Turkish German comedy culture and the lived realities of Turkish Muslims in Germany Comedy entertainment is a powerful arena for serious public engagement with questions of German national identity and Turkish German migration. The German majority society and its largest labour migrant community have been asking for decades what it means to be German and what it means for Turkish Germans, Mu…
In recent years research into creative labour and cultural work has usually addressed the politics of production in these fields, but the sociotechnical and aesthetic dimensions of collaborative creative work have been somewhat overlooked. This book aims to address this gap. Through case studies that range from TV showrunning to independent publishing, from the film industry to social media pla…
This book introduces readers to modern Thai literature through the themes of modernity, nationalism, identity and gender. In the cultural, political and social transformations that occurred in Thailand during the first half of the twentieth century, Thai literature was one of the vehicles that moved the changes. Taking seriously ‘read till it shatters’, a Thai phrase that instructs readers …
Memory matters. It matters because memory brings the past into the present, and opens it up to the future. But it also matters literally, because memory is mediated materially. Materiality is the stuff of memory. Meaningful objects that we love (or hate) function not only as aide-mémoire but are integral to memory. Drawing on previous scholarship on the interrelation of memory and materiality,…
The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to have been Russia's first truly original contribution to world culture. In contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hack-work and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities.
Proposing a series of innovative steps towards better understanding human lives at the interstices of water and land, this volume includes eight ethnographies from deltas around the world. The book presents ‘delta life’ with intimate descriptions of the predicaments, imaginations and activities of delta inhabitants. Conceptually, the collection develops ‘delta life’ as a metaphor for ap…
Once Upon the Permafrost is a longitudinal climate ethnography about “knowing” a specific culture and the ecosystem that culture physically and spiritually depends on in the twenty-first-century context of climate change. The author, anthropologist Susan Alexandra Crate, has spent three decades working with Sakha, the Turkic-speaking horse and cattle agropastoralists of northeastern Siberia…
A sympathetic examination of the failure of anti-corruption efforts in contemporary Indonesia. Combining ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kupang with an acute historical sensibility, Sylvia Tidey shows how good governance initiatives paradoxically perpetuate civil service corruption while also facilitating the emergence of new forms of it. Importing critical insights from the anthropology …
The book contains essays on current issues in arts and humanities in which peoples and cultures compete as well as collaborate in globalizing the world while maintaining their uniqueness as viewed from cross- and interdisciplinary perspectives. The book covers areas such as literature, cultural studies, archaeology, philosophy, history, language studies, information and literacy studies, and ar…
In the summer of 1974, twenty-four year old Anna DeVoss finds herself widowed and alone in the unfamiliar country of the North Carolina mountains. The body of her husband, a navy pilot missing in action for six years, has just been returned home from Vietnam. Following his funeral her mother in law persuades her to spend some time alone at the family’s summer home in Watauga County, North Car…