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The coveted “Made in Italy” label calls to mind visions of nimble-fingered Italian tailors lovingly sewing elegant, high-end clothing. The phrase evokes a sense of authenticity, heritage, and rustic charm. Yet, as Elizabeth L. Krause uncovers in Tight Knit, Chinese migrants are the ones sewing “Made in Italy” labels into low-cost items for a thriving fast-fashion industry—all the while adding new patterns to the social fabric of Italy’s iconic industry. Krause offers a revelatory look into how families involved in the fashion industry are coping with globalization based on longterm research in Prato, the historic hub of textile production in the heart of metropolitan Tuscany. She...
"Deftly bridging literary conventions, this compelling work exposes the cultural origins of a quiet revolution that occurred over the course of the twentieth century. Elizabeth Krause combines novelistic and ethnographic techniques to illuminate population dynamics that have raised alarm across Europe and the United States, and manifested, for example, in Italy's extremely low birthrate. But what actually motivates people to have fewer children? Krause turns to the evocative story of one woman, Emilia Raugei, who was born in a Tuscan hill town in 1920 and worked as a straw weaver in a rapidly globalizing economy, to better understand this question. Based on extensive fieldwork, including ind...
When reproduction becomes a political issue, where do you stand? A CRISIS OF BIRTHS: POPULATION POLITICS AND FAMILY MAKING IN ITALY tells the fascinating story of Italian families in the 1990s, when Italy had the lowest birthrate of any nation in the world. You'll gain an in-depth understanding of why Italy's birthrate has fallen so low and what this means for Italians as individuals and Italy as a society and how reproduction has become politicized. Personal dialogues with ordinary people ranging from sweater-makers to counts, and aging bachelors to doting mothers reveal how a silent revolution against patriarchy reshapes social and sexual morality to create new imperatives for family making.
Why do men and women sometimes risk everything to defend their liberties? What motivates principled opposition to the abuse of power? In Liberalism with Honor, Sharon Krause explores honor as a motive for risky and difficult forms of political action. She shows the sense of honor to be an important source of such action and a spring of individual agency more generally. Krause traces the genealogy of honor, including its ties to conscientious objection and civil disobedience, beginning in old-regime France and culminating in the American civil rights movement. She examines the dangers intrinsic to honor and the tensions between honor and modern democracy, but demonstrates that the sense of honor has supported political agency in the United States from the founders to democratic reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr. Honor continues to hold interest and importance today because it combines self-concern and personal ambition with principled higher purposes, and so challenges the disabling dichotomy between self-interest and self-sacrifice that currently pervades both political theory and American public life.
Migration across Europe's external and internal borders has introduced unprecedented sociocultural diversity, and with it, new questions about belonging, identity, and the incorporation of others into extant and emergent groups and communities. Bringing together leading cultural anthropologists, Digesting Difference offers a series of ethnographic studies that show incorporation to be a process rooted in the everyday encounters and exchanges between strangers, friends, lovers, neighbors, parents, workers, and others. Rich in ethnographic detail and ambitious in its theorizing, the volume tells the stories of Europe’s transformative engagement with sociocultural difference in the wake of migration associated with EU expansion, the Eurozone meltdown, and the 2015-2016 refugee crisis. It promises to be essential reading for scholars and students of cultural anthropology, migration, integration, and European studies.
The Anthropological Demography of Health explores the combination of anthropological and demographic approaches to public health research, charting the growing body of research that combines ethnography with quantitative models and methods in the field of population health.
Leading proponents and critics articulate and debate the rapid rise of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) as an educational and open access innovation
In this innovative collaborative ethnography of Italian-Chinese ventures in the fashion industry, Lisa Rofel and Sylvia J. Yanagisako offer a new methodology for studying transnational capitalism. Drawing on their respective linguistic and regional areas of expertise, Rofel and Yanagisako show how different historical legacies of capital, labor, nation, and kinship are crucial in the formation of global capitalism. Focusing on how Italian fashion is manufactured, distributed, and marketed by Italian-Chinese ventures and how their relationships have been complicated by China's emergence as a market for luxury goods, the authors illuminate the often-overlooked processes that produce transnational capitalism—including privatization, negotiation of labor value, rearrangement of accumulation, reconfiguration of kinship, and outsourcing of inequality. In so doing, Fabricating Transnational Capitalism reveals the crucial role of the state and the shifting power relations between nations in shaping the ideas and practices of the Italian and Chinese partners.
Aulino's work is a strong contribution to the study of aging in the field of medical anthropology specifically because of the focus on the embodied performativity of care evident in her research practice and analysis. Rituals of Care is an excellent book, which offers a thoughtful approach to everyday care in Thailand. ― Anthropology & Aging End-of-life issues are increasingly central to discussions within medical anthropology, the anthropology of political action, and the study of Buddhist philosophy and practice. Felicity Aulino's Rituals of Care speaks directly to these important anthropological and existential conversations. Against the backdrop of global population aging and increased...
Anthropologists working in Italy are at the forefront of scholarship on several topics including migration, far-right populism, organised crime and heritage. This book heralds an exciting new frontier by bringing together some of the leading ethnographers of Italy and placing together their contributions into the broader realm of anthropological history, culture and new perspectives in Europe.