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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.

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.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, agricultural practices and rural livelihoods were challenged by changes such as commercialization, intensified global trade, and rapid urbanization. Planting Seeds of Knowledge studies the relationship between these agricultural changes and knowledge-making through a transnational lens.

Through extensive archival research and conversations with renowned publicists, musicians and insiders, author Michael Rauhut examines more than fifty texts to give an in-depth overview of the historical development of blues music in East and West Germany during the postwar period.

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

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.

Focusing on major shifts in East Germany leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall, End Game accounts for everyday life from the autumn of 1989 to the first free elections in March of 1990. With an understanding of the events of 1989 as a citizens’ movement as a whole, the volume contextualizes the societal reactions to a nation’s large scale political changes.

Focusing on African societies, Crypolitics brings together empirically grounded studies of digital media to draw out the significance of hidden information, double meanings, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages in negotiations of power relations.

By focusing on regional film markets in Thessasloniki, Sarajevo, and Tbilisi, Coproduction Europe uses comparative ethnography to look beyond the economic nature of film coproductions to explore their role in Europeanisation, memories of the Cold War, and preconstructed political agendas.

Set in a remote district of villagers and nomadic pastoralists in the northernmost part of Mongolia, this ethnography reveals an everyday universe where uncertain relations are as much internally cultivated in indigenous Mongolian perceptions of social relatedness, as it is externally confronted in postsocialist surroundings of unemployment and diminished social security.

Contrary to persistent depictions of an ethnically and economically homogeneous Japan, “ghetto” or “gangsta” J-hop music gives voice to the suffering, deprivation, and social exclusion experienced by many modern Japanese. 24 Bars to Kill gives a fascinating ethnographic account of this music as well as the subculture around it.

Estates and Constitution provides a rich account of Hungarian politics during the eighteenth century, restoring the Diet to its rightful place as one of the era’s major innovations in government. István M. Szijártó traces the religious, economic, and partisan forces that shaped the Diet, putting its historical significance in international perspective and demonstrating that it played a critical role in the eventual dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Focusing on mobility, religion, and belonging, the volume contributes to transatlantic anthropology and history by bringing together religion, cultural heritage and placemaking in the Atlantic world. The entanglements of religion, cultural heritage and belonging are ethnographically scrutinized to perceive the connections and disconnections of specific places.

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.

Focusing on contemporary ideas about how aged care is provided, this book poses the question: How can people who are aged and frail live out the final phase of their lives with dignity? In seeking answers, the author examines what it means to be ‘at home’ in residential care in a novel and compassionate way.

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.

Roma identities have often been presented in literature as collectively constructed and in opposition to those who are not Roma. Contesting Moralities challenges these preconceptions about Roma identification by disentangling the binaries between Roma and nonRoma, state and non-state, public and private. This book explores topics resonating in contemporary Romani studies that are in need of further exploration through individual perspectives.

The critique of twentieth-century American anthropology often portrays anthropologists of the past as servants of colonialism who “extracted” information from indigenous peoples and published works causing them harm. This volume presents powerful refutations of these damaging myths.

This volume advocates for an analytical focus on intellectual exchange, as well as producing an ethnographically informed framework for its study across cultures and contexts.

Sensitive Subjects examines how contemporary German-language cinema may be read as seeking to produce greater political sensitivity in audiences through its form—that is, by employing medium-specific devices such as lighting, sound, editing and mise-en-scène in ways that prompt a more critical stance towards the societies it depicts.

The studies in Working in Greece and Turkey provide an overdue exploration of labour history on both sides of the Aegean, before as well as after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Deploying the approaches of global labour history as a framework, this volume presents transnational, transcontinental, and diachronic comparisons that illuminate the shared history of Greece and Turkey.

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.

While human cannibalism has attracted considerable notice and controversy, certain aspects of the practice have received scant attention. These include the connection between cannibalism and xenophobia: the capture and consumption of unwanted strangers. Likewise ignored is the connection to slavery: the fact that in some societies slaves and persons captured in slave raids could be, and were, killed and eaten. This book explores these largely forgotten practices and ignored connections.

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.

Jane Ellen Harrison transformed the study of Greek religion with her discovery of a religious system predating that of the Olympic gods and goddesses familiar to the modern world. This book introduces her work and ideas, which have influenced and profoundly shaped scholarship, primarily in the classics, throughout the last century.

Taking an uncommonly focused lens against the deep and active role coffee had in connecting East Germans to a global market, Brewing Socialism uncovers the significance of East German efforts to democratize coffee and how that focus on material cultural informed the everyday life of the Social Unity Party’s conceptualization of a modern social utopia.

An in-depth analysis of German massacres in Poland over the whole period of German occupation during the Second World War, this innovative study recounts the widely forgotten ethnic Polish civilian victims. Using both German and Polish sources, In the Shadow of Auschwitz uncovers for the first time the depredations that were inflicted on Polish society under Nazi rule.

Authors investigate the multifaceted character of maritime landscapes and maritime oriented communities in California’s equally diverse cultural landscape; viewed through an archaeological lens, and emphasizing social behavior and community as material culture in order to reveal intersections and commonalities.

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.

The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Temple Tracks critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion.

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.

Sufism is known as the mystical dimension of Islam. Nasima Selim explores this definition to find out what it means to ‘breathe well’ along the Sufi path in the context of anti-Muslim racism. Breathing Hearts is the first book-length ethnographic account of Sufi practices and politics in Berlin.

Exploring notions of activism and space as narrated by Karen displaced persons and refugees in the Thai-Burma borderlands, this book looks beyond refugees as passive victims or a ‘humanitarian case’. Instead, the book examines the active engagement the Karen have with their persecution and displacement, and their subsequent emplacement in the borderlands.

