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Simulated Shelves: Browse November 2015 New Books!

We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, Applied Anthropology, Film Studies, History, and Politics, along with a selection of our New in Paperback titles.

 

ULTIMATE AMBIGUITIES
Investigating Death and Liminality
Edited by Peter Berger and Justin Kroesen

 

Periods of transition are often symbolically associated with death, making the latter the paradigm of liminality. Yet, many volumes on death in the social sciences and humanities do not specifically address liminality. This book investigates these “ultimate ambiguities,” assuming they can pose a threat to social relationships because of the disintegrating forces of death, but they are also crucial periods of creativity, change, and emergent aspects of social and religious life. Contributors explore death and liminality from an interdisciplinary perspective and present a global range of historical and contemporary case studies outlining emotional, cognitive, artistic, social, and political implications.

Read Introduction

 

 

GYPSY ECONOMY
Romani Livelihoods and Notions of Worth in the 21st Century
Edited by Micol Brazzabeni, Manuela Ivone Cunha, and Martin Fotta
Afterword by Keith Hart

Volume 3, The Human Economy

 

Economic arrangements of Romanies are complexly related to their social position. The authors of this volume explore these complexities, including how economic exchanges forge key social relationships of gender and ethnicity, how economic opportunities are constructed and seized, and how economic success and failure are transformed into attributes of social persons. They explore how, despite — or perhaps because of — their unstable and ambiguous position within the market economy, shared today with a growing number of people facing precarity and informalisation, Roma and Gypsy communities continuously re-create more or less viable economic strategies. The ethnographically based chapters share accounts of socially and economically vulnerable populations that face their situation with self-determination and creativity.

Read Introduction

 

TOURISM AND INFORMAL ENCOUNTERS IN CUBA
Valerio Simoni
Foreword by Nelson Graburn

Volume 38, New Directions in Anthropology

 

Based on a detailed ethnography, this book explores the promises and expectations of tourism in Cuba, drawing attention to the challenges that tourists and local people face in establishing meaningful connections with each other. Notions of informal encounter and relational idiom illuminate ambiguous experiences of tourism harassment, economic transactions, hospitality, friendship, and festive and sexual relationships. Comparing these various connections, the author shows the potential of touristic encounters to redefine their moral foundations, power dynamics, and implications, offering new insights into how contemporary relationships across difference and inequality are imagined and understood.

Read Introduction: Relating through Tourism

 

 

WATERWORLDS
Anthropology in Fluid Environments
Edited by Kirsten Hastrup and Frida Hastrup

Volume 3, Ethnography, Theory, Experiment

 

In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people’s lives, practices, and stories. Contributors’ detailed ethnographic work analyzes the union and mutual shaping of water and social lives. This volume discusses current ecological disturbances and engages in a world where unbounded relationalities and unsettled frames of orientation mark the lives of all, anthropologists included. Water emerges as a fluid object in more senses than one, challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their objects of study and to responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.

Read Introduction: Waterworlds at Large

 

 

TIME AND THE FIELD
Edited by Steffen Dalsgaard and Morten Nielsen
Afterword by George Marcus

 

In recent years, ethnographic fieldwork has been subjected to analytical scrutiny in anthropology. Ethnography remains anchored in tropes of spatiality with the association between field and fieldworker characterized by distances in space. With updates on the discussion of contemporary requirements to ethnographic research practice, Time and the Field rethinks the notion of the field in terms of time rather than space. Such an approach not only implies a particular attention to the methodology of studying local (social and ontological) imaginaries of time, but furthermore destabilitizes the relationship between fieldworker and fieldsite, allowing it to emerge as a dynamic and ever-shifting constellation.

