New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations – serie

Vertiginous Life provides a theory of the intense temporal disorientation brought about by life in crisis. In the whirlpool of unforeseen social change, people experience confusion as to where and when they belong on timelines of previously unquestioned pasts and futures. Through individual stories from crisis Greece, this book explores the everyday affects of vertigo: nausea, dizziness, breathlessness, the sense of falling, and unknowingness of Self. Being lost in time, caught in the spin-cycle of crisis, people reflect on belonging to modern Europe, neoliberal promises of accumulation, defeated futures, and the existential dilemmas of life held captive in the uncanny elsewhen.

What defines cooking as cooking, and why does cooking matter to the understanding of society, cultural change and everyday life? This book explores these questions by proposing a new theory of the meaning of cooking as a willingness to put oneself and one’s meals at risk on a daily basis. Richly illustrated with examples from the author’s anthropology fieldwork in Greece, Bigger Fish to Fry proposes a new approach to the meaning of cooking and how the study of cooking can reshape our understanding of social processes more generally.

Against the backdrop of an alienating, technologizing and ever-accelerating world of material production, this book tells an intimate story: one about a community of woodworkers training at an historic institution in London’s East End during the present ‘renaissance of craftsmanship’. The animated and scholarly accounts of learning, achievement and challenges reveal the deep human desire to create with our hands, the persistent longing to find meaningful work, and the struggle to realise dreams. In its penetrating explorations of the nature of embodied skill, the book champions greater appreciation for the dexterity, ingenuity and intelligence that lie at the heart of craftwork.

In the Netherlands, girls and young women are increasingly active in women-only kickboxing. The general assumption, in the Netherlands and in western Europe more broadly, is that women’s sport is a form of secular, feminist empowerment. Muslim women’s participation would then exemplify the incongruence of Islam with the modern, secular nation-state. Punching Back provides a detailed ethnographic study that contests this view by showing that young Muslim women who kickbox establish agentive selves by playing with gender norms, challenging expectations, and living out their religious subjectivities.

Focusing on the underlying politics behind children’s food, this book highlights the variety of social relationships, expectations and emotions ingrained in feeding children in Poland. With rich ethnographic accounts, including research with children, the book demonstrates how families, schools, the food industry and state agencies shape and experience feeding anxieties, and how such anxiety is at the heart of a new form of sociality. The book complicates our understanding of health and modern subjectivity and unpacks what and how we feed children today.

Through individual stories from crisis Greece, this book explores the everyday effects of vertigo: nausea, dizziness, breathlessness, the sense of falling, and unknowingness of Self. Being lost in time, caught in the spin-cycle of crisis, people reflect on belonging to modern Europe, neoliberal promises of accumulation, defeated futures, and the existential dilemmas of life held captive.

What defines cooking as cooking, and why does cooking matter to the understanding of society, cultural change and everyday life? This book explores these questions by proposing a new theory of the meaning of cooking as a willingness to put oneself and one’s meals at risk on a daily basis. Richly illustrated with examples from the author’s anthropology fieldwork in Greece, Bigger Fish to Fry proposes a new approach to the meaning of cooking and how the study of cooking can reshape our understanding of social processes more generally.

Against the backdrop of an alienating, technologizing and ever-accelerating world of material production, this book tells an intimate story: one about a community of woodworkers training at an historic institution in London’s East End during the present ‘renaissance of craftsmanship’. The animated and scholarly accounts of learning, achievement and challenges reveal the deep human desire to create with our hands, the persistent longing to find meaningful work, and the struggle to realise dreams. In its penetrating explorations of the nature of embodied skill, the book champions greater appreciation for the dexterity, ingenuity and intelligence that lie at the heart of craftwork.

Anthropologists working in Italy are at the forefront of scholarship on several topics including migration, far-right populism, organised crime and heritage. This book heralds an exciting new frontier by bringing together some of the leading ethnographers of Italy and placing together their contributions into the broader realm of anthropological history, culture and new perspectives in Europe.

The idea of citizenship is formed through a dynamic and flexible set of relationships that go beyond a sequence of formal rights and duties. It is recurring in everyday social contexts—in practices that play out in the real world, in the everyday exercises or refusals of citizenship rights, in the purposeful defiance of norms, and in the tactical evasion of duties. This book explores the troubled relationship between a state and its citizens across four different kinds of social spaces in Limassol, Cyprus. Tactical Citizenships is a testament to the tenacity and resourcefulness of citizens of unfair states in directing their relations with the government.

