We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, Film Studies, History, Medical Anthropology and Sociology, along with our New in Paperback titles.
Paperback Original
RE-IMAGINING DEFA
East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts
Edited by Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke
“This is an excellent book that includes among its contributors many of the most respected scholars on DEFA and East German cinema. There is an impressive array of critical and historical approaches on offer here, reflecting the breadth of scholarship on the subject and relating GDR film to a whole array of other areas and disciplines from Third Cinema to science fiction.” · Hunter Bivens, University of California, Santa Cruz
By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed, the cinema of the German Democratic Republic—to the extent it was considered at all—was widely regarded as a footnote to European film history, with little of enduring value. Since then, interest in East German cinema has exploded, inspiring innumerable festivals, books, and exhibits on the GDR’s rich and varied filmic output. In Re-Imagining DEFA, leading international experts take stock of this vibrant landscape and plot an ambitious course for future research, one that considers other cinematic traditions, brings genre and popular works into the fold, and encompasses DEFA’s complex post-unification “afterlife.”
Read Introduction: Re-Imagining East German Cinema
Paperback Original
CONTEXTUALIZING DISASTER
Edited by Gregory V. Button and Mark Schuller
NEW SERIES Volume 1, Catastrophes in Context
“This book presents a vivid picture of extreme events and how different parties involved in the recovery process contextualize them.” · Arthur D. Murphy, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Contextualizing Disaster offers a comparative analysis of six recent “highly visible” disasters and several slow-burning, “hidden,” crises that include typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, chemical spills, and the unfolding consequences of rising seas and climate change. The book argues that, while disasters are increasingly represented by the media as unique, exceptional, newsworthy events, it is a mistake to think of disasters as isolated or discrete occurrences. Rather, building on insights developed by political ecologists, this book makes a compelling argument for understanding disasters as transnational and global phenomenon.
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Paperback Original
WAR MAGIC
Religion, Sorcery, and Performance
Edited by D. S. Farrer
“This fascinating volume reconfigures the study of magic, sorcery, and religion by inquiring beyond the meaning of beliefs and symbols to ask what spiritual performances do in accomplishing or preventing violence and death.” · John Whalen-Bridge, National University of Singapore
This compelling volume explores how war magic and warrior religion unleash the power of the gods, demons, ghosts, and the dead. Documenting war magic and warrior religion as they are performed in diverse cultures and across historical time periods, this volume foregrounds embodiment, practice, and performance in anthropological approaches to magic, sorcery, shamanism, and religion. The authors go beyond what magic ‘represents’ to consider what magic does. From Chinese exorcists, Javanese spirit siblings, and black magic in Sumatra to Tamil Tiger suicide bombers, Chamorro spiritual re-enchantment, tantric Buddhist war magic, and Yanomami dark shamans, religion and magic are re-evaluated not just from the practitioner’s perspective but through the victim’s lived experience. These original investigations reveal a nuanced approach to understanding social action, innovation, and the revitalization of tradition in colonial and post-colonial societies undergoing rapid social transformation.
Read Introduction: War Magic: Religion, Sorcery, and Performance
LIFE AS A HUNT
Thresholds of Identities and Illusions on an African Landscape
Stuart A. Marks
The “extensive wilderness” of Zambia’s central Luangwa Valley is the homeland of the Valley Bisa whose cultural practices have enriched this environment for centuries. Beginning with the intrusions of warlords and later British colonials, successive generations have experienced the callousness and challenges of colonialism. Their homeland, a slender corridor surrounded by three national parks and an escarpment, is a microcosm of the political, economic and cultural battlefields surrounding most African protected areas today. The story of the Valley Bisa diverges from the myths that conservationists, administrators, and philanthropists, tell about Africa’s environmental and wildlife crises.
