We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, Applied Anthropology, Cultural Studies, History and Theory & Methodology in Anthropology, along with our New in Paperback titles.
THEORETICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND APPLIED PRACTICE
Edited by Sarah Pink, Vaike Fors, and Tom O’Dell
Volume 11, Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology
Academics across the globe are being urged by universities and research councils to do research that impacts the world beyond academia. Yet to date there has been very little reflection amongst scholars and practitioners in these fields concerning the relationship between the theoretical and engaged practices that emerge through such forms of scholarship. Theoretical Scholarship and Applied Practice investigates the ways in which theoretical research has been incorporated into recent applied practices across the social sciences and humanities. This collection advances our understanding of the ethics, values, opportunities and challenges that emerge in the making of engaged and interdisciplinary scholarship.
Read Editor’s Introduction: Theoretical Scholarship and Applied Practice: opportunities and challenges of working in the in-between
BORDER AESTHETICS
Concepts and Intersections
Edited by Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe
Volume 3, Time and the World: Interdisciplinary Studies in Cultural Transformations
Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.
Read Introduction
COLLABORATIVE INTIMACIES IN MUSIC AND DANCE
Anthropologies of Sound and Movement
Edited by Evangelos Chrysagis and Panas Karampampas
Volume 10, Dance and Performance Studies
Across spatial, bodily, and ethical domains, music and dance both emerge from and give rise to intimate collaboration. This theoretically rich collection takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the collective dimension of sound and movement in everyday life, drawing on genres and practices in contexts as diverse as Japanese shakuhachi playing, Peruvian huayno, and the Greek goth scene. Highlighting the sheer physicality of the ethnographic encounter, as well as the forms of sociality that gradually emerge between self and other, each contribution demonstrates how dance and music open up pathways and give shape to life trajectories that are neither predetermined nor teleological, but generative.
Read Introduction: Collaborative Intimacies
FROM CLANS TO CO-OPS
Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily
Theodoros Rakopoulos
Volume 4, The Human Economy
From Clans to Co-ops explores the social, political, and economic relations that enable the constitution of cooperatives operating on land confiscated from mafiosi in Sicily, a project that the state hails as arguably the greatest symbolic victory over the mafia in Italian history. Rakopoulos’s ethnographic focus is on access to resources, divisions of labor, ideologies of community and food, and the material changes that cooperatives bring to people’s lives in terms of kinship, work and land management. The book contributes to broader debates about cooperativism, how labor might be salvaged from market fundamentalism, and to emergent discourses about the ‘human’ economy.
Paperback Original
WHEN THINGS BECOME PROPERTY
Land Reform, Authority and Value in Postsocialist Europe and Asia
Thomas Sikor, Stefan Dorondel, Johannes Stahl and Phuc Xuan To
Volume 3, Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy
Governments have conferred ownership titles to many citizens throughout the world in an effort to turn things into property. 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 interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, and finds that property reforms are no longer, if they ever were, miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.
ON RETALIATION
Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of a Basic Human Condition
Edited by Bertram Turner and Günther Schlee
Volume 15, Integration and Conflict Studies
Retaliation is associated with all forms of social and political organization, and retaliatory logics inform many different conflict resolution procedures from consensual settlement to compensation to violent escalations. This book derives a concept of retaliation from the overall notion of reciprocity, defining retaliation as the human disposition to strive for a reactive balancing of conflicts and injustices. On Retaliation presents a synthesized approach to both the violence-generating and violence-avoiding potentials of retaliation. Contributors to this volume touch upon the interaction between retaliation and violence, the state’s monopoly on legitimate punishment and the factors of socio-political frameworks, religious interpretations and economic processes.
Read Introduction: On Retaliation: Conceptual Plurality, Transdisciplinary Research, Rifts, Blurrings and Translations
THE GREEK EXODUS FROM EGYPT
Diaspora Politics and Emigration, 1937-1962
Angelos Dalachanis
From the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, Greeks comprised one of the largest and most influential minority groups in Egyptian society, yet barely two thousand remain there today. This painstakingly researched book explains how Egypt’s once-robust Greek population dwindled to virtually nothing, beginning with the abolition of foreigners’ privileges in 1937 and culminating in the nationalist revolution of 1952. It reconstructs the delicate sociopolitical circumstances that Greeks had to navigate during this period, providing a multifaceted account of demographic decline that arose from both large structural factors as well as the decisions of countless individuals.
