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The city of Beirut is increasingly congested, polluted and suffocating. Its already limited green public spaces are under growing threat of privatisation and redevelopment. The State Otherwise examines the difficult predicament of Beirut's public green spaces from the vantage point of the civic campaign to reopen Horsh al Sanawbar, the city's largest public park. Analysing the relationship between neoliberal sectarianism, private interest and political action, the book asks questions about the nature of privatisation of public property, civic society's potential to mobilise individuals and the role of public authorities in promoting the public good.

While the social and cultural history of the early modern military has greatly advanced in the last few decades, the religious dimension of the military life in the Holy Roman Empire between 1500 and 1650 has hardly been explored. The Reformation's brought profound political, social and cultural upheavals, but the religiosity of the men and women who followed the Christian life in the chaos of war still represents a large gap in the historiography. Faith in War shows that confessional antagonisms lost much of their meaning during war and coexistence became a fact of army life. Connecting military and civilian social and cultural history in these ways, Nikolas Funke's case study on this period brings new life to important current historiographical discussions in a military context, including stereotyping, confessionalization, social discipline, deviance, toleration, religious violence, and the culture of death.

To better understand migration governance and the concrete, daily practices of civil servants tasked with enforcing state laws and policies, it is important to focus on documents, which are core artefacts of bureaucratic work. These can include certificates, letters, reports, case files, decisions, internal guidelines and judgements, in both digital and paper form. Based on ethnographic studies in various geographical and bureaucratic contexts, this collection shows how civil servants produce statehood, restrict migrants' movements and engage with migrants' strategies to make themselves legible. It contributes to the study of the state as documentary practice and highlights the role of paperwork as a powerful practice of migration control.

American anthropologist Oscar Lewis secured permission from Fidel Castro to undertake three years of field research on cultural and economic change in Cuba in the decade after the victory of Castro's M-26 Movement. This book delves into Lewis' research goals, methods, the training and composition of his field team, and the difficulties of executing the plan in the political climate in Cuba at the time. The government's reasons for early termination of the research agreement are enumerated and their many discrepancies and inconsistencies evaluated. The experience of Project Cuba offers lessons on the difficulties of doing social science research in any highly surveilled, politically controlled environment however sympathetic the principal investigator.

More than 30 years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, its cinema continues to attract scholarly attention. Documenting Socialism moves beyond the traditionally analyzed "feature film production" and places East Germany's documentary cinema at the center of history behind the Iron Curtain. Between questions of gender, race and sexuality and the complexities of diversity under the political and cultural environments of socialism, the specialist contributions in this volume cohere into an introductory milestone on documentary film production in the GDR.

During the Cold War, scientific discoveries were adapted and critiqued in many different forms of media across a divided Europe. Now, more than 30 years since the end of the Cold War, Science on Screen and Paper explores the intersections between scientific research and media by drawing from media history, film studies, and the history of science. From public relations material to educational and science films, from children's magazines to television broadcasts, the contributions in this collected volume seek to embrace medial differences and focus on intersectional themes and strategies for the representation of science.

Liminality: the state of being 'betwixt and between' is one of anthropology's most influential concepts. This volume reconsiders Victor Turner's innovative extension of Arnold Van Gennep's concept of liminality from within the Manchester tradition of Social Anthropology established by Max Gluckman. Turner's work was grounded in ethnography and engaged with philosophical perspectives in varied socio-historical contexts, extending well-beyond the confines of the anthropology that initially inspired much of his work. Liminality has therefore become a concept with broad interdisciplinary reach. Engaging with topical issues across the globe - from neuroscience to open access publishing and refugee experiences in Europe - this volume launches Turner's fundamental work into the future.

During the formation of the Turkish national movement, while Istanbul was under British, French, and Italian occupation, a distinct factional split emerged. One side supported the Ottoman sultanate's sovereignty, while the other championed a populist, republican path. An Istanbul at the Threshold of Nation State contextualizes this history of coalition, political disintegration, and power struggles in Turkey between 1918 and 1923 to highlight the rise of anti-communist movements and the emergence of national labor and merchant confederations that formed xenophobic, Christian exclusionary policies in the 1920s and 30s.

The relationship between anthropology departments and their surrounding urban communities has been traditional limited by a number of factors. The Potential for Anthropology and Urban Community Engagement pushes past these limitations, developing a firm foundation from which applied anthropology can support grassroots research and lasting community programs. Using two partnering Milwaukee organizations as examples, this volume explores the need in urban neighborhoods for practicing anthropologists, how a high volume of asset-building programs can be developed by practicing anthropologists, and the potential efficacy of anthropology departments in partnering with urban neighborhoods.

