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SIMULATED SHELVES: BROWSE September 2017 NEW BOOKS

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


THE PARTICIPANTS
The Men of the Wannsee Conference
Edited by Hans-Christian Jasch and Christoph Kreutzmüller
Translated from the German by Charlotte Kreutzmüller-Hughes and Jane Paulick

 

On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior German government officials attended a short meeting in Berlin to discuss the deportation and murder of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. Despite lasting only a few hours, the Wannsee Conference is today understood as a signal episode in the history of the Holocaust, exemplifying the labor division and bureaucratization that made the “Final Solution” possible. Yet while the conference itself has been exhaustively researched, many of its attendees remain relatively obscure. Combining accessible prose with scholarly rigor, The Participants presents fascinating profiles of the all-too-human men who implemented some of the most inhuman acts in history.

Read Introduction: The Participants: The Men of the Wannsee Conference

 

LABORERS AND ENSLAVED WORKERS
Experiences in Common in the Making of Rio de Janeiro’s Working Class, 1850-1920
Marcelo Badaró Mattos
Translated by Renata Meirelles and Frederico Machado de Barros

Volume 29, International Studies in Social History

 

From the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1888 abolition of slavery in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro was home to the largest urban population of enslaved workers anywhere in the Americas. It was also the site of an incipient working-class consciousness that expressed itself across seemingly distinct social categories. In this volume, Marcelo Badaró Mattos demonstrates that these two historical phenomena cannot be understood in isolation. Drawing on a wide range of historical sources, Badaró Mattos reveals the diverse labor arrangements and associative life of Rio’s working class, from which emerged the many strategies that workers both free and unfree pursued in their struggles against oppression.

Read Introduction

 

MAKING NORDIC HISTORIOGRAPHY
Connections, Tensions and Methodology, 1850-1970
Edited by Pertti Haapala, Marja Jalava, and Simon Larsson

Volume 32, Making Sense of History

 

Is there a “Nordic history”? If so, what are its origins, its scope, and its defining features? In this informative volume, scholars from all five Nordic nations tackle a notoriously problematic historical concept. Whether recounting Foucault’s departure from Sweden or tracing the rise of movements such as “aristocratic empiricism,” each contribution takes a deliberately transnational approach that is grounded in careful research, yielding rich, nuanced perspectives on shifting and contested historical terrain.

Read Introduction: Nordic Historiography: From Methodological Nationalism to Empirical Transnationalism

 

THE PERSISTENCE OF RACE
Continuity and Change in Germany from the Wilhelmine Empire to National Socialism
Edited by Lara Day and Oliver Haag

 

Race in 20th-century German history is an inescapable topic, one that has been defined overwhelmingly by the narratives of degeneracy that prefigured the Nuremberg Laws and death camps of the Third Reich. As the contributions to this innovative volume show, however, German society produced a much more complex variety of racial representations over the first part of the century. Here, historians explore the hateful depictions of the Nazi period alongside idealized images of African, Pacific and Australian indigenous peoples, demonstrating both the remarkable fixity race had as an object of fascination for German society as well as the conceptual plasticity it exhibited through several historical eras.

Read Introduction

 

COMPENSATION IN PRACTICE
The Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ and the Legacy of Forced Labour during the Third Reich
Edited by Constantin Goschler

 

Founded in 2000, the German Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” is one of the largest transitional justice initiatives in history: in cooperation with its international partner organizations, it has to date paid over 4 billion euros to nearly 1.7 million survivors of forced labour during the Nazi Era. This volume provides an unparalleled look at the Foundation’s creation, operations, and prospects after nearly two decades of existence, with valuable insights not just for historians but for a range of scholars, professionals, and others involved in human rights and reconciliation efforts.

Read Introduction

 

FROM EASTERN BLOC TO EUROPEAN UNION
Comparative Processes of Transformation since 1990
Edited by Günther Heydemann and Karel Vodička
Translated from the German

Volume 22, Contemporary European History

 

More than 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, European integration remains a work in progress, especially in those Eastern European nations most dramatically reshaped by democratization and economic liberalization. This volume assembles detailed, empirically grounded studies of eleven states—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and the former East Germany—that went on to join the European Union. Each chapter analyzes the political, economic, and social transformations that have taken place in these nations, using a comparative approach to identify structural similarities and assess outcomes relative to one another as well as the rest of the EU.

Read Introduction


CULTURE CHANGE AND EX-CHANGE
Syncretism and Anti-Syncretism in Bena, Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea
Regina Knapp

Volume 6, Person, Space and Memory in the Contemporary Pacific

 

How is cultural change perceived and performed by members of the Bena Bena language group, who live in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea? In her analysis, Knapp draws upon existing bodies of work on ‘culture change’, ‘exchange’ and ‘person’ in Melanesia but brings them together in a new way by conjoining traditional models with theoretical approaches of the new Melanesian ethnography and with collaborative, reflexive and reverse anthropology.

Read Introduction: Culture Change and Exchange

 

FOUCAULT’S ORIENT
The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan
Marnia Lazreg

 

Foucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the “Orient” constitute the “limit” of Western rationality. Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars in Tunisia, Japan and France, this book examines the philosophical sources, evolution as well as contradictions of Foucault’s experience with non-Western cultures. Beyond tracing Foucault’s journey into the world of otherness, the book reveals the personal, political as well as methodological effects of a radical conception of cultural difference that extolled the local over the cosmopolitan.

Read Introduction

 

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.