Read Introduction: On Poaching an Elephant: Calling the Shots and Following the Ricochets
MOVING PLACES
Relations, Return and Belonging
Edited by Nataša Gregorič Bon and Jaka Repič
Volume 29, EASA Series
“This is a well conceived and well executed volume that addresses an important and timely constellation of themes regarding movement, (im)mobilities, dislocations, reorientations, return, and memory in a range of compelling sociocultural contexts.” · Peter Kirby, University of Oxford
Moving Places draws together contributions from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, exploring practices and experiences of movement, non-movement, and place-making. The book centers on “moving places”: places with locations that are not fixed but relative. Locations appearing to be reasonably stable, such as home and homeland, are in fact always subject to practices, imaginaries, and politics of movement. Bringing together original ethnographic contributions with a clear theoretical focus, this volume spans the fields of anthropology, human geography, migration, and border studies, and serves as teaching material in related programs.
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FROM CRAFTSMEN TO CAPITALISTS
German Artisans from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic, 1939-1953
Frederick L. McKitrick
Volume 37, Monographs in German History
“Among historians, German Handwerker have typically been treated only in terms of their presumed Nazi sentiments or persistent economic backwardness. This extensively researched, well-written volume shows that these artisans were neither exclusively reactionary in their politics nor cynically sacrificed by the Nazis at the altar of the war economy.” · Jay Lockenour, Temple University
Politically adrift, alienated from Weimar society, and fearful of competition from industrial elites and the working class alike, the independent artisans of interwar Germany were a particularly receptive audience for National Socialist ideology. As Hitler consolidated power, they emerged as an important Nazi constituency, drawn by the party’s rejection of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Yet, in the years after 1945, the artisan class became one of the pillars of postwar stability, thoroughly integrated into German society. From Craftsmen to Capitalists gives the first account of this astonishing transformation, exploring how skilled tradesmen recast their historical traditions and forged alliances with former antagonists to help realize German democratization and recovery.
Read Chapter 1. From Zünfte to Nazism: German Handwerk to 1939
MIGRATIONS IN THE GERMAN LANDS, 1500-2000
Edited by Jason Coy, Jared Poley, and Alexander Schunka
Volume 13, Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association
“This well-edited, well-written volume represents an important contribution to migration history. Its distinctiveness lies both in its focus on immigration to and within Germany—as opposed to German emigration to other lands—and its unusually broad chronological range, including a welcome emphasis on the early modern period.” · James Melton, Emory University
Migration to, from, and within German-speaking lands has been a dynamic force in Central European history for centuries. Exemplifying some of the most exciting recent research on historical mobility, the essays collected here reconstruct the experiences of vagrants, laborers, religious exiles, refugees, and other migrants during the last five hundred years of German history. With diverse contributions ranging from early modern martyrdom to post–Cold War commemoration efforts, this volume identifies revealing commonalities shared by different eras while also placing the German case within the broader contexts of European and global migration.
Read Introduction: Migration in the German Lands: An Introduction
IN THE NAME OF THE GREAT WORK
Stalin’s Plan for the Transformation of Nature and its Impact in Eastern Europe
Edited by Doubravka Olšáková
Volume 10, Environment in History: International Perspectives
“By focusing on the Eastern European experience, this book offers an original angle on the ‘Stalin Plan.’ Its case studies are substantial, covering a considerable amount of ground and presenting new empirical findings.” · Jonathan Oldfield, University of Birmingham
Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” Intended to increase agricultural yields dramatically, this utopian impulse quickly spread to the newly communist states of Eastern Europe, captivating political elites and war-fatigued publics alike. By the time of Stalin’s death, however, these attempts at “transformation”—which relied upon ideologically corrupted and pseudoscientific theories—had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume follows the history of such projects in three communist states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.
Read Introduction: The Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature and the East European Experience
HEALTH AND DIFFERENCE
Rendering Human Variation in Colonial Engagements
Edited by Alexandra Widmer and Veronika Lipphardt
Volume 8, Studies of the Biosocial Society
“This volume contributes valuably to literature by showing how medical knowledge practices both shaped, and were shaped by, categories and images of social, cultural, sexual,and biological difference, and ‘racial difference’.” · Ricardo Roque, University of Lisbon
Human variation represented a central research topic for life scientists and posed challenging administrative issues for colonial bureaucrats in the first half of the 20th century. By following scientists’ and administrators’ interests in innovating styles and tools for making and circulating documents, in reshaping landscapes and environments, and in fixing distances between humans, the book advances new understandings of the materiality of colonial institutional life and governance.