Read Introduction
DRIVING MODERNITY
Technology, Experts, Politics, and Fascist Motorways, 1922-1943
Massimo Moraglio
Translated from the Italian by Erin O’Loughlin
Volume 3, Explorations in Mobility
On March 26th, 1923, in a formal ceremony, construction of the Milan–Alpine Lakes autostrada officially began, the preliminary step toward what would become the first European motorway. That Benito Mussolini himself participated in the festivities indicates just how important the project was to Italian Fascism. Driving Modernity recounts the twisting fortunes of the autostrada, which—alongside railways, aviation, and other forms of mobility—Italian authorities hoped would spread an ideology of technological nationalism. It explains how Italy ultimately failed to realize its mammoth infrastructural vision, addressing the political and social conditions that made a coherent plan of development impossible.
Read Introduction
CHILDREN IN THE HOLOCAUST AND ITS AFTERMATH
Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive
Edited by Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Eva Fogelman, and Dalia Ofer
The testimonies of individuals who survived the Holocaust as children pose distinct emotional and intellectual challenges for researchers: as now-adult interviewees recall profound childhood experiences of suffering and persecution, they also invoke their own historical awareness and memories of their postwar lives, requiring readers to follow simultaneous, disparate narratives. This interdisciplinary volume brings together historians, psychologists, and other scholars to explore child survivors’ accounts. With a central focus on the Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive’s over 1,500 testimonies, it not only enlarges our understanding of the Holocaust empirically but illuminates the methodological, theoretical, and institutional dimensions of this unique form of historical record.
Paperback Original
STARRY NIGHTS
Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology
Stephen P. Reyna
NEW SERIES: Volume 1, Loose Can(n)ons
Starry Nights: Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology offers nothing less than a reinventing of the discipline of anthropology. In these six essays – four published here for the first time – Stephen Reyna critiques the postmodern tenets of anthropology, while devising a new strategy for conducting research. Combative and clear, Starry Nights provides an important critique of mainstream anthropology as represented by Geertz and the postmodern legacy, and envisions a mode of anthropological research that addresses social, cultural and biological questions with techniques that are theoretically rigorous and practically useful.
NEW IN PAPERBACKS:
THE GIFT OF EUROPEAN THOUGHT AND THE COST OF LIVING
Vassos Argyrou
European thought is often said to be a gift to the rest of the world, but what if there is no gift as such? What if there is only an economy where every giving is also a taking, and every taking is also a giving? This book extends the question of economies by making a case for an “economy of thought” and a “political economy.” It argues that all thinking and doing presupposes taking, and therefore giving, as the price to pay for taking; or that there exists a “cost of living,” which renders the idea of free thinking and living untenable. The argument is developed against the Enlightenment directive to think for oneself as the means of becoming autonomous and shows that this “light,” given to the rest of the world as a gift, turns out to be nothing.
