Books in the New Directions in Anthropology series

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.

The construction of masculinity is becoming a field of growing interest because it is opening up new and fascinating perspectives, thus adding a further dimension to Gender Studies. However, so far the analysis has focused mostly on homosexuality. By contrast, the author examines social processes and relations that constitute hegemonic masculinity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 is the ethnography of the Mykoniots d'lection, a 'gang' of romantic adventurers who have been visiting the island of Mykonos for the last thirty-five years and have formed a community of dispersed friends. Their constant return to and insistence on working, acting and creating in a tourist space, offers them an extreme identity, which in turn is aesthetically marked by the transient cultural properties of Mykonos. Drawing semiotically from its ancient counterpart Delos, whose myth of emergence entails a spatial restlessness, contemporary Mykonos also acquires an idiosyncratic fluidity. In mythology Delos, the island of Apollo, was condemned by the gods to be an island in constant movement. Mykonos, as a signifier of a new form of ontological nomadism, semiotically shares such assumptions. The Nomads of Mykonos keep returning to a series of alternative affective groups largely in order to heal a split: between their desire for autonomy, rebellion and aloneness and their need to affectively belong to a collectivity. Mykonos for the Mykoniots d'lection is their permanent 'stopover'; their regular comings and goings discursively project onto Mykonos' space an allegorical (discordant) notion of 'home'.