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Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City examines the complexities and changing sociopolitical dynamics of urban renewal in contemporary China. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the northeastern Chinese city of Qingdao, the book tells the story of the slow, fragmented, and contentious transformation of Dabaodao—an area in the city’s former colonial center—from a place of common homes occupied by the urban poor into a showcase of architectural heritage and site for tourism and consumption. The ethnography provides a nuanced account of the diverse experiences and views of a range of groups involved in shaping, and being shaped, by the urban renewal process—local residents, migrant workers, preservationists, planners, and government officials—foregrounding the voices and experiences of marginal groups, such as migrants in the city. Unpacking structural reasons for urban developmental impasses, it paints a nuanced local picture of urban governance and political practice in contemporary urban China. Seeking a Future for the Past also weighs the positives and negatives of heritage preservation and scrutinizes the meanings and effects of “preservation” on diverse social actors. By zeroing in on the seemingly contradictory yet coexisting processes of urban stagnation and urban destruction, the book reveals the multifaceted challenges that China faces in reforming its urbanization practices and, ultimately, in managing its urban future.

‘Am I Less British?’ focuses on the children of refugees and immigrants in North London, whose parents migrated from Turkey. Providing a rich ethnography of the lives of the children, the book studies their sense of identity, belonging and their transnational experiences. It aims to understand how the children position themselves within a range of locations (London, North London and Turkey), where they face class hierarchy, racism and discrimination, and explores how they think about their sense of belonging within the contemporary political context in Britain and Turkey. De-identifying themselves from national identities and holding onto the oppressed identities appear as new forms of resistance in response to racism and exclusion. The experiences of the young people reflect the complexity of their lives in changing political and social circumstances across the borders of nation-states, and the importance of other categories of identity, including local identities. Overall, the book argues that the intersections of local, national and transnational approaches, the political context through which the lives of young people are framed, and their sophisticated engagement with ideas of race, class, ethnicity and gender, are crucial in understanding their identity formation. Praise for 'Am I Less British?' ‘This is a nuanced and deeply researched study of the changing meaning of identity, citizenship and belonging in today’s Britain. Drawing on her research in London among the children of Turkish migrants and Kurdish refugees, Şimşek makes an important intervention in the conversations on Britishness that are helping to shape our society.' John Solomos, University of Warwick "Am I Less British?" is a beautifully crafted ethnography of young Londoners whose parents are Kurdish and Turkish. Their voices sing out from its pages and question what it means to be British and the exclusions that block an equal access to belonging and full citizenship. A brilliant, stunning and urgent analysis of young multicultural lives.' Les Back, University of Glasgow ‘This is a wonderful addition to our understanding of conviviality in a postcolonial city. Here we learn from new generations of Londoners as they contend with what it means to feel at home, in any place, at any time.’ Vron Ware, author of Who Cares about Britishness? (2007)

This open access book explores the deep connections between environment, language, and cultural integrity, with a focus on Indigenous peoples from early modern times to the present. It illustrates the close integration of nature and culture through historical processes of environmental change in North, Central, and South America and the nurturing of local knowledge through ancestral languages and oral traditions. This volume fills a unique space by bringing together the issues of environment, language and cultural integrity in Latin American historical and cultural spheres. It explores the reciprocal and necessary relations between language/culture and environment; how they can lead to sustainable practices; how environmental knowledge and sustainable practices toward the environment are reflected in local languages, local sources and local socio-cultural practices. The book combines interdisciplinary methods and initiates a dialogue among scientifically trained scholars and local communities to compare their perspectives on well-being in remote and recent historical periods and it will be of interest to students and scholars in fields including sociolinguistics, (ethno)history, linguistic anthropology, cultural studies and cultural anthropology, environmental studies and Indigenous/minority studies.

Pipeline is a low-income, high-rise-tenement settlement in Nairobi's marginalized East and one of sub-Saharan Africa's most densely populated estates. An aspirational place where fleeting forms of capitalist consumption reassure migrants of an upward trajectory, it is also a place where their ambitions of long-term economic success and stable romantic relationships are routinely thwarted. This book explores how men who migrate to Nairobi from Western Kenya navigate this tension that is generated by the contrast between their view of Pipeline as a launching pad for their personal and professional careers and the fact that they face constant economic, romantic, and personal backlashes. Drawing on over two years of fieldwork, the book reveals that many male migrants design their future on trajectories of personal and economic growth but have to adjust or indefinitely postpone their plans once they arrive in Kenya's capital. Under the pressure to succeed from romantic partners, spouses, rural kin, and children, they create and participate in homosocial spaces where a sense of brotherhood emerges and their experience of pressure is attenuated. Alongside a deep ethnographic exploration of how male migrants model their financial, physical, and mental well-being in three different masculine spaces - an ethnically homogenous investment group, an interethnic gym, and the semi-digital sphere of self-help books, workshops, and motivational trainings on man- and fatherhood - this book brings a new perspective to our understanding of urban African life and the nature of masculinity. This title is available under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND, with funding from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Open Access Fund and the German Research Foundation.

This volume examines Russia’s war on Ukraine. Scholars who have lived through the Russian invasion or who have conducted ethnographic research in the region for decades provide timely analysis of a war that will leave a lasting mark on the twenty-first century. Using the concept of dispossession, this volume showcases some of the novel ways violence operates in the Russian-Ukrainian war and the multiple means by which civilians, within the conflict zone and beyond, have become active participants in the war effort. Anthropological perspectives on war provide on-the-ground insight, historically informed analysis, and theoretical engagement to depict the experiences of dispossession by war and the motivations that drive the responses of the dispossessed. Such perspectives humanize the victims even as they depict the very inhumanity of war. Dispossession is geared towards upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, and the general reader who seeks to have a deeper understanding of the Russian-Ukrainian war as it continues to impact geopolitics more broadly.

