We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, Gender Studies, History, Media Studies, and Urban Studies, along with our New in Paperback titles.
STATEGRAPHY
Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State
Edited by Tatjana Thelen, Larissa Vetters, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann
NEW SERIES: Volume 4, Studies in Social Analysis
Stategraphy—the ethnographic exploration of relational modes, boundary work, and forms of embeddedness of actors—offers crucial analytical avenues for researching the state. By exploring interactions and negotiations of local actors in different institutional settings, the contributors explore state transformations in relation to social security in a variety of locations spanning from Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans to the United Kingdom and France. Fusing grounded empirical studies with rigorous theorizing, the volume provides new perspectives to broader related debates in social research and political analysis.
PEACEFUL SELVES
Personhood, Nationhood, and the Post-Conflict Moment in Rwanda
Laura Eramian
This ethnography of personhood in post-genocide Rwanda investigates how residents of a small town grapple with what kinds of persons they ought to become in the wake of violence. Based on fieldwork carried out over the course of a decade, it uncovers how conflicting moral demands emerge from the 1994 genocide, from cultural contradictions around “good” personhood, and from both state and popular visions for the future. What emerges is a profound dissonance in town residents’ selfhood. While they strive to be agents of change who can catalyze a new era of modern Rwandan nationhood, they are also devastated by the genocide and struggle to recover a sense of selfhood and belonging in the absence of kin, friends, and neighbors. In drawing out the contradictions at the heart of self-making and social life in contemporary Rwanda, this book asserts a novel argument about the ordinary lives caught in global post-conflict imperatives to remember and to forget, to mourn and to prosper.
SELFHOOD AND RECOGNITION
Melanesian and Western Accounts of Relationality
Anita C. Galuschek
Volume 7, Person, Space and Memory in the Contemporary Pacific
The disciplines of philosophy and cultural anthropology have one thing in common: human behavior. Yet surprisingly, dialogue between the two fields has remained largely silent until now. Selfhood and Recognition combines philosophical and cultural anthropological accounts of the perception of individual action, exploring the processes through which a person recognizes the self and the other. Touching on humanity as porous, fractal, dividual, and relational, the author sheds new light on the nature of selfhood, recognition, relationality, and human life.
VITAL DIPLOMACY
The Ritual Everyday on a Dammed River in Amazonia
Chloe Nahum-Claudel
Volume 5, Ethnography, Theory, Experiment
In Brazil, where forest meets savanna, new towns, agribusiness and hydroelectricity plants form a patchwork with the indigenous territories. Here, agricultural work, fishing, songs, feasts and exchanges occupy the Enawenê-nawê for eight months of each year, during a season called Yankwa. Vital Diplomacy focuses on this major ceremonial cycle to shed new light on classic Amazonian themes such as kinship, gender, manioc cultivation and cuisine, relations with non-humans and foreigners, and the interplay of myth and practice, exploring how ritual contains and diverts the threat of violence by reconciling antagonistic spirits, coordinating social and gender divides, and channelling foreign relations and resources.
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.
DIFFERENCE AND SAMENESS AS MODES OF INTEGRATION
Anthropological Perspectives on Ethnicity and Religion
Edited by Günther Schlee and Alexander Horstmann
Volume 16, Integration and Conflict Studies
What does it mean to “fit in?” In this volume of essays, editors Günther Schlee and Alexander Horstmann demystify the discourse on identity, challenging common assumptions about the role of sameness and difference as the basis for inclusion and exclusion. Armed with intimate knowledge of local systems, social relationships, and the negotiation of people’s positions in the everyday politics, these essays tease out the ways in which ethnicity, religion and nationalism are used for social integration.
BISHKEK BOYS
Neighbourhood Youth and Urban Change in Kyrgyzstan’s Capital
Philipp Schröder
Volume 17, Integration and Conflict Studies
In this pioneering ethnographic study of identity and integration, author Philipp Schröder explores urban change in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek from the vantage point of the male youth living in one neighbourhood. Touching on topics including authority, violence, social and imaginary geographies, interethnic relations, friendship, and competing notions of belonging to the city, Bishkek Boys offers unique insights into how post-Socialist economic liberalization, rural-urban migration and ethnic nationalism have reshaped social relations among young males who come of age in this Central Asian urban environment.
