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With the rise of imperialism, the centuries-old European tradition of humanist scholarship as the key to understanding the world was jeopardized. Nowhere was this more true than in nineteenth-century Germany. It was there that the battle lines of today's “culture wars” were first drawn when anthropology challenged humanism as a basis for human scientific knowledge. Drawing on sources ranging from scientific papers and government correspondence to photographs, pamphlets, and police reports of “freak shows,” the author demonstrates how German imperialism opened the door to antihumanism. As Germans interacted more frequently with peoples and objects from far-flung cultures, they were forced to reevaluate not just those peoples, but also the construction of German identity itself. Anthropologists successfully argued that their discipline addressed these issues more productively—and more accessibly—than humanistic studies.

Between 1914 and 1918, German anthropologists conducted their work in the midst of full-scale war. The discipline was relatively new in German academia when World War I broke out, and, as this book reveals, its development was profoundly altered by the conflict. As the war shaped the institutional, ideological, and physical environment for anthropological work, the discipline turned its back on its liberal roots and became a nationalist endeavor primarily concerned with scientific studies of race. Combining intellectual and cultural history with the history of science, this book examines both the origins and consequences of this shift. Evans locates its roots in the decision to allow scientists access to prisoner-of-war camps, which prompted them to focus their research on racial studies of the captives. Caught up in wartime nationalism, a new generation of anthropologists began to portray the country's political enemies as racially different. After the war ended, the importance placed on racial conceptions and categories persisted, paving the way for the politicization of scientific inquiry in the years of the ascendancy of National Socialism.

Musicians rapping in Kriolu—a hybrid of Portuguese and West African languages spoken in Cape Verde—have recently emerged from Lisbon's periphery. They popularize the struggles with identity and belonging among young people in a Cape Verdean immigrant community that shares not only the Kriolu language but its culture and history. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research in Portugal and Cape Verde, this book introduces Lisbon's Kriolu rap scene and the role of rap music in challenging metropolitan Portuguese identities. It demonstrates that Cape Verde, while relatively small within the Portuguese diaspora, offers valuable lessons about the politics of experience and social agency within a postcolonial context that remains poorly understood. As the book argues, knowing more about both Cape Verdeans and the Portuguese invites clearer assessments of the relationship between the experience and policies of migration. That in turn allows us to better gauge citizenship as a balance of individual achievement and cultural ascription.

This book illuminates one of the world's most troubled regions from the perspective of a Russian intellectual, examining the evolution of the war in Chechnya that erupted in 1994, and untangling the myths, long-held resentments, and ideological manipulations which have fueled the crisis. In particular, it explores the key themes of nationalism and violence that feed the turmoil there, combining extensive interview material, historical perspectives, and deep local knowledge. The book sheds light on Chechnya in particular and on how secessionist conflicts can escalate into violent conflagrations in general.

At the height of the Greek Civil War in 1948, thirty-eight thousand children were evacuated from their homes in the mountains of northern Greece. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries in the national government placed the rest in children’s homes elsewhere in Greece. A point of contention during the Cold War, this controversial episode continues to fuel tensions between Greeks and Macedonians and within Greek society itself. The authors present here a comprehensive study of the two evacuation programs and the lives of the children they forever transformed. Marshalling archival records, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork, they analyze the evacuation process, the political conflict surrounding it, the children’s upbringing, and their fates as adults cut off from their parents and their homeland. The authors also give voice to seven refugee children who poignantly recount their childhood experiences and heroic efforts to construct new lives in diaspora communities throughout the world. A corrective to previous historical accounts, the book is also a searching examination of the enduring effects of displacement on the lives of refugee children.

This book is a lively account of dacha life and how Russians experience this deeply rooted tradition of the summer cottage amid the changing cultural, economic, and political landscape of postsocialist Russia. Simultaneously beloved and reviled, dachas wield a power that makes owning and caring for them an essential part of life. The book captures the their abiding traditions and demonstrates why Russians insist that these dwellings are key to understanding Russian life. It draws on literary texts as well as observations from dacha dwellers to highlight this enduring fact of Russian culture at a time when so much has changed. The book presents the dacha world in all its richness and complexity—a “good life” that draws inspiration from the natural environment in which it is situated.