This open access book provides thought-provoking anthropology grounded in comparative ethnography. The theory captures the current historical moment, the long-term trends that led us here, and the prospects for a humane future. The experience of complexity characterizing a globalized information society triggers simplexes. These unidimensional responses instrumental in bringing about a predictable effect are altering our ways of communicating and the technologies we design. In Part I, a ‘speciated’ history, injected with the anthropology of Bateson and Gluckman, describes the semantic and experiential impoverishment of the lifeworld. After going through the affects of distrust (the neolithic lifeway), of futility (industrial lifeway) and disconnection (post-knowledge), the human species today depends for its survival on installing a new lifeway, which manages to wed (eco-social) inclusion to the already difficult first pair of the French Revolution. The species needs to rehumanize. Part II illustrates the remedies currently developed: to reframe, re-sphere and re-source. What do critical street art, international football matches, presidential elections, hip-hop dissing performances, charismatic church services, intuition stimulation, and ‘pre-ceptive’ experiences of consciousness have in common? They are moments of the real. Rooted in ‘life sensing’, they are tensors organizing frameshift. As multiplex measures tackling the simplex, these tensors overcome the cultural relativism of the postmodern matrix.

This open access book explores some of the struggles and challenges that researchers and practitioners face when conducting research in the Central Asian research setting. Written for scholars still in the planning stages of their research, it addresses key questions, including: How shall we problematize and reconceptualize the concept of positionality through lenses of local voices from the region? How does practitioners’ and scholars’ positionality contribute to their experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and access to the field? How do scholars navigate issues of personal safety and mental well-being in the more closely monitored societies of Central Asia? The book includes contributors from both Central Asia and Western countries, paying particular attention to the ways researchers’ subjectivity shape how they are received in the region, which, in turn, influences how they write about and disseminate their research. In featuring an even greater variety of voices, this book fills an important gap in the literature on field research and knowledge production in and on Central Asia.

This open access book includes socio-anthropological and anthropo-sociological conversations between one of the world’s leading anthropologists, Thomas Hyland Eriksen, and a young scholar, using his groundbreaking "overheating" approach.This book includes socio-anthropological and anthropo-sociological conversations between one of the world’s leading anthropologists, Thomas Hyland Eriksen, and a young scholar, using his groundbreaking "overheating" approach. From the pandemic to the spread of nationalism, from the Anthropocene to the Homogenocene, the authors discuss the most urgent issues of current society: e.g., the loss of biological and cultural diversity owing to the forces of globalisation; and the emergence of new forms of diversity through globalisation and migration; the intersectional dimension of climate change; the incredible rising of anger demonstrations around the world and resentful, overheated identities often linked to right-wing nationalism; the way digital devices have changed the meaning of temporality in people's life-worlds; the regulatory and competitive pressures on universities which are a result of many factors in the intersection of globalisation, massification and marketisation; youth's weakened belief in progress connected to changes in the contemporary world, such as growing inequality, political alienation and environmental destruction; recent pathbreaking research and original theory in sociology and anthropology related to the changes in an overheated world; and what post-Coronavirus social life might become. Highly topical, engaging and written in a conversational style, this book is a must-read for social scientists and discerning lay persons who want a fresh perspective on understanding the critical issues of our time. This is an open access book.

This open access book presents a series of speculative, experimental modes of inquiry in the present times of environmental damage that have come to be known as the age of the Anthropocene. Throughout the book authors develop more nuanced ways of engaging with the environmentally vulnerable Arctic. They counter distancing, exoticising, and even apocalyptic imaginaries of the Arctic by staying proximate with mundane places and beings of the north. The volume engages and plays with familiar tourism concepts, such as hospitality, visiting, difference, care, openness, and distance, while expanding the focus from binary and human-centric approaches of hosts and guests to questions of wellbeing among multispecies communities. The transdisciplinary group of contributors share a curiosity about how staying proximate may provide theoretical depth and epistemological openings to attend to current tensions and to diversify the ways we do and enact research. Thus, each chapter provides a methodological experiment with proximity, developing diverse ways of envisioning and storying more-than-human worlds.

The Materiality of Nothing explores the invisible, intangible and transient materials and objects of everyday life and the relationships we have with them. Drawing on over 15 years of original, empirical research, it builds on growing research on the everyday, and unites the established field of material culture and materiality with emerging sociological studies exploring notions of nothing and the unmarked. The chapters cover topics such as lost property, museum curation, plastic microfibres, thrift, music and even hair, illuminating how invisible and intangible materials conjure memories, meanings and identities, inextricably binding us to other people, places and things. In turn, the book also engages with issues of sustainability and consumption, raising questions regarding society’s increasing need for material accumulation and posing some alternatives.

Beyond Description brings anthropologists and other social scientists together to examine the problem of explanation. What is "an explanation?" What can it add? What makes it authoritative, clarifying, or misleading? Whom does it serve and how is it produced? These questions lie at the heart of recent public crises of confidence in expertise, political representation, and classic liberal visions of whom we can rely on for true and trustworthy accounts. In a world beset by events and processes that seem to defy expert predictions of their impossibility, and in which post-hoc accounts can often feel more like rationalizations than explanations, competing voices vie for public presence and seek to silence one another. Anthropology and the social sciences face such questions too, making contemporary explanatory practice both an empirical and a reflexive challenge. By combining ethnographic studies of practices of explanation in a range of contemporary political, medical, artistic, religious, and bureaucratic settings, the essays inBeyond Description offer critical examinations of changing norms and forms of explanation in the world and within anthropology itself.

“Slava Ukraini!” Strategy and the Spirit of Ukrainian Resistance tells the story of the volunteers lauded to have saved Ukraine twice. The volunteers first emerged in the spring of 2014 after the onset of the war in Donbas in a context characterized by ambiguity, state weakness, political uncertainty, and threat. They re-emerged again in February 2022 after the large-scale Russian invasion. Aimed at an interdisciplinary audience, this volume makes significant contributions to our understanding of events in Ukraine over the past decade. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with volunteer battalion fighters, the volume focuses on strategy, or the creation, control, and use of force. This framework is first applied to the volunteer militias to further the understanding of militia strategy conducted after 2014, and then to the first year and a half that followed the Russian invasion in 2022. “Slava Ukraini!” also discusses the long-term sociological impact of volunteer battalions and the war they fought in Ukraine. The Ukrainian spirit of resistance emerged first on the Maidan in November 2013, ignited the volunteer Spirit of 2014 after the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, and ultimately flared-up on a national scale in a manner which surprised the invading Russian forces in 2022. Yet initially the volunteers may also have exacerbated internal divisions in Ukraine. The Spirit of 2014 was also better suited to a war of movement than immobile trench warfare that left little room for heroism and aggressive soldiering. Unrealistic expectations about modern warfare led to disillusionment, and many volunteers leaving the war in 2015. The perceived stalemate and lack of Ukrainian soldiers by late 2023 raised the question of a similar dynamic witnessed in 2014 and 1914 alike.