From Clans to Co-ops: Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily by Theodoros Rakopoulos is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

This edition is supported by the University of Bergen. OA ISBN: 978-1-78533-606-5

 

POWER IN PRACTICE
The Pragmatic Anthropology of Afro-Brazilian Capoeira
Sergio González Varela

 

Considering the concept of power in capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian ritual art form, Varela describes ethnographically the importance that capoeira leaders (mestres) have in the social configuration of a style called Angola in Bahia, Brazil. He analyzes how individual power is essential for an understanding of the modern history of capoeira, and for the themes of embodiment, play, cosmology, and ritual action. The book also emphasizes the great significance that creativity and aesthetic expression have for capoeira’s practice and performance.

Read Introduction


SPANISH LESSONS
Cinema and Television in Contemporary Spain
Paul Julian Smith

 

Though unjustly neglected by English-language audiences, Spanish film and television not only represent a remarkably influential and vibrant cultural industry; they are also a fertile site of innovation in the production of “transmedia” works that bridge narrative forms. In Spanish Lessons, Paul Julian Smith provides an engaging exploration of visual culture in an era of collapsing genre boundaries, accelerating technological change, and political-economic tumult. Whether generating new insights into the work of key figures like Pedro Almodóvar, comparing media depictions of Spain’s economic woes, or giving long-overdue critical attention to quality television series, Smith’s book is a consistently lively and accessible cultural investigation.

Read Introduction: Film, Television, Transmedia


CHILDREN OF THE CAMP
The Lives of Somali Youth Raised in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya
Catherine-Lune Grayson

 

Chronic violence has characterized Somalia for over two decades, forcing nearly two million people to flee. A significant number have settled in camps in neighboring countries, where children were born and raised. Based on in-depth fieldwork, this book explores the experience of Somalis who grew up in Kakuma refugee camp, in Kenya, and are now young adults. This original study carefully considers how young people perceive their living environment and how growing up in exile structures their view of the past and their country of origin, and the future and its possibilities.

Read Introduction


New in Paperback:

 

MEDIA, ANTHROPOLOGY AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
Edited by Sarah Pink and Simone Abram

Volume 9, Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology

 

“The importance of public anthropology has been growing around the world making this a timely edition which, ‘mark[s] a line in the sand about where we are today’ [This volume] provides a place to begin to discuss the different ways in which people are currently engaging in public anthropology, including their methods, types of media used, topics researched and blogs such as ‘Savage Minds.’ It has the potential to be a valuable resource in instigating discussions around what anthropology can do, should do and has the potential to communicate through being public.” · SITES – A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies

Read Introduction: Mediating Publics and Anthropology: An Introduction

 

WINNER OF THE 2014 GOURMAND WORLD COOKBOOK UK AWARD

FOOD IN ZONES OF CONFLICT
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives
Edited by Paul Collinson and Helen Macbeth
Foreword by Hugo Slim

Volume 8, Anthropology of Food & Nutrition

 

“One of the most prevalent themes of this innovative collection is the exploration of how food becomes highly politicized and used as a political and military weapon, with multiple chapters examining—and convincingly demonstrating—how governments and other powerful groups exploit the availability of and access to food… a valuable contribution to an often overlooked and underexplored topic, which also offers innovative and novel case studies and empirical data to the more well-trodden tropes of food security and poverty, nutrition and intervention. It is sure to find its way onto many reading lists and will provide a useful resource for undergraduate and graduate teaching and research.” · Food, Culture & Society

Read Introduction

 

WHAT IS EXISTENTIAL ANTHROPOLOGY?
Edited by Michael Jackson and Albert Piette

 

“Overall, this book offers fascinating insights into the potentialities of existential anthropology… it allows to step beyond some of the conceptions that have governed past edited collections in this field, without yielding to current fads in Anglophone anthropology.” · Sociologus

“In giving insight into the existential questions that arise from specific ‘moments of being’, this book will form a crucial point of departure for anyone who is interested in the continuously shifting conditions of human existence.” · Anthropology & Humanism

Read Introduction: Anthropology and the Existential Turn

 

THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS WRITER
Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Helena Wulff

 

“This well-written collection of essays is not merely a programmatic statement about the need for anthropologists to experiment with genres, but indicates how it can be done. It succeeds in showing just as much as telling, with examples ranging from the thought-provoking to the entertaining.” · Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo

Read Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer: Across and Within Genres

 

ECONOMY FOR AND AGAINST DEMOCRACY
Edited by Keith Hart

Volume 2, The Human Economy

 

“[This book] sets out debates and insights that have been long forgotten in social science as a result of the domination of orthodox economics. Absent is the arcane mathematical formalism that commands mainstream enquiry into economics; in these chapters, the study of economics speaks to – and of – people and their daily struggles. In a phrase not to be killed with over-use: this is a liberating read.” · Peter Vale, University of Johannesburg

Read Introduction

 

REGIMES OF IGNORANCE
Anthropological Perspectives on the Production and Reproduction of Non-Knowledge
Edited by Roy Dilley and Thomas G. Kirsch

Volume 29, Methodology & History in Anthropology

 

“What Kirsch and all the contributors to the volume illustrate is that, although anthropology is a latecomer to the topic of agnotology, the discipline has much to offer, especially in expanding the range of the study beyond Western science and corporations and in identifying the constructive processes and effective outcomes of ignorance-making.” · Anthropology Review Database

Read Introduction: Regimes of Ignorance: An Introduction