Religion and politics have historically clashed in modern Spain but the complexity of the controversial and sometimes violent relationships between Catholic values and modern political regimes continue to ride a precarious line of spiritual accommodation versus public policy. Leading experts on religious Spanish tradition and recent historiographic findings set out to define and interrogate grey areas in the last two centuries beyond the reductive conventional notion of an ever-warring "Two Spains." The Soul of the Nation unravels the role of religion in the country's public life following the imperial crisis of 1808 when the Catholic Monarchy put the role of the Church at heart of political and cultural debates.

Archaeology can be weird and fun, especially the digital kind. Readers of archaeology, media studies, and game studies are introduced to the wild-and-wooly side of digital archaeology: artifacts, sites, and landscapes contained within-and supporting-interactive digital built environments. Follow your guide, the reluctant digital archaeologist Charlie, to disappear into the weeds of post-landscapes, non-place cultural spaces, persistent digital spaces, software citizenship, machine-created culture, digital drift, technofossils, quantum archaeology, archaeological time, singularities, complexity and retrocausality, noise, and more. These bite-sized chapters offer new ways of interpreting humanity's blossoming digitalia, an archaeology done at the source of creation, use, and abandonment of our electronic selves.

Contemporary screen industries such as film and television have become primary sites for visualizing borders, migration, maps, and travel as processes of separation and dislocation, but also connection. Migration, Dislocation and Movement on Screen pulls case studies in film and television industries from throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia to interrogate the nature of movement via moving images. By combining theoretical, interdisciplinary engagements with empirical research, this volume offers a new way to look at screen media's representations of our contemporary world's transnational and cosmopolitan imaginaries.

Resource extraction exists in diverse settings across the world and is carried out through different practices. The Global Life of Mines provides a comprehensive framework examining the spatial and temporal relationships between mining and postmining as interrelated and coexisting features within the global minescape. The book brings together scholars from various fields, such as anthropology, geography, sociology and political science, examining ethnographic case studies throughout the Americas (Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, USA), Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Europe (Italy, Arctic Norway and Spain).

When Charles Seligman invited his wife, Brenda, to share his tent in 1907, he sanctioned a professional place for female fieldworkers in anthropology. Seligman was a groundbreaking pioneer of ethnographic work in Oceania and Africa. He treated shellshocked soldiers, he amassed museum collections and he fathered a generation of exceptional students. Brenda, his first student, became a scholar in her own right. Eighty years after his death, the Seligman legacy was deleted from the institution he began. Two Against the Tide explores how as wealthy Anglo-Jews, Charles and Brenda Seligman built a shared career through secret benevolence and silent endurance of hardship.

In the practice of constructing the idea of home and the emotions surrounding it, sensory experiences and materiality intertwine to form layers of memory and affective atmospheres. People in different life stages and situations create continuity and a sense of home by engaging with materiality and objects in their own unique way. Reconstructing Homes takes on a multidisciplinary approach of sensory ethnography, visual methods and autoethnography methodologies to explore affective engagements with materiality in the context of home and the idea of belonging.

Rodeo, cattle ranching, and bullfighting converge in the arenas of race, gender, and ethics in Reversible America. In Southwestern California, these sports manifest in spectacular expressions of transcultural interactions that continue to develop through border crossings. Using an interdisciplinary scope, this unique look into the subculture negotiates the paradoxes and connections between the popular American performances, Iberian bullfighting, and Native American hunting methods, along with the relationship between human and non-human beings, and systems of value across borders.

Anthropologists working in Italy are at the forefront of scholarship on several topics including migration, far-right populism, organised crime and heritage. This book heralds an exciting new frontier by bringing together some of the leading ethnographers of Italy and placing together their contributions into the broader realm of anthropological history, culture and new perspectives in Europe.

The formation of modern European states during the long 19th century was complicated and challenged by the integration of completely different territories and populations. The Science of State Power in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790-1880 builds on recent research to investigate the means of administrative, legal, and educational structures overlooked as part of the German sciences of the state. Integral to shaping imperial power for the process of Habsburg state-building, the science of Statistik (statistics) dissected and translated the states disparate territories it into empirically perceptible components.

More than a decade since the start of the war in Syria, Turkey is home to almost four million of that country's displaced citizens. Youth is one of the most vulnerable groups within the refugee population, as they struggle with language and education barriers and demands on them to assimilate while retaining their own culture. Lives in Limbo gives voice to the dreams of Syrian youth who have little hope of returning to their devastated homeland and explains why this generation's future will shape how the region will develop. It explores how refugee youth create futures from the liminality of exile.