A fresh perspective on conflict and peace-making that highlights the cosmologies and invisible entities that state, society and religious authorities draw on to claim or reclaim legitimacy and control. Peace-making can be a violent, arbitrary assertion of power. At the same time, the spheres of power, politics and religion are rarely discrete: when governments behave like gods through demonstrations of arbitrary violence, the remaking of moral and spiritual worlds can provide radical ways to contest the brutality of both conflict and peace. This book is an exploration of the way that Nuer- and Dinka-speaking communities living around the Bilnyang and connected river systems in Warrap and Unity States in South Sudan have experienced peace-making and conflict in an increasingly militarized South Sudan. The book traces patterns of violence in peace-making back to colonial and mercantile activities in the late 19th century, but focuses on the period since the 1980s. Challenging dominant understandings of conflict and peace centred on neo-liberal brokerage and settlements or a politics entirely driven by instrumentalist, neo-patrimonial, marketized logics, this book shows how South Sudanese authorities, particularly religious authorities, have contested the legitimacy of violence and peace by drawing on divinely inspired notions of authority and norms of conduct. Drawing on archive, ethnographic and oral history research, as well as participant observations of the elite peace negotiations since 2013, Pendle describes the peace-making efforts of a range of actors from international diplomats to chiefs, Nuer prophets and local priests, to show how peace-making in South Sudan became an instrument used by actors to build authority by reshaping rituals, remaking hierarchies and re-encoding moral protest against oppressive regimes. By recasting anthropological and historical scholarship on divine authorities and moral communities in South Sudan, this book brings a new perspective to conflict, peace and governance that will be invaluable not only to scholars but to policymakers, practitioners and NGOs. This book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC.

In an age where history is a global battleground and fake news proliferates, culture wars are being waged across India over its future – majoritarian or inclusive, neoliberal or socialist, religious or secular? Fake Gods and False History takes us to the BDD Chawls, a central Mumbai neighbourhood of tenement blocks (chawls) on the brink of a controversial redevelopment. It reveals how contested narratives of Indian history play out in the daily life of this divided neighbourhood and how the legacies of certain godlike but very human historical figures, such as Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and Chhatrapati Shivaji, are invoked by different communities. Jonathan Galton draws on research conducted among the formerly untouchable Dalit Buddhist community, who are staunchly opposed to the redevelopment plans and deeply critical of the religious nationalism they perceive in their Hindu neighbours. We also meet young male migrants living in village-linked dormitory rooms called Gramastha Mandals, trapped in a liminal space between urban and rural. Throughout the book, which is woven through with candid reflections on methodology and research ethics, readers are challenged into drawing connections with their own experiences of history impinging on their lives. A story that might initially seem parochial will thus resonate with a diverse global audience. Praise for Fake Gods and False History 'With the skill of an exceptional ethnographer, Galton vividly brings to life the dynamics of an entire country in the everyday life of a tenement block. Familiar clear-cut narratives on migration, politics and caste are called into question, resulting in a remarkable story that makes this book a treasure.' David Mosse, School of Oriental and African Studies 'With his empathetic, wry examination of contested pasts and anxious presents as they play out in Delisle Road's BDD Chawls, Galton allows us to imagine the contours of Mumbai's – and India's – uncertain futures. Fake Gods and False History is painstaking academic research disguised as an engaging collection of city stories.' Naresh Fernandes, Founder and Editor, Scroll.in

Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions is a transdiciplinary essay collection that explores the physical, conceptual, and political possibilities materialized by “solarity”— a form of relation to the sun and its elemental force upon planetary life. The authors propose that a different set of questions becomes possible when the material specificities of solar become the compass for thought, prompting us to uncover our relationship to the sun. How does solarity materialize in the bodies and lives of humans and non-humans now and in the future? What can we learn if we no longer take the sun for granted? How do we continue to persist on a planet that is so intimately bound up in a state of love, fear, and dependence on this primary source of all living energy? Each of the essays in Solarities take solar radiation as an interpretive lens that takes multiple forms, often transforming as it does so. Solarities draws inspiration from Black ecologies, Indigenous philosophy, feminist science & technology studies, and more-than-human discussions in the human sciences, recognizing the phenomenological and ontological openings they make available. The authors understand solarity as an energy source (channeled through photovoltaic cells, for example), but the essays gathered here focus on the lives that solarity creates or impedes. The experimental task is to find how solarities work their way into materials and processes across our work, seeking out the particular influences of solarity in making being(s). These relations are core to thinking the elemental conditions of solarity, since it is through particular forms of focalizing the sun that life is sustained, or made to wither, across the planet. In these ways, the elemental condition of solarity is at once hyper-particular and also shared across organic and inorganic bodies, conditioned by physical form and material composition. Throughout the collection, the authors explore how solarity appears or recedes from view when we concentrate our attentions on it, surfacing the existential omnipresence of the sun to open new thought possibilities, inspire new actions, and refract new dimensions of socionatural encounter.

It has been a decade since Diamond’s seminal and sober work on the possibilities of ‘liberation technology’ to ‘expand political, social and economic freedom’ (Diamond 2010). Since that time, the Arab supernova has electrified Twitter’s supporters, Russian paws and exquisite Cambridge algorithms have lent on the scales of a presidential campaign via social media, and China has amassed the data and technology to control its citizenry with cold efficiency. So what of liberation technology? What do we know about its impact on political participation, expression and freedom? In this chapter I review the promise and complexities of the pursuit of freedom via liberation technology. Tracing powerful forces that have darkened liberation technology’s initial promise, I look specifically at the complexities of both access to, and activism via, social media, showing how simple and naïve characterisations of its role in political engagement are misplaced. Whilst these results would appear to suggest that oppressive regimes have already snuffed out the promise of technology to support wider freedoms, recent theorising suggests that a pathway to freedom and prosperity has been opened where both the state and society have equal strength in the technology of accountability, information, and coordination, co-investing in each other’s capacity.