Read Introduction: Time and the Field

 

 

THE GERMANS AND THE HOLOCAUST
Popular Responses to the Persecution and Murder of the Jews
Edited by Susanna Schrafstetter and Alan E. Steinweis

Volume 6, Vermont Studies on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

 

For decades, historians have debated how and to what extent the Holocaust penetrated the German national consciousness between 1933 and 1945. How much did “ordinary” Germans know about the subjugation and mass murder of the Jews, when did they know it, and how did they respond collectively and as individuals? This compact volume brings together six historical investigations into the subject from leading scholars employing newly accessible and previously underexploited evidence. Ranging from the roots of popular anti-Semitism to the complex motivations of Germans who hid Jews, these studies illuminate some of the most difficult questions in Holocaust historiography, supplemented with an array of fascinating primary source materials.

Read Introduction: The German People and the Holocaust

 

 

MEMORY AND CHANGE IN EUROPE
Eastern Perspectives
Edited by Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak
Foreword by Jeffrey Olick

Volume 16, Contemporary European History

 

In studies of a common European past, there is a significant lack of scholarship on the former Eastern Bloc countries. While understanding the importance of shifting the focus of European memory eastward, contributors to this volume avoid the trap of Eastern European exceptionalism, an assumption that this region’s experiences are too unique to render them comparable to the rest of Europe. They offer a reflection on memory from an Eastern European historical perspective, one that can be measured against, or applied to, historical experience in other parts of Europe. In this way, the authors situate studies on memory in Eastern Europe within the broader debate on European memory.

Read Introduction: Memory and Change in Eastern Europe: How Special?

 

LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY POLITICS
A Cross-Atlantic Perspective
Edited by Christina Späti

 

In an increasingly multicultural world, the relationship between language and identity remains a complicated and often fraught subject for most societies. The growing political salience of questions relating to language is evident not only in the expanded implementation of new policies and legislation, but also in heated public debates about national unity, collective identities, and the rights of linguistic minorities. By taking a comprehensive approach that considers both the inclusive and exclusive dimensions of linguistic identity across Europe and North America, the studies assembled here provide a sophisticated look at one of the global era’s defining political dynamics.

Read Introduction: Language and the Rise of Identity Politics: An Introduction

 

 

NEW HONG KONG CINEMA
Transitions to Becoming Chinese in 21st-Century East Asia
Ruby Cheung

 

The trajectory of Hong Kong films had been drastically affected long before the city’s official sovereignty transfer from the British to the Chinese in 1997. The change in course has become more visible in recent years as China has aggressively developed its national film industry and assumed the role of powerhouse in East Asia’s cinematic landscape. The author introduces the “Cinema of Transitions” to study the New Hong Kong Cinema and on- and off-screen life against this background. Using examples from the 1980s to the present, this book offers a fresh perspective on how Hong Kong-related Chinese-language films, filmmakers, audiences, and the workings of film business in East Asia have become major platforms on which “transitions” are negotiated.

Read Introduction: The New Hong Kong Cinema, Cinema of Transitions and East Asia

 

 

 

SACRIFICE AND REBIRTH
The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War
Edited by Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman

Volume 18, Austrian and Habsburg Studies

 

When Austria-Hungary broke up at the end of the First World War, the sacrifice of one million men who had died fighting for the Habsburg monarchy now seemed to be in vain. This book is the first of its kind to analyze how the Great War was interpreted, commemorated, or forgotten across all the ex-Habsburg territories. Each of the book’s twelve chapters focuses on a separate region, studying how the transition to peacetime was managed either by the state, by war veterans, or by national minorities. This “splintered war memory,” where some posed as victors and some as losers, does much to explain the fractious character of interwar Eastern Europe.

 

 

EMPIRE OF PICTURES
Global Media and the 1960s Remaking of American Foreign Policy
Sönke Kunkel

Volume 8, Explorations in Culture and International History

 

In Cold War historiography, the 1960s are often described as a decade of mounting diplomatic tensions and international social unrest. At the same time, they were a period of global media revolution: communication satellites compressed time and space, television spread around the world, and images circulated through print media in expanding ways. Examining how U.S. policymakers exploited these changes, this book offers groundbreaking international research which shows that U.S. power came to depend more and more not on military superiority or economic strength alone, but also on America’s ability to create appealing pictures that assured recognition of its global leadership.

