It happens among people

Written by eleven leading anthropologists from around the world, this volume extends the insights of Fredrik Barth, one of the most important anthropologists of the twentieth century, to push even further at the frontiers of anthropology.

Born a slave, died a pioneer

Few people in the history of the United States embody ideals of the American Dream more than Nathan Harrison. His is a story with prominent themes of overcoming staggering obstacles, forging something-from-nothing, and evincing gritty perseverance. This book uses spectacular recent discoveries ...

Shakespeare and money

Though better known for his literary merits, Shakespeare made money, wrote about money and enabled money-making by countless others in his name. With chapters by leading scholars on the economic, financial and commercial ramifications of his work, this multifaceted volume connects the Bard to b...

Money counts

Nourishing the nation

I thoroughly explore the connection between national identity (especially everyday nationalism) and food from an ethnographic perspective, a new approach in social sciences This is an in-depth ethnography into the contemporary situation in Catalonia, which gives greater, in-depth insight...

Social im/mobilities in africa

Grounded in both theory and ethnography, this volume insists on taking social positionality seriously when accounting for Africa’s current age of polarizing wealth. To this end, the notion of social im/mobilities emphasizes the complexities of current changes, taking us beyond the prism of a un...

On the edges of whiteness

From 1942 to 1950, nearly twenty thousand Poles found refuge from the horrors of World War II in camps within Britain’s African colonies, including Uganda, Tanganyika, and Kenya. On the Edges of Whiteness tells their improbable story, tracing the manifold, complex relationships that developed a...

Men under fire

In historical writing on World War I, Czech-speaking soldiers serving in the Austro-Hungarian military are primarily studied as Czechs, rarely as soldiers, and never as men. Men under Fire provides a groundbreaking analysis of this oft-overlooked cohort, drawing on a wealth of soldiers’ private...

Cyborg mind

How materials matter

Explores how design and innovation shape people’s lives in the Pacific. Focusing on plant materials from the region, it reveals ways in which a variety of people – from craftswomen and scientists to architects and politicians – work with materials to transform worlds.

Repair, brokenness, breakthrough

We are all repairers. Exploring some of the ways in which repair practices and perceptions of brokenness vary culturally Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough argues that repair is an attempt to extend the life of things as well as an answer to failures, gaps, wrongdoings and leftovers.

Critique of identity thinking

Michael Jackson’s response to our beleaguered age is to ask what forms of speech and action are called for in ‘dark times’. He argues that experiences that fall outside the concepts and categories we habitually deploy in rendering life manageable and intelligible have both critical and redempti...

Democracy's paradox

Does populism indicate a radical crisis in Western democratic political systems? Is it a revolt by those who feel they have too little voice in the affairs of state or are otherwise marginalized or oppressed? Or are populist movements part of the democratic process?

Velvet retro

This innovative study develops the concept of “retro” to describe the nuanced and ironic depiction of the past as seen in Czech popular culture. It locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature, film, and other cultural forms, enriching our understanding of not only the nation’s m...

Comrades in arms

Birds of passage

Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Malta, this book traces the complex interactions between hunters, birds and the landscapes they inhabit, as well as the dynamics and politics of bird conservation. Birds of Passage looks at the practice and meaning of hunting in a specific context, ...

Time work

Examining how people alter or customize various dimensions of their temporal experience, this volume discovers how we resist external sources of temporal constraint or structure. These ethnographic studies are international in scope and look at many different countries and continents.

Friendship without borders

Mixed harvest

After millennia of wandering the earth with little impact, a universal, if inadvertent transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and pastoralism was complete within a period of a few thousand years. Mixed Harvest tells the story of the Sedentary Divide, the most significant event sin...

Financialization

The sound of silence

 Combining Sámi perspectives and other Indigenous archaeologies  Offers new perspectives for understanding the role of material culture in transformation of indigenous cultures in colonial contact  Emphasizes local and indigenous histories and interpretations over Eurocentric ones

Navigating miscarriage

This collected volume explores miscarriage in diverse historical and cultural settings with contributions from anthropologists, historians and medical professionals. The book considers meanings attached to miscarriage and how religious, cultural, medical and legal forces impact the way miscarri...

Jaguars of the dawn

Drawing upon over a decade of extensive fieldwork in temples of the Vale do Amanhecer in Brazil and Europe, this ethnography explores how mediums understand their experiences and how they learn to establish relationships with their spirit guides.

Agency in transnational memory politics

Beyond filial piety

This volume explores emerging cultural meanings and social responses to population aging in contemporary East Asian societies. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, policy, archival, and media data, the authors trace both common patterns and diverging trends across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sin...

Playing with the past

Heritage is all around us, not just in monuments and museums, but in places that matter, the countryside and in collections and stories. It touches all of us. How do we decide what to preserve? And how do we make the case for heritage when there are so many other priorities? Playing with the Pa...