Die Wahrnehmung des Islam in Indonesien ist radikal auf seine lebensfeindlichen bis gewaltbereiten Komponenten verkürzt. Dagegen setzt Volker Gottowik einen anderen Akzent. Er fokussiert auf heterodoxe Praktiken, die im Kontext von Pilgerfahrt und Heiligenverehrung auf Java untersucht werden. Dazu gehören ritualisierte Sexualkontakte (ritual seks), die Pilger untereinander eingehen, um den Segen des verehrten Heiligen zu empfangen. Im Zentrum der Analyse stehen die gesellschaftlichen Reaktionen auf solche Praktiken. Die Rückschlüsse, die daraus gezogen werden, zeigen deutlich: Eine erweiterte Perspektive auf Islam und Islamisierung ist dringend notwendig.

This book focuses on performance and performance-based artworks as seen through the lens of conservation, which has long been overlooked in the larger theoretical debates about whether and how performance remains. Unraveling the complexities involved in the conservation of performance, Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (vol. 1) brings this new understanding to bear in examining performance as an object of study, experience, acquisition, and care. In so doing, it presents both theoretical frameworks and functional paradigms for thinking about—and enacting—the conservation of performance. Further, while the conservation of performance is undertheorized, performance is nevertheless increasingly entering the art market and the museum, meaning that there is an urgent need for discourse on how to care for these works long-term. In recent years, a few pioneering conservators, curators, and scholars have begun to create frameworks for the longterm care of performance. This volume presents, explicates, and contextualizes their work so that a larger discourse can commence. It will thus serve the needs of conservation students and professors, for whom literature on this subject is sorely needed. This interdisciplinary book thus implements a novel rethinking of performance that will challenge and revitalize its conception in many fields, such as art history, theater, performance studies, heritage studies, and anthropology.

The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology provides a broad overview of the widening and flourishing area of media anthropology, and outlines key themes, debates, and emerging directions. The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology draws together the work of scholars from across the globe, with rich ethnographic studies that address a wide range of media practices and forms. Comprising 41 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into three parts: Histories, Approaches, Thematic Considerations. The chapters offer wide-ranging explorations of how forms of mediation influence communication, social relationships, cultural practices, participation, and social change, as well as production and access to information and knowledge. This volume considers new developments, and highlights the ways in which anthropology can contribute to the study of the human condition and the social processes in which media are entangled. This is an indispensable teaching resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and an essential text for scholars working across the areas that media anthropology engages with, including anthropology, sociology, media and cultural studies, internet and communication studies, and science and technology studies.

When fans become researchers, crossing boundaries is part of it. Citizen science makes it possible to change sides and perspectives, which can lead to productive exchanges of knowledge and experience in scholarship and society. This volume discusses the possibilities and limits of citizen science in media and cultural studies, and is the first to bring together the two disciplines of citizen science and fan research.

Originally developed by the Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith, institutional ethnography is an approach to research that aims to explore and challenge power relations in society. In Norway and the other Nordic countries, the approach is used by researchers in a variety disciplines and professional fields. In Experiences with Institutional Ethnography, we gain insight into several different researchers’ motivation for, experiences with and reflections on delving into and using institutional ethnography in their own research. We gain insight into specific research processes and their attendant methodological approaches, into experiences of using key concepts from institutional ethnography, and into reflections on the researcher's role. This book will be a useful tool for researchers, master’s students and research fellows who utilize – or are considering utilizing – institutional ethnography in their work., Institusjonell etnografi er en forskningstilnærming som opprinnelig ble utviklet av den kanadiske sosiologen Dorothy E. Smith, og som har som formål å utforske og utfordre maktforhold i samfunnet. I Norge og Norden for øvrig brukes tilnærmingen av forskere fra ulike disipliner og fagfelt. I Erfaringer med institusjonell etnografi får vi innblikk i ulike forskeres motivasjon for, erfaringer med og refleksjoner rundt å sette seg inn i og bruke institusjonell etnografi i sin egen forskning. Vi får innblikk i bestemte forskningsprosesser og metodiske grep i slike prosesser, i erfaringer med å bruke sentrale begreper fra institusjonell etnografi og i refleksjoner over forskerrollen. Boken er et nyttig redskap for forskere, masterstudenter og stipendiater som benytter – eller vurderer å benytte – institusjonell etnografi i sin forskning.

This insightful work on rural health in the United States examines the ways immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, navigate the health care system in the United States. Since 1990, immigration to the United States has risen sharply, and rural areas have seen the highest increases. Thurka Sangaramoorthy reveals that that the corporatization of health care delivery and immigration policies are deeply connected in rural America. Drawing from fieldwork that centers on Maryland's sparsely populated Eastern Shore, Sangaramoorthy shows how longstanding issues of precarity among rural health systems along with the exclusionary logics of immigration have mutually fashioned a "landscape of care" in which shared conditions of physical suffering and emotional anxiety among immigrants and rural residents generate powerful forms of regional vitality and social inclusion. Sangaramoorthy connects the Eastern Shore and its immigrant populations to many other places around the world that are struggling with the challenges of global migration, rural precarity, and health governance. Her extensive ethnographic and policy research shows the personal stories behind health inequity data and helps to give readers a human entry point into the enormous challenges of immigration and rural health.

Among the literature aimed at students of art science and other image-interpreting sciences are a number of texts that deal with theories and theoretical concepts. However, what is largely missing, and which students often call for, are texts in Swedish that show how theories and concepts can be applied in concrete interpretation situations. The series Theoretical applications in art science aims to fill that gap, with the book Materiality being the fourth in the series. The book introduces and activates a concept that in recent decades has come to take an increasingly important place in humanistic research. Art scholars - but also archaeologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, ethnologists and other humanistic researchers - are increasingly interested in the material conditions for, and the manifestations of, people's social and cultural life and exchange. But despite its topicality in today's scientific conversation, the concept of materiality can seem elusive and elusive. It moves all the way from the most tangible analyzes of the material components of a cultural artefact, to the somewhat impenetrable theorizations of objectivity, agents and networks that are usually sorted under the label ""new materialism"". However, the book Materialitet gives concrete examples of how the concept of materiality can open up interpretations of important layers of meaning in works of art and other cultural artifacts. After the initial introduction where different perspectives and conceptualisations of materiality are discussed, six researchers each do their own analysis based on their subject area. The chapters are based on new research and are written specifically for this book. The different chapters together show the multifaceted nature of the concept of materiality, but do not lock it down to a definition, but open the eyes to a number of different interpretive paths.

