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The historization of anthropology has entailed a radically new view upon history and the nature of history. This collection of papers from the first conference of the newly formed European Association of Social Anthropologists demonstrate how ways of thinking about history are important features of any production of history, and how cultural concepts enter as forcs of historical causation.
Secrecy is one of the defining characteristics of the Italian Mafia. Wiretaps, financial records, and the rare informant occasionally reveal its inner workings, but these impressions are all too often spotty and fleeting, hampering serious scholarship on this major form of criminal activity. During her years as a consultant to the Italian government agency responsible for combating organized crime, Letizia Paoli was given unparalleled insider access to the confessions by pentiti (literally, repentants), former Mafia operatives who had turned. This mafia "hard core" came primarily from the two largest and most influential Southern Italian mafia associations, known as Cosa Nostra and 'Ndranghe...
"Published in Association with the European Association of Social Anthropologists."
In this study of identity politics, memory and long-distance nationalism among Serbian migrants in California, the author examines the complicated ways in which visions of the past are used to form Diaspora subjects and make claims to the homeland in the present. Drawing on extended fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay Area community, she shows how the Yugoslav wars generated a revaluation Serbian history and personal life stories, resulting in the strengthening of ethnic identity. Nevertheless, strategies for dealing with rupture and change also included contestation of exile nationalism.
This collection explores the social legacy of European Enlightenment ideas of science and rationality. In their deployment science and rationality were intended to give rise to open and democratic societies. The volume addresses the history of these notions while centring on ethnographic studies of openness and equitability in contemporary European social milieux, as well as in the European postcolony and on Europe's increasingly global 'fringes'. The book takes its lead, in particular, from Karl Popper's ideas, and his key liberal text, The Open Society and its Enemies.
Communicating Cultures explores contemporary and historical issues. The title may be read in various ways, including cultures as communicative systems; cultures communicating with one another; or, communication about cultures. The contributors to this volume represent different fields within or related to European ethnology, such as anthropology, geography, folklore, linguistics, or area studies. ** "The editors have assembled a rich collection of papers. The questions that they address - migration and diasporas; the invention of traditions; education and language; media and representation - are at the very heart of today's agenda in cultural analysis." - from the Foreword
Corruption, a major problem in the present, global world, is a very complex phenomenon. It has economic, political and ethical aspects and is simultaneously a global and a local issue. This anthropological study shows how actors in Indian society are entangled in hierarchical relations of social, economic and political inequality that breed corruption, yet also how resistance against corruption takes place in local context. By exposing the complexity of corruption and also by questioning apparently simple remedies, this rich study certainly contributes to "making sense" of corruption in India.
Some of the first figures the Nazis conscripted in their rise to power were rhetoricians devoted to popularizing the German vocabulary of Leben (life). This fascinating study reexamines this movement through one of its most prominent exponents, Ludwig Klages, revealing the philosophical-cultural crises and political volatility of the Weimar era.
This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on contemporary biomedicine as a cultural practice. It brings together leading scholars from cultural anthropology, sociology, history, and science studies to conduct a critical dialogue on the culture(s) of biomedical practice, discussing its epistemic, material, and social implications. The essays look at the ways new biomedical knowledge is constructed within hospitals and academic settings and at how this knowledge changes perceptions, material arrangements, and social relations, not only within clinics and scientific communities, but especially once it is diffused into a broader cultural context.
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L...