This classic in the study of ethnicity, identity, and nation-building has a new introduction (on which Eric Wolf collaborated near the end of his life) that shows the continuing validity of the book's approach to ethnography, ecology, culture, and politics. The chapters investigate two Alpine villages—the German-speaking community of St. Felix and Romance-speaking Tret—only a mile apart in the same mountain valley.

This historical and ethnographic study of the political economy of the Vega Baja region of Spain, one of the European Union's “Regional Economies,” takes up the question of how to understand the growing alienation ordinary working people feel in the face of globalization. Combining oral histories with a sophisticated and nuanced structural understanding of changing political economies, the chapters in this book examine the growing divide between government and its citizens in a region that has in the last four decades been transformed from a primarily agricultural economy into a primarily industrial one. Offering a form of ethnography appropriate for the study of suprastate polities and a globalized economy, the book contributes to our understanding of one region as well as the way we think about changing class relations, modes of production, and cultural practices in a newly emerging Europe. The chapters consider how phenomena such as the “informal economy” and “black market” are not marginal to the normal operation of state and economic institutions, but are intertwined with both.

This book argues for an ethnographic analysis of international intervention as a series of encounters, focusing on the relations of difference and inequality, and the question of legitimacy that permeate such encounters. The book discusses the transformations that happen in everyday engagements between intervention agents and their target populations, and also identifies key instabilities that emerge out of such engagements. It highlights the struggles, entanglements and inter-dependencies between and among foreign agents, and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that channel and shape intervention and how it unfolds. Drawing upon nearly two years of fieldwork studying in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, the book's analysis identifies previously overlooked sites, processes, and effects of international intervention, and suggests new comparative opportunities for the study of transnational action that seeks to save and secure human lives and improve the human condition. Above all, the book foregrounds and analyzes the open-ended, innovative, and unpredictable nature of international intervention that is usually omitted from the ordered representations of the technocratic vision and the confident assertions of many critiques.

This book offers a powerful, innovative analysis of welfare policies and practices in Hungary from 1948 to the last decade of the twentieth century. Using a compelling mix of archival, interview, and ethnographic data, the book shows that three distinct welfare regimes succeeded one another during that period and that they were based on divergent conceptions of need. The welfare society of 1948–1968 targeted social institutions, the maternalist welfare state of 1968–1985 targeted social groups, and the liberal welfare state of 1985–1996 targeted impoverished individuals. Because they reflected contrasting conceptions of gender and of state-recognized identities, these three regimes resulted in dramatically different lived experiences of welfare. This book's approach bridges the gaps in scholarship that frequently separate past and present, ideology and reality, and state policies and local practices. A wealth of case histories gleaned from the archives of welfare institutions brings to life the interactions between caseworkers and clients and the ways they changed over time. In one of its most provocative findings, the book argues that female clients' ability to use the state to protect themselves in everyday life diminished over the fifty-year period. As the welfare system moved away from linking entitlement to clients' social contributions and toward their material deprivation, the welfare system, and those associated with it, became increasingly stigmatized and pathologized. With its focus on shifting inventions of the needy, this broad historical ethnography brings new insights to the study of welfare state theory and politics.

In Greece, women speak of mothering as “within the nature” of a woman. But this durable association of motherhood with femininity exists in tension with the highest incidence of abortion and one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe. In this setting, how do women think of themselves as proper individuals, mothers, and Greek citizens? In this anthropological study of reproductive politics and ethics in Athens, Greece, the text tracks the effects of increasing consumerism and imported biomedical family planning methods, showing how women's “nature” is being transformed to meet crosscutting claims of the contemporary world. Locating profound ambivalence in people's ethical evaluations of gender and fertility control, the book offers a far-reaching analysis of conflicting assumptions about what it takes to be a good mother and a good woman in modern Greece, where assertions of cultural tradition unfold against a backdrop of European Union integration, economic struggle, and national demographic anxiety over a falling birth rate.