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THE ONLINE WORLD OF SURROGACY
Zsuzsa Berend
Volume 35, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality
“This is a much awaited contribution to the surrogacy scholarship as it is the first ethnographic study to look at surrogacy in the United States since the early 1990’s… Berend’s book is also cutting edge in its methodology, since it is based on “online ethnography.” · Elly Teman, author of Birthing a Mother: the Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self
Zsuzsa Berend presents a methodologically innovative ethnography of SurroMomsOnline.com, the largest surrogacy support website in the United States. Surrogates’ views emerge from the stories, debates, and discussions that unfold online. The Online World of Surrogacy documents these collective meaning-making practices and explores their practical, emotional, and moral implications. In doing so, the book works through themes of interest across the social sciences, including definitions of parenthood, the symbolic role of money, reproductive loss, altruism, and the moral valuation of relationships.
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RELUCTANT INTIMACIES
Japanese Eldercare in Indonesian Hands
Beata Świtek
Based on seventeen months of ethnographic research among Indonesian eldercare workers in Japan and Indonesia, this book is the first ethnography to research Indonesian care workers’ relationships with the cared-for elderly, their Japanese colleagues, and their employers. Through the notion of intimacy, the book brings together sociological and anthropological scholarship on the body, migration, demographic change, and eldercare in a vivid account of societal transformation. Placed against the background of mass media representations, the Indonesian workers’ experiences serve as a basis for discussion of the role of bodily experience in shaping the image of a national “other” in Japan.
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THE FRANCE OF THE LITTLE-MIDDLES
A Suburban Housing Development in Greater Paris
Marie Cartier, Isabelle Coutant, Olivier Masclet, and Yasmine Siblot
Translated by Juliette Rogers
NEW SERIES Volume 1, Anthropology of Europe
The Poplars housing development in suburban Paris is home to what one resident called the “Little-Middles” – a social group on the tenuous border between the working- and middle- classes. In the 1960s The Poplars was a site of upward social mobility, which fostered an egalitarian sense of community among residents. This feeling of collective flourishing was challenged when some residents moved away, selling their homes to a new generation of upwardly mobile neighbors from predominantly immigrant backgrounds. This volume explores the strained reception of these migrants, arguing that this is less a product of racism and xenophobia than of anxiety about social class and the loss of a sense of community that reigned before.
Read Introduction
NEW in Paperback:
ANTHROPOLOGY AND NOSTALGIA
Edited by Olivia Angé and David Berliner
“[This volume] illustrates that nostalgia is an undeniable part of modern (if not general human) experience and that anthropology has a great deal to offer in understanding and critiquing its diverse forms, practices, and social and political implications.” · Anthropology Review Database
Nostalgia is intimately connected to the history of the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular, though finely grained ethnographies of nostalgia and loss are still scarce. Today, anthropologists have realized that nostalgia constitutes a fascinating object of study for exploring contemporary issues of the formation of identity in politics and history. Contributors to this volume consider the fabric of nostalgia in the fields of heritage and tourism, exile and diasporas, postcolonialism and postsocialism, business and economic exchange, social, ecological and religious movements, and nation building. They contribute to a better understanding of how individuals and groups commemorate their pasts, and how nostalgia plays a role in the process of remembering.
Read Introduction: Anthropology of Nostalgia—Anthropology as Nostalgia
PEOPLE, MONEY AND POWER IN THE ECONOMIC CRISIS
Perspectives from the Global South
Edited by Keith Hart and John Sharp
Volume 1, The Human Economy
“A striking element of the volume is the interdisciplinarity of its textual form. While most of the contributors are in fact sociocultural anthropologists, the appropriation of templates and literary conventions within and across the fields of history, sociology, political economy and geography reflects the seriousness of the authors’ coalition building aspirations.” · Anthropological Forum
The Cold War was fought between “state socialism” and “the free market.” That fluctuating relationship between public power and private money continues today, unfolding in new and unforeseen ways during the economic crisis. Nine case studies — from Southern Africa, South Asia, Brazil, and Atlantic Africa – examine economic life from the perspective of ordinary people in places that are normally marginal to global discourse, covering a range of class positions from the bottom to the top of society. The authors of these case studies examine people’s concrete economic activities and aspirations. By looking at how people insert themselves into the actual, unequal economy, they seek to reflect human unity and diversity more fully than the narrow vision of conventional economics.
