Christmas is not a holiday just for Christians anymore, if it ever was. Embedded in calendars around the world and long a lucrative merchandising opportunity, Christmas enters multicultural, multi-religious public spaces, provoking both festivity and controversy, hospitality and hostility. The Public Work of Christmas provides a comparative historical and ethnographic perspective on the politics of Christmas in multicultural contexts ranging from a Jewish museum in Berlin to a shopping boulevard in Singapore. A seasonal celebration that is at once inclusive and assimilatory, Christmas offers...

A frank conversation about how Christmas spurs conflict and compromise in multicultural societies.

This issue opens with an in-depth analysis by Antti Lindfors of the ways that satire is intertwined with moral understandings, bringing recent discussions from the anthropology of ethics as well as emotions to the stand-up comedian's stage in Finland and elsewhere. Ethical issues are also at stake in Britta Lundgrens's examination of how Swedish health-care providers involved in the threat of an epidemic as well as adverse side-effects of vaccinations face double-bind situations and deal with their own doubts. Then Niels Jul Nielsen and Janus Jul Olsen explain how the neoliberal...

In many Mediterranean countries we observe newcomers to the political arena: new forms of social networking, growing opposition, and protest articulated by local communities or locally active social movements. In this special issue we present fresh research on localized practices of resistance by protest groups, solidarity initiatives, and cultural projects, which have arisen in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Based on ethnological fieldwork, the volume offers insights into the media-based protest against the commodification of the historic Marseille district Panier (Philip Cartelli); urban...