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When is sex abnormal and when is it dangerous? A multi-disciplinary approach that includes sociology, anthropology, history, and philosophy provides an understanding of how cultural norms have shifted over time and the implications of these shifts.

Drawing from ethnographic research, this book brings together the narratives of Italian and migrant women pole dancing for leisure, women pole and lap dancing for work, as well as women selling sex. By tracing commonalities in women’s processes of subjectivation and othering across the non/sex working women divide, the book foregrounds the intersecting structures of oppression under which women negotiate selfhood.

Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe traces from the 1970s through the post 1989 period how documentaries and filmmakers began to articulate alternative, aesthetically and ideologically provocative visions of the relationship between human and natural worlds.

The Social Origins of Thought explores the Durkheim School’s ambitious critique of philosophical interpretations of the genesis and constitution of the categories of thought. With contributions from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, media studies, and sinology, this volume illustrates the interdisciplinarity and intellectual rigor of the “category project”.

There is little agreement today on what it takes to be intelligent. Yet this word is widely believed to be about something real, mostly biological, and important. Looked at closely, it turns out this word belongs more in the realm of traditional folklore than modern science.

Inspired by the idea of revolution and excitement about the ways archaeology is being used in social justice arenas, this volume seeks to visualize archaeology as part of a movement by redefining what archaeology is and does for the greater good.

The mortgaging of land is not just economic and legal but also social and cultural. Here, anthropologists, historians, and economists explore origins, variations, and meanings of the land mortgage, and the risks to homes and livelihoods.

With a focus on West Germany and Europe, Social Movements after ’68 bridges the 1970s and 1980s as a vital period of European political development and social change. Looking past the known ruptures and changes in the history of European social movements, this volume brings together interconnected social movements including environmental, women’s and gay rights movements.

Dreams Made Small offers an in-depth, ethnographic look at journeys of education among young Papuans under Indonesian rule, ultimately revealing how dreams of transformation, equality, and belonging are shaped and reshaped in the face of multiple constraints.

Studying the im/mobility trajectories of West Africans in the EU, this book presents a new approach to West African migrants in Europe. Based on a trajectory ethnography, this book discusses how African migrants are confronted with rigid mobility regimes, but also how they manage to transgress and circumvent them.

Made up of 10 of Roy Ellen’s finest articles along with a new introduction linking them together, this book looks back at his ideas about nature before taking the arguments forward. Many of the chapters focus on research the author has conducted amongst the Nuaulu people of eastern Indonesia.

Exploring the evolution of Eastern European discourses in Asia, Africa and Latin America in nineteenth and twentieth century, this volume locates the mechanisms and strategies that diverse Eastern European social actors adopted when discussing the non-European world. The Eastern European perspective is not only an important addition to the study of orientalism and post coloniality, but the transnational links in-between Eastern Europe show the region’s importance to a global history.

Music and Postwar Transitions takes a groundbreaking and much anticipated dive into the concept of postwar transitions and how these affect and are affected by the world of music. Leading scholars in the field explore new approaches to create a novel understanding of music and postwar periods.

Contributing to the history of anthropology, this book looks at the Porto School of Anthropology and analyses the life and work of its main mentor – Mendes Correia (1888-1960). Focused on Portugal, the analysis is also comparative with other international contexts.

In the Netherlands, girls and young women are increasingly active in women-only kickboxing. The general assumption, in the Netherlands and in western Europe more broadly, is that women’s sport is a form of secular, feminist empowerment. Muslim women’s participation would then exemplify the incongruence of Islam with the modern, secular nation-state. Punching Back provides a detailed ethnographic study that contests this view.

Using a thorough analysis of the diversity of the forms, places and actors of gentrification in an attempt to isolate the ‘DNA’ of gentrification, the book addresses the place of social groups in cities, their competition over the appropriation of space, the infrastructure unequally offered to them by economic and political actors and the stakes of everyday social relationships.

Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, this book focuses on concepts such as domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. By looking into hunting rituals and herding techniques, the ethnography questions the dynamics between people, domesticated reindeer, and wild animals.