Locating Black girls' desires, needs, knowledge bases, and lived experiences in relation to their social identities has become increasingly important in the study of transnational girlhoods. Black Schoolgirls in Space pushes this discourse even further by exploring how Black girls negotiate and navigate borders of blackness, gender, and girlhood educational spaces. The contributors of this collected volume highlight girls as actors and agents of not only girlhood but also the larger, transnational educational worlds in which girlhoods are contained.

Ethnographic research, anthropological theory, and the understanding of the objects of inquiry, are co-created through figuration (using tropes and rhetorical figures) and techniques of persuasion. Delving into descriptive ethnography and theoretical texts spanning across classical monographs and recent texts in cultural anthropology, Culture Figures places rhetoric and rhetoricity as central to the discipline's self-understanding. It focuses on how understandings of 'culture' and social life are shaped and conveyed in cultural anthropology through textual rhetoric. The book demonstrates how processes of using tropes and modes of persuasion underlie the creation of meanings or misunderstandings in society.

New technologies and scientific imagination rearrange the boundary that we identify as the beginning and end of life. New techno-social constellations, such as the ever-increasing presence of digital avatars and genetic screenings, implore us to reconsider and transcend the existing definitions of life and death. Through a multidisciplinary approach, this volume explores how the limitations and perceived finality of life and death are reconstituted through engagements with modern technology.

Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific was a major contribution to anthropological theory and method, while simultaneously establishing the sub-field of economic anthropology. Even a century after its publication, Malinowski's pioneering work remains critical for anthropology in a postcolonial age. This volume uses ethnographic studies from around the world to contextualize the work politically and intellectually, examining its gestation and influence from multiple perspectives. It critically explores the meaning of "economy" for Malinowski from his formation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to his path-breaking fieldwork in Melanesia and ensuing career in London.

Rethinking the contributions of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology for political ethnography, the Politics of Relations elaborates its relational approach to the state along four interlaced axes of research - embeddedness, boundary work, modalities and strategic selectivity - that enable thick comparisons across spatio-temporal scales of power. In Serbia local experiences of self-government, infrastructure and care motivate its citizens to "become the state" while cursing it heartily. While both officials and citizens strive for a state that enables a "normal life," they navigate the increasingly illiberal politics enacted by national parties and tolerated by trans-national donors.

Early modern European monarchies legitimized their rule through dynasty and religion where ideally the divine right of the ruler corresponded with the official confession of the territory. It has thus been assumed that at princely courts only a single confession was present. However, the reality of the confessionalization paradigm commonly involved more than one faith. Religious Plurality at Princely Courts explores the reverberations of bi-confessional or multi-confessional intra-Christian settings at courts on dynastic, symbolic, diplomatic, artistic, and theological levels addressing a significant neglected understanding of interreligious dialogue, religious change, and confessional blending. Incorporating perspectives across European studies such as domestic and international politics, dynastic strategies, the history of ideas, women's and gender history, and material culture, the contributions to this volume highlight the intersections of religious plurality at court.

Presenting European Anthropology of Education through eleven studies of European schools, this volume explores the constructing and handling of difference and sameness in the central institutions of schools. Based on ethnographic studies of schools in Greece, England, Norway, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Spain, Austria, Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, it illustrates how anthropological studies of schools provide a window to larger society. It thus offers insights into cultural lessons taught to children through policies, institutional structures and everyday interactions, as well as into schools' entanglement in state projects, cultural processes, societal histories and conflicts, and hence into contemporary Europe.

The West emancipated itself from the old humanism long ago and in doing so distanced itself from 'heteronomy' it declared that man, and not a non-human power, should be the first reference to approach people and nature. Today, as heirs of this tradition, we are still stuck in Eurocentrism (and often racism), and now even threaten to ruin nature by destroying biodiversity and causing the climate to warm up dangerously. Applied through an anthropological perspective, this book calls for a NEED-humanism: Not-Eurocentric, Ecological and (economically) Durable approach that can help promote inclusion and pluralism.

One of the most significant philosophical voices of the twentieth century - the philosopher of 'the Other' - Emmanuel Levinas' work offers a challenge to the discipline of anthropology that claims knowledge of the human. Levinasian philosophy considers subjectivity and identity as 'secret'. For him an attempt to document humanity should then be placed in an ethics of ignorance and 'not-knowing' so that 'otherness' can be inspired. Anthropology thus reaches the Levinasian challenge of defining itself as a humanistic science as well as a humanistic documentation of social life. This book endeavours to take Levinasian and anthropological precepts equally seriously and offers tentative conclusions.