Bücher der Reihe European Anthropology in Translation

Croatia gained the world's attention during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In this context its image has been overshadowed by visions of ethnic conflict and cleansing, war crimes, virulent nationalism, and occasionally even emergent regionalism. Instead of the norm, this book offers a diverse insight into Croatia in the 1990s by dealing with one of the consequences of the war: the more or less forcible migration of Croats from Serbia and their settlement in Croatia, their "e;ethnic homeland."e; This important study shows that at a time in which Croatia was perceived as a homogenized nation-in-the-making, there were tensions and ruptures within Croatian society caused by newly arrived refugees and displaced persons from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Refugees who, in spite of their common ethnicity with the homeland population, were treated as foreigners; indeed, as unwanted aliens.

Many people feel that the impact of technology and the pressure of the market economy on alpine communities leads to a loss of biodiversity, authenticity and cultural diversity, affecting animal husbandry, local food production, social networks and traditions.

This study compares the topographic and ethnographic descriptions produced with respect to Galicia and Portugal during the 19th and 20th centuries in order to understand how the integration in different states and the existence of a specific nationalist discourse marked differences in the ways that two bordering regions have been represented.

The Portuguese Colonial Empire established its base in Africa in the fifteenth century and would not be dissolved until 1975. This book investigates how the different populations under Portuguese rule were represented within the context of the Colonial Empire by examining the relationship between these representations and the meanings attached to the notion of 'race'. Colour, for example, an apparently objective criterion of classification, became a synonym or near-synonym for 'race', a more abstract notion for which attempts were made to establish scientific credibility. Through her analysis of government documents, colonial propaganda materials and interviews, the author employs an anthropological perspective to examine how the existence of racist theories, originating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, went on to inform the policy of the Estado Novo (Second Republic, 1933-1974) and the production of academic literature on 'race' in Portugal. This study provides insight into the relationship between the racist formulations disseminated in Portugal and the racist theories produced from the eighteenth century onward in Europe and beyond.

Presents the life-worlds and personal experiences of workers and employees in three enterprises in East Berlin at the moment of political and economic upheaval. This book sets out in 1989 at the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall, witnessing the confrontations with the market economy and examining the reinterpretations of the socialist past.

Based on ethnographic research in southern Italy, this book examines the concept of raccomandazione, the omnipresent social practice of using connections to get things done. Viewing the practice from both emic and etic perspectives, it builds on and extends past scholarship to consider the nature of patronage in a contemporary society.

This book gives a dramatic account of life after the socio-economic transformations of the 1990s in Poland, which left many people impoverished and unemployed.

Heirs of the Bamboo is about the Macanese who left Macao and now live in Portugal and looks at their interactions with their counterparts in Macao and elsewhere in the diaspora, using the Internet.

Based on interviews and fieldwork conducted among residents of Pula, a coastal city in Northwestern Croatia, this study explores various aspects of a local feeling of boredom. This is mirrored in the term tapija, a word of Turkish origin describing a property deed, and in Pula's urban slang it has morphed from its original sense describing a set of affective states into one of lameness, loneliness, unwillingness, and irony. Combining lively conversations with a significant bibliography of the topic, the result is a compelling local anthropological study of boredom in a wider historical and global context.

Guiding the reader through the development of sex education in Poland, Agnieszka KoA ciaA ska looks at how it has changed from the 19th century to the present day. The book compares how sex was described in school textbooks, including those scrapped by the communists for fear of offending religious sentiments, and explores how the Catholic church retained its power in Poland under various regimes. The book also identifies the women and men who changed the way sex was written about in the country, and how they established the field of Polish sex education.