BEYOND THE LENS OF CONSERVATION
Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another
Eva Keller
Volume 20, Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology
“This book will make a great addition to undergraduate courses on Anthropology of the Environment and/or Development or Political Ecology. Keller’s highly readable style, in turn, will satisfy both those new to the subject and scholars already familiar with the topics of conservation practice in Madagascar. It could even become an important resource for those conservation experts who are trying – and (as the study shows) failing – to establish connections between distant places and people.” · Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Read Introduction
LIVING KINSHIP IN THE PACIFIC
Edited by Christina Toren and Simonne Pauwels
Volume 4, Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists
“Altogether, this collection goes a long way to meeting the volume’s main objectives. The volume provides ethnographically-grounded overviews of the various ways kinship in these locales continues to serve as vital ‘knowledge that counts.’ … the volume will be a valuable resource for Pacific Islands scholars who will also have to consider the ways that kinship matters in their field sites as a central dimension of everyday life. The volume also provides useful resources for teaching contemporary Pacific kinship in the Pacific.” · Anthropos
Read Introduction: Kinship in the Pacific as Knowledge that Counts
PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY IN A BORDERLESS WORLD
Edited by Sam Beck and Carl A. Maida
Volume 8, Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology
“[This] collection fruitfully examines how the turn to public engagement is transforming the discipline, leading anthropologists to reconsider the researcher’s subject position and to use new techniques for conducting, communicating, and applying research to communities and publics. Contributors offer candid perspectives on their personal and professional transformations as they turn to a more engaged scholarly practice.” · Krista Harper, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Read Introduction
LEARNING UNDER NEOLIBERALISM
Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education
Edited by Susan Brin Hyatt, Boone W. Shear, and Susan Wright
Volume 1, Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies
“All in all, Learning under Neoliberalism is an important contribution to the critical studies of HE transformations taking place in the Western world today. It goes some way in helping us figure out the ways the university as an institution and the student as a telling figure are changing, for better or worse, in neoliberal times. Notwithstanding the Euro-American focus, this volume has much to offer in terms of inspiring similar kinds of endeavours in other geographical and sociocultural contexts. It stands out because of the rich original ethnography and critical thoughts it offers. It is very well-edited and/or written, a delightful read, and will likely make readers feel they are taking part in an engaging conversation.” · Social Anthropology
Read Introduction: Higher Education, Engaged Anthropology, and Hegemonic Struggle
NIMBY IS BEAUTIFUL
Cases of Local Activism and Environmental Innovation around the World
Edited by Carol Hager and Mary Alice Haddad
“This new edited volume provides an innovative, empirically driven perspective on controversial facilities that will be of interest to many scholars, decision makers, and residents around the world. The volume’s international perspective helps make its conclusions convincing and robust and it rests on a well developed set of theories and hypotheses.” · Daniel P. Aldrich, Purdue University
Read Introduction: A New Look at NIMBY
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
An Appraisal from the Gulf Region
Edited by Paul Sillitoe
Volume 19, Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology
“This is clearly the most comprehensive overview of sustainable development in the Gulf, a strategic region within the global economy…What is particularly innovative is the last section on cultural issues, ranging from collaborative research methods to indigenous knowledge… the inclusion of health issues, together with a discussion of the ‘cultural turn’ in sustainability, including participatory approaches, make this book an exemplar of the next generation of thought and knowledge development in the area of sustainable development.” · Carl Maida, University of California, Los Angeles
Read Introduction: Sustainable Development in the Gulf: Some Introductory Remarks
IMPERIAL PROJECTIONS
Screening the German Colonies
Wolfgang Fuhrmann
Volume 17, Film Europa
“One cannot rank the significance of Fuhrmann’s book as a model of German film historiography highly enough. Not only does Imperial Projection offer the first convincing overall overview of a forgotten and suppressed chapter of German film history; the book makes also clear what a modern, methodologically innovative and empirically supported film historiography is capable of achieving.” · H-Soz-Kult
Read Introduction
BODIES IN PAIN
Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky
Tarja Laine
“Laine’s evocative, near-poetic style is refreshing after the former domination of strenuous cognitivist theory in the study of film emotion, and she offers plenty of empirical evidence to back up her claims. Surely such a sensory art form as cinema deserves to be seen (or felt) through an affective lens, and Laine makes an engaging and accessible yet thoroughly rigorous argument for doing so through her study of Aronofsky’s work. Bodies in Pain is recommended for those interested in film phenomenology as well as the intersections of aestheticism, emotion, and philosophy in the cinema.” · Film-Philosophy
Read Introduction: Aronofsky, Auteurship, Aesthetics
TELEVISION’S MOMENT
Sitcom Audiences and the Sixties Cultural Revolution
Christina von Hodenberg
“Television scholars of all stripes will find much that is interesting in this book. Hodenberg blends thorough industrial history, textual analysis, and audience research in her examination of three iterations of a single television show…This book operates at the methodological intersection of cultural studies, social science, and television history, and the research is the better for it. This is a thoughtful work of television scholarship written in an accessible style…Highly recommended.” · Choice
Read Introduction: Negotiating the Sixties