Trousson, Raymond / Vercruysse, Jeroom (dir.), Dictionnaire general de Voltaire. (Champion classiques, references et dictionnaires 18) 1272 p. 2020:10 (Champion, FR) <670-9>
ISBN 978-2-38096-016-7 paper ¥7,064.- (税込) EUR 38.00

York, Susan, A Mountain Oasis: Daily Life in a Village in the Yasin Valley, Pakistan. (Iran and the Caucasus Monographs) 470 pp. 2023:11 (Brill, NE) <708-892>
ISBN 978-90-04-68481-2 hard ¥36,487.- (税込) EUR 155.00

In A Mountain Oasis, Susan York presents a richly illustrated socio-economic study of village life in Pakistan's Yasin Valley, undertaken during one year spent living with a local family. It documents this dynamic agro-pastoral society at a time when few researchers were recording developments in these far-flung and difficult to reach mountain oases of the Hindukush. It is a record of a time when development interventions were in their beginnings, and before this area in Gilgit-Baltistan entered a crucial period of transformation. It provides solid comparative reference material for future research on this region, which is continuing to undergo challenging and complex changes.

Lagunas, David, American Gitanos in Mexico City: Transnationalism, Cultural Identity and Economic Environment. 342 pp. 2023:8 (Palgrave Macmillan, UK) <708-970>
ISBN 978-3-031-27996-6 hard ¥30,598.- (税込) EUR 129.99

This book provides a detailed and comprehensive description of the Gitano community of Mexico City. The ethnographic study showcases the interplay between cultural reproduction, economic reproduction, and the Gitano / non-Gitano opposition. The first part of the book discusses how the cultural identity of this community is reproduced based on migratory processes, social relations and the dynamics of kinship and gender roles to understand the contradiction between value systems and practices in a patriarchal society. In the second part, emphasis is placed on the economic dynamism of this group in its interactions with the majority society in the context of informal economy and the group's articulation with space and mobility in the territory. The analysis problematizes territorial mobility and circulation regimes based on fieldwork carried out in the process of active participation with Gitano families selling textile clothes and accessories through the country.

Limerick, Nicholas, Recognizing Indigenous Languages: Double Binds of State Policy and Teaching Kichwa in Ecuador. (Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language) 272 pp. 2023:9 (Oxford U. Pr., US) <708-972>
ISBN 978-0-19-755917-8 hard ¥21,344.- (税込) US$ 99.00
ISBN 978-0-19-755918-5 paper ¥7,535.- (税込) US$ 34.95 *

What follows when state institutions name historically oppressed languages as official? What happens when bilingual education activists gain the right to coordinate schooling from upper-level state offices? The intercultural bilingual school system in Ecuador has been one of the most prominent referents of Indigenous education in the Americas. Since its establishment in 1988, members of Ecuador's pueblos and nationalities have coordinated a second national school system that includes the teaching of Indigenous languages. Based on more than two years of ethnographic research in Ecuador's Ministry of Education, at international and national conferences, in workshops, in schools, and with families, Recognizing Indigenous Languages considers how state agents carry out linguistic and educational politics and policies in eras of greater inclusivity and multiculturalism. This book shows how institutional advances for bilingual education and Indigenous languages have been premised on affirming the equality-and the equivalency-of the linguistic and cultural practices of members of Indigenous pueblos and nationalities with other Ecuadorians. Major responsibilities like serving as national state agents, crafting a standardized variety of the Kichwa language family, translating legal documents to Kichwa, and teaching Indigenous languages in schools have provided vast authority, representation, and visibility for those languages and their speakers. However, the everyday work of directing a school system and making Kichwa a language of the state includes double binds that work against the very goals of autonomous schooling and getting people to speak and write Kichwa.

Myers, Jody / Goldish, Matt, Eating at God's Table: How Foodways Create and Sustain Orthodox Jewish Communities. (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology) 340 pp. 2023:11 (Wayne State U. Pr., US) <708-173>
ISBN 978-0-8143-4955-7 hard ¥20,479.- (税込) US$ 94.99 *
ISBN 978-0-8143-4954-0 paper ¥7,975.- (税込) US$ 36.99 *

How do contemporary American Orthodox Jews use food to create boundaries, distinguishing and dividing groups from each other and from non-Orthodox communities? How does food symbolize beliefs, sustain and grow communities, and represent commitment to God? Eating at God's Table explores answers and examples from ten years of ethnographic research in the Orthodox enclave in the west Los Angeles Pico-Robertson neighborhood. Author Jody Myers explores the food-centeredness of Orthodox Jewish religious practice and the evolutionary development of today's demanding kosher laws. Opening with four scenarios based on real observations, Myers illustrates how many Orthodox residents' religious beliefs and practices around food are integrated into, even inseparable from, their daily activities. While the shared commitment to the kosher diet creates an overall sense of community, Orthodox sub-affiliations in the neighborhood use foodways to construct smaller, intimate communities, and individuals use food to fashion personal identities within the larger group. This rich exploration of kosher Orthodox foodways and their meanings demonstrates the inadequacy of limited or simple definitions of Orthodox Jewishness and offers insight into the religious diversity in American communities.

