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From its scattered beginnings in the 1980s the Austrian new wave has developed into a cinema with broad international recognition.

There are not many areas that are more rooted in both the biological and social-cultural aspects of humankind than diet and nutrition. Throughout human history nutrition has been shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces, and in turn, access to food and nutrition has altered the course and direction of human societies.

Outside France, French anthropology is conventionally seen as being dominated by grand theory produced by writers who have done little or no fieldwork themselves, and who may not even count as anthropologists in terms of the institutional structures of French academia.

Cosmopolitanism is often discussed in a critical and disapproving manner: as a concept complicit with the interests of the powerful, or as a notion related to Western political supremacy, the ills of globalization, inequality, and capitalist economic penetration...

Psychologists have done a great deal of research on the effects of trauma on the individual, revealing the paradox that violent experiences are often secreted away beyond easy accessibility, becoming impossible to verbalize explicitly.

The last century has seen radical social changes in Ireland, which have impacted all aspects of local life but none more so than traditional Irish music, an increasingly important identity marker both in Ireland and abroad. The author focuses on a small village in County Clare, which became a kind of pilgrimage site for those interested...

Many people investigating the operation of large-scale environmentalist organizations see signs of power, knowledge and governance in their policies and projects. This collection indicates that such an analysis appears to be justified from one perspective, but not from another.

The nature of the currently emerging European society, which includes the economic and social transformation of Eastern and Central European countries, has been hotly debated. At its center is the relationship between markets and civil society within political and social contexts.

Forms of group identity play a prominent role in everyday lives and politics in northeast Africa. Case studies from Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya illustrate the way that identities are formed and change over time, and how local, national, and international politics are interwoven.

Analyzing both historical contexts and geographical locations, this volume explores the continuous reformation of state power and its potential in situations of violent conflict. The state, otherwise understood as an abstract and transcendent concept in many works on globalization in political philosophy, is instead located and analyzed here...

During the last decades, the world has been facing tremendous political transformations and new risks: epidemics such as HIV/Aids have had destabilizing effect on the caretaking role of kin; in post-socialist countries political reforms have made unemployment a new source of insecurity.

Imperial Germany's governing elite frequently sought to censor literature that threatened established political, social, religious, and moral norms in the name of public peace, order, and security. It claimed and exercised a prerogative to intervene in literary life that was broader than that of its Western neighbors...

Jazz has had a peculiar and fascinating history in Germany. The influential but controversial German writer, broadcaster, and record producer, Joachim-Ernst Berendt (1922-2000), author of the world's best-selling jazz book, labored to legitimize jazz in West Germany after its ideological renunciation during the Nazi era.

As Director of the Refugee Law Project at the University of Makerere, Kampala, Uganda, Dolan offers a behind-the-scenes, cross-disciplinary study of one of Africa's longest running and most intractable conflicts. This book shows how, alongside the activities of the Lord's Resistance Army, government decisions and actions on the ground, consolidated by humanitarian interventions and silences, played a central role in creating a massive yet only very belatedly recognized humanitarian crisis. Not only individuals, but society as a whole, came to exhibit symptoms typical of torture, and the perpetrator-victim dichotomy became blurred. It is such phenomena, and the complex of social, political, economic and cultural dynamics which underpin them, which the author describes as social torture. Building on political economy, social anthropology, discourse analysis, international relations and psychoanalytic approaches to violence, this book offers an important analytical instrument for all those seeking entry points through which to address entrenched conflicts, whether from a conflict resolution, post-conflict recovery or transitional justice perspective.

This original and thought-provoking collection of case studies examines some of the ways in which migration, and the concomitant processes of ecological and social change, have shaped and continue to shape human-environment relations in Amazonia.

Our lives are mostly composed of ordinary reality - the flow of moment-to-moment existence - and yet it has been largely overlooked as a subject in itself for anthropological study. In this work, the author achieves an understanding of this part of reality for the Mehinaku Indians, an Amazonian people, in two stages...

Around 1800 roughly three per cent of the human population lived in urban areas; by 2030 this number is expected to have gone up to some seventy per cent. This poses problems for traditional religions that are all rooted in rural, small-scale societies.

In recent years, the field of study variously called local, indigenous or traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) has experienced a crisis brought about by the questioning of some of its basic assumptions. This has included reassessing notions that scientific methods can accurately elicit and describe TEK...

The past few decades have seen growing interest in the study of the body. However, the increasing number of exciting and influential publications has primarily, if not exclusively, focused on the body in Western cultures.

