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SIMULATED SHELVES: Browse February 2018 NEW BOOKS

We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, Theory and Methodology in Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and Sociology, along with our New in Paperback titles.


MORAL ANTHROPOLOGY
A Critique
Edited by Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold

Volume 16, Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis

 

A development in anthropological theory, characterized as the ‘moral turn’, is gaining popularity and should be carefully considered. In examining the context, arguments, and discourse that surrounds this trend, this volume reconceptualizes the discipline of anthropology in a radical way. Contributions from anthropologists from around the world from different theoretical traditions and with expertise in a multiplicity of ethnographic areas makes this collection a provocative contribution to larger discussions not only in anthropology but the social sciences more broadly.

 

AFTER DIFFERENCE
Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory
Paolo Heywood

Volume 6, WYSE Series in Social Anthropology

 

Queer activism and anthropology are both fundamentally concerned with the concept of difference. Yet they are so in fundamentally different ways. The Italian queer activists in this book value difference as something that must be produced, in opposition to the identity politics they find around them. Conversely, anthropologists find difference in the world around them, and seek to produce an identity between anthropological theory and the ethnographic material it elucidates. This book describes problems faced by an activist “politics of difference,” and issues concerning the identity of anthropological reflection itself—connecting two conceptions of difference whilst simultaneously holding them apart.

Read Introduction

 

SOUP, LOVE, AND A HELPING HAND
Social Relations and Support in Guangzhou, China
Friederike Fleischer

Volume 8, Asian Anthropologies

 

Despite growing affluence, a large number of urban Chinese have problems making ends meet. Based on ethnographic research among several different types of communities in Guangzhou, China, Soup, Love and a Helping Hand examines different modes and ideologies of help/support, as well as the related issues of reciprocity, relatedness (kinship), and changing state-society relations in contemporary China. With an emphasis on the subjective experience, Fleischer’s research carefully explores people’s ideas about moral obligations, social expectations, and visions of urban Chinese society.

Read Introduction

 

SACRED PLACES, EMERGING SPACES
Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus
Edited by Tsypylma Darieva, Florian Mühlfried, & Kevin Tuite

Volume 17, Space and Place

 

Though long-associated with violence, the Caucasus is a region rich with religious conviviality. Based on fresh ethnographies in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Russian Federation, Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces discusses vanishing and emerging sacred places in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious post-Soviet Caucasus. In exploring the effects of de-secularization, growing institutional control over hybrid sacred sites, and attempts to review social boundaries between the religious and the secular, these essays give way to an emergent Caucasus viewed from the ground up: dynamic, continually remaking itself, within shifting and indefinite frontiers.

Read Introduction

 

MANAGING NORTHERN EUROPE’S FORESTS
Histories from the Age of Improvement to the Age of Ecology
Edited by K. Jan Oosthoek and Richard Hölzl

Volume 12, Environment in History: International Perspectives

 

Northern Europe was, by many accounts, the birthplace of much of modern forestry practice, and for hundreds of years the region’s woodlands have played an outsize role in international relations, economic growth, and the development of national identity. Across eleven chapters, the contributors to this volume survey the histories of state forestry policy in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Germany, Poland, and Great Britain from the early modern period to the present. Each explores the complex interrelationships of state-building, resource management, knowledge transfer, and trade over a period characterized by ongoing modernization and evolving environmental awareness.

Read Introduction: State Forestry in Northern Europe

 

A LIVING PAST
Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America
Edited by John Soluri, Claudia Leal, and José Augusto Pádua

Volume 13, Environment in History: International Perspectives

 

Though still a relatively young field, the study of Latin American environmental history is blossoming, as the contributions to this definitive volume demonstrate. Bringing together thirteen leading experts on the region, A Living Past synthesizes a wide range of scholarship to offer new perspectives on environmental change in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Each chapter provides insightful, up-to-date syntheses of current scholarship on critical countries and ecosystems (including Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, the tropical Andes, and tropical forests) and such cross-cutting themes as agriculture, conservation, mining, ranching, science, and urbanization. Together, these studies provide valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing the region.