Rocha, Cristina, Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the Fashioning of Cosmopolitan Identities. 240 pp. 2024:1 (Oxford U. Pr., US) <708-188>
ISBN 978-0-19-767319-5 hard ¥32,340.- (税込) US$ 150.00
ISBN 978-0-19-767320-1 paper ¥6,457.- (税込) US$ 29.95 *

Hillsong, an Australian megachurch founded in 1983, is now a global phenomenon. It has branches in most global cities and award-winning worship bands that tour the world and whose music is sung weekly by an estimated 50 million people in 60 languages. Moreover, the megachurch and its bands have an immense presence on social media with millions of followers. The scandals around sex and money that have rocked Hillsong in recent times have been reported globally in the mainstream secular media, reflecting the megachurch's prominence. Hillsong's style of Pentecostalism relies on a deep engagement with consumer capitalism, as well as celebrity, youth, and digital cultures. In Cool Christianity, Cristina Rocha tells the story of how Hillsong's "Cool Christianity" aesthetic allowed it to make inroads among the Brazilian middle classes, who adopted Hillsong's brand of Christianity as a way of becoming cosmopolitan and establishing class boundaries. Rocha draws on the theoretical frameworks of material religion and lived religion to show how religion can be made globally relevant to young people through cool aesthetics, affect, and engagement with consumer culture--from fashion to music to branding--in the digital age.

Strauss-Mazzullo, Hannah / Tennberg, Monica (eds.), Living and Working With Snow, Ice and Seasons in the Modern Arctic: Everyday Perspectives. (Arctic Encounters) 267 pp. 2023:10 (Palgrave Macmillan, UK) <708-1004>
ISBN 978-3-031-36444-0 hard ¥32,952.- (税込) EUR 139.99

This book describes everyday practices of life in changing Arctic winter conditions. The authors explore the contemporary and situated outdoor practices in different work settings in Finnish Lapland and investigate how, for example, tourism, reindeer herding, cattle breeding and urban snow management adapt to the physically limiting or enabling features of cold temperatures, snow and ice. The book also highlights individual and societal adjustments to such harsh conditions and their seasonal changes in mobility, including winter cycling, use of snow mobiles and walking with studded shoes. The impact of a warming climate is a great concern for those utilising the enabling qualities of winter weather. The need, then, for continuous adaptation in everyday practices of work and mobility will increase in the future.

Carlson, Bronwyn / Kennedy, Tristan / Day, Madi (eds.), Global Networks of Indigeneity: Peoples, Sovereignty and Futures. 296 pp. 2023:11 (Manchester U. Pr., UK) <708-1035>
ISBN 978-1-5261-5697-6 hard ¥25,641.- (税込) GB￡ 90.00 *

Global Indigeneity is a term that reflects shared recognition of sovereignty among Indigenous peoples. Terms like global Indigeneity, transnational, and relational are in use to describe both ancient and contemporary connections between Indigenous peoples all over the world. This edited volume brings together a range of Indigenous perspectives, forming a global network of writers, thinkers, and scholars connected by common investment in Indigenous futures. This transnational solidarity results in collective activism and envisioning - a joint investment in futures free of the tyrannies imposed by settler-colonialism.This edited volume assembles collective visions of Indigenous futures, contemplations of the potential of digital technologies, and considerations of Indigenous intimacies, relationalities and manners in which we locate ourselves in an increasingly global, connected world. Together, they present possibilities and the practicalities required to bring them to fruition.