This book offers an historical anthropology of the re-emergence of the Mediterranean as a transnational region in modern times. It examines this region formation by showing how Sicilian poaching in North African fishing grounds transformed transnational political action, imaginaries, and relations in the central Mediterranean: how Sicilians and Tunisians came to regard each other as related. The book is centered around the ethnography of life aboard a fishing boat from the fleet of Mazara del Vallo, a fishing town at the south-western tip of Sicily, ninety nautical miles northeast of the African shore. Beyond the trawler’s deck, the book focuses on Mazara’s recent turbulent history: from a relatively unimportant viticulture town in the 1940s to a central scene in Fish Wars, clandestine migration, the Trans-Mediterranean gas pipeline, and the rising importance of the Mediterranean in Italian politics since the 1970s. Drawing on 21 months of ethnographic research ashore and at sea and extensive archival research in Sicily and Tunisia, it makes a case for treating regions as the medium and scales of transnationalism. The book argues that the historical processes through which transnational regions form should become objects of anthropological analysis. It proposes to view such spaces as ever-changing constellations, which form and dissipate through the interaction between cross-boundary practices and official region-making projects. And it shows how we can attain this viewpoint from the moving vessels that weave these constellations together and stage their social relations and dynamics in full view.

Focusing on language and media in Asian Russia, particularly in Buryat territories, this book engages debates about the role of minority media in society, alternative visions of modernity, and the impact of media on everyday language use. The book demonstrates that language and the production, circulation, and consumption of media are practices by which residents of the region perform and negotiate competing possible identities. What languages should be used in newspapers, magazines, or radio and television broadcasts? Who should produce them? What kinds of publics are and are not possible through media? How exactly do discourses move into, out of, and through the media to affect everyday social practices? The book addresses these questions through a rich ethnography of the Russian Federation's Buryat territories, a multilingual and multiethnic region on the Mongolian border with a complex relationship to both Europe and Asia. The book shows that belonging in Asian Russia is a dynamic process that one cannot capture analytically by using straightforward categories of ethnolinguistic identity.

The current transformation of many Eastern European societies is impossible to understand without comprehending the intellectual struggles surrounding nationalism in the region. This book shows how the example of Romania suggests that current ethnic tensions come not from a resurrection of pre-Communist Nationalism but from the strengthening of national ideologies under Communist Party rule.

This book presents an ethnography of a powerful western cultural organization, the renowned Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. As a year-long participant-observer, the author studied the social and cultural economy of an institution for the research and production of avant-garde and computer music. The text gives a unique portrait of IRCAM's composers, computer scientists, technicians, and secretaries, interrogating the effects of the cultural philosophy of the controversial avant-garde composer, Pierre Boulez, who directed the institute until 1992. It depicts a major artistic institution trying to maintain its status and legitimacy in an era increasingly dominated by market forces, and in a volatile political and cultural climate, illuminating the erosion of the legitimacy of art and science in the face of growing commercial and political pressures. By tracing how IRCAM has tried to accommodate these pressures while preserving its autonomy, the book reveals the contradictory effects of institutionalizing an avant-garde. Contrary to those who see postmodernism as representing an accord between high and popular culture, this book stresses the continuities between modernism and postmodernism, and how postmodernism itself embodies an implicit antagonism toward popular culture.

This book investigates the changing fates of the socialist past in postsocialist Hungary. The book introduces the concept of “remains”—both physical objects and cultural remainders—to analyze all that Hungarians sought to leave behind after the end of state socialism. Spanning more than two decades of postsocialist transformation, the book follows Hungary from the optimism of the early years of transition to its recent right-wing turn toward illiberal democracy. The book analyzes remains that range from exiled statues of Lenin to the socialist-era “Bambi” soda, and from discredited official histories to the scandalous secrets of the communist regime's informers. It demonstrates that these remains were far more than simply the leftovers of an unwanted past. Ultimately, the struggles to define remains of socialism and settle their fates would represent attempts to determine the future—and to mourn futures that never materialized.

