In "Neoliberal Frontiers," Brenda Chalfin presents an ethnographic examination of the day-to-day practices of the officials of Ghana s Customs Service, exploring the impact of neoliberal restructuring and integration into the global economy on Ghanaian sovereignty. From the revealing vantage point of the Customs office, Chalfin discovers a fascinating inversion of our assumptions about neoliberal transformation: bureaucrats and local functionaries, government offices, checkpoints, and registries are typically held to be the targets of reform, but Chalfin finds that these figures and sites of...
In "Neoliberal Frontiers," Brenda Chalfin presents an ethnographic examination of the day-to-day practices of the officials of Ghana s Customs Service...
What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? Andreas Glaeser investigates this question in the context of a fascinating historical case: socialist East Germany s unexpected self-dissolution in 1989. His analysis builds on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control as well as research into the documents both groups produced. In particular, Glaeser analyzes how these two opposing factions understanding of the socialist project came to change in response to countless...
What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? Andreas Glaeser investigates this question...
Morality is often imagined to be at odds with capitalism and its focus on the bottom line, but in The Moral Neoliberal morality is shown as the opposite: an indispensible tool for capitalist transformation. Set within the shifting landscape of neoliberal welfare reform in the Lombardy region of Italy, Andrea Muehlebach tracks the phenomenal rise of voluntarism in the wake of the state's withdrawal of social service programs. Using anthropological tools, she shows how socialist volunteers are interpreting their unwaged labor as an expression of social solidarity, with Catholic...
Morality is often imagined to be at odds with capitalism and its focus on the bottom line, but in The Moral Neoliberal morality is shown as the...
In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. Romantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance.In "The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan," William M....
In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire fro...
"The Genealogical Science"analyzes the scientific work and social implications of the flourishing field of genetic history.A biological discipline that relies on genetic data in order to reconstruct the geographic origins of contemporary populations their histories of migration and genealogical connections to other present-day groups this historical science is garnering ever more credibility and social reach, in large part due to a growing industry in ancestry testing.In this book, Nadia Abu El-Haj examines genetic history s working assumptions about culture and nature, identity and biology,...
"The Genealogical Science"analyzes the scientific work and social implications of the flourishing field of genetic history.A biological discipline tha...
We often invoke the "magic" of mass media to describe seductive advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella asks what happens to social theory if we take that idea seriously. How would it change our understanding of publicity, propaganda, love, and power? Mazzarella reconsiders the concept of "mana," which served in early anthropology as a troubled bridge between "primitive" ritual and the fascination of mass media. Thinking about mana, Mazzarella shows, means rethinking some of our most fundamental questions: What powers authority?...
We often invoke the "magic" of mass media to describe seductive advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass Society, Willi...
Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes be deadly. What Nostalgia Was unearths that history. Thomas Dodman begins his story in Basel, where a nineteen-year-old medical student invented the new diagnosis, modeled on prevailing notions of melancholy. From there, he traces its spread through the European republic of letters and into Napoleon's armies, as French...
Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late seventeenth century...
Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes be deadly. What Nostalgia Was unearths that history. Thomas Dodman begins his story in Basel, where a nineteen-year-old medical student invented the new diagnosis, modeled on prevailing notions of melancholy. From there, he traces its spread through the European republic of letters and into Napoleon's armies, as French...
Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late seventeenth century...
We often invoke the "magic" of mass media to describe seductive advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella asks what happens to social theory if we take that idea seriously. How would it change our understanding of publicity, propaganda, love, and power? Mazzarella reconsiders the concept of "mana," which served in early anthropology as a troubled bridge between "primitive" ritual and the fascination of mass media. Thinking about mana, Mazzarella shows, means rethinking some of our most fundamental questions: What powers authority?...
We often invoke the "magic" of mass media to describe seductive advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass Society, Willi...
"This work looks into the Colombian government's efforts to demobilize rebel FARC fighters and transform them into the entrepreneurial subjects and consumer citizens. Anthropologist Alexander Fattal shows how the market has become one of the principal grounds on which counterinsurgency warfare is waged in Colombia."--Supplied by publisher.
"This work looks into the Colombian government's efforts to demobilize rebel FARC fighters and transform them into the entrepreneurial subjects and co...
