Contemporary forms of capitalism and the state require close analytic attention to reveal the conditions of possibility for effective counter-politics. On the other hand the practice of collective politics needs to be studied through historical ethnography if we are to understan…
Based on long-term fieldwork, six vivid ethnographies from Colombia, India, Poland, Spain and the southern and northern U.S. address the dwindling importance of labor throughout the world. The contributors to this volume highlight the growing disconnect between labor struggles a…
Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with British and American Pagans. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitio…
Talking about the Holocaust has provided an international language for ethics, victimization, political claims, and constructions of collective identity. As part of a worldwide vocabulary, that language helps set the tenor of the era of globalization. This volume addresses manif…
The scholarship of Ulf Hannerz is characterized by its extraordinary breadth and visionary nature. He has contributed to the understanding of urban life and transnational networks, and the role of media, paradoxes of identity and new forms of community, suggesting to see culture…
Parliamentary theory, practices, discourses, and institutions constitute a distinctively European contribution to modern politics. Taking a broad historical perspective, this cross-disciplinary, innovative, and rigorous collection locates the essence of parliamentarism in four k…
Significant historic and archaeological sites affiliated with two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer history in the United States are examined in this unique volume. The importance of the preservation process in documenting and interpreting the lives and expe…
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-…
Looking at the cultural responses to death and dying, this collection explores the emotional aspects that death provokes in humans, whether it is disgust, fear, awe, sadness, anger, or even joy. Whereas most studies of death and dying treat the subject from an objective viewpoin…
Proposing a series of innovative steps towards better understanding human lives at the interstices of water and land, this volume includes eight ethnographies from deltas around the world. The book presents 'delta life' with intimate descriptions of the predicaments, imagination…
East Asia is home to some of the oldest and most rapidly aging populations on earth. Known for Confucian filial piety and adult children caring for elderly parents at home, these societies are experiencing unprecedented social challenges to traditional forms of eldercare. This v…
Describing the Islamic State's ideologues as 'entrepreneurs of identity', this book explores how the group defined categories of social identity and used these categories as tools of communicative and cognitive structuring. Based on a wide dossier of original texts, speeches, im…
For all of the recent debates over the methods and theoretical underpinnings of the historical profession, scholars and laypeople alike still frequently think of history in terms of storytelling. Accordingly, historians and theorists have devoted much attention to how historical…
Through his influential work on cultural capital and social mobility, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has provided critical insights into the complex interactions of power, class, and culture in the modern era. Ubiquitous though Bourdieu's theories are, however, they have…
On the surface, historical scholarship might seem thoroughly incompatible with political engagement: the ideal historian, many imagine, is a disinterested observer focused exclusively on the past. In truth, however, political action and historical research have been deeply inter…
Exploring contemporary debates and developments in Roma-related research and forms of activism, this volume argues for taking up reflexivity as practice in these fields, and advocates a necessary renewal of research sites, methods, and epistemologies. The contributors gathered h…
Although studies of fascism have constituted one of the most fertile areas of historical inquiry in recent decades, more and more scholars have called for a new agenda with more research beyond Italy and Germany, less preoccupation with definition and classification, and more su…
In the early twenty-first century, trauma is seemingly everywhere, whether as experience, diagnosis, concept, or buzzword. Yet even as many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition, historical research on th…
For many years, scholars struggled to write the history of the constitution and political structure of the Holy Roman Empire. This book argues that this was because the political and social order could not be understood without considering the rituals and symbols that held the E…