The Gitanos of el Rastro carry an ‘ontology of simultaneity’ as self-employed traders and Pentecostal practitioners in Madrid. This makes the Spanish Romani be considered as both a part of and apart from mainstream society. This book is an anthropological account of a group of middle and upper-class Gitanos and their ways of creating a ‘society within society’ based upon distinct cultural, moral and ideological values, notions and practices. The study renders a comprehensive perspective on social processes of classification, stratification, ‘othering’ and the role of ‘strangers’ in society and how these processes unfold in the interface between social, ritual and economic life on a local to global scale.

The 2008 economic collapse in Iceland sent its residents into a destabilising crisis with far-reaching, temporal and affective consequences. Haunting Futures explores how the complex relationships of this unstable past and the anticipatory modes of the ongoing present keep Icelanders and the Polish migrant community in their midst alert to looming futures in crisis. It offers insights into timely crisis-ridden impacts and imaginings, migration processes and social understandings and practices. Through its attention to how people engage with crisis temporally and affectively, the book presents the crisis not simply as an isolated and distressing event but as a spectre embodied in time through ongoing anticipation.

The Gitanos of el Rastro carry an ‘ontology of simultaneity’ as self-employed traders and Pentecostal practitioners in Madrid. This makes the Spanish Romani be considered as both a part of and apart from mainstream society. This book is an anthropological account of a group of middle and upper-class Gitanos and their ways of creating a ‘society within society’ based upon distinct cultural, moral and ideological values, notions and practices. The study renders a comprehensive perspective on social processes of classification, stratification, ‘othering’ and the role of ‘strangers’ in society and how these processes unfold in the interface between social, ritual and economic life on a local to global scale.

Known for its anarchist and leftist movements, its uprisings and its vibrant counterculture, Exarcheia has long been a symbol of resistance and political activism in Greece. Through the voices and experiences of those who live, work and move through Exarcheia, this book delves into Athens’ most contested neighbourhood – both its visible, striking elements and the unseen, elusive forces that linger in whispers, silences and memories. It unravels the tensions and contradictions of a place where beauty and resistance, decay and resilience are coexistent. Rather than reinforcing or dismissing its clichés and stereotypes, this exploration reveals the layered histories and political narratives that shape Exarcheia’s past, present and future.

Latina was founded in 1932 by the Fascist Regime and is often described by its inhabitants through its absences, as a place where there is ‘nothing’. The book examines the role of absence in place-making and delves into the lived experience of Latina. Through the analytical lens of haunting, this work explores its inhabitants’ efforts to see their city as a meaningful social space, as they navigate its multiple histories and the absent presence of the contested past.

Lasting traces of the Cold War continue to shape the social landscape in Italy and Greece. Lurking Cold War critiques the connections between global categories and individual experiences, foregrounding Cold War resonances through materiality, imagination, speculation, and affect – in literature, bureaucracy, and the family.

Where Saints Show Respect reveals the penetration of mafia values in Sicilian society. Instead of focusing on sensational criminality, this study considers rituals through which local society learns deep respect – sometimes fearful, but often playful or pious – for those values and their enforcers. State and Church misconstrue these values as vestiges of a society morally damned and left behind in a pagan past. This study draws on three decades of ethnographic research to explore a strikingly different Sicily from the self-congratulatory version of government and religious leaders, where a seemingly obscure set of rural practices offers a critical perspective on modernity itself.

Lampedusa evokes the crossings made by migrants and refugees and its name is associated with the sad sequence of shipwrecks and deaths in the central Mediterranean. For several centuries, Lampedusa has been an uninhabited land at the frontier of two conflicting worlds: between Africa and Europe and between Christianity and Islam. It was a stopover for sailors and a zone of religious truce. This book follows an ethnographic account of the social life on this small island, exploring its history articulated with the present where thousands of migrants and tourists cohabit both well and poorly in a few square miles.

Homogenization, monochromatic rendering, and the process of schematic imposition is readily apparent in modern mainstream Jewish French politics. The Jewish Maghreb explores complex self and communal understandings of Maghrebi Jewish populations and their descendants in France through ethnography across generations. This study examines how colonial history, migration, and geopolitics shape ongoing Maghrebi belonging. From commercial networks in Paris to Algerian pilgrimage journeys, the book reveals communal North African Jewish navigation of plural sediments of self and history. The heuristic ‘maghrebinicité,’ works to illuminate ongoing negotiations of memory, citizenship, and cultural transmission in postcolonial France, offering fresh insights into diaspora, return, and the persistence of transnational connections.

In the Netherlands, girls and young women are increasingly active in women-only kickboxing. The general assumption, in the Netherlands and in western Europe more broadly, is that women’s sport is a form of secular, feminist empowerment. Muslim women’s participation would then exemplify the incongruence of Islam with the modern, secular nation-state. Punching Back provides a detailed ethnographic study that contests this view by showing that young Muslim women who kickbox establish agentive selves by playing with gender norms, challenging expectations, and living out their religious subjectivities.