Bücher der Reihe Dislocations

Prevailing scholarship on migration tends to present migrants as the objects of history, subjected to abstract global forces or to concrete forms of regulation imposed by state and supra state organizations. In this volume, by contrast, the focus is on migrants as the subjects of history who not only react but also act to engage with and transform

Industrial workers in Ukraine have a complex political lifeworld because their political action aimed at bringing radical social change coexists with a demobilizing stance that condemns all political participation as corrupt. This contradictory attitude to politics defines the character of populist mass mobilizations that shook Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, as well as the electoral overhaul of 2019 and the popular response to the Russian invasion in 2022. Based on three years of fieldwork in the city of Kryvyi Rih, the book focuses on the moral economy that constitutes the working-class and structures its relations with other social groups.

Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getulio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. Brazilian Steel-Town tells the story of the people tied to this ailing giant - of their fears, hopes, and everyday struggles.

This book traces the boom of local NGOs in Serbia since the 1990s in the context of the global political economy of Aid, neoliberal state restructuring, and shifting post-Cold War hegemonies, and unpacks the various forms of dispossession and inequality entailed in the democracy-promotion project.

Worldwide Mobilizations argues that transformations of urban class relationships must be approached in a way that is both globally and locally informed.

The first in-depth ethnographic monograph on the New Right in Central and Eastern Europe, The Revolt of the Provinces explores the making of right-wing hegemony in Hungary over the last decade, focusing on interaction between social antagonisms emerging on the local level and struggles waged within the political public sphere.

Frontiers of Civil Society is a historical anthropological analysis of the roles of `civil society' in Serbia's postsocialist and postauthoritarian transformation.

Located in the far-western Tarai region of Nepal, Kailali has been the site of dynamic social and political change in recent history. The Partial Revolution examines Kailali in the aftermath of Nepal's Maoist insurgency, focusing primarily on the end of Kailali's feudal system of bonded labor.

Indigenist Mobilization explores the history of the dynamics between the Communist party in Kerala and indigenist activists, and the subtle ways in which global capitalist restructuring leads to a resonance of indigenist visions in the changed the everyday working lives and future aspirations of subaltern groups in Kerala.

The collection traces the connections and conflicts between the local politics of corporate engagement and the global movements of CSR, revealing the ways in which social and environmental relations are transformed through the regimes of ethical capitalism.

Comprehensively examines the promise which planning offers. Demonstrates how people involved with planning, deal with discrepancies between what it promises and what is done. Offers insight into the varied outcomes of planning.

After the collapse of the USSR, Kyrgyzstan chose a path of economic and political liberalization. Only a few years later, however, the country ceased producing anything of worth and developed a dependence on the outside world, particularly on international aid. Its principal industry, sheep breeding, was decimated by reforms suggested by international institutions providing assistance. Virtually annihilated by privatization of the economy and deserted by Moscow, the Kyrgyz have turned this economic "e;opening up"e; into a subtle strategy to capture all manner of resources from abroad. In this study, the author describes the encounters, sometimes comical and tinged with incomprehension, between the local population and the well-meaning foreigners who came to reform them.

Contemporary forms of capitalism and the state require close analytic attention to reveal the conditions of possibility for effective counter-politics. On the other hand the practice of collective politics needs to be studied through historical ethnography if we are to understand what might make people's actions effective. This book suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. Gavin Smith opens and closes this series of interlinked essays by proposing a concise framework for untangling what he calls "e;the society of capital"e; and subsequently a potentially controversial way of seeing its contemporary features. This book tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.

Presenting an account of the intersection of globalization and neo-racism in a rural Greek community, this book describes the contradictory political and economic development of the Greek countryside since its incorporation into the European Union. It addresses key issues of racism, neoliberalism and nationalism in contemporary anthropology.

During the 1990s, the Eastern Caribbean was caught in a bitter trade dispute between the US and EU over the European banana market. When the World Trade Organization rejected preferential access for Caribbean growers in 1998 the effect on the region's rural communities was devastating. This volume examines the "e;banana wars"e; from the vantage point of St. Lucia's Mabouya Valley, whose recent, turbulent history reveals the impact of global forces. The author investigates how the contemporary structure of the island's banana industry originated in colonial policies to create a politically "e;stable"e; peasantry, followed by politicians' efforts to mobilize rural voters. These political strategies left farmers dependent on institutional and market protection, leaving them vulnerable to any alteration in trade policy. This history gave way to a new harsh reality, in which neoliberal policies privilege price and quantity over human rights and the environment. However, against these challenges, the author shows how the rural poor have responded in creative ways, including new social movements and Fair Trade farming, in order to negotiate a stronger position for themselves in the in a shifting global economy.

For a decade, from 1983 to 1993, homelessness was a major concern in the United States. In 1994, this public concern suddenly disappeared, without any significant reduction in the number of people without proper housing. By examining the making and unmaking of a homeless crisis, this book explores how public understandings of what constitutes a social crisis are shaped. Drawing on five years of ethnographic research in New York City with African Americans and Latinos living in poverty, Where Have All the Homeless Gone? reveals that the homeless "e;crisis"e; was driven as much by political misrepresentations of poverty, race, and social difference, as the housing, unemployment, and healthcare problems that caused homelessness and continue to plague American cities.

