Algerian migration to France began at the end of the 19th century, but in recent years France's Algerian community has been the focus of a shifting public debate encompassing issues of unemployment, multiculturalism, Islam, and terrorism. In this finely crafted historical and anthropological study, Paul A. Silverstein examines a wide range of social and cultural forms--from immigration policy, colonial governance, and urban planning to corporate advertising, sports, literary narratives, and songs--for what they reveal about postcolonial Algerian subjectivities. Investigating the connection...

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) had an enormous influence on social and cultural thought in the second half of the 20th century, leaving a mark on fields as diverse as sociology, anthropology, critical theory, education, literary criticism, art history, and media studies. From his childhood in a rural French village, to his fieldwork in Algeria, to his ascension to the Chair of Sociology at the College de France, Bourdieu's life followed a trajectory both complex and contradictory. In this original and eloquent study, Deborah Reed-Danahay offers fresh insights on Bourdieu's work by drawing on...

"An unparalleled study of a transforming and privatizing Russian health care system, of the promises and perils of prescriptive programs for change, that points to the areas that need change in the change-makers themselves.... part of a larger story about the inherent dangers of current neoliberal economic transformations of fragile post-socialist social welfare arrangements.... "Rivkin-Fish takes the reader into a new understanding of the fragile and tense relations between state and market transitions, and into the deep and largely silent struggle for gender and health equity in Russia."...

" I]ntersects with very active areas of research in history and anthropology, and links these domains of inquiry spanning Europe and North Africa in a creative and innovative fashion." --Douglas Holmes, Binghamton University

Maltese settlers in colonial Algeria had never lived in France, but as French citizens were abruptly "repatriated" there after Algerian independence in 1962. In France today, these pieds-noirs are often associated with "Mediterranean" qualities, the persisting tensions surrounding the French-Algerian War, and far-right, anti-immigrant politics. Through their...

Julie Hemment's engrossing study traces the development encounter through interactions between international foundations and Russian women's groups during a decade of national collapse. Prohibited from organizing independently under state socialism, women's groups became a focus of attention in the mid-1990s for foundations eager to promote participatory democracy, but the version of civil society that has emerged (the "third sector") is far from what Russian activists envisioned and what donor agencies promised. Drawing on ethnographic methods and Participatory Action Research, Hemment...

In this innovative and thought-provoking study, Kira Kosnick explores the landscape of Turkish-language broadcasting in Berlin. From 24-hour radio broadcasting in Turkish to programming on Germany's national public broadcasting and local public access channels, Germany's largest immigrant minority has made its presence felt in German media. Satellite dishes have appeared in migrant neighborhoods all over the city, giving viewers access to Kurdish channels and broadcasts from Turkey. Kosnick draws on interviews with producers, her own participation in production work, and analysis of...

This compelling ethnographic study describes how two groups of Romanian industrial workers have fared since the end of socialism. Once labor's elite, the celebrated coal miners of the Jiu Valley and the chemical workers of the Fagaras region had many social privileges and often derived genuine satisfaction from their work. Today, they are a rarely noted casualty of postsocialist transformations. Fear, distance, and alienation are the physical manifestations of stress experienced due to their precarious job status, declining health, and loss of a social safety net. Kideckel traces these...

In postsocialist Ukraine, with privatization and the scaling back of the social safety net, it is primarily women who have been left as leaders of service-oriented NGOs and mutual aid associations, caring for the marginalized and destitute with little or no support from the Ukrainian state. Sarah D. Phillips follows 11 activists over the course of several years to document the unexpected effects that social activism has produced for women: increasing social inequality and "differentiation" in the form of new cultural criteria for productive citizenship and new definitions of the rights and...

Anthropologist Daphne Berdahl was one of the leading scholars of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in central and eastern Europe. From her pathbreaking ethnography of a former East German border village in the aftermath of German reunification, to her insightful analyses of consumption, nostalgia, and citizenship in the early 21st century, Berdahl's writings probe the contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities of postsocialism as few observers have done. This volume brings together her essays, from an early study of memory at the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., to...

The island of Corsica has long been a popular destination for travelers in search of the European exotic, but it has also been a focus of French concerns about national unity and identity. Today, Corsica is part of a vibrant Franco-Mediterranean social universe. Starting from an ethnographic study in a Corsican village, Corsican Fragments explores nationalism, language, kinship, and place, as well as popular discourses and concerns about violence, migration, and society. Matei Candea traces ideas about inclusion and exclusion through these different realms, as Corsicans, "Continentals,"...