Carbone, Mauro / Lingua, Graziano, Toward an Anthropology of Screens: Showing and Hiding, Exposing and Protecting. 210 pp. 2023:10 (Palgrave Macmillan, UK) <708-1099>
ISBN 978-3-031-30815-4 hard ¥28,244.- (税込) EUR 119.99

This book shows that screens don't just distribute the visible and the invisible, but have always mediated our body's relationships with the physical and anthropological-cultural environment. By combining a series of historical-genealogical reconstructions going back to prehistoric times with the analysis of present and near-future technologies, the authors show that screens have always incorporated not only the hiding/showing functions but also the protecting/exposing ones, as the Covid-19 pandemic retaught us. The intertwining of these functions allows the authors to criticize the mainstream ideas of images as inseparable from screens, of words as opposed to images, and of what they call "Transparency 2.0" ideology, which currently dominates our socio-political life. Moreover, they show how wearable technologies don't approximate us to a presumed disappearance of screens but seem to draw a circular pathway back to using our bodies as screens. This raises new relational, ethical, and political questions, which this book helps to illuminate.

Kahn, Alison L., Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe: Papal Ethnographic Collections and Material Culture. (People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities) 112 pp. 2023:10 (Springer, GW) <708-1113>
ISBN 978-981-9931-88-0 hard ¥25,890.- (税込) EUR 109.99 *

This book reveals the history of the Vatican's ethnographic collections by exploring the imperial, scientific, technological, and religious agendas behind its collecting and curating practices in the early twentieth century. It focuses on two principal contributors: the academic, priest, and 'Pope's Curator', Father Wilhelm Schmidt, SVD, and the missionary and linguist, Father Franz Kirschbaum, SVD. Their narratives are embedded in a unique set of comparisons between the 'liberal humanist ideals' that underpinned the 1851 Great Exhibition, mid-nineteenth-century German museology, and the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition. It relates to the period of high colonialism and rampant missionary activity worldwide. It unravels the complicated political and ideological stance taken by the Catholic Church and its place within the science/religion debates of its time. Establishing an essential link between the secular and catholic practices of collecting and curating ethnographic objectsfrom non-Western traditions, the author proposes a broader framework for post-colonial approaches to scholarly studies of ethnographic collections, including those of the Catholic Church. This book appeals to students and scholars of anthropology, museum studies, history, art history, religion, politics, and cultural studies.

Baldacchino, Jean-Paul / Houston, Christopher (eds.), Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures. 208 pp. 2023:11 (Rutgers U. Pr., US) <708-1147>
ISBN 978-1-9788-3723-2 hard ¥32,340.- (税込) US$ 150.00 *
ISBN 978-1-9788-3722-5 paper ¥8,181.- (税込) US$ 37.95 *

Many of us feel a pressing desire to be different-to be other than who we are. Self-conscious, we anxiously perceive our shortcomings or insufficiencies, wondering why we are how we are and whether we might be different. Often, we wish to alter ourselves, to change our relationships, and to transform the person we are in those relationships. Not only a philosophical question about how other people change, self-alteration is also a practical care-can I change, and how? Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures explores and analyzes these apparently universal hopes and their related existential dilemmas. The essays here come at the subject of the self and its becoming through case studies of modes of transformation of the self. They do this with social processes and projects that reveal how the self acquires a non-trivial new meaning in and through its very process of alteration. By focusing on ways we are allowed to change ourselves, including through religious and spiritual traditions and innovations, embodied participation in therapeutic programs like psychoanalysis and gendered care services, and political activism or relationships with animals, the authors in this volume create a model for cross-cultural or global analysis of social-self change that leads to fresh ways of addressing the 'self' itself.

DuBois, Thomas A., Folklore in the Nordic World. (Nordic World) 120 pp. 2024:2 (U. Wisconsin Pr., US) <708-1150>
ISBN 978-0-299-34704-8 paper ¥3,654.- (税込) US$ 16.95

In seven concise chapters that document both the history of Nordic folkloristics and the ongoing vivacity of Nordic folklore today, Thomas A. DuBois demonstrates how the informal, traditional elements of a culture or subculture are an integral and vibrant part of the Nordic world. From methods of preparing suovabiergu (smoked reindeer meat) in SApmi, to celebrating graduation by "running the falls" at Uppsala University in Sweden, to massive folk music festivals in Finland and tales of supernatural visitors bestowing baby names in Iceland, folklore offers unique insights into the everyday life of Nordic society. The study of Nordic folklore began in the nineteenth century, when early folklorists imagined that the true character of a nation could be found among the tales of the peasantry. Today, the theories, tools, and institutions developed by influential folklorists in the Nordic region continue to lead the way in documentation, preservation, and analysis of folklore.

