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Migration and multiculturalism are hotly discussed in public debates across Europe. Whereas ethnographic research has begun to examine the Right in this context, the Left remains largely unexplored. This book provides fresh perspectives on how the contemporary Left "frames" these issues in practice and how such framing has changed.

As an inquiry into engagements with forces of loss and threat, this work explores experimental ways to write about climate crisis in anthropology. From Belize to Ontario and back, this ambitious piece of ethnographic writing set during a time "beyond ruin" in a fictional, ecotourist community in the year 2040. Here, loss is taken up through an inventive form of ethnographic storytelling that brings together people, animals, landscapes, and the weather in a world beyond the climate crisis right now where new entanglements with things which have fallen to ruin emerge in imagined milieus in which loss and life converge.

Since the time of the Grand Tour, the Italian region of Tuscany has sustained a highly visible American and Anglo migrant community. Today American women continue to migrate there, many in order to marry Italian men. Confronted with experiences of social exclusion, unfamiliar family relations, and new cultural terrain, many women struggle to build local lives. In the first ethnographic monograph of Americans in Italy, Catherine Trundle argues that charity and philanthropy are the central means by which many American women negotiate a sense of migrant belonging in Italy. This book traces women's daily acts of charity as they gave food to the poor, fundraised among the wealthy, monitored untrustworthy recipients, assessed the needy, and reflected on the emotional work that charity required. In exploring the often-ignored role of charitable action in migrant community formation, Trundle contributes to anthropological theories of gift giving, compassion, and reflexivity.

The collapse of Soviet influence and the disillusionment with socialism in the early 1990s led to ambitious programs of economic reform throughout Eastern Europe. The papers in this volume, written by anthropologists and sociologists with detailed first-hand knowledge of the rural areas concerned, explore the situation in several countries; account is also taken of the differences between them. Not only are reform policies considered in the light of actual developments and reactions of villagers to changing circumstances; actual processes of land reform, the emergence of new family farms, and the creation of new forms of co-operative and joint stock company are described and examined well.

Based on fieldwork on the socioeconomic aspects of conservation on the tourist destination of Zakynthos, Theodossopoulos (social anthropology, U. of Bristol) shifted his original focus from a general analysis of emerging Greek environmental politics to an ethnographic case study of the values shapin

Focusing on terminally ill people in a German hospice, this study addresses the question, how meaningful experience is constructed for these patients in an attempt to preserve their dignity as persons. It is based on material from diary texts and active participation of the author in the role of a nurse.

In the decades since the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe, time has been a central resource under negotiation. Focusing on a local community that was considered a "model" in the socialist period, the author explores a variety of state-sponsored and unofficial pasts - history, folklore, and tradition - and shows how they "fit" together...

Most studies on transnational migration either stress assimilation, circulatory migration, or the negative impact of migration. This remarkable study, which covers migrants from one Jordanian village to 17 different countries in Europe, Asia, and North America, emphasizes the resiliency of transnational migrants after long periods of absence, social encapsulation, and stress, and their ability to construct social networks and reinterpret traditions in such a way as to mix the old and the new in a scenario that incorporates both worlds. Focusing on the humanistic aspects of the migration experience, this book examines questions such as birth control, women's work, retention of tribal law, and the changing attitudes of migrants towards themselves, their families, their home communities, and their nation. It ends with placing transnational migration from Jordan in a cross-cultural perspective by comparing it with similar processes elsewhere, and critically reviews a number of theoretical perspectives that have been used to explain migration.

Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork, this book explores the professional, social and cultural world of Burgundy wines and demystifies the terroir ideology to provide a unique long-term ethnographic analysis of what lies behind the concept in Burgundy, raising important questions about the future of quality wine in a global era.

By linking the experiences of immigrant families with the increased reliance on cheap and flexible workers for care and domestic work in Southern Europe, this study documents the lived experiences of neglected actors of globalization - migrant women - as well as the transformations of Western families more generally. However, while describing in detail the structural and cultural contexts within which these women have to operate, the book questions dominant paradigms about women as passive victims of patriarchal structures and brings out instead their agency and the creative ways in which they take control of their lives in often difficult circumstances. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, the author offers a valuable dual comparison between two Southern European countries on the one hand and between two migrant groups, one Christian and one Muslim, on the other, thus bringing to light unique detailed data on migration decision-making, settlement and on the multiple ways in which different women cope with the consequences of their transnational lives.

On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise is a collection of seven stories about local lives in the fictional village of Wallaceville. They turn rogue in the face of runaway forces that take the form and figure of a Belize beast-time, which can appear as a comic mishap, social ruin, tragic excess, or wild guesses.

Contains papers from a September 1993 workshop on the privatization of agriculture in Eastern Europe, exploring the situation in several countries. Discusses reform policies and actual processes of land reform, the emergence of new family farms, and the creation of new forms of cooperative and joint

Originally seen as a positive force, nationalism has resulted in warfare and persecution of minorities, so much so that, over time, it has been considered a social evil whose apparent decline has been greeted as a positive development. This text disputes this, maintaining that nationalism is not disappearing but has taken on a different form.