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THE ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPERIMENT
A.M. Hocart and W.H.R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908
Edited by Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg
Volume 1, Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists
“[With this] very cohesive set of essays, Hviding and Berg h ave done an excellent job lifting an important expedition out of the archival oblivion where it reposed for the better part of a century. This is an appropriate volume to introduce the new Pacific Perspectives series. As such, this work appeals to readers interested in the histories of anthropology and Pacific worlds.” · Oceania
In 1908 Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers brought about a turning point in modern anthropology. The two pioneers’ fieldwork in Island Melanesia brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. Contributors to this volume—who have all carried out fieldwork in Melanesian locations—situate the scholars’ efforts in the contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.
Read Introduction: The Ethnographic Experiment in Island Melanesia
GLOBALIZED FATHERHOOD
Edited by Marcia C. Inhorn, Wendy Chavkin & José-Alberto Navarro
Volume 27, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality
“Thanks to Globalized Fatherhood we now have a benchmark set of studies with which to further build the theory necessary to study men in relation to children and mothers, as well as a splendid collection of essays each of which reveals common, unique, and often surprising ways of being fathers today, that is fatherhood in all its contradictory and mutable variations.” · Global Public Health
Using an entirely new conceptual vocabulary through which to understand men’s experiences and expectations at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this path-breaking volume focuses on fatherhood around the globe, including transformations in fathering, fatherhood, and family life. It includes new work by anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural geographers, working in settings from Peru to India to Vietnam. Each chapter suggests that men are responding to globalization as fathers in creative and unprecedented ways, not only in the West, but also in numerous global locations.
Read Introduction: Globalized Fatherhood: Emergent Forms and Possibilities in the New Millennium
THE STATE AND THE GRASSROOTS
Immigrant Transnational Organizations in Four Continents
Edited by Alejandro Portes and Patricia Fernández-Kelly
“This impressive book… offers a very easy introduction and overview of the topic. It is, therefore, recommended not only to specialists with prior knowledge but to all interested in the topic. What makes this book special is the presentation and inclusion of the first completed, comprehensive studies of various migration groups in the US… [It] provides exhaustive documentation of how transnational immigrant organizations emerge and interact with home and host countries, presenting immigrants as vital agents of development. There is no doubt that [this volume) should be purchased by all university libraries and that it can enlighten readers in a domain in urgent need of attention.” · European Planning Studies
The book outlines the principal positions in the migration and development debate and discusses the concept of transnationalism as a means of resolving these controversies.
Read Introduction: Immigration, Transnationalism, and Development: The State of the Question
TALKING STONES
The Politics of Memorialization in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland
Elisabetta Viggiani
Foreword by Hastings Donnan
“This is an excellent book that makes a major contribution by presenting the most comprehensive study yet written on the meaning and significance, past and present, of the ubiquitous political memorials that mark the urban terrain of one of the most famously politically divided cities in the world.” · CritCom – Council for European Studies
If memory was simply about past events, public authorities would never put their ever-shrinking budgets at its service. Rather, memory is actually about the present moment, as Pierre Nora puts it: “Through the past, we venerate above all ourselves.” This book examines how collective memory and material culture are used to support present political and ideological needs in contemporary society. Using the memorialization of the Troubles in contemporary Northern Ireland as a case study, this book investigates how non-state, often proscribed, organizations have filled a societal vacuum in the creation of public memorials. In particular, these groups have sifted through the past to propose “official” collective narratives of national identification, historical legitimation, and moral justifications for violence.
Read Introduction: Memorials as Silent Extras or Scripted Actors?