Drawing on fieldwork with British Pakistani clients of a UK genetics service, this book explores the personal and social implications of a 'genetic diagnosis'. Through case material and comparative discussion, the book identifies practical ethical dilemmas raised by new genetic knowledge and shows how, while being shaped by culture, these issues also cross-cut differences of culture, religion and ethnicity. The book also demonstrates how identifying a population-level elevated 'risk' of genetic disorders in an ethnic minority population can reinforce existing social divisions and cultural stereotypes. The book addresses questions about the relationship between genetic risk and clinical practice that will be relevant to health workers and policy makers.

Where lived experience of surroundings is shifting, visceral, and immersive, interpretation of social spaces tends to be static and remote. "Space" and "place" are also often analyzed without grappling much (if at all) with the social, political, and historical roots of spatial practice.

While the first decade after the fall of the Berlin wall was marked by the challenges of unification and the often difficult process of reconciling East and West German experiences, many Germans expected that the new centuryA" would achieve normalization.A" The essays in this volume take a closer look at Germany's new normalcy...

The legacy of emigres in the British film industry, from the silent film era until after the Second World War, has been largely neglected in the scholarly literature. Destination London is the first book to redress this imbalance...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a uniquely reluctant and distinctly German Lutheran revolutionary. In this volume, the author, an Anglican priest and historian, argues that Bonhoeffer's powerful critique of Germany's moral derailment needs to be understood as the expression of a devout Lutheran Protestant. Bonhoeffer gradually recognized the ways in which the intellectual and religious traditions of his own class - the Bildungsbrgertum - were enabling Nazi evil. In response, he offered a religiously inspired call to political opposition and Christian witness-which cost him his life. The author investigates Bonhoeffer's stance in terms of his confrontation with the legacy of Hegelianism and Neo-Rankeanism, and by highlighting Bonhoeffer's intellectual and spiritual journey, shows how his endeavor to politicially reeducate the German people must be examined in theological terms.

From September 1990 to June 1991, the UK deployed 53,462 military personnel in the Gulf War. After the end of the conflict anecdotal reports of various disorders affecting troops who fought in the Gulf began to surface. This mysterious illness was given the name "e;Gulf War Syndrome"e; (GWS). This book is an investigation into this recently emergent illness, particularly relevant given ongoing UK deployments to Iraq, describing how the illness became a potent symbol for a plethora of issues, anxieties, and concerns. At present, the debate about GWS is polarized along two lines: there are those who think it is a unique, organic condition caused by Gulf War toxins and those who argue that it is probably a psychological condition that can be seen as part of a larger group of illnesses. Using the methods and perspective of anthropology, with its focus on nuances and subtleties, the author provides a new approach to understanding GWS, one that makes sense of the cultural circumstances, specific and general, which gave rise to the illness.

It has often been assumed that Europeans invented and had the exclusive monopoly over courtly and romantic love, commonly considered to be the highest form of relations between men and women. This view was particularly prevalent between 1770 and the mid-twentieth century, but was challenged in the 1960s...

Court dance in Java has changed from a colonial ceremonial tradition into a national artistic classicism. Central to this general transformation has been dance's role in personal transformation, developing appropriate forms of everyday behaviour and strengthening the powers of persuasion that come from skillful manipulation...

When reason fails to guide us in our everyday lives, we turn to faith, to religion; we close our minds; we reject austere reasoning. This rejection, which is a faith-based social and intellectual malignancy, has two unfortunate consequences: it blocks the way to knowledge that might enhance the quality of life and it opens the way to charlatans who exploit the faith of others. Examining two unquestionable malignancies of "e;the Christian Right"e; in present-day politics in the United States and the "e;secular religion"e; of Hitler's National Socialism, as well as the third, more complex case of Gandhi, the author asserts that we need religion, but we also need to make sure it does no harm.

Introduces academics, students and political analysts to some of the trends in the study and state of culture and international history: NGOs, internationalism, cultural violence, the "Romance of Resistance," and the culture of diplomacy.

The current world situation is fraught with potential future conflicts and calls for global responses. The point needs to be made yet again that sustainable development concerns us all and is a vital prerequisite for effectively combating poverty, since it is the poorest individuals that are most affected by drought and other natural catastrophes looming over the planet. Today, though, we understand that our war on nature is a world war...As part of the current reform of the United Nations system, a wide-ranging debate has now begun concerning the governance of the environment at a world-wide level and the need for better coordination of everybody''s efforts. [from the Preface] Unesco is actively involved in the debate as reflected in this volume that outlines some of the fundamental themes outlined here by prominent thinkers and offered as a forum for discussion.