This book proposes a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Epistemological embodiment signals that personal scholarly experience of the “unknown”—be it in the form of trance, or as the embodiment of an “other”—shapes the concepts of healing, body, trance, self, and matter by which ethnographers craft out analysis.

A range of meaningful objects—exhibits of human remains or live people, fetishes, objects in a Catholic Museum, exotic photographs, commodities, and computers—demonstrate a subordinate modern consciousness about powerful objects and their “life”. The Spirit of Matter discusses these objects that move people emotionally but whose existence is often denied by modern wishful thinking of “mind over matter”.

Despite high degrees of cultural and ethnic diversity as well as prevailing political instability, Guinea-Bissau’s population has developed a strong sense of national belonging. By examining contemporary and historical perspectives, A Creole Nation explores how creole identity, culture, and political leaders have influenced postcolonial nation-building processes in Guinea-Bissau.

Bringing together the voices of nine individuals from an archive of over 200 in-depth interviews with transnational migrants and refugees across five European countries, Finding Home in Europe critically engages with how home is experienced by those who move.

Former Neighbors, Future Allies is a key bridge into the research and perspectives needed to nurture ethnography’s growing role in German studies. This volume creates a space for dialogue between North American Germanists and ethnographers in and of the German-speaking world, enriching both fields in the process.

Jean Quataert’s former students, colleagues, and collaborators come together in Gender in Germany and Beyond to not only celebrate Quataert’s shaping of the field of modern German, Women’s and transnational history, but also to expand on that scholarship, setting a precedent for the future of the field.

Though long-associated with violence, the Caucasus is a region rich with spirituality. Based on fresh ethnographies and studies of sacred sites in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia, Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces discusses vanishing and emerging sacred places in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious post-Soviet Caucasus.
 

This collection of Claudia Roth's work closely documents the livelihood strategies of members of various neighbourhoods in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. This collection focuses on notions of “the African family” as a solidary network, changing marriage and kinship relations, and increasingly precarious social status of young women and men.

Located in the far-western Tarai region of Nepal, Kailali has been the site of dynamic social and political change in recent history. The Partial Revolution examines Kailali in the aftermath of Nepal’s Maoist insurgency, focusing primarily on the end of Kailali’s feudal system of bonded labor.

Germany’s football culture has a historically rich background full of transnational entanglements, German identity formation, and fan cultures. Football Nation constructs new insights surrounding the multifaceted landscapes of German historical and contemporary football debates as it investigates football’s role in discourses on culture, history, and politics.

Pilgrimage, as a global activity linked to the sacred, speaks to the special significance of persons, places and events. This book relates these sentiments to the curatorship of the Camino de Santiago that comprises a lattice of European pilgrimage itineraries converging at Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain.

Trademark-protected since 1910, the famous woollen cloth known as Harris Tweed can only be produced in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland – yet it is exported to over 50 countries around the world. Examining contemporary experiences of work and life, this book is the first in-depth anthropological study of the renowned textile industry, complementing and updating existing historical and ethnographic research.

Exploring Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work through a decolonial lens, this book traces Hurston’s journey from her early life (1891–1919) and struggles at the margins (1920–1930) to her peak as a pioneering ethnographer and writer (1931–1956) and her later years (1957–1960).

Reexamining a classical work of Social Anthropology, African Political Systems (1940), edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, this book looks at the colonial and academic context from which the work arose, as well as its reception and its subject matter and looks at how the work can help with analysis of current politics in Africa.

In an increasingly transnational production of film and television, Entertaining German Culture explores and contextually thematizes a radical shift in the past fifteen years towards a profound appreciation of German cultural and intellectual history in the international mainstream.

Anthropologists have long explained social behaviour as if people always do what they think is best. But what if most of these explanations only work because they are premised upon ignoring what philosophers call 'akrasia' – that is, the possibility that people might act against their better judgment? The contributors to this volume turn an ethnographic lens upon situations in which people seem to act out of line with what they judge, desire and intend.