The girl in the text

How are girls represented in written and graphic texts, and how do these representations inform our understanding of girlhood? In this volume, contributors examine the girl in the text in order to explore a range of perspectives on girlhood across borders and in relation to their positionality.

Hazardous chemicals

(1) The long period of analysis: Unique is the approach to present several substance biographies which analyze the handling of various hazardous chemicals in different countries during the course of two centuries. (2) The comparative approach applied to several different substances, and...

Fierce medicines, fragile socialities

Comprehensive ethnographic case studies of people living with HIV and ARVs. In-depth observations of the infrastructural conditions and social dynamics shaping day-to-day work routines at Tanzanian HIV treatment centers. Focus on the financial and infrastructural fragilities of treat...

Structures of protection?

Questioning what shelter is and how we can define it, this volume brings together twenty-three essays on different forms of refugee shelter, with a view to widening public understanding about the lives of forced migrants and developing theoretical understanding of this oft-neglected facet of th...

Escapees

Escapes from deportation trains: First study of the phenomenon as Jewish resistance to National Socialistic persecution More than 750 escapees in Western Europe show various forms of motives and implementation (agency) First study of deportation train guards (who they were and how th...

In search of european liberalisms

This comprehensive study takes a fresh look at the diverse understandings and interpretations of the concept of liberalism in Europe during the last several centuries, encompassing not just the familiar movements, doctrines, and political parties that fall under the heading of “liberal” but als...

German railroads, jewish souls

This book centers around preeminent Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg’s landmark study of Nazi railways and their roles within the Jewish genocide. Supplemented with additional writings from Hilberg, primary source materials, and a comprehensive historical survey from leading scholars Christopher ...

The roma and their struggle for identity in contemporary europe

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.

German division as shared experience

German Division as Shared Experience shows the extent to which the story of East and West Germany was one of mutual entanglement after 1945. By subsuming political considerations into the historical domain of the social and cultural, each of the innovative studies presented here analyzes moment...

A u-turn to the future

Unsustainable practices since the Industrial Revolution still impact our everyday lives. This book looks at how we can achieve sustainable urban mobility now and in the future by tapping into our knowledge of the historical trajectories leading up to the features of modern mobility in cities to...

Shakespeare and stratford

As the site of literary pilgrimage since the eighteenth century, the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the topic of hundreds of imaginary portrayals, Stratford is ripe for analysis, both in terms of its factual existence and its fictional afterlife.

Heritage movements in asia

Disaster upon disaster

A consistent problem that confronts disaster reduction is the disjunction between academic and expert knowledge and policies and practices of agencies mandated to deal with the concern. Disaster Upon Disaster illuminates the numerous disjunctions between the suppositions, realities, agendas, an...

Rethinking and unthinking development

Title calls readers to rethink conventional development practices  It encourages readers to unthink/unlearn conventional development practices in order to explore now practices relevant to the communities  Title exposes the coloniality of long-established development practices taken ...

Public engagement and education

Public Engagement and Education shares effective approaches for engaging and educating learners of all ages about archaeology and how one can encourage them to become stewards of the past. Offered are applied examples that are not bound to specific geographies or cultures, but rather, are appro...

Conceptualizing the world

This innovative and interdisciplinary volume explores the central paradox of globalization and illuminates historical moments that range from antiquity to the era of Google Earth through contributions that trace the emergence of the world in multitudinous representations, practices, and human e...

Crossing histories and ethnographies

Presents novel combinations of archival and ethnographic methods in the study of colonial historicities; Offers new perspectives on how to critically connect oral accounts, ethnography, and colonial archives; Brings together an international community of scholars who have conducted e...

Changes in the air

It’s the first “hurricane history” of New Orleans It covers all three of the city’s historical eras: French (1718-1762), Spanish (1762-1800) and American (1803-present) based on primary sources It features the first comprehensive history of the New Orleans levees from the French colo...

France and the german question, 1945–1990

This book revisits France’s attitude towards the German question as it existed and evolved during the post-World War Two and the Cold War eras in order to shed light on previously neglected aspect of the history of the Cold War, of Germany, and of Europe in the second half of the twentieth cent...

Germany on their minds

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, the United States granted asylum to approximately ninety thousand German Jews fleeing the horrors of the Third Reich. Author Anne C. Schenderlein gives a fascinating account of these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic and demonstrates the rem...

Ambiguous childhoods

 linguistic ethnographic observations, recordings and analyses of children’s everyday interactions and learning trajectories in a rural postcolonial setting “multi-site” observations and recordings of children interacting across homes, fields, classrooms, and the marketplace  interdi...

Nearly the new world

 First comprehensive study of Jewish migration to the British West Indies during the Nazi era Combines refugee, West Indian, British, Governmental and NGO perspectives and very wide range of sources from the Caribbean, United States, Israel and the UK.  Adds uniquely to the study of ...

Submerged on the surface

Refugee resettlement

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 app...