Focused on the German-speaking parts of the former Habsburg Empire, this book offers a series of analyses of the interplay of nationalism’s discursive and institutional facets. Christian Karner develops a distinctive, longue durée perspective on Austrian nationalism, which traces nationalist politics from the late eighteenth century to today’s digital age.

Based on extensive research in Brandt’s personal archives, additional studies in international archives, and interviews with contemporary witnesses, this book traces Brandt’s nearly lifelong efforts towards the full reintegration of a united Germany into the community of European countries.

Yiddish Transformed explores Jewish reading practices alongside the rise of Yiddish in Eastern Europe between 1860 and 1914 by delving into publishing policies of Yiddish books and newspapers, popular literary genres of the time, the development of Jewish public libraries, as well as reflections of reading experiences in life stories.

This volume brings together leading scholars in Spanish and Latin American studies to explore the concept of the Spanish “public sphere” and its relation to society and political power over time. It offers a long-term, panoramic view—spanning from the Enlightenment to current developments in the EU—on one of the most urgent issues for contemporary European societies.

This volume brings together leading scholars in Spanish and Latin American studies to explore the concept of the Spanish “public sphere” and its relation to society and political power over time. It offers a long-term, panoramic view—spanning from the Enlightenment to current developments in the EU—on one of the most urgent issues for contemporary European societies.

Following the idea of Yugoslavism since its first public usage in 1849, Yugoslavia without Yugoslavs explains why the concept of Yugoslavia competed with Slavic, Serbian, and Croatian nationalistic ideas and failed just five years after its first nation state was established

During the nineteenth century, a change developed in the way architectural objects from the distant past were viewed by contemporaries. Architectural heritage often was (and still is) an important element of nation building. Authors address the process of building national myths around certain architectural objects. National narratives are questioned, as is the position architectural heritage played in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. 

Moving across disciplines, The Marseille Mosaic integrates a diverse range of sources and methods to reveal France’s second city in the national imagination as a critical site for postcolonial memory and urban transformation as they crucially interact with debates in contemporary French society.

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.

Invisible Labours traces women’s experiences of miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly in the second trimester before legal viability and shows how such events are positioned as less ‘real’ or significant when the foetal being does not, or will not, survive. It describes the reproductive politics of this specific category of pregnancy loss in England.

Black Schoolgirls in Space is a theoretical turn that advances the growing interest in transnational girlhoods by focusing on the Black girls as actors and agents in the construction of not only girlhood but also the educational worlds in which girlhoods are contained.

Deriving from innovative new work by six researchers, this book questions what the new media's role is in contemporary Africa. The focus is on media-related practices, which require engagement with different perspectives and concerns while situating these in a wider analytical context.

In a series of illuminating case studies, Curto follows the history and perception of major Portuguese colonial initiatives while integrating the complex perspectives of participating agents to show how the empire’s life and culture were richly inflected by the operations of imperial expansion.

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.

Focusing on the cases of Great Britain and France, this innovative study explores the discourses and narratives that arose in the wake of the incident among both state and nonstate actors. It gives a thorough account of the strategies that shaped Western European responses to the disaster as well as nuclear policy up to the present day.

Based on extensive narrative interviews, this collection of essays reflects on the participants’ individual experiences and represents the voices of staff and caregivers working in long-term residential care communities, in-home and community-based programs, as well as regional aging service providers and advocates.

There is a continuity of a cohesive system of symbols and patterns from the Paleolithic and the Neolithic that survives in present-day imagery. The understanding of commonalities underlying these seemingly distant cultures demonstrates that, despite appearances, there is more that unites us than that divides us.

Based on extensive narrative interviews, this collection of essays reflects on the participants’ individual experiences and represents the voices of staff and caregivers working in long-term residential care communities, in-home and community-based programs, as well as regional aging service providers and advocates.

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.

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

An exacting reassessment of neurodiversity within activist and artistic communities, Autistic Dreaming illuminates how the integration of neurodivergent perspectives within critical memory studies has the opportunity to expand ideas about the relationship between the individual and collective, and reform our method of remembrance.

Presenting the political and cultural processes that occur within the indigenous Sámi people of North Europe as they undergo urbanization, this book examines how they have retained their sense of history and culture in this new setting. The book is written by a team of researchers, mostly Sámi, from all the countries covered in the book.

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.

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.

Through a multidisciplinary approach, Limits of Life explores how the limitations and perceived finality of life and death are reconstituted through engagements with modern technology.

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.

Rest in Plastic gives an insight into local entanglements of death, synthetic materials and power in Ewe community. It shows how different materials and things that come to shape power relations, exist in a delicate balance between state and local governance, kin and outsiders, death and life, the invisible and the visible, movement and containment.

Rudolf Kjellén, regularly referred to as “the father of geopolitics”, developed in the first decade of the twentieth century an analytical model for calculating the capabilities of great-power states and promoting their interests in the international arena. Territory, State and Nation explores his century-long international scholarly impact, his analytical model, and his analyses of contemporary history.

Thinking Russia’s History Environmentallybrings together an international set of scholars to showcase the contribution that the study of Russian environments makes to the global environmental field. It challenges the stereotypes of Russian history, highlighting lesser-known features of the nation’s environments…

A Human Garden explains the longevity of the Ungemach Gardens, an experimental eugenic city that survived on the outskirts of Strasbourg from the 1920s to the 1980s. He reveals the inheritance of eugenics, examining ways in which eugenics have come to influence social, health, and educational policymaking in the post-war era.

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.