Mauritian independence in 1968 marked the end of a regime favorable to the Franco-Mauritians, the island's white colonial elite. Now, in postcolonial Mauritius, this group is faced with a much more diverse power constellation and often feels in competition with others vying for their privileges. Though this is a clear departure from the colonial heydays, Franco-Mauritians have been able to continue their elite position into the early twenty-first century. This book focuses on the power of white elites still lingering on in postcolonial realities, and with regards to elites and power in general, addresses anew how an elite group aims to prolong its position over time.

Children and youth, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds, are experiencing lifestyle choices their parents never imagined and contributing to the transformation of ideals, traditions, education and adult - child power dynamics.

In the decades since the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe, time has been a central resource under negotiation. Focusing on a local community that was considered a "e;model"e; in the socialist period, the author explores a variety of state-sponsored and unofficial pasts - history, folklore, and tradition - and shows how they "e;fit"e; together in everyday life. During the socialist period, the past was a central dimension of local politics and village identity. Post-socialist development has demanded a revaluation of temporality - as well as public and private space. This has led to fundamental changes in social life and political relations, reduced local resources, threatened village identity and transformed political activity through the emergence of new political elites. While the full implications of this process are still being played out, this study underlines some of the fundamental processes prevalent across eastern Europe that help explain widespread ambiguity vis-B-vis post-socialist reform.

This in-depth description of life in a nursing/care home, told in a year of daily conversations with patients and staff, highlights the daily care of frail or ill residents of extreme old age, emphasising interaction with care assistants and the different behaviours of men and women.

At the turn of the millennium the state of Europe is fluid and contested, yet how this affects the everyday lives of European peoples and the ways they experience the social world they live in remains largely unexplored. Drawing upon ethnographic information from diverse European settings, this volume points to the contradictions that the project of a "Europe without boundaries" involves. In illustrating how the removal of political boundaries can create other boundaries, the articles in this volume provide alternatives to recent theorising on complexity, which takes little account of human agency.

Based on a number of case studies, this book offers analysis of the life of the new Russian-Jewish immigrants and the interaction between them and other Israeli citizens.

Since Israel is primarily a country of immigrants, the state takes on the responsibility for the settlement and integration of each new group. It therefore sees its role as benevolent and indispensable to the welfare of the immigrants. This be true to some extent.

The museum boom, with its accompanying objectification and politicization of culture, finds its counterpart in the growing interest by social scientists in material culture, much of which is to be found in museums. Not surprisingly, anthropologists in particular are turning their attention again to museums, after decades of neglect...

With the growing fragmentation of western societies and disillusionment with the political process, the question of legitimacy has become one of the key issues of contemporary politics and is examined in this volume in depth for the first time. Drawing on ethnographic material from the U.S., Europe, India, Japan, and Africa...

The extension of the EU into the Mediterranean areas led to a redefinition of social difference in Spain, creating new boundaries in the interior. This text traces the historical processes by which Andalusians experienced the shift from being poor emigrants to northern Europe to becoming privileged citizens of the southern borderland of the EU.

A reconsideration of secularization theory using, as its core study, the people of a rural island in Denmark. Buckser (sociology and anthropology, Purdue U.) combines historical research and field study to portray the people of Mors whose community went through a profound religious awakening in the

Tropical islands are magical, volcanoes are magical and coral reefs are magical. Classical ruins, old town centres, modern artworks, and contemporary architecture are magical as well. Even local people are magical. The attribution of magical qualities appears central in the constitution of contemporary tourism attractions.

This book offers insights into the lives of children and youth in Britain, Japan, Spain, Israel/Palestine, Pakistan, and Ethiopia. Attention is focused on the child's perspective within the social-power dynamics involved in child-adult relations, which reveals the dilemmas of policy, planning, and parenting in a changing world.

Investigating how ideas about village boundaries and private property in the Trentino region of northern Italy form the background against which regionalist ideologies are understood, this study suggests that ideas about regionalism largely reflect views about private property.

Interpretations of the background to the Cuban diaspora - a political revolution and the subsequent radical transformation of the society and economy towards socialism - are politicised and highly contested. The Miami-based Cuban diaspora has had extraordinary success in putting its case high on the US political agenda and in capturing world media attention, but in the process the multiplicity of experiences within the diaspora has been overshadowed. This book gives voice to diasporic Cubans living in Spain, the former colonial ruler of Cuba. By focusing on their lived experiences of displacement, the book brings to light imaginative, narrative re-creations of the nation from afar. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book argues that the Cuban diaspora in Spain consists of three diasporic generations, generated through distinct migratory experiences. This constitutes an important step forward in understanding the dynamics of memory-making and social differentiation within diasporas, and in appreciating why people within the same diaspora engage in different modes of transnational practices and homeland relations.

As tourism service standards become more homogeneous, travel destinations worldwide are conforming yet still trying to maintain, or even increase, their distinctiveness. Based on more than two years of fieldwork in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Arusha, Tanzania, this book offers an in-depth investigation of the local-to-global dynamics of contemporary tourism. Each destination offers examples that illustrate how tour guide narratives and practices are informed by widely circulating imaginaries of the past as well as personal imaginings of the future.

This collection demonstrates both varied and skillful ways in which individuals and communities react to and cope with the impact of decades of mass tourism on their lives and values, thus throwing new light onto questions of identity, boundary maintenance and cultural adjustment.