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Simulated Shelves: Browse May 2016 New Books

We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, Cultural Studies, History and Refugee & Migration Studies, along with our New in Paperback titles.

 


 

COMING OF AGE
Constucting and Controlling Youth in Munich, 1942-1973
Martin Kalb

 

“This is a strong contribution to the (still under-researched) post-war history of West Germany, one that also provides fresh insights into the histories of European youth and Cold War cultural politics. It transcends traditional markers of German history such as Stunde Null, moving from a ‘generational’ approach to one more rooted in the everyday history of youth.” · Alan McDougall, University of Guelph

In the lean and anxious years following World War II, Munich society became obsessed with the moral condition of its youth. Initially born of the economic and social disruption of the war years, a preoccupation with juvenile delinquency progressed into a full-blown panic over the hypothetical threat that young men and women posed to postwar stability. As Martin Kalb shows in this fascinating study, constructs like the rowdy young boy and the sexually deviant girl served as proxies for the diffuse fears of adult society, while allowing authorities ranging from local institutions to the U.S. military government to strengthen forms of social control.

Read Introduction

 

 

RESCUING THE VULNERABLE
Poverty, Welfare and Social Ties in Modern Europe
Edited by Beate Althammer, Lutz Raphael, and Tamara Stazic-Wendt

Volume 27, International Studies in Social History

 

In many ways, the European welfare state constituted a response to the new forms of social fracture and economic turbulence that were born out of industrialization—challenges that were particularly acute for groups whose integration into society seemed the most tenuous. Covering a range of national cases, this volume explores the relationship of weak social ties to poverty and how ideas about this relationship informed welfare policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By focusing on three representative populations—neglected children, the homeless, and the unemployed—it provides a rich, comparative consideration of the shifting perceptions, representations, and lived experiences of social vulnerability in modern Europe.

Read Intrdouction: Poverty and Endangered Social Ties: An Introduction

 

 

CROWN, CHURCH AND CONSTITUTION
Popular Conservatism in England, 1815-1867
Jörg Neuheiser
Translated from the German by Jennifer Walcoff Neuheiser

Volume 4, Studies in British and Imperial History

 

Much scholarship on nineteenth-century English workers has been devoted to the radical reform politics that powerfully unsettled the social order in the century’s first decades. Comparatively neglected have been the impetuous patriotism, royalism, and xenophobic anti-Catholicism that countless men and women demonstrated in the early Victorian period. This much-needed study of the era’s “conservatism from below” explores the role of religion in everyday culture and the Tories’ successful mobilization across class boundaries. Long before they were able to vote, large swathes of the lower classes embraced Britain’s monarchical, religious, and legal institutions in the defense of traditional English culture.

Read Introduction

 

 

FASCIST INTERACTIONS
Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and Its Era, 1919-1945
David D. Roberts

 

“The literature on fascism has become so elaborate and dense during the past couple of decades that we badly need surefooted critical guidance of the kind that Roberts provides. This consistently interesting volume is the culminating statement of a long and distinguished career.” · Geoff Eley, University of Michigan

Although studies of fascism have constituted one of the most fertile areas of historical inquiry in recent decades, more and more scholars have called for a new agenda with more research beyond Italy and Germany, less preoccupation with definition and classification, and more sustained focus on the relationships among different fascist formations before 1945. Starting from a critical assessment of these imperatives, this rigorous volume charts a historiographical path that transcends rigid distinctions while still developing meaningful criteria of differentiation. Even as we take fascism seriously as a political phenomenon, such an approach allows us to better understand its distinctive contradictions and historical variations.

Read Preface

 

 

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

Volume 25, Making Sense of History

 

Employing an innovative methodological toolkit, Doing Conceptual History in Africa provides a refreshingly broad and interdisciplinary approach to African historical studies. The studies assembled here focus on the complex role of language in Africa’s historical development, with a particular emphasis on pragmatics and semantics. From precolonial dynamics of wealth and poverty to the conceptual foundations of nationalist movements, each contribution strikes a balance between the local and the global, engaging with a distinctively African intellectual tradition while analyzing the regional and global contexts in which categories like “work,” “marriage,” and “land” take shape.

Read Introduction: Theories and Methods of African Conceptual History

 

 

 

MIGRATION BY BOAT
Discourses of Trauma, Exclusion and Survival
Edited by Lynda Mannik

Volume 35, Forced Migration

 

At a time when thousands of refugees risk their lives undertaking perilous journeys by boat across the Mediterranean, this multidisciplinary volume could not be more pertinent. It offers various contemporary case studies of boat migrations undertaken by asylum seekers and refugees around the globe and shows that boats not only move people and cultural capital between places, but also fuel cultural fantasies, dreams of adventure and hope, along with fears of invasion and terrorism. The ambiguous nature of memories, media representations and popular culture productions are highlighted throughout in order to address negative stereotypes and conversely, humanize the individuals involved.