Read Introduction: Finding the “Latin American” in Latin American Environmental History

 

MESSY EUROPE
Crisis, Race, and Nation-State in a Postcolonial World
Edited by Kristín Loftsdóttir, Andrea L. Smith, and Brigitte Hipfl

Volume 32, EASA Series

 

Using the economic crisis as a starting point, Messy Europe offers a critical new look at the issues of race, gender, and national understandings of self and other in contemporary Europe. It highlights and challenges historical associations of Europe with whiteness and modern civilization, and asks how these associations are re-envisioned, re-inscribed, or contested in an era characterized by crises of different kinds. This important collection provides a nuanced exploration of how racialized identities in various European regions are played out in the crisis context, and asks what work “crisis talk” does, considering how it motivates public feelings and shapes bodies, boundaries and communities.

Read Introduction


New in Paperback:

 

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

 

“I specifically recommend this book to those who are interested in anthropology, ethnography, or in the everyday lives of Roma in general. However, those who are interested in unusual economic processes will find this volume interesting, too.”Cornivus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy

Read Introduction

 

OIKOS AND MARKET
Explorations in Self-Sufficiency after Socialism
Edited by Stephen Gudeman and Chris Hann

Volume2, Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy

 

“These studies make a timely contribution to postsocialist studies, wherein anthropologists grapple with the transformative effects of collectivization and subsequent privatization of productive resources. They also offer enduring insights into the way people sharpen or blur boundaries between household and market, especially with regard to particular lives. These understandings resonate throughout anthropology.” · Anthropological Forum

Read Introduction: Self-Sufficiency as Reality and as Myth

 

YEARNINGS IN THE MEANTIME
‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex
Stef Jansen

Volume 15, Dislocations

 

“…a carefully conceptualized and thoroughly researched ethnographic account of ‘yearnings for normal life’ among ordinary people living on the outskirts of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The book is also a timely theoretical investigation of statecraft, statehood, hope, temporality, normalcy, and citizenship in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina and beyond. Jansen’s account is well-written and accessible, and its ‘tone’ is complex as it moves from intimate and reflexive to bold, critical, and analytical.” · Slavic Review

Read Introduction: [or, Towards an Anthropology of Shared Concerns]

 

THINKING THROUGH SOCIALITY
An Anthropological Interrogation of Key Concepts
Edited by Vered Amit

 

“[The volume] advances conceptual tools for contemporary anthropology and in provides a valuable source of overviews of the examined concepts, stimulating reading on how to think the configuration of social life.” · Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Read Introduction:Thinking through Sociality: The Importance of Mid-Level Concepts

 

OUR COMMON DENOMINATOR
Human Universals Revisited
Christoph Antweiler
Translated from the German by Diane Kerns

 

FULLY REVISED AND COMPREHENSIVELY UPDATED FROM THE SECOND GERMAN EDITION

“Antweiler’s is a quite meticulous and lucid study of human universals in the discipline of anthropology after more than a century of neglect in favor of the particularistic, relativist study of human cultures through the method of ethnography. His review is comprehensive and searching.” · Choice

Read Introduction

 

EXTRAORDINARY ENCOUNTERS
Authenticity and the Interview
Edited by Katherine Smith, James Staples and Nigel Rapport

Volume 28, Methodology & History in Anthropology

 

Given the anthropological focus on ethnography as a kind of deep immersion, the interview poses theoretical and methodological challenges for the discipline. This volume explores those challenges and argues that the interview should be seen as a special, productive site of ethnographic encounter, a site of a very particular and important kind of knowing. In a range of social contexts and cultural settings, contributors show how the interview is experienced and imagined as a kind of space within which personal, biographic and social cues and norms can be explored and interrogated.

Read Introduction: The Interview as Analytical Category

 

POLITICAL FELLINI
Journey to the End of Italy
Andrea Minuz
Translated from the Italian by Marcus Perryman

 

“As a scholar deeply immersed in Italian culture, Minuz knows the material inside and out, and his fresh interpretations of Fellini’s films reference both the political and artistic climate in which they were created. Smoothly translated by Perryman, Political Fellini is a truly valuable book, one that delves deep into Fellini as a critic of politics on a larger scale and society as a whole… Highly recommended.” · Choice

Read Introduction: Political Fellini?

