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Simulated Shelves: Browse July 2015 New Books

We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, Applied Anthropology, Education, Film Studies, History, Media Studies, Refugee & Migration Studies, Socio-Legal Studies, and Sociology, along with a selection of our New in Paperback titles.

We are especially excited to announce the publication of TELEVISION’S MOMENT by Christina von Hodenberg.

“… A very interesting analysis of how sitcoms negotiated the ‘culture wars,’ paying particular attention to discussions of gender, race, and sexuality. Particularly effective here is the ability to set the text—the sitcom—into the larger context of politics, culture, and society in the three national cases the author compares… The book makes an important methodological contribution … it will make a splash with historians … and students of film and media studies.” · Robert Moeller, University of California, Irvine

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TELEVISION’S MOMENT
Sitcom Audiences and the Sixties Cultural Revolution
Christina von Hodenberg

 

Television was one of the forces shaping the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when a blockbuster TV series could reach up to a third of a country’s population. This book explores television’s impact on social change by comparing three sitcoms and their audiences. The shows in focus – Till Death Us Do Part in Britain, All in the Family in the United States, and One Heart and One Soul in West Germany – centered on a bigoted anti-hero and his family. Between 1966 and 1979 they saturated popular culture, and managed to accelerate as well as deradicalize value changes and collective attitudes regarding gender roles, sexuality, religion, and race.

 

 

 

STRIKE ACTION AND NATION BUILDING
Labor Unrest in Palestine/Israel, 1899-1951
David De Vries

 

Strike-action has long been a notable phenomenon in Israeli society, despite forces that have weakened its recurrence, such as the Arab-Jewish conflict, the decline of organized labor, and the increasing precariousness of employment. While the impact of strikes was not always immense, they are deeply rooted in Israel’s past during the Ottoman Empire and Mandate Palestine. Workers persist in using them for material improvement and to gain power in both the private and public sectors, reproducing a vibrant social practice whose codes have withstood the test of time. This book unravels the trajectory of the strikes as a rich source for the social-historical analysis of an otherwise nation-oriented and highly politicized history.

 

 

 

THE RHYTHM OF ETERNITY
The German Youth Movement and the Experience of the Past, 1900-1933
Robbert-Jan Adriaansen

Volume 22, Making Sense of History Series

 

The Weimar era in Germany is often characterized as a time of significant change. Such periods of rupture transform the way people envision the past, present, and future. This book traces the conceptions of time and history in the Germany of the early 20th century. By focusing on both the discourse and practices of the youth movement, the author shows how it reinterpreted and revived the past to overthrow the premises of modern historical thought. In so doing, this book provides insight into the social implications of the ideological de-historicization of the past.

 

 

 

MASKS AND STAFFS
Identity Politics in the Cameroon Grassfields
Michaela Pelican

Volume 11, Integration and Conflict Studies Series

 

The Cameroon Grassfields, home to three ethnic groups – Grassfields societies, Mbororo, and Hausa – provide a valuable case study for the anthropological examination of identity politics and interethnic relations. In the midst of the political liberalization of Cameroon in the late 1990s and 2000s, local responses to political and legal changes took the form of a series of performative and discursive expressions of ethnicity. Confrontational encounters stimulated by economic and political rivalry, as well as socially integrative processes, transformed collective self-understanding in Cameroon in conjunction with recent global discourses on human, minority, and indigenous rights. The book provides a vital contribution to the study of ethnicity, conflict, and social change in the anthropology of Africa.

 

 

PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY IN A BORDERLESS WORLD
Edited by Sam Beck and Carl A. Maida

Volume 8, Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology Series

 

Anthropologists have acted as experts and educators on the nature and ways of life of people worldwide, working to understand the human condition in broad comparative perspective. As a discipline, anthropology has often advocated — and even defended — the cultural integrity, authenticity, and autonomy of societies across the globe. Public anthropology today carries out the discipline’s original purpose, grounding theories in lived experience and placing empirical knowledge in deeper historical and comparative frameworks. This is a vitally important kind of anthropology that has the goal of improving the modern human condition by actively engaging with people to make changes through research, education, and political action.