Jones, Peter, Corrupt Britain: Public Ethics in Practice and Thought Since the Magna Carta. (Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology) 227 pp. 2023:10 (Palgrave Macmillan, UK) <708-1151>
ISBN 978-3-031-36933-9 hard ¥30,598.- (税込) EUR 129.99 *

This book deploys a long-term account of political corruption in Britain to explain the phenomenon of corruption as it resides within the state and the contemporary problem of corruption denial among members of the political class. It aims to satisfy the concern about corruption and identify potential causes and significance. The book provides and account of definitions of corruption and how those definitions have changed over time. Throughout the succeeding chapters it discusses public life and how ethical considerations for public office holders have evolved over time. This book argues that corruption is not just a concern about politics and understanding corruption requires a multi-disciplinary approach: history; political science; sociology; anthropology and urban ethnography.

Kamp-Whittaker, April / Devine, Jamie J. et al. (eds.), Historical Archaeology of Childhood and Parenting: Materialized Experiences, Discourses, Identities, Places, and Meanings. (Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology) 268 pp. 2023:10 (Springer, GW) <708-1153>
ISBN 978-3-031-37577-4 hard ¥28,244.- (税込) EUR 119.99

The study of childhood in historical archaeology enriches interpretations of the past, but also has the potential for contributing to the understanding of methodological and theoretical issues in archaeology. Archaeologically, children are understudied relative to both their demographic and social importance, partly because children are viewed as difficult to discern in the archaeological record. Historical archaeology, with its access to historical documents to supplement and illuminate archaeological evidence, provides an opportunity to gain a greater understanding of the ways children's daily lives in the past were expressed in historically changing types and patterns of material culture. Recent research presented in this volume contributes valuable perspectives for conceptualizing the historically changing social nature of childhood and methods for illuminating the roles of children. Case studies are designed to illustrate methodological and theoretical advances in the historical archaeology of materialized experiences, discourses, identities, places and their meanings associated with parenting and childhood. The volume is organized into three sections devoted to case studies about 1) how childhood and parenting have been socially constructed cross culturally and temporally, 2) social ideologies of childhood in contested spaces, and 3) the relationship between children's experiences and adult expectations of childhood. Each chapter demonstrates advances in current methods or theories used in the archaeology of childhood. A final discussant, drawn from the broader field of research on the archaeology of childhood, provides a commentary on the ways the perspectives provided in the volume can be employed by researchers outside the sub-discipline of historical archaeology.

Konstantinov, Yulian, Power and the People: The State and Peripheral Communities in the Russian Far North. 375 pp. 2023:10 (Palgrave Macmillan, UK) <708-1154>
ISBN 978-3-031-38305-2 hard ¥30,598.- (税込) EUR 129.99

This book discusses state-periphery relations from the view-point of a reindeer husbandry community in the Russian Far North (Murmansk Region). The time is the current period of Putin-led Russia. The analysis is based on the premise that the mode of current top-power governance can be described as selective de-centralization. Below a certain level of state power interests, conflicts get resolved in favour of local communities. That gains support for the supreme leadership, and reproduces a Soviet-like reality. Termed sovkhoism, the latter holds the Soviet state-farm (sovkhoz) as creating an ideal socio-economic environment. When issues are of significant interest to superior power, selection favours cavalier bypassing of people-friendly concerns. At this level, power acts in an authoritarian mode, favouring the interests of state power structures in conjunction with the upper tiers of the loyal oligarchate. It is shown how this governing mode contains significant potential for escalating centre vs. periphery tensions.

Townsend, Camilla / Michael, Nicky Kay, On the Turtle's Back: Stories the Lenape Told Their Grandchildren. (CERES: Rutgers Studies in History) 250 pp. 2023:9 (Rutgers U. Pr., US) <708-1160>
ISBN 978-1-9788-1915-3 hard ¥12,493.- (税込) US$ 57.95 *
ISBN 978-1-9788-1914-6 paper ¥5,594.- (税込) US$ 25.95 *

The Lenape tribe, also known as the Delaware Nation, lived for centuries on the land that English colonists later called New Jersey. But once America gained its independence, they were forced to move further west: to Indiana, then Missouri, and finally to the territory that became Oklahoma. These reluctant migrants were not able to carry much from their ancestral homeland, but they managed to preserve the stories that had been passed down for generations. On the Turtle's Back is the first collection of Lenape folklore, originally compiled by anthropologist M. R. Harrington over a century ago but never published until now. In it, the Delaware share their cherished tales about the world's creation, epic heroes, and ordinary human foibles. It features stories told to Harrington by two Lenape couples, Julius and Minnie Fouts and Charles and Susan Elkhair, who sought to officially record their legends before their language and cultural traditions died out. More recent interviews with Lenape elders are also included, as their reflections on hearing these stories as children speak to the status of the tribe and its culture today. Together, they welcome you into their rich and wondrous imaginative world.