Since 1989 neo-nationalism has grown as a volatile political force in almost all European societies in tandem with the formation of a neoliberal European Union and wider capitalist globalizations. Focusing on working classes situated in long-run localized processes of social change, including processes of dispossession and disenfranchisement, this volume investigates how the experiences, histories, and relationships of social class are a necessary ingredient for explaining the re-emergence and dynamics of populist nationalism in both Eastern and Western Europe. Featuring in-depth urban and regional case studies from Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Italy and Scotland this volume reclaims class for anthropological research and lays out a new interdisciplinary agenda for studying identity politics in the intensifying neoliberal conjuncture.

This book is a collective effort on the part of researchers affiliated with the CERES Research School in Development Studies in the Netherlands to discuss a series of themes and concepts crucial to the overlapping fields of globalization and development research. While development in the course of the 1980s and 1990s was becoming hinged onto globalization, prior approaches to development were increasingly being criticized. An impasse was announced by various actors in the field, and renewed reflection on some of the basic concepts and methods became inevitable. Much of the initial rethinking went under the sign of postmodernism and tended to give priority to micro- and actor-centered research. Later, with the emerging discussion on globalization, new macro dimensions were added, and efforts were launched to articulate local/global approaches. This book discusses a set of key themes and concepts that reflect these intellectual and historical developments. Used by politicians and researchers, they reflect the continuing concern about inequality and poverty by students and practitioners of development, and contain crucial perspectives for a critical engagement of current globalization processes and their consequences. The chapters in this book examine the notions and issues of globalization, livelihood, identity, governance, transnationalism, and knowledge.

The “cultural turn” has been a multifarious and pervasive phenomenon in Western universities and modes of social knowledge since the early 1980s.

This volume focuses on the conjunction of two disciplines where both the analytic promises as well as the difficulties involved in the meeting of humanist and social science approaches soon became obvious. Anthropologists and historians have come together here in order to recapture, elaborate, and criticize pre-Cultural Turn and non-Cultural Turn modes of analysing structures of experience, feeling, subjectivity and action in human societies and to highlight the still unexploited possibilities developed among others in the work of scholars such as Norbert Elias, Max Gluckman, Eric Wolf, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.

The past decades have seen significant urban insurrections worldwide, and this volume analyzes some of them from an anthropological perspective; it argues that transformations of urban class relationships must be approached in a way that is both globally informed and deeply embedded in local and popular histories, and contends that every case of urban mobilization should be understood against its precise context in the global capitalist transformation. The book examines cases of mobilization across the globe, and employs a Marxian class framework, open to the diverse and multi-scalar dynamics of urban politics, especially struggles for spatial justice.

Advocating for an interdisciplinary Marxist anthropology of the present, this book uses historical and global anthropology to engage with history, theory, unevenness, and comparison, while using “global ethnography” and “hidden histories” as the keys to social discovery. Kalb’s anthropology of value and worthlessness lays bare the logics that currently produce right wing, populist, and nationalist outcomes. The book also battles with the “anthropology of global systems”, financialization, and the seductive myths of global middle-class formation, while assessing the theoretical legacies of Eric Wolf, David Graeber, David Harvey, Jonathan Friedman, Marcel Mauss and “moral anthropology”, among others.

Since 1989 neo-nationalism has grown as a volatile political force in almost all European societies in tandem with the formation of a neoliberal European Union and wider capitalist globalizations. Focusing on working classes situated in long-run localized processes of social change, including processes of dispossession and disenfranchisement, this volume investigates how the experiences, histories, and relationships of social class are a necessary ingredient for explaining the re-emergence and dynamics of populist nationalism in both Eastern and Western Europe. Featuring in-depth urban and regional case studies from Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Italy and Scotland this volume reclaims class for anthropological research and lays out a new interdisciplinary agenda for studying identity politics in the intensifying neoliberal conjuncture.

This book is a collective effort on the part of researchers affiliated with the CERES Research School in Development Studies in the Netherlands to discuss a series of themes and concepts crucial to the overlapping fields of globalization and development research. While development in the course of the 1980s and 1990s was becoming hinged onto globalization, prior approaches to development were increasingly being criticized. An impasse was announced by various actors in the field, and renewed reflection on some of the basic concepts and methods became inevitable. Much of the initial rethinking went under the sign of postmodernism and tended to give priority to micro- and actor-centered research. Later, with the emerging discussion on globalization, new macro dimensions were added, and efforts were launched to articulate local/global approaches. This book discusses a set of key themes and concepts that reflect these intellectual and historical developments. Used by politicians and researchers, they reflect the continuing concern about inequality and poverty by students and practitioners of development, and contain crucial perspectives for a critical engagement of current globalization processes and their consequences. The chapters in this book examine the notions and issues of globalization, livelihood, identity, governance, transnationalism, and knowledge.

The “cultural turn” has been a multifarious and pervasive phenomenon in Western universities and modes of social knowledge since the early 1980s.

This volume focuses on the conjunction of two disciplines where both the analytic promises as well as the difficulties involved in the meeting of humanist and social science approaches soon became obvious. Anthropologists and historians have come together here in order to recapture, elaborate, and criticize pre-Cultural Turn and non-Cultural Turn modes of analysing structures of experience, feeling, subjectivity and action in human societies and to highlight the still unexploited possibilities developed among others in the work of scholars such as Norbert Elias, Max Gluckman, Eric Wolf, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.

The past decades have seen significant urban insurrections worldwide, and this volume analyzes some of them from an anthropological perspective; it argues that transformations of urban class relationships must be approached in a way that is both globally informed and deeply embedded in local and popular histories, and contends that every case of urban mobilization should be understood against its precise context in the global capitalist transformation. The book examines cases of mobilization across the globe, and employs a Marxian class framework, open to the diverse and multi-scalar dynamics of urban politics, especially struggles for spatial justice.

Advocating for an interdisciplinary Marxist anthropology of the present, this book uses historical and global anthropology to engage with history, theory, unevenness, and comparison, while using “global ethnography” and “hidden histories” as the keys to social discovery. Kalb’s anthropology of value and worthlessness lays bare the logics that currently produce right wing, populist, and nationalist outcomes. The book also battles with the “anthropology of global systems”, financialization, and the seductive myths of global middle-class formation, while assessing the theoretical legacies of Eric Wolf, David Graeber, David Harvey, Jonathan Friedman, Marcel Mauss and “moral anthropology”, among others.