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Simulated Shelves: Browse June’s New Books

We’re delighted to offer a selection of soon-to-be-published titles from our core subjects of Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, History, Sociology, Travel & Tourism and Urban Studies. The following list of new volumes is complete with brief descriptions of the books and a peek at each cover. 

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DIGNITY FOR THE VOICELESS

Willem Assies’s Anthropological Work in Context

Edited by Ton Salman, Salvador Marti i Puig, and Gemma van der Haar

Willem Assies died in 2010 at the age of 55. The various stages of his career as a political anthropologist of Latin American illustrate how astute a researcher he was. He had a keen eye for the contradictions he observed during his fieldwork but also enjoyed theoretical debate. A distrust of power led him not only to attempt to understand “people without voice” but to work alongside them so they could discover and find their own voice. Willem Assies explored the messy, often untidy daily lives of people, with their inconsistencies, irrationalities, and passions, but also with their hopes, sense of beauty, solidarity, and quest for dignity. This collection brings together some of Willem Assies’s best, most fascinating, and still highly relevant writings.

Series: Volume 103, CEDLA Latin America Studies  


THE ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPERIMENT

A.M. Hocart and W.H.R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908

Edited by Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg

In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers’ later work in psychiatry and psychology, and Hocart’s work as a comparativist, for which both would largely be remembered despite the novelty of that independent fieldwork on remote Pacific islands in the early years of the 20th Century. Contributors to this volume—who have all carried out fieldwork in those Melanesian locations where Hocart and Rivers worked—give a critical examination of the research that took place in 1908, situating those efforts in the broadest possible contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.

Series: Volume 1, Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists


LIVING TRANSLATION
Language and the Search for Resonance in U.S. Chinese Medicine
Sonya E. Pritzker

Integrating theoretical perspectives with carefully grounded ethnographic analyses of everyday interaction and experience, Living Translation examines the worlds of international translators as well as U.S. teachers and students of Chinese medicine, focusing on the transformations that occur as participants engage in a “search for resonance” with foreign terms and concepts. Based on a close examination of heated international debates as well as specific texts, classroom discussions, and interviews with publishers, authors, teachers, and students, Sonya Pritzker demonstrates the “living translation” of Chinese medicine as a process unfolding through interaction, inscription, embodied experience, and clinical practice.


ENCOUNTERS WITH MODERNITY
The Catholic Church in West Germany, 1945-1975
Benjamin Ziemann
Translated from the German by Andrew Evans

During the three decades from 1945 to 1975, the Catholic Church in West Germany employed a broad range of methods from empirical social research. Statistics, opinion polling, and organizational sociology, as well as psychoanalysis and other approaches from the “psy sciences,” were debated and introduced in pastoral care. In adopting these methods for their own work, bishops, parish clergy, and pastoral sociologists tried to open the church up to modernity in a rapidly changing society. In the process, they contributed to the reform agenda of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Through its analysis of the intersections between organized religion and applied social sciences, this award-winning book offers fascinating insights into the trajectory of the Catholic Church in postwar Germany.

Series: Volume 17, Studies in German History


WEARY WARRIORS
Power, Knowledge, and the Invisible Wounds of Soldiers
Pamela Moss and Michael J. Prince

As seen in military documents, medical journals, novels, films, television shows, and memoirs, soldiers’ invisible wounds are not innate cracks in individual psyches that break under the stress of war. Instead, the generation of weary warriors is caught up in wider social and political networks and institutions—families, activist groups, government bureaucracies, welfare state programs—mediated through a military hierarchy, psychiatry rooted in mind-body sciences, and various cultural constructs of masculinity. This book offers a history of military psychiatry from the American Civil War to the latest Afghanistan conflict. The authors trace the effects of power and knowledge in relation to the emotional and psychological trauma that shapes soldiers’ bodies, minds, and souls, developing an extensive account of the emergence, diagnosis, and treatment of soldiers’ invisible wounds.


TOURISM IMAGINARIES
Anthropological Approaches
Edited by Noel B. Salazar and Nelson H. H. Graburn
Afterword by Naomi Leite

It is hard to imagine tourism without the creative use of seductive, as well as restrictive, imaginaries about peoples and places. These socially shared assemblages are collaboratively produced and consumed by a diverse range of actors around the globe. As a nexus of social practices through which individuals and groups establish places and peoples as credible objects of tourism, “tourism imaginaries” have yet to be fully explored. Presenting innovative conceptual approaches, this volume advances ethnographic research methods and critical scholarship regarding tourism and the imaginaries that drive it. The various authors contribute methodologically as well as conceptually to anthropology’s grasp of the images, forces, and encounters of the contemporary world.


POWER AND ARCHITECTURE
The Construction of Capitals and the Politics of Space
Edited by Michael Minkenberg

Capital cities have been the seat of political power and central stage for their state’s political conflicts and rituals throughout the ages. In the modern era, they provide symbols for and confer meaning to the state, thereby contributing to the “invention” of the nation. Capitals capture the imagination of natives, visitors and outsiders alike, yet also express the outcomes of power struggles within the political systems in which they operate. This volume addresses the reciprocal relationships between identity, regime formation, urban planning, and public architecture in the Western world. It examines the role of urban design and architecture in expressing (or hiding) ideological beliefs and political agenda.  Case studies include “old” capitals such as Rome, Vienna, Berlin and Warsaw; “new” ones such as Washington, D.C., Ottawa, Canberra, Ankara, Bonn, and Brasília; and the “European” capital Brussels. Each case reflects the authors’ different disciplinary backgrounds in architecture, history, political science, and urban studies, demonstrating the value of an interdisciplinary approach to studying cities.

Series: Volume 12, Space and Place