Based on long-term fieldwork, six vivid ethnographies from Colombia, India, Poland, Spain and the southern and northern U.S. address the dwindling importance of labor throughout the world. The contributors to this volume highlight the growing disconnect between labor struggles and the advancement of the greater common good...

This title assesses the current state of knowledge concerning oil, integration, and conflict and formulates an anthropological research strategy to advance an understanding of oil and its vicissitudes.

Planning in contemporary democratic states is often understood as a range of activities, from housing to urban design, regional development to economic planning. This volume sees planning differently - as the negotiation of possibilities that time offers space.

Bringing together original, contemporary ethnographic research on the Northeast African state of Eritrea, this book shows how biopolitics - the state-led deployment of disciplinary technologies on individuals and population groups - is assuming particular forms in the twenty-first century.

Based on anthropological studies across the globe, this book explores the social practice of home-making amongst people whose lives are characterized by movement and violence. Social scientific and policy understandings of home and migration tend to focus on territory, culture and nation, often carrying implicit 'sedentarist' assumptions...

A compelling account of the intersection of globalization and neo-racism in a rural Greek community, this book describes the contradictory political and economic development of the Greek countryside since its incorporation into the European Union, where increased prosperity and social liberalization have been accompanied by the creation of a vulnerable and marginalized class of immigrant laborers. The author analyzes the paradoxical resurgence of ethnic nationalism and neo-racism that has grown in the wake of European unification and addresses key issues of racism, neoliberalism and nationalism in contemporary anthropology.

Everyday life in contemporary rural China is characterized by an increased sense of moral challenge and uncertainty. Ordinary people often find themselves caught between the moral frameworks of capitalism, Maoism and the Chinese tradition. This ethnographic study of the village of Zhongba (in Hubei Province, central China) is an attempt to grasp the ethical reflexivity of everyday life in rural China. Drawing on descriptions of village life, interspersed with targeted theoretical analyses, the author examines how ordinary people construct their own senses of their lives and their futures in everyday activities: building houses, working, celebrating marriages and funerals, gambling and dealing with local government. The villagers confront moral uncertainty; they creatively harmonize public discourse and local practice; and sometimes they resolve incoherence and unease through the use of irony. In so doing, they perform everyday ethics and re-create transient moral communities at a time of massive social dislocation.

It is important to see China's activities in the Pacific Islands, not just in terms of a specific set of interests, but in the context of Beijing's recent efforts to develop a comprehensive and global foreign policy. China's policy towards Oceania is part of a much larger outreach to the developing world...

"e;Peasants tell tales,"e; one prominent cultural historian tells us (Robert Darnton). Scholars must then determine and analyze what it is they are saying and whether or not to incorporate such tellings into their histories and ethnographies. Challenging the dominant culturalist approach associated with Clifford Geertz and Marshall Sahlins among others, this book presents a critical rethinking of the philosophical anthropologies found in specific histories and ethnographies and thereby bridges the current gap between approaches to studies of peasant society and popular culture. In challenging the methodology and theoretical frameworks currently used by social scientists interested in aspects of popular culture, the author suggests a common discursive ground can be found in an historical anthropology that recognizes how myths, fairytales and histories speak to a universal need for imagining oneself in different timescapes and for linking one's local world with a "e;known"e; larger world.

In 1900, Sheffield was the tenth largest city in the world. Cutlery "e;made in Sheffield"e; was used across the globe, and the city built armored plate for the navy in the run-up to the First World War. Today, however, Sheffield's derelict Victorian shop floors and industrial buildings are hidden behind new leisure developments and shopping centers. Based on an extended period of research in two local steel factories, this book combines a lively, descriptive account with a wide-ranging critique of post-industrial capitalism. Its central argument is that recent government attempts to engineer Britain's transition to a post-industrial and classless society have instead created volatile post-industrial spaces marked by informal labor, industrial sweatshops and levels of risk and deprivation that divide citizens along lines of gender, age, and class. The author discovers a link between production and reproduction, and demonstrates the centrality of kinship relations, child and female labor, and intra-household exchanges to the economic process of de-industrialization. Paradoxically, government policies have reinvigorated working-class militancy, spawned local industrial clusters and re-embedded the economy in the spatial and social structure of the neighborhood.

Based on anthropological studies across the globe, this book explores the experiences and contested meanings of home for people whose lives are characterized by migration related to varying forms of violence. Taking seriously the political implications and exploitation of discourses of home in the transnational processes...

Bringing together original, contemporary ethnographic research on the Northeast African state of Eritrea, this book shows how biopolitics - the state-led deployment of disciplinary technologies on individuals and population groups - is assuming particular forms in the twenty-first century.

Shortly after the book's protagonists moved into their apartment complex in Sarajevo, they, like many others, were overcome by the 1992-1995 war and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia More than a decade later, in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, they felt they were collectively stuck in a time warp where nothing seemed to be as it should be. Starting from everyday concerns, this book paints a compassionate yet critical portrait of people's sense that they were in limbo, trapped in a seemingly endless "e;Meantime."e; Ethnographically investigating yearnings for "e;normal lives"e; in the European semi-periphery, it proposes fresh analytical tools to explore how the time and place in which we are caught shape our hopes and fears.

The collection traces the connections and conflicts between the local politics of corporate engagement and the global movements of CSR, revealing the ways in which social and environmental relations are transformed through the regimes of ethical capitalism.