 

 

 

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New in Paperback

 

DYNAMICS OF INNOVATION
The Expansion of Technology in Modern Times
François Caron
Translated from the French by Allan Mitchell

 

“…offers a series of fascinating vignettes tied together by a satisfactory thesis about the commonalities associated with the evolving nature of technological innovation.” · The Historian

“To integrate the slow evolution of medieval know-how and the current explosion of information technologies into one analysis is a challenge magnificently met by the historian François Caron.” · Gerard Moatti, Les Echos.

 

 

Winner of the 2015 Keeley Book Prize of the Modern Greek Studies Association

CHILDREN OF THE DICTATORSHIP
Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the ‘Long 1960s’ in Greece
Kostis Kornetis

Volume 10, Protest, Culture & Society

 

This long-anticipated… publication signals the beginning of a potentially fruitful and certainly long overdue examination of the 1960s and 1970s in Greece. After so many years of discussions and debates on the Greek Civil War, the time for a careful consideration of the junta and its afterlife seems to have finally come. Kornetis offers an enormously productive entry point by exploring the issue that is analytically most central and socially most sensitive concerning this period: resistance and its counterpart, complicity. For anyone with an interest in the period or in the broad range of theoretical issues raised by its study, Children of the Dictatorship is an indispensible book that is sure to anchor future discussion and debate of the military regime.” · Journal of Modern Greek Studies

 

SEXUAL KNOWLEDGE
Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900-1934
Britta McEwen

Volume 13, Austrian and Habsburg Studies

 

“In [this book] Britta McEwen has produced an interesting and useful work of scholarship that not only deals with a previously neglected topic, but, in so doing, also expands the still under-researched field of interwar Austria.”  ·  American Historical Review

“McEwen has based her excellent and lively written book, which covers a broad range of issues related to the shaping of sexual knowledge in Austria, on a close investigation of a wide range of sources. McEwen’s book should become a standard reference for anybody interested in the history of sexuality in the German-speaking world during the first third of the twentieth century.” · German Studies Review

Read Introduction: Vienna as Laboratory for Sexual Knowledge

 

FROM FIDELITY TO HISTORY
Film Adaptations as Cultural Events in the Twentieth Century
Anne-Marie Scholz

Volume 3, Transatlantic Perspectives

 

“Overall, Scholz’s highly readable and accessible book contributes new insights to the field of adaptation studies and the individual films that she so thoroughly and eloquently studies. She achieves a balance in considering films as both industrial products and artistic achievement and her transnationality and, more specifically, her bi-lingual skills give her important access to German language secondary source material, hitherto not included in English-language studies of these works. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in transatlantic adaptations or indeed any of the films she considers and its intellectual paradigm is both expansive and offers a significant contribution to current debates in adaptation studies.” · Cercles. Revue pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone

 

BONDAGE
Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries
Alessandro Stanziani

Volume 24, International Studies in Social History

 

“The strength of Stanziani’s work is his lively engagement with numerous scholars over the meaning and significance of labor around the world. Whether or not one agrees or disagrees with the many arguments he posits, his ideas deserve attention, and are sure to inspire further research and discussion… Highly recommended.” · Choice

“Stanziani has produced an intellectually rich and invigorating study. The problems identified are not necessarily new, but they are enduring, and for students of Russia, they have to my knowledge never before been so thoroughly integrated into the framework of world history… Stanziani’s breadth of vision is impressive and his arguments invariably challenge. Every student of Russian histo
ry and international politics should read his work.”
· Slavic Review

 

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Please note we have recently released our brand new History 2016 Catalog, Slavic Studies 2016 Catalog, Anthropology & Sociology 2016 Catalog , German Studies 2016 Catalog, Fall/Winter 2015 New titles Catalog, and Medical Anthropology and Global Health 2015/6 Catalog.

 

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