This book examines property rights, settlement structure and social organization in Norway’s Østlandet in the Iron age (500 BC–AD 1050). Inspired by ethnographical and anthropological studies, a model of a stateless, agrarian and hierarchical society with socially based rights to land is presented. In this model, where there are no territorially embedded rights, society is better represented as a heterarchy or anarchy than as a hierarchy. Power in society was shared between the honoured warrior, the powerless leader and perhaps also the productive farmer. This model differs from that presented by standard Norwegian research, where the retrogressive method is combined with a belief in the stability and continuity of the farm. A critical study of Norwegian research history is therefore an essential part of this book. This study has also been able to make use of new and extensive settlement evidence gained from machine-stripping of topsoil from large areas in the past thirty years; this has shed new light on the issues discussed in the book related to building practices and the settlement pattern.

When Anna Johanna Grill travelled from Sweden to England in 1788, she was impressed by the vast array of consumer goods in shops. In her travel diary, she writes how the shopkeepers displayed goods in myriad of ways that fooled people into shopping. How did shops look like in Anna Johanna Grill’s hometown Stockholm in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century? Were there distinctive shopping streets? Who sold goods, who shopped them and what goods were available? How were goods displayed in shops and marketed? How households act in organising their purchases and consumption? From a microhistorical case studies, this richly illustrated anthology widens the perspective to social, economic and cultural practices in everyday urban life. The chapters demonstrate how shopping streets and shops with their range of silk fabrics, accessories, fashion plates, blacksmithing, wigs and hair pomades not only met the desires of consumers, but also enabled dreams of novel identities and social accession for themselves and their families.

Wenn Menschen miteinander musizieren, koordinieren und synchronisieren sie ihre Handlungen so präzise, dass sie ein hörbares Kollektivgebilde konstruieren: Gemeinsame Musik. Das ist eine herausragende Leistung, die ein Grundinteresse adressiert, das nicht nur die Musiksoziologie, sondern die Soziologie und Sozialtheorie gleichermaßen betrifft: Wie gelingt es Handelnden, gemeinsam Soziales zu erschaffen? Die Untersuchung baut auf Alfred Schütz‘ klassischem Aufsatz „Gemeinsam Musizieren“ auf und folgt der Frage, wie es Musiker:innen gelingt, mit Noten und Instrumenten gemeinsam zu musizieren und wie dies durch die Spielenden erlebt wird. Sie wird anhand von Streichensembles untersucht, die ohne Dirigierende musizieren. Durch die Integration von Videographie, fokussierter und lebensweltanalytischer Ethnographie wird der Blick keineswegs auf situatives Musizieren verengt, sondern die institutionelle und organisationale Ordnung des Forschungsfeldes systematisch integriert. Sozialtheoretisch wird die Untersuchung mit dem Kommunikativen Konstruktivismus gerahmt. Dies ist ein Open-Access-Buch.

Kollaboratives Forschen quer zu hegemonialen Wissensordnungen gilt als wichtiger Baustein dekolonialer Wissenspraxis. Gemeinsame Schreibprozesse von Wissenschaftler*innen und ihren nicht-wissenschaftlichen Forschungspartner*innen sind allerdings selten und eine methodologische und forschungspraktische Reflexion fehlt. Die Beiträger*innen widmen sich diesen Lücken, indem sie erfolgreiche, aber auch gescheiterte Projekte kollaborativer Textproduktion zwischen Universität und Feld vorstellen und auf ihr Potenzial als transformative und dekoloniale Wissenspraxis befragen. So entsteht eine praktische Orientierungshilfe, die gleichzeitig die interdisziplinäre Diskussion anregt.

Was bedeutet es, aus dem Gefängnis entlassen zu werden? Und wie sehen die Lebensrealitäten haftentlassener Menschen aus? Barbara Sieferle geht diesen Fragen nach und gibt einen anschaulichen Einblick in die kreativen, taktischen Versuche von Männern, sich nach ihrer Entlassung wieder ein bedeutungsvolles Leben aufzubauen. Dabei gilt es, mit den häufigen Handicaps von gesellschaftlicher Stigmatisierung und moralischer Verurteilung zurechtzukommen. Im Mittelpunkt der Analyse stehen die Lebensrealitäten einzelner Menschen - so ergibt sich ein dichtes Bild des Post-Gefängnis-Lebens abseits aller Stereotype und Vorurteile.

Öffentlichkeit ist der zentrale Begriff in Diskussionen über Demokratie und politische Partizipation. Johanna Montanari erweitert den Öffentlichkeitsbegriff postkolonial, indem sie den globalen Süden nicht als defizitären Raum »nachholender Modernisierung« beschreibt, sondern die Anstrengungen um die Herstellung von Öffentlichkeit unter eingeschränkt demokratischen Bedingungen ernst nimmt. Anhand der journalistischen Praxis einer englischsprachigen Tageszeitung in Jordanien zeigt sie, dass Öffentlichkeit immer kuratiert wird und sich universal verstandene Versprechen der Moderne lokal aneignet. Ihre Ergebnisse fordern zur Reflexion der Auslassungen westlicher Diskurse auf.

Alarming environmental shifts and disasters have raised public awareness and anxieties regarding the future of the planet. While planetary in scale, the negative effects of this global crisis are distributed unequally, affecting some of the already most fragile communities most intensely, thus contributing to rising global inequality. The pairing of environmental crises and a sense of inadequacy facing hitherto celebrated models of citizenry informs a current spirit of the times. The contributors to this volume place ethnographic or world cultures museums at the centre of these debates - these museums have been embroiled in longstanding debates about their histories, collections, and practices in relation to the colonial past.