As an introduction to studying and reverse engineering a digital artifact, this volume is intended for nontechnical audiences wanting to learn how to conduct their own similar research on computer software. While presented through an archaeological lens, it is also suitable for readers in history, game studies, and other areas in the humanities and social sciences, as well as computer science and engineering.

There is a call in Heritage Studies to democratize heritage practices and place local communities at the forefront; heritage plays an important role in identity formation, and therefore in social inclusion and exclusion. This series of studies contributes to a better understanding of public participation in the heritage sector by applying Public Administration theory on collaborative governance.

Persistently Postwar approaches the topics of social memory and political discourse through an exploration of Japan’s post-war mass media. Diverse disciplinary backgrounds and contrasting perspectives offer a nuanced dialogue in which the functions of mass media are explored as more than a simple ideological tool.

Through anthropological accounts of Muslim men’s everyday lives in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and diasporic settings, Reconceiving Muslim Men explores the creative ways in which Muslim men care for and nurture their families and communities. By focusing on reproduction, love, and care, this volume showcases Muslim men’s humanity.

Revisiting Austria draws on a rich selection of films, marketing materials, literature, and first-person accounts to explore the ways in which tourism has shaped both international and domestic perceptions of Austrian identity even as it has failed to confront the nation’s often violent and troubled history.

Detlef Siegfried’s long-awaited English translation chronicles Ernest Borneman’s journey from his days as a young Jewish Communist in Berlin to his ventures in England and Canada, and ultimately, to his endeavors as the most prominent sexologist spearheading the sexual revolution in West Germany and Austria in the twentieth century.

This book offers a much-needed analysis of shifting reproductive policies and practices in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a society that is usually represented as either “revolutionary” or “oppressive.” Instead, Tremayne reflects on more than four decades of research to argue that changing reproductive behaviors on the part of ordinary Iranians must always be viewed against the backdrop of core cultural values and traditions.

Taking motorcycling in Romania as an ethnographic entry point, this book documents how bikers handle the inevitable moment of malfunction and breakdown. Using both mobile and sedentary research methods, the book describes the joys and troubles experienced by amateur mechanics, professional mechanics and untechnical male and females when fixing bikes.

Emerging technologies in museums have the potential to reveal unheard or silenced stories, challenge preconceptions, encourage emotional responses, introduce the unexpected, and overall provide alternative experiences. By examining varied theoretical approaches and case studies, authors demonstrate how “awkward”, contested, and rarely discussed subjects and stories are treated – or can be potentially treated - in a museum setting with the use of the latest technology.

Using this handbook, researchers learn to develop historical and archaeological research questions anchored in dynamic network analysis (DYRA). Undergraduate and graduate students, as well as professional historians and archaeologists can consult on issues that range from hypothesis-driven research to critiquing dominant historical narratives, especially those that have tended ignore the diversity of the archaeological record.

In the wake of recent protests against police violence and racism, calls to dismantle problematic memorials have reverberated around the globe. This is not a new phenomenon, however, nor is it limited to the Anglo-Saxon world. De-Commemoration focuses on the concept of de-commemoration as it relates to remembrance.

Political Friendship demonstrates the central role of the German liberal elite’s interpersonal relationships in the uncertain path to unification and 19th century Germany political culture.

Capturing Quicksilver considers the use, promotion, and legislation of Chinese medicine in Singapore in relation to government policies favoring international investment, urban redevelopment, healthcare regulation, “multiracial” nationalism, and the management of history and heritage. Theoretically and methodologically developed within medical anthropology, it explores embodied experience and individual and group creativity vis-à-vis state agendas.

The first in-depth ethnographic monograph on the New Right in Central and Eastern Europe, The Revolt of the Provinces explores the making of right-wing hegemony in Hungary over the last decade, focusing on interaction between social antagonisms emerging on the local level and struggles waged within the political public sphere.

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.

Based on an ethnographic account of subsistence forest use by Wapishana people in Guyana and developing an original analytical framework, Edges, Frontiers, Fringes examines the social, cultural and behavioral bases for sustainability and resilience in indigenous resource use.