 

 

 

FIGURATION WORK
Student Participation, Democracy and University Reform in a Global Knowledge Economy
Gritt B. Nielsen

Volume 27, EASA Series

 

What role should students take in shaping their education, their university, and the wider society? These questions have assumed new importance in recent years as universities are reformed to become more competitive in the “global knowledge economy.” With Denmark as the prism, this book shows how negotiations over student participation — influenced by demands for efficiency, flexibility, and student-centered education — reflect broader concerns about democracy and citizen participation in increasingly neoliberalised states. Combining anthropological and historical research, Gritt B. Nielsen develops a novel approach to the study of policy processes and opens a timely discussion about the kinds of future citizens who will emerge from current reforms.

 

 

 

MARXISM AND FILM ACTIVISM
Screening Alternative Worlds
Edited by Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen

 

In Theses on Feuerbach, Marx writes, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is to change it.” This collection examines how filmmakers have tried to change the world by engaging in emancipatory politics through their work, and how audiences have received them. It presents a wide spectrum of case studies, covering both film and digital technology, with examples from throughout cinematic history and around the world, including Soviet Russia, Palestine, South America, and France. Discussions range from the classic Marxist cinema of Aleksandr Medvedkin, Chris Marker, and Jean-Luc Godard, to recent media such as 5 Broken Cameras (2010), the phenomena of video-blogging, and bicycle activism films.

 

 

 

 

THE STATE AND THE GRASSROOTS
Immigrant Transnational Organizations in Four Continents
Edited by Alejandro Portes and Patricia Fernández-Kelly

 

Whereas most of the literature on migration focuses on individuals and their families, this book studies the organizations created by immigrants to protect themselves in their receiving states. Comparing eighteen of these grassroots organizations formed across the world, from India to Colombia to Vietnam to the Congo, researchers from the United States, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Spain focus their studies on the internal structure and activities of these organizations as they relate to developmental initiatives. The book outlines the principal positions in the migration and development debate and discusses the concept of transnationalism as a means of resolving these controversies.

 

 

 

 

LEGAL DISSONANCE
The Interaction of Criminal Law and Customary Law in Papua New Guinea
Shaun Larcom

 

Papua New Guinea’s two most powerful legal orders — customary law and state law —undermine one another in criminal matters. This phenomenon, called legal dissonance, partly explains the low level of personal security found in many parts of the country. This book demonstrates that a lack of coordination in the punishing of wrong behavior is both problematic for legal orders themselves and for those who are subject to such legal phenomena Legal dissonance can lead to behavior being simultaneously promoted by one legal order and punished by the other, leading to injustice, and, perhaps more importantly, undermining the ability of both legal orders to deter wrongdoing.

 

 

 

SOCIAL QUALITY THEORY
A New Perspective on Social Development
Edited by Ka Lin and Peter Herrmann

 

Social quality thinking emerged from a critique of one-sided policies by breaking through the limitations previously set by purely economistic paradigms. By tracing its expansion and presenting different aspects of social quality theory, this volume provides an overview of a more nuanced approach, which assesses societal progress and introduces proposals that are relevant for policy making. Crucially, important components emerge with research by scholars from Asia, particularly China, eastern Europe, and other regions beyond western Europe, the theory’s place of origin. As this volume shows, this rich diversity of approaches and their cross-national comparisons reveal the increasingly important role of social quality theory for informing political debates on development and sustainability.

 

 

 

 

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New in Paperback:

 

ETHICS IN THE FIELD
Contemporary Challenges
Edited by Jeremy MacClancy and Agustín Fuentes

Volume 7, Studies of the Biosocial Society Series

 

“Everyone who has anything to do with fieldwork should read this book. To my knowledge there is no other work that so clearly demonstrates the kinds of ethical dilemmas that occur routinely in the field, in all their everyday, messiness…It will appeal to anyone working within anthropological or conservation-based disciplines, but it will encourage scholars and students of virtually any discipline, even journalists, to think about the effects of their work. More, much more, this volume should be required reading for anyone who ever sits on an ethics committee.” · Qualitative Research

 

 

PREGNANCY IN PRACTICE
Expectation and Experience in the Contemporary US
Sallie Han

Volume 25, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality Series

 

“Pregnancy in Practice is a feminist contribution to the anthropology of reproduction in that it explores the quotidian experiences of pregnant women…While her sample is by no means statistically representative of the experiences of American women, the women in her ethnography represent the normative prenatal experience in America. Han successfully demonstrates that the concept of an ‘ordinary’ or ‘norma’ pregnancy is a phantom itself. Because of this work, perhaps we can definitively say that all women have ordinary pregnancies, or perhaps none do.” · Association for Feminist Anthropology Review