 

GERMAN TELEVISION
Historical and Theoretical Perspectives
Edited by Larson Powell and Robert R. Shandley

Volume 19, Film Europa

 

“This collection of essays is the first of its kind in English … this volume offers well-researched, in-depth reflection on the subject of German television ranging from historical overview to case study and spanning the history of West and East Germany, the key relationship between film and television, and the transnational dimensions of programming, technology and audience.” · Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Read Introduction

 

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

Volume 16, Contemporary European History

 

“[This volume] addresses memory and cultural transformations from an eastern point of view… [and] illuminates very different aspects of the problems Eastern European researchers face identifying national crossroads of diverging memories and the necessity of coming to terms with a surfeit of memories which had not hitherto been publicly articulated or acknowledged.” · European History Quarterly

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

 

THE LONG AFTERMATH
Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936-2016
Edited by Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame
Foreword by Richard Overy
Afterword by Jay Winter

Volume 17, Contemporary European History

 

“Manuel Braganca and Peter Tame have compiled a highly stimulating volume of essays, which whets the appetite for more.” · Journal of European Studies

In its totality, the “Long Second World War”—extending from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War to the end of hostilities in 1945—has exerted enormous influence over European culture. Bringing together leading historians, sociologists, and literary and film scholars, this broadly interdisciplinary volume investigates Europeans’ individual and collective memories and the ways in which they have shaped the continent’s cultural heritage.

Read Introduction: The Long Aftermath of the Long Second World War

 

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

Volume 18, Austrian and Habsburg Studies

 

“By following the many ways in which the Great War was framed and interpreted all over the former Habsburg Monarchy, this collection provides a fantastic foundation for fresh and thought-provoking comparisons throughout Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and makes a strong argument for overcoming the hitherto prevailing focus on single successor states.” H-Soz-Kult

Read Introduction: A Conflicted and Divided Habsburg Memory

 

REVISED EDITION

DOING CONCEPTUAL HISTORY IN AFRICA
Edited by Axel Fleisch and Rhiannon Stephens

Volume 25, Making Sense of History

 

“The volume offers conceptual historians of other world regions a rich trove of new sources and methods (rituals, historical linguistics, proverbs, songs, and patterns in the combination of lexical items, to name a few) for doing conceptual history in areas and for time periods for which we have few written records.”The International Journal of African Historical Studies

Read Introduction: Theories and Methods of African Conceptual History

 

KEYWORDS OF MOBILITY
Critical Engagements
Edited by Noel B. Salazar and Kiran Jayaram

Volume 1, Worlds in Motion

 

“Grounded in anthropology and informed by trans-disciplinary mobility studies, the authors rely on ethnographic analyses from a refreshing combination of both American and European perspectives… [The volume] is careful in its selection of topics, and contributors are up-to-date in their scholarship and rigorous in the construction of their analyses… [A]s a methodological and theoretical approach to the topic, Keywords of Mobility is unparalleled. It represents an important contribution to the literature on studies of forced migration, and human mobilities more generally, by working toward a common, robust vocabulary.” · Refuge

Read Introduction: Keywords of Mobility: A Critical Introduction

 

SUSTAINING RUSSIA’S ARCTIC CITIES
Resource Politics, Migration, and Climate Change
Edited by Robert Orttung

Volume 2, Studies in the Circumpolar North

 

Urban areas in Arctic Russia are experiencing unprecedented social and ecological change. This collection outlines the key challenges that city managers will face in navigating this shifting political, economic, social, and environmental terrain. In particular, the volume examines how energy production drives a boom-bust cycle in the Arctic economy, explores how migrants from Muslim cultures are reshaping the social fabric of northern cities, and provides a detailed analysis of climate change and its impact on urban and industrial infrastructure.

Read Chapter 1. Russia’s Arctic Cities: Recent Evolution and Drivers of Change