We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, Economic History, Film Studies and History, along with our New in Paperback titles.
Anthropology
EDGES, FRINGES, FRONTIERS
Integral Ecology, Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainability in Guyana
Thomas B. Henfrey
Volume 23, Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology
Based on an ethnographic account of subsistence use of Amazonian forests by Wapishana people in Guyana, Edges, Frontiers, Fringes examines the social, cultural and behavioral bases for sustainability and resilience in indigenous resource use.
Read Chapter 1. Edges, Fringes, Frontiers
ECONOMY, CRIME AND WRONG IN A NEOLIBERAL ERA
Edited by James G. Carrier
Volume 36, EASA Series
Corporate scandals since the 1990s have made it clear that economic wrong-doing is more common in Western societies than might be expected. This volume examines the relationship between such wrong-doing and the neoliberal orientations, policies, and practices that have been influential since around 1980, considering whether neoliberalism has affected the likelihood that people and firms will act in ways that many people would consider wrong.
Read Introduction: Economy, Crime and Wrong in a Neoliberal Era
CASH TRANSFERS IN CONTEXT
An Anthropological Perspective
Edited by Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Emmanuelle Piccoli
Cash transfer programs have become the preferred channel for delivering emergency aid or tackling poverty in low-and middle-income countries. This book sheds light on their unpredicted consequences worldwide, detailing how they are used by actors to pursue their own strategies and how local populations relate to the external norms they impose.
Read Introduction: Cash Transfers and the Revenge of Contexts: An Introduction
BARTER AND SOCIAL REGENERATION IN THE ARGENTINEAN ANDES
Olivia Angé
Despite the pervasiveness of barter across societies, this mode of transaction has largely escaped the anthropologist’s gaze. Drawing on data from fairs in the Argentinean Andes, this book explores fairs’ embeddedness within religious celebration, arguing that barter is addressed as a sacrifice to catholic figures and local ancestors, and thus challenging a widespread view of barter as a non-monetary form of commodity exchange.
Read Introduction
TRAVELLING TOWARDS HOME
Mobilities and Homemaking
Edited by Nicola Frost and Tom Selwyn
Volume 3, Articulating Journeys: Festivals, Memorials, and Homecomings
This collection brings ethnographic insight into the practices of homemaking, exploring a diverse range of contexts ranging from economic migrants to new Chinese industrial cities, Jewish returnees from Israel to Ukraine, and young gay South Asians in London.
Read Introduction: Home and Homemaking in a Time of Crisis
MEDICINAL RULE
A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa
Koen Stroeken
Volume 35, Methodology & History in Anthropology
Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine – and not the colonizer’s despotic administrator, the missionary’s divine king, or Vansina’s big man.
Read Introduction: Endogenous Kingship
ELITE MALAY POLYGAMY
Wives, Wealth and Woes in Malaysia
Miriam Koktvedgaard Zeitzen
Volume 41, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives
An ethnography of elite polygamy in urban Malaysia, this volume explores the impact this growing practice has on Malay gender relations, examining the varied and often-conflicted polygamy narratives of elite Malay women, who manage their lives and loves under the “threat” of husbands able to marry another woman without their knowledge or consent.
Read Introduction: Polygamous Anxieties
Economic History
WHAT IS WORK?
Gender at the Crossroads of Home, Family, and Business from the Early Modern Era to the Present
Edited by Raffaella Sarti, Anna Bellavitis, and Manuela Martini
Volume 30, International Studies in Social History
Every society has a definition of what work is, and isn’t. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary overview of work as it applies to the highly gendered realm of household economies, drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics.
Film Studies
SCREENED ENCOUNTERS
The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, 1955-1990
Caroline Moine
Translated from the French by John Barrett
Preface by Dina Iordanova
Edited by Skyler J. Arndt-Briggs
NEW SERIES: Volume1, Film and the Global Cold War
Established in 1955, the Leipzig International Documentary Film Festival became a central arena for staging the cultural politics of the German Democratic Republic, both domestically and in relation to West Germany and the rest of the world. Screened Encounters represents the definitive history of this key event, recounting the political and artistic exchanges it enabled from its founding until German unification, and tracing the outsize influence it exerted on international cultural relations during the Cold War.
Read Introduction: A Festival at the Heart of the Cold War
History
GULAG MEMORIES
The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia’s Repressive Past
Zuzanna Bogumił
Translated from the Polish by Philip Palmer
This ethnographic study takes a holistic, comprehensive approach to understanding memories of the Gulag, and particularly the language of commemoration that surrounds it in present-day Russian society. It focuses on four regions of particular historical significance—the Solovetsky Islands, the Komi Republic, the Perm region, and Kolyma—to carefully explore how memories become a social phenomenon, how objects become heritage, and how the human need to create sites of memory has preserved the Gulag in specific ways today.
Read Introduction
A HISTORY SHARED AND DIVIDED
East and West Germany since the 1970s
Frank Bösch
Translated from the German by Jennifer Walcoff Neuheiser
Divided History uniquely explores how East and West Germany responded to the new challenges and crises of the 1970s, and reunification. Topics range from political, labor, and business issues to migration and environmental issues, showing how the two German states remained inextricably connected in the 1970s and 1980s.
Read Introduction: Divided and Connected: Perspectives on German History since the 1970s
New in Paperback
RE-ORIENTING CUISINE
East Asian Foodways in the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Kwang Ok Kim
Volume 3, Food, Nutrition, and Culture
“Overall, this volume provides rich ethnographic and descriptive material for any scholar interested in Asian foodways. This work is a welcome addition to the ever-growing cannon on food scholarship in Asia.” · Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute
Read Introduction
A FRAGMENTED LANDSCAPE
Abortion Governance and Protest Logics in Europe
Edited by Silvia De Zordo, Joanna Mishtal, and Lorena Anton
Volume 20, Protest, Culture & Society
“This edited volume does not only offer gender historians a rich source, but should also be of interest to historians of social movements and legal historians who have to face the fact that an expected process like ‘liberalization’ is created by economic and material factors as well as subterranean techniques of subjectivization and does not reveal any direction but presents a constellation that can switch position any time.” · H-Soz-Kult
Read Introduction
REFLECTING ON REFLEXIVITY
The Human Condition as an Ontological Surprise
Edited by Terry Evens, Don Handelman and Christopher Roberts
Reflexivity is fundamental to human social life. This volume analyzes reflexivity on two analytical planes. On one is the role reflexivity plays in human life and the study of it. The other plane is anthropo-philosophical, which maintains that reflexivity definitively distinguishes the being and becoming of the human.
Read Introduction: Reflexivity and Selfhood
‘CITY OF THE FUTURE’
Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana
Mateusz Laszczkowski
Volume 14, Integration and Conflict Studies
“The book can serve as the perfect companion to post-graduate studies in many fields, because its methodology is brilliant, clear, transparent, and utterly reflexive. No doubt it will become a major reference text on many syllabi to come.” • Central Asian Affairs
Read Introduction: Pathways into the ‘City of the Future’
NEW & REVISED PAPERBACK EDITION
SHAMANISM
Traditional and Contemporary Approaches to the Mastery of Spirits and Healing
Merete Demant Jakobsen†
“This is a most useful book in the present discourse on shamanism, for it is one in which a specialist in traditional or classical shamanism who is also familiar with New Age shamanism compares the two complexes … highly recommendable.” · Shamanism
Read Introduction
THE ONLINE WORLD OF SURROGACY
Zsuzsa Berend
Volume 35, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives
“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
Read Introduction
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