This book explores both the complexities of local situations and the power relations that shape the global order. He shows how historically informed anthropological perspectives can contribute to debates about democratisation by incorporating a 'view from below' and revealing forces that shape power relations behind the formal facade of state institutions. Examples are drawn from Brazil, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia,...

This study of media and migrant communities in Germany's capital city is a "model of clarity and rigor in its arguments" (Martin Stokes, University of Chicago). In this innovative and thought-provoking study, Kira Kosnick explores the landscape of Turkish-language broadcasting in Berlin. From twenty-four-hour radio broadcasting in Turkish to programming on Germany's national public broadcasting and local public access channels, Germany's largest...

Turkey is famed for a history of tolerance toward minorities, and there is a growing nostalgia for the "Ottoman mosaic." In this richly detailed study, Marcy Brink-Danan examines what it means for Jews to live as a tolerated minority in contemporary Istanbul. Often portrayed as the "good minority," Jews in Turkey celebrate their long history in the region, yet they are subject to discrimination and their institutions are regularly threatened and periodically...

Sonja Luehrmann explores the Soviet atheist effort to build a society without gods or spirits and its afterlife in post-Soviet religious revival. Combining archival research on atheist propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s with ethnographic fieldwork in the autonomous republic of Marij El in Russia's Volga region, Luehrmann examines how secularist culture-building reshaped religious practice and interreligious relations. One of the most palpable legacies...

Hilda Ransome's well-documented and copiously illustrated study of bees points out that no creature has provided man with so much wholesome food; nor has any inspired so many beliefs and superstitions. Illustrations depict bees, hives, and beekeepers as they appear in paintings and sculpture, on coins, jewelry, and Mayan glyphs; and carved into African tree trunks. Chapters cover the folklore of bees and bee culture - from Egyptian, Babylonian, and...

This definitive source on the intricate tattoos of Polynesia's Marquesas Islands offers a rare glimpse of a dying art. Because of the colonial authorities' 1884 ban on tattooing, there remained only a single surviving tattoo artist at the time of this 1921 survey-and a dwindling number of living examples. These 38 plates of black-and-white drawings and photographs provide an unusually complete and intimate record of a sophisticated art form. The Marquesas...

*Shortlisted for the BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed Award for Ethnography 2015* This book follows the global trail of one of the world's most unremarkable and ubiquitous objects - flip-flops. Through this unique lens, Caroline Knowles takes a ground level view of the lives and places of globalisation's back roads, providing new insights that challenge contemporary accounts of globalisation. Rather than orderly product chains, the book shows...

Organisational Anthropology is a pioneering analysis of doing ethnographic fieldwork in different types of complex organisations, focusing on the process of initiating contact, establishing rapport and gaining the trust of an organisation's members. The thirteen contributors work from the premise that doing fieldwork in an organisation shares essential characteristics with fieldwork in more 'classical' anthropological environments, but that it...