This book attempts to answer the question, why, in contemporary global society, are monarchies still so compelling to millions of people around the globe? It does so by focusing on the worldwide fascination with the British royal family, a monarchy that has existed for more than one thousand years and that has retained its economic and cultural significance in the twenty-first century. The authors explore the myriad ways in which consumer culture and the royal family intersect across historic sites, media products, fashion, commemoratives, royal brands, and touristic experiences. The book uses a case-study approach to examine both producer and consumer perspectives. Some chapters illustrate how those who are responsible for orchestrating experiences related to the British monarchy engage the public through the creation of compelling consumption experiences. Others reveal why people devote their time, effort, and money to royal consumption. Overall, the book highlights the important role the royal family continues to play in many people’s lives and its ongoing contribution to maintaining a sense of Britishness.

Following independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, economic and political liberalization projects were rolled out in Latvia and across Eastern Europe. While economic liberalism was welcomed, political liberalism was contested. Many in Latvia insisted on the importance of the nation alongside individual liberties and respect for diversity. From the perspective of liberal Europe, this often led to the conclusion that Latvia’s residents exhibited too much socialist mentality or nationalist sentiment and thus required lessons in political liberalism in order to become fully European. This ethnography examines the efforts to extend lessons in political liberalism to Latvia’s residents. The book argues that, rather than viewing Eastern Europe as falling behind, it should be viewed as the laboratory for forging post-Cold War political liberalism in Europe. It shows that Europe’s liberal democratic polities are based on a fundamental tension between the need to exclude and the requirement to profess and institutionalize the value of inclusion. The book provides insight with regard to the current crisis of political liberalism from a moment in time when it was still confident and from the perspective of a place and people that were thought to have never been liberal.

Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island explores the changing nature of everyday cooking practices on the Greek island of Kalymnos. It asks how cooking skills, practices, and knowledges are being reproduced or transformed, concomitant with other changes associated with contemporary life. Kalymnian islanders, both women and men, have an elaborate, shared discourse on ingredients, tastes, and recipes, and they consciously use food as a way of evoking personal and collective memory. Thus cooking knowledge, controlled mainly by women, has been a key way in which women have been socially evaluated by other women and by men. This ethnography treats the kitchen as an environment through which people move in the course of pursuing tasks, displaying skills, confronting culturally defined risks, and deploying their culturally shaped sensory abilities. On Kalymnos, cooking is much more than a mechanical chore to be executed. It is a central feature of people’s discourses and practices, which unlocks larger understandings of what is entailed in “the good life.” These larger meanings, however, can only be fully understood through a thick description that pays attention to the cutting of onions, the use of a can opener, and the rolling of phyllo dough. Through attention to these micropractices in the kitchen, I show how we can open up new perspectives on the anthropology of everyday life.

This book revisits times of excitement and loss in early 1990s Albania, in which about a dozen pyramid firms collapsed and caused the country to fall into anarchy and a near civil war. To gain a better understanding of how people from all walks of life came to invest in these financial schemes and how these schemes became intertwined with everyday transactions, dreams, and aspirations, the book looks at the materiality, sociality, and temporality of financial speculations at the margins of global capital. It argues that the speculative financial practices of the schemes were enabled by official financial infrastructures (such as the postsocialist free-market reforms), by unofficial economies (such as transnational remittances), as well as by historically specific forms of entrepreneurship, transnational social networks, and desires for a European modernity. Overall, these granular stories of participation in the Albanian schemes help understand neoliberal capitalism as a heterogeneous economic formation that intertwines capitalist and noncapitalist forms of accumulation and investment.