Read Introduction

 

 

TROPICS OF VIENNA
Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire
Ulrich E. Bach

Volume 19, Austrian and Habsburg Studies

 

The Austrian Empire was not a colonial power in the sense that fellow actors like 19th-century England and France were. It nevertheless oversaw a multinational federation where the capital of Vienna was unmistakably linked with its eastern periphery in a quasi-colonial arrangement that inevitably shaped the cultural and intellectual life of the Habsburg Empire. This was particularly evident in the era’s colonial utopian writing, and Tropics of Vienna blends literary criticism, cultural theory, and historical analysis to illuminate this curious genre. By analyzing the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Theodor Herzl, Joseph Roth, and other representative Austrian writers, it reveals a shared longing for alternative social and spatial configurations beyond the concept of the “nation-state” prevalent at the time.

Read Introduction

 

 

OWNERSHIP AND NURTURE
Studies in Native Amazonian Property Relations
Edited by Marc Brightman, Carlos Fausto, and Vanessa Grotti
Foreword by James Leach

 

The first book to address the classic anthropological theme of property through the ethnography of Amazonia, Ownership and Nurture sets new and challenging terms for anthropological debates about the region and about property in general. Property and ownership have special significance and carry specific meanings in Amazonia, which has been portrayed as the antithesis of Western, property-based, civilization. Through carefully constructed studies of land ownership, slavery, shamanism, spirit mastery, aesthetics, and intellectual property, this volume demonstrates that property relations are of central importance in Amazonia, and that the ownership of persons plays an especially significant role in native cosmology.

Read Introduction: Altering Ownership in Amazonia

 

 

BEING AND BECOMING
Embodiment and Experience among the Orang Rimba of Sumatra
Ramsey Elkholy
Foreword by Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen

 

For the Orang Rimba of Sumatra – and tropical foragers in general – life in the forest engenders a kind of “connectedness” that is contingent not only on harmonious relations between people, but also between people and the non-human environment, including those supernatural agencies of the forest that people depend on for their spiritual and emotional wellbeing. Exploring this world, anthropologist Ramsey Elkholy treats embodied action and perception as the basis of shared experience and shows how various forms of embodied experience constitute the very foundations of human culture. In a unique methodological contribution, Elkholy adopts a set of body-centered approaches that reflect and capture the day-to-day, moment-to-moment ways in which people engage with the world. Being and Becoming is an important contribution to phenomenological anthropology, hunter-gatherer studies, and to Southeast Asian ethnography more generally.

Read Introduction

 

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New in Paperback

 

DOMESTICATING YOUTH
Youth Bulges and their Socio-political Implications in Tajikistan
Sophie Roche
Foreword by Günther Schlee

Volume 8, Integration and Conflict Studies

 

“[This] is an interesting and valuable study of Tajikistan, but its lessons have much broader implications. Roche has illustrated powerfully that age is a central structural issue in society and that each particular age-category has its own history, interests, and experiences…Fieldworkers and theorists [should] absorb this message and investigate age concepts, relationships, institutions, and practices in all cultures, where no doubt many valuable things will be learned.” · Anthropology Review Database

Read Introduction: Youth (Bulge) and Conflict

 

THE LEGACIES OF A HAWAIIAN GENERATION
From Territorial Subject to American Citizen
Judith Schachter

 

“Schachter has written a book that models how anthropologists can be responsible and responsive to indigenous people. [It is] massively researched but exceedingly accessible, ethically and methodologically groundbreaking, and yet humble in its ambition and presentation. This book deserves a wide audience, and will appeal to Hawai‘i specialists, as well as scholars of the Pacific and indigeneity. It is also imminently suited to classroom use, if students are ready for ethnographic detail…[and] will leave its own rich legacy for future generations of scholars.” · Asia Pacific Viewpoint

Read Chapter 1. Introduction—A perspective on Hawai`i-US relations

 

 

FROM ANTIQUITIES TO HERITAGE
Transformations of Cultural Memory
Anne Eriksen

Volume 1, Time and the World: Interdisciplinary Studies in Cultural Transformations

 

‘”The case studies supply the overall argument with a desirable empirical specificity; they deepen and enrich it, while they at the same time challenge common generalizations, current theories and habitual ways of thinking. This works on two parallel levels: the empirical cases are lifted out of their immediate contexts and used to examine and discuss theoretical arguments, and then carried back to shed new light on their historical settings.” · Nordic Museology

Read Introduction

 

DURKHEIM, THE DURKHEIMIANS, AND THE ARTS
Edited by Alexander Tristan Riley, W.S.F. Pickering, and William Watts Miller
Published in Association with the Durkheim Press

 

“The strengths of the book are the featuring of the diversity of the [Durkheim] tradition and the many lines linking broadly Durkheimian themes to current work on the arts… [It] illustrates powerfully how Durkheimian concepts live with us today and how we can benefit by comparisons with this rich tradition. Read and be inspired.” · American Journal of Sociology

“The triumvirate editors have put together an imaginative set of authors, representing different generations, who have already made important contributions to recent Durheimiana.” · Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie

Read Introduction