Waiting for the Revolution to End explores the Syrian revolution through the experiences of citizens in exile. Based on more than three years of embedded fieldwork with Syrians displaced in the border city of Gaziantep (southern Turkey), the book places the Syrian revolution and its tragic aftermath under ethnographic scrutiny. It charts the evolution from peaceful uprising (2011) to armed confrontation (2012), descent into fully fledged conflict (2013) and finally to proxy war (2015), to propose an understanding of revolution beyond success and failure. While the Assad regime remains in place, the Syrian revolution (al-thawra) still holds a transformational power that can be located on intimate and world-making scales. Charlotte Al-Khalili traces the unintended consequences of revolution and its unexpected consequences to reveal the reshaping of Syrian life-worlds and exiles’ evolving theorizations, experiences and imaginations of al-thawra. She describes the in-between spatio-temporal realm inhabited by Syrians displaced to Turkey as they await the revolution’s outcomes, and maps the revolution’s multidimensional and multi-scalar effects on their everyday life. By following the chronology of events inside Syria and Syrians’ geography of displacement, the book makes the relation between revolution and displacement its centerpiece, both as an ethnographic object and an analytical device. Praise for Waiting for the Revolution to End 'Waiting for the Revolution to End is essential reading for scholars and students wanting to understand the temporal and affective orientations at play in the aftermath of the Syrian revolution. Al-Khalili presents a lucid ethnography of revolutionary hopes, defeat, and displacement hereby offering a sustained theoretical engagement with the social, political and religious forces that undergird Syrian existence.' Andreas Bandak, University of Copenhagen 'Although so much has been said about the Syrian revolution, surprisingly little has been written about what it did to the selves, hopes, and lives of those who joined it but were defeated. Waiting for the Revolution to End is a very important and urgently needed contribution that tells the story of the revolution as it is understood by ordinary Syrians who turned into revolutionaries by participating in the uprising from its beginnings in 2011 and 2012, when the possibility of a non-violent overcoming of a violent regime still appeared within reach. Writing through the experience of living among displaced Syrians in Gaziantep, Al-Khalili tells us something that political analyses from above so often miss: the transformational power of participation in the revolution, and the cosmogonic change it effected in the minds and lives of people while they were tragically defeated. Speaking of defeat rather than failure of Syrian revolutionaries, Waiting for the Revolution to End *weaves a rich, emphatic, convincing, tragic yet also hopeful story of the possibility of dignity.' Samuli Schielke, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient 'Charlotte Al-Khalili’s stunning and moving ethnography is a landmark in the study of revolution, social change and mobility. Through an extraordinary portrayal of the lives, hopes and fears of Syria’s exiled revolutionaries in their “capital”, Al-Khalili transforms understandings of how migration shapes revolutionary subjectivity, how grassroots revolutionary activists theorize revolutionary outcomes, and how revolutionaries reorganize families and networks to keep ideals of social transformation alive.’ Alice Wilson, University of Sussex

The museum of the East India Company formed, for a large part of the nineteenth century, one of the sights of London. In recent years, little has been remembered of it beyond its mere existence, while an assumed negative role has been widely attributed to it on the basis of its position at the heart of one of Britain’s arch-colonialist enterprises. Extensively illustrated, The India Museum Revisited provides a full examination of the museum’s founding manifesto and evolving ambitions. It surveys the contents of its multi-faceted collections – with respect to materials, their manufacture and original functions on the Indian sub-continent – as well as the collectors who gathered them and the manner in which they were mobilized to various ends within the museum. From this integrated treatment of documentary and material sources, a more accurate, rounded and nuanced picture emerges of an institution that contributed in major ways, over a period of 80 years, to the representation of India for a European audience, not only in Britain but through the museum’s involvement in the international exposition movement to audiences on the continent and beyond.

Gurus and Media is the first book dedicated to media and mediation in domains of public guruship and devotion. Illuminating the mediatisation of guruship and the guru-isation of media, it bridges the gap between scholarship on gurus and the disciplines of media and visual culture studies. It investigates guru iconographies in and across various time periods and also the distinctive ways in which diverse gurus engage with and inhabit different forms of media: statuary, games, print publications, photographs, portraiture, films, machines, social media, bodies, words, graffiti, dolls, sound, verse, tombs and more. The book’s interdisciplinary chapters advance, both conceptually and ethnographically, our understanding of the function of media in the dramatic production of guruship, and reflect on the corporate branding of gurus and on mediated guruship as a series of aesthetic traps for the captivation of devotees and others. They show how different media can further enliven the complex plurality of guruship, for instance in instantiating notions of ‘absent-present’ guruship and demonstrating the mutual mediation of gurus, caste and Hindutva. Throughout, the book foregrounds contested visions of the guru in the development of devotional publics and pluriform guruship across time and space. Thinking through the guru’s many media entanglements in a single place, the book contributes new insights to the study of South Asian religions and to the study of mediation more broadly. Praise for Gurus and Media 'Sight, sound, image, narrative, representation and performance in the complex world of gurus are richly illuminated and deeply theorised in this outstanding volume. The immensely important, but hitherto under-explored, visual and aural dimensions of guru-ship across several religious traditions have received path-breaking and wide-ranging treatment by best-known experts on the subject.' Nandini Gooptu, University of Oxford ‘Gurus and Media casts subtle light on a phenomenon that too often shines so brightly that it is hard to see. This collection is a tremendously rich resource for anyone trying to make sense of that ambiguous zone where authority appears at once as seduction and as salvation, as comfort and as terror.’ William Mazzarella, University of Chicago 'This remarkable collection uses the figure of the mass-mediated guru to throw light on how modern Hindu mobilization generates a highly diverse set of religious charismatics in India. Because of the diversity of the contributors to this volume, the book is also a moveable feast of cases, methods and cultural styles in a major cultural region.' Arjun Appadurai, Emeritus Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University

Los fenómenos geológicos tienen una fuerte presencia visual en el paisaje de los Andes chilenos. Volcanes, aguas termales, terremotos y géiseres son fruto de una activa geología. Desde principios del siglo XX, ingenieros y geólogos comenzaron a imaginar transformar en electricidad el calor de los reservorios de agua subterránea. Sin embargo, su uso como energía eléctrica a una escala nacional ha sido una promesa inconclusa. Inspirado por la antropología de la energía e infraestructuras, Martín Fonck indaga etnográficamente en las promesas de la energía geotérmica y su abandono en los Andes chilenos.