CYPRUS AND ITS CONFLICTS
Representations, Materialities, and Cultures
Edited by Vaia Doudaki and Nico Carpentier
The Mediterranean island of Cyprus is the site of enduring political, military, and economic conflict. This interdisciplinary collection takes Cyprus as a geographical, cultural and political point of reference for understanding how conflict is mediated, represented, reconstructed, experienced, and transformed. Through methodologically diverse case studies of a wide range of topics—including public art, urban spaces, and print, broadcast and digital media—it assembles an impressively multifaceted perspective, one that provides broad insights into the complex interplay of culture, conflict, and identity.
SUBJECTS, CITIZENS, AND OTHERS
Administering Ethnic Heterogeneity in the British and Habsburg Empires, 1867-1918
Benno Gammerl
Translated from the German by Jennifer Walcoff Neuheiser
Volume 7, Studies in British and Imperial History
Bosnian Muslims, East African Masai, Czech-speaking Austrians, North American indigenous peoples, and Jewish immigrants from across Europe—the nineteenth-century British and Habsburg Empires were characterized by incredible cultural and racial-ethnic diversity. Notwithstanding their many differences, both empires faced similar administrative questions as a result: Who was excluded or admitted? What advantages were granted to which groups? And how could diversity be reconciled with demands for national autonomy and democratic participation? In this pioneering study, Benno Gammerl compares Habsburg and British approaches to governing their diverse populations, analyzing imperial formations to reveal the legal and political conditions that fostered heterogeneity.
CULTURAL TOPOGRAPHIES OF THE NEW BERLIN
Edited by Karin Bauer and Jennifer Ruth Hosek
Since Unification and the end of the Cold War, Berlin has witnessed a series of uncommonly intense social, political, and cultural transformations. While positioning itself as a creative center populated by young and cosmopolitan global citizens, the “New Berlin” is at the same time a rich site of historical memory, defined inescapably by its past even as it articulates German and European hopes for the future. Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin presents a fascinating cross-section of life in Germany’s largest city, revealing the complex ways in which globalization, ethnicity, economics, memory, and national identity inflect how its urban spaces are inhabited and depicted.
NEW IN PAPERBACK:
THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS
The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide
Taner Akçam and Umit Kurt
Translated by Aram Arkun
Volume 21, War and Genocide
“This book is a valuable addition to filling the gaps of our understanding of genocide and helps readers navigate complex terrain in the case study presented… I recommend this book as a case study to be included in graduate level courses. In addition to its thorough review of the questionable statecraft of genocidal states, it is a reminder of the merits of engaged scholarship. Akçam and Kurt, by sharing their research as an act of solidarity with citizens who continue to challenge state restraints and master narratives based on genocide, make a contribution to the ongoing process of crafting a just society.” · Histoire Sociale/Social History
Read Introduction
SOCIAL MOVEMENT STUDIES IN EUROPE
The State of the Art
Edited by Olivier Fillieule and Guya Accornero
Foreword by James Jasper
Volume 16, Protest, Culture & Society
“Fillieule and Accornero have edited a timely volume for breaking down national silos in social movement research… As a sociology of sociology, the major thrust of the work is that context is of paramount importance: many factors contributed to why social movement theory has largely been more robust in the US than in Europe. Nevertheless, the material here prepares scholars around the globe for detailed, comparative studies of movements… Highly recommended.” · Choice
Read Introduction: “So Many as the Stars of the Sky in Multitude, and as the Sand which is By the Sea Shore Innumerable”: European Social Movement Research in Perspective
MUSIC AND INTERNATIONAL HISTORY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Edited by Jessica Gienow-Hecht
Volume 7, Explorations in Culture and International History
“What is interesting about this book? First, each chapter focuses on one genre of music—classical music…Second, this book highlights the benefits of music in the study of international history… This kind of aesthetics is less studied because of its seemingly apolitical nature. This book shows that music is not the “dessert,” but “the meat and the potatoes” (Buzzanco [2000], quoted by Fosler-Lussier, 119). In short, it nourishes our understanding of international history. IR scholars, especially rationalists or structural realists of IR, should read Music and International History in the Twentieth Century.” · International Dialogue, A Multidisciplinary Journal of World Affairs
Read Introduction: Sonic History or Why Music Matters in International History
PARLIAMENT AND PARLIAMENTARISM
A Comparative History of a European Concept
Edited by Pasi Ihalainen, Cornelia Ilie, and Kari Palonen
Volume 2, European Conceptual History
“The focus on representation, sovereignty, responsibility and deliberation offers a lot: the book convincingly demonstrates how these concepts from as early as seventeenth-century Britain recur time and time again in political controversies over what parliament is or should be. Thanks to this specific approach, the quality of the case studies and the coherence between them are significant.” · Parliament, Estates and Representation
Read Introduction: Parliament as a Conceptual Nexus