For the Mengen of Papua New Guinea, ‘hard work’ does not refer to drudgery or physically exhausting labour. Instead, ‘work’ involves creating and recreating meaningful social relations and generating value through acts of care, marriages, ceremonial events, sharing, and working the land together. Similarly, all activities that produce valued people, places, and relations are hard work. This book is a study of human-environmental relations, value production, natural resource extraction, and state formation. It examines these themes by looking at how the Mengen relate to each other, their lived environment, and outside actors.
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Religion, Law, and COVID-19 in Europe investigates how the pandemic and the subsequent legal restrictions influenced religious life in the region. The volume is based on 19 in-depth country case studies that combine legal and sociological analyses. By reflecting the plurality of religious and secular contexts, the volume details how the pandemic affected religious communities and challenged both religions and societies and how this was influenced by varying religious landscapes, political histories and legal cultures. More broadly, this edited volume reveals the importance of sudden, large-scale events in understanding religious change in the modern world.
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An Anthropology of Crosslocations introduces a new approach to understanding location. Geographical space is often perceived as divided by state borders, but it can also be classified and segmented based on, for example, ecosystems or religious structures and beliefs. The book shows how different locating logics coexist in a single place and how this influences people's lives. The authors are anthropologists who draw on ethnographic and historical research from locations across the Mediterranean region.
Book Details“Slava Ukraini!” Strategy and the Spirit of Ukrainian Resistance tells the story of the volunteers lauded to have saved Ukraine twice. First in the spring of 2014 after the onset of the war in Donbas, and again in February 2022 after the large-scale Russian invasion. Aimed at an interdisciplinary audience, this volume makes significant contributions to our understanding of events in Ukraine over the past decade. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with volunteer battalion fighters, the volume focuses on strategy, or the creation, control, and use of force. In addition, “Slava Ukraini!” discusses the volunteers’ long-term sociological impact in Ukraine. While the volunteers may have initially exacerbated internal divisions in Ukraine, their spirit of 2014 also embodied the beginning of Ukrainian resistance, which in 2022 flared-up on a national scale.
Book DetailsThis volume presents theoretical ideas, case studies, and reflective insights on community archaeology approaches across the Middle East, with contributions by scholars working in and from Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria. The contributions provide multiple insights from contemporary public archaeology practice, drawing on theoretical frameworks and discussing the realities of challenges, innovations and opportunities on the ground.
Book DetailsLocating the Mediterranean brings together ethnographic examinations of processes that make locations and render them meaningful. The volume’s contributions illustrate how historical, legal, religious, economic, political, and social connections and separations shape the experience of being located in the geographical space around the Mediterranean. Theoretically novel and empirically rich, the volume stimulates anthropological debates on the interplay between location and region-making.
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Situating Sustainability reframes our understanding of sustainability through related concepts, practices, and case studies. The differing geographic scope of this volume is joined by the disciplinary diversity of the contributors, bringing together researchers from cultural studies, anthropology, literature, law, behavioral science, urban studies, design, and development. The work of researchers and artists enables readers to better understand what sustainability means in their own locations, and how work in one place might support the efforts of others in other places.
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