for anthropological research and practice.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Based on fieldwork in Kinshasa and Paris, Breaking Rocks examines patronage payments within Congolese popular music. This book offers insights into both the ideologies of power and value in central Africa’s troubled post-colonial political economy, and the economic flows that make up the hidden side of the globalization.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General)
Paperback available
As Hitler consolidated power, German artisans emerged as an important Nazi constituency, drawn by the party’s rejection of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Yet, after 1945, they became one of the pillars of postwar stability. This volume gives the first account of this astonishing transformation, exploring how tradesmen helped to realize German democratization and recovery.
Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
Paperback available
Economic Citizenship explores shifting responsibility for the welfare of minority and poor citizens, which has shifted from states to local communities through neoliberalization. This has produced odd discursive blends of justice, solidarity, and wellbeing, and placed the languages of feminist and minority rights side by side with the language of apolitical consumerism.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
What makes people lose faith in democratic statecraft? The question seems an urgent one. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, citizens across the world have grown increasingly disillusioned with what was once a cherished ideal. The State We’re In is a must-read for all political theorists, scholars of democracy, and readers concerned for the future of the democratic ideal.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
From a multifaceted, global, and transnational perspective, the volume examines street vending and urban policies around the globe, comparing practices in the Global South to that in the Northern hemisphere. Essays show that though street vending activities vary depending on site-specific regulations, this urban practice also reveals global ties and developments.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
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The January 2015 shooting at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris sparked an enormous discussion among citizens and intellectuals worldwide. By analyzing the effects the attacks have had in various spheres of social life including the political, ideology, collective imaginaries, the media, and education, this collection aims to serve as a contribution and a critical response to that discussion.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Common sense suggests that rituals drain economic wealth and that rational actions are antithetical to rituals. These six ethnographies offer a different vision. Comparative, historical, and contemporary, the studies stretch from Macedonia to Kyrgyzstan, each one illuminating the changes in an area as it emerged from socialism and (re-)entered market society.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
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By providing a long-term historical perspective on Turkey's economy and its relationship to Islamism, this volume explores how Islamism as a political ideology has been utilized by the conservative bourgeoisie in Turkey, and elsewhere, to establish hegemony over labor.
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
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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.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies
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The Cold War was fought between “state socialism” and “the free market.” That fluctuating relationship between public power and private money continues today, unfolding in new and unforeseen ways during the economic crisis. Nine case studies -- from Southern Africa, South Asia, Brazil, and Atlantic Africa – examine economic life from the perspective of ordinary people in places that are normally marginal to global discourse, covering a range of class positions from the bottom to the top of society.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
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Six historical ethnographies stemming from fieldwork around the world offer a comparative perspective on the uneven consequences of and reactions to the anthropology of labor. The contributors’ vivid accounts show in how dispossession was lived by local working classes illustrates the defeat and unmaking of particular working classes.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
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“A cutting edge discussion between anthropology and the disciplines of history and geography, all through the lens of the politics of intellectual work. A paradigm of sensitive ethnographic work fused with broadly social/political theory, this book will pull in a lot of people looking to find their way out of a certain rabbit hole of recent academia.” · Neil Smith, Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Gavin Smith suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. He tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
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Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
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Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology
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Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
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Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Subjects: Applied Anthropology Political and Economic Anthropology
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In northwest Namibia, people’s political imagination offers a powerful insight into the post-apartheid state. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this book focuses on the former South African apartheid regime and the present democratic government; it compares the perceptions and practices of state and customary forms of judicial administration, reflects upon the historical trajectory of a chieftaincy dispute in relation to the rooting of state power and examines everyday forms of belonging in the independent Namibian State.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
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Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology
Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology
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Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology
Paperback available
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology
Paperback available