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This book illuminates one of the world's most troubled regions from the perspective of a Russian intellectual, examining the evolution of the war in Chechnya that erupted in 1994, and untangling the myths, long-held resentments, and ideological manipulations which have fueled the crisis. In particular, it explores the key themes of nationalism and violence that feed the turmoil there, combining extensive interview material, historical perspectives, and deep local knowledge. The book sheds light on Chechnya in particular and on how secessionist conflicts can escalate into violent conflagrations in general.

This book is a lively account of dacha life and how Russians experience this deeply rooted tradition of the summer cottage amid the changing cultural, economic, and political landscape of postsocialist Russia. Simultaneously beloved and reviled, dachas wield a power that makes owning and caring for them an essential part of life. The book captures the their abiding traditions and demonstrates why Russians insist that these dwellings are key to understanding Russian life. It draws on literary texts as well as observations from dacha dwellers to highlight this enduring fact of Russian culture at a time when so much has changed. The book presents the dacha world in all its richness and complexity—a “good life” that draws inspiration from the natural environment in which it is situated.

This classic in the study of ethnicity, identity, and nation-building has a new introduction (on which Eric Wolf collaborated near the end of his life) that shows the continuing validity of the book's approach to ethnography, ecology, culture, and politics. The chapters investigate two Alpine villages—the German-speaking community of St. Felix and Romance-speaking Tret—only a mile apart in the same mountain valley.

This historical and ethnographic study of the political economy of the Vega Baja region of Spain, one of the European Union's “Regional Economies,” takes up the question of how to understand the growing alienation ordinary working people feel in the face of globalization. Combining oral histories with a sophisticated and nuanced structural understanding of changing political economies, the chapters in this book examine the growing divide between government and its citizens in a region that has in the last four decades been transformed from a primarily agricultural economy into a primarily industrial one. Offering a form of ethnography appropriate for the study of suprastate polities and a globalized economy, the book contributes to our understanding of one region as well as the way we think about changing class relations, modes of production, and cultural practices in a newly emerging Europe. The chapters consider how phenomena such as the “informal economy” and “black market” are not marginal to the normal operation of state and economic institutions, but are intertwined with both.

This book offers a powerful, innovative analysis of welfare policies and practices in Hungary from 1948 to the last decade of the twentieth century. Using a compelling mix of archival, interview, and ethnographic data, the book shows that three distinct welfare regimes succeeded one another during that period and that they were based on divergent conceptions of need. The welfare society of 1948–1968 targeted social institutions, the maternalist welfare state of 1968–1985 targeted social groups, and the liberal welfare state of 1985–1996 targeted impoverished individuals. Because they reflected contrasting conceptions of gender and of state-recognized identities, these three regimes resulted in dramatically different lived experiences of welfare. This book's approach bridges the gaps in scholarship that frequently separate past and present, ideology and reality, and state policies and local practices. A wealth of case histories gleaned from the archives of welfare institutions brings to life the interactions between caseworkers and clients and the ways they changed over time. In one of its most provocative findings, the book argues that female clients' ability to use the state to protect themselves in everyday life diminished over the fifty-year period. As the welfare system moved away from linking entitlement to clients' social contributions and toward their material deprivation, the welfare system, and those associated with it, became increasingly stigmatized and pathologized. With its focus on shifting inventions of the needy, this broad historical ethnography brings new insights to the study of welfare state theory and politics.

In Greece, women speak of mothering as “within the nature” of a woman. But this durable association of motherhood with femininity exists in tension with the highest incidence of abortion and one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe. In this setting, how do women think of themselves as proper individuals, mothers, and Greek citizens? In this anthropological study of reproductive politics and ethics in Athens, Greece, the text tracks the effects of increasing consumerism and imported biomedical family planning methods, showing how women's “nature” is being transformed to meet crosscutting claims of the contemporary world. Locating profound ambivalence in people's ethical evaluations of gender and fertility control, the book offers a far-reaching analysis of conflicting assumptions about what it takes to be a good mother and a good woman in modern Greece, where assertions of cultural tradition unfold against a backdrop of European Union integration, economic struggle, and national demographic anxiety over a falling birth rate.