This deeply researched collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the eighteenth-century trade in street literature – ballads, chapbooks, and popular prints – in England and Scotland. Offering detailed studies of a selection of the printers, types of publication, and places of publication that constituted the cheap and popular print trade during the period, these essays delve into ballads, slip songs, story books, pictures, and more to push back against neat divisions between low and high culture, or popular and high literature. The breadth and depth of the contributions give a much fuller and more nuanced picture of what was being widely published and read during this period than has previously been available. It will be of great value to scholars and students of eighteenth-century popular culture and literature, print history and the book trade, ballad and folk studies, children’s literature, and social history.

Wie kann ein Umbau technischer Geräte, von Prozessen und Infrastrukturen aus einer Postwachstumsperspektive aussehen? Mit dem Ansatz der konvivialen Technik stellt Andrea Vetter eine empirische Technikethik vor, die sie durch ethnographische Erkundungen in der Technikproduktion sowie die Sichtung historischer Quellen zu »alternativer« Technik entwickelt hat. Anhand der Beispiele Komposttoilette und Lastenfahrrad arbeitet sie die zentralen Kriterien für eine postwachstumstaugliche Technikbewertung aus: Verbundenheit, Zugänglichkeit, Anpassungsfähigkeit, Bio-Interaktivität und Angemessenheit.

In less than half a century, people in Vietnam have gone from fearing war and famine to fretting over the best cell phone plan. This shift in the landscape of people’s anxieties is the result of policies that made Vietnam the second-fastest-growing economy in the world and a triumph of late capitalist development. Yet as much as people marvel at the speed of progress, all this change— even for the better—can be difficult to handle. A Life of Worry unpacks an ethnographic puzzle. What accounts for the simultaneous increase in anxiety and economic prosperity among Ho Chi Minh City’s middle class? At a time when people around the world are turning to the pharmaceutical and wellness industries to soothe their troubled minds, it is worth asking whether these industries might be part of the problem. “A fascinating study of an important global phenomenon.” — LI ZHANG, author of Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy “A Life of Worry takes us from Ho Chi Minh City’s lively cafes to its burgeoning psychotherapy centers to offer an original phenomenological approach to anxiety as it is felt and enacted, often as a form of care for others, in Vietnam today.” — JOCELYN LIM CHUA, author of In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India

COVID-19 turned the world as we knew it upside down, impacting families around the world in profound ways. Seeking to understand this global experience, Family Life in the Time of COVID brings together case studies from 10 countries that explore how local responses to the pandemic shaped, and were shaped by, understandings and practices of family life. Carried out by an international team during the first year of the pandemic, these in-depth, longitudinal, qualitative investigations examined the impact of the pandemic on families and relationships across diverse contexts and cultures. They looked at how families made sense of complex lockdown laws, how they coped with collective worry about the unknown, managed their finances, fed themselves, and got to grips with online work and schooling to understand better how life had transformed (or not). In short, the research revealed their everyday joys and struggles in times of great uncertainty. Each case study follows the same methodology revealing experiences in Argentina, Chile, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the USA. They show how local government responses were understood and responded to by families, and how different cultures and life circumstances impacted everyday life during the pandemic. Ultimately the analysis demonstrates how experiences of global social upheaval are shaped by international and local policies, as well as the sociocultural ideas and practices of diverse families.

Michael M. J. Fischer examines documentary filmmaking, literature, and innovative dance from Southeast Asia and Singapore for their para-ethnographic insights into politics, culture, and aesthetics.

According to regular reports from newspapers or television programs, advice books or fitness websites, walking is not only the most natural, but also the healthiest and most sustainable form of transport. Humans are evolutionarily born to walk, their bodies are downright conditioned to walk. At the same time, everyday human mobility raises questions of living together, of socio-economic differentiations, but above all of lifestyles and biographical influences. We are therefore dealing with culturally negotiated practices that make a physical movement process such as walking a subject that can be observed and examined in a variety of ways. What is important is therefore less the fact that everyone goes, but rather the identifiable cultural imprint of these practices and the associated levels of meaning, for example when long-distance hikes or modern pilgrimages evoke motives critical of the present and thus also social diagnostic evaluations. Walking is therefore a major topic, but one in which precisely that empirical, cultural-scientific perspective that characterizes the European ethnology practiced at the University of Innsbruck (and elsewhere) can bring something new. From both a historical and contemporary ethnographic perspective, changes, economic cycles and negotiations that call for micro-perspective, empirical-field-related and qualitative-empathic surveys come into view. The contributions in this volume question the everyday practices of walking mobility by adopting a relational perspective in which physical walking practices are combined with experiences, ideas, projections, evaluations and adjustments. With the chosen focus on practices of walking, it is possible to understand in excerpts how powerful, social, gendered, religious, urban, scientific, textual-literary, spatial and material these practices always are.

The book uncovers the versatility and literary skills of oral narrators in a small African island. Relying on the researches of three French ethnographers who interviewed storytellers in the 1970s-80s, Lee Haring shows a once-colonised people using verbal art to preserve ancient values in the postcolonial world, when the island of Mayotte was transforming itself from a neglected colony to an overseas department of France. The author’s innovation is to read ethnographic researches as play scripts—to see printed folktales as accounts of live performances. One storyteller after another comments symbolically on what it is like to be a formerly colonised population. Storytelling women, in particular, combine diverse plots and characters to create traditional-sounding stories, which could not have been predicted from the African, Malagasy, Indian, and European traditions coexisting in Mayotte. Haring’s account shows them to be particularly skilled at irony and ambiguity, conveying both submissive and rebellious attitudes in their tales. He makes Mayotte storytelling accessible to a new, English-speaking audience and demonstrates that traditional storytellers in those years were preserving, but also critiquing, their inherited social order in a changing world. Their creative intentions, cultural influences and widely different narrative styles constitute Mayotte’s system of the arts of the word. Literary specialists, folklore enthusiasts, and people who like reading stories will find much to appreciate in this engaging and sophisticated book.

Wehali defines itself as the ritual centre of the island of Timor. As a ritual centre, Wehali continues to be the residence of a figure of traditional authority on whom, in the 18th century, the Dutch conferred the title of Kaiser (Keizer) and to whom the Portuguese gave the title of Emperor (Imperador). At one time, Wehali was the centre of a network of tributary states, which both the Dutch and Portuguese regarded as paramount to the political organisation of the island. This book is a study of Wehali in its contemporary setting as it continues to maintain its rituals and traditions. Significantly, Wehali is a 'Female' centre and its ‘Great Lord’ is considered to be a ‘Female’ lord. Whereas other Timorese societies are organised along male lines, in Wehali, all land, all property, all houses belong to women. Men are exchanged as husbands in marriage. Wehali is thus considered to be the ‘husband-giver’ to the surrounding realms on the island that look to its inner power as their source of life.

In the Pacific, as elsewhere, indigenous communities live with the consequences of environmental mismanagement and over-exploitation but rarely benefit from the short-term economic profits such actions may generate within the global system. National and international policy frameworks ultimately rely on local community assent. Without effective local participation and partnership, these extremely imposed frameworks miss out on millennia of local observation and understanding and seldom deliver viable and sustained environmental, cultural and economic benefits at the local level. This collection argues that environmental sustainability, indigenous political empowerment and economic viability will succeed only by taking account of distinct local contexts and cultures. In this regard, these Pacific indigenous case studies offer 'islands of hope' for all communities marginalised by increasingly intrusive—and increasingly rapid—technological changes and by global dietary, economic, political and military forces with whom they have no direct contact or influence.

Examining the work of key Southeast and East Asian artists, Michael M. J. Fischer calls for a new anthropology of the arts that attends to the materialities and technologies of the world as it exists today.

The highly productive subfield of literary studies analysing digital fiction has so far primarily focussed on what makes these digital phenomena new and thus different from their analogue predecessors. This book takes these valuable approaches as a given and sets out to add another piece to the mosaic by instead foregrounding continuities, historical parallels, and pre-digital literary theory to analyse these seemingly new phenomena in a larger context of cultural production and human expression. This introductory chapter outlines the main aims of the book, provides an overview of the material considered in the analysis, and orients the reader in the overall structure of the following chapters.

The book shows how Chicanx, Latinx and otherwise watched and "othered" people in San Diego, close to the US-Mexico border, respond to racism and surveillance. Watchfulness goes beyond counter-surveillance, as it is understood as a "way of life" and contributing to community building. The contributions pay attention to notions of borderlands, coloniality, subjectivity, struggle, the racialized body and the digital sphere.

Since the early 1990s, Mongolia began its hopeful transition from socialism to a market democracy, becoming increasingly dependent on international mining revenue. Both shifts were promised to herald a new age of economic plenty for all. Now, roughly 30 years on, many of Mongolia’s poor and rural feel that they have been forgotten. Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands describes these shifts from the viewpoint of the self-proclaimed ‘excluded’: the rural township of Magtaal on the Chinese border. In the wake of socialism, the population of this resource-rich area found itself without employment and state institutions, yet surrounded by lush nature 30 kilometres from the voracious Chinese market. A two-tiered resource-extractive political-economic system developed. Whilst large-scale, formal, legally sanctioned conglomerates arrived to extract oil and land for international profits, the local residents grew increasingly dependent on the Chinese-funded informal, illegal cross-border wildlife trade. More than a story about rampant capitalist extraction in the resource frontier, this book intimately details the complex inner worlds, moral ambiguities and emergent collective politics constructed by individuals who feel caught in political-economic shifts largely outside of their control. Offering much needed nuance to commonplace descriptions of Mongolia’s post-socialist transition, this study presents rich ethnographic detail through the eyes and voices of the state’s most geographically marginalized. It is of interest not only to experts of political-economy and post-socialist transition, but also to non-academic readers intrigued by the interplay of value(s) and capitalism.

Lisa Mitchell explores the historical and contemporary methods of collective assembly that people in India use to hold elected officials and government administrators accountable.

This chapter begins with the problem of ‘climate anxiety’, a psychological and cultural response to collapsing ecological systems marked by depression, trauma and helplessness. While a reasonable response to an existential threat, climate anxiety impedes our capacity to act where it leads to apathy, indecision or fatalism. The paper considers Jem Bendell’s argument that accepting and ‘grieving’ for inevitable civilisational collapse is a precondition to clear-sighted adaptation. This response is insufficient for the problem of motivation necessary for the capacity to act. It considers Martha Nussbaum’s 2018 claim that fear hinders reciprocity, amplifies infantile narcissism and endangers democracy. While salient, developing a countervailing ‘capacity for concern’ requires not merely a therapeutic relationship or the uncritical restitution of faltering liberal public institutions. Via Spinoza, an effective capacity to act against fear is conceived as interrelational and affective, founded on cooperation, friendship and the cultivation of causal knowledge. A common autonomy, one not merely of individual choice or identitarian self-expression.

Psychedelically-enhanced psychotherapy (PAP) looks set to become a common remedy for a range of serious mental health problems. The market for providing PAP, including a secondary market for the training, credentialising and monitoring of therapists, is expanding rapidly. Concerns have been raised recently by actors in that secondary market about the potential for abuse in PAP, which have been framed in terms of a failure to respect patient autonomy. Such concerns cannot be adequately addressed without a fundamental reconsideration of the role of autonomy in psychotherapy. Discussing what autonomy means in psychotherapy and thence especially in PAP is the aim of this chapter, which starts from practitioner-focused guidance, before reflecting on the history of autonomy in geopolitics and ethics and finally returning to consider its place in psychotherapy generally and PAP specifically. The conclusion reached is that while protecting autonomy is the primary concern of medical ethics today, autonomy is not equal to the phenomenology of the psychedelic experience, which is better characterised in terms of ‘autoheteronomy’. The chapter’s contribution to the emerging ‘psychedelic humanities’ is to show that PAP brings to crisis longstanding cultural compromises and uncertainties around the way in which psychotherapy has been thought to foster patient autonomy.