The current transformation of many Eastern European societies is impossible to understand without comprehending the intellectual struggles surrounding nationalism in the region. This book shows how the example of Romania suggests that current ethnic tensions come not from a resurrection of pre-Communist Nationalism but from the strengthening of national ideologies under Communist Party rule.

This book presents an ethnography of a powerful western cultural organization, the renowned Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. As a year-long participant-observer, the author studied the social and cultural economy of an institution for the research and production of avant-garde and computer music. The text gives a unique portrait of IRCAM's composers, computer scientists, technicians, and secretaries, interrogating the effects of the cultural philosophy of the controversial avant-garde composer, Pierre Boulez, who directed the institute until 1992. It depicts a major artistic institution trying to maintain its status and legitimacy in an era increasingly dominated by market forces, and in a volatile political and cultural climate, illuminating the erosion of the legitimacy of art and science in the face of growing commercial and political pressures. By tracing how IRCAM has tried to accommodate these pressures while preserving its autonomy, the book reveals the contradictory effects of institutionalizing an avant-garde. Contrary to those who see postmodernism as representing an accord between high and popular culture, this book stresses the continuities between modernism and postmodernism, and how postmodernism itself embodies an implicit antagonism toward popular culture.

This book attempts to answer the question, why, in contemporary global society, are monarchies still so compelling to millions of people around the globe? It does so by focusing on the worldwide fascination with the British royal family, a monarchy that has existed for more than one thousand years and that has retained its economic and cultural significance in the twenty-first century. The authors explore the myriad ways in which consumer culture and the royal family intersect across historic sites, media products, fashion, commemoratives, royal brands, and touristic experiences. The book uses a case-study approach to examine both producer and consumer perspectives. Some chapters illustrate how those who are responsible for orchestrating experiences related to the British monarchy engage the public through the creation of compelling consumption experiences. Others reveal why people devote their time, effort, and money to royal consumption. Overall, the book highlights the important role the royal family continues to play in many people’s lives and its ongoing contribution to maintaining a sense of Britishness.

Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island explores the changing nature of everyday cooking practices on the Greek island of Kalymnos. It asks how cooking skills, practices, and knowledges are being reproduced or transformed, concomitant with other changes associated with contemporary life. Kalymnian islanders, both women and men, have an elaborate, shared discourse on ingredients, tastes, and recipes, and they consciously use food as a way of evoking personal and collective memory. Thus cooking knowledge, controlled mainly by women, has been a key way in which women have been socially evaluated by other women and by men. This ethnography treats the kitchen as an environment through which people move in the course of pursuing tasks, displaying skills, confronting culturally defined risks, and deploying their culturally shaped sensory abilities. On Kalymnos, cooking is much more than a mechanical chore to be executed. It is a central feature of people’s discourses and practices, which unlocks larger understandings of what is entailed in “the good life.” These larger meanings, however, can only be fully understood through a thick description that pays attention to the cutting of onions, the use of a can opener, and the rolling of phyllo dough. Through attention to these micropractices in the kitchen, I show how we can open up new perspectives on the anthropology of everyday life.

Starting with the premise that Europe was made by its imperial projects as much as colonial encounters were shaped by events and conflicts in Europe, this book investigates metropolitan–colonial relationships from a new perspective. The fifteen chapters demonstrate various ways in which “civilizing missions” in both metropolis and colony provided new sites for clarifying a bourgeois order. Focusing on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, they show how new definitions of modernity and welfare were developed, and how new discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion were contested and worked out. The chapters argue that colonial studies can no longer be confined to the units of analysis on which it once relied; instead of being the study of “the colonized,” it must account for the shifting political terrain on which the very categories of colonized and colonizer have been shaped and patterned at different times.