Books Books Press imprint: 2592 books
Remaking Modernity
Politics, History, and Sociology
Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2005
A state-of-the-field survey of historical sociology, Remaking Modernity assesses the field’s past accomplishments and peers into the future, envisioning changes to come. The seventeen essays in this collection reveal the potential of historical sociology to transform understandings of social and...
States of Memory
Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection
Language: English
Release Date: July 21, 2003
States of Memory illuminates the construction of national memory from a comparative perspective. The essays collected here emphasize that memory itself has a history: not only do particular meanings change, but the very faculty of memory—its place in social relations and the forms it takes—varies...
by Lora Wildenthal, Julia Adams, George Steinmetz
Language: English
Release Date: November 28, 2001
Language: English
Release Date: November 28, 2001
When Germany annexed colonies in Africa and the Pacific beginning in the 1880s, many German women were enthusiastic. At the same time, however, they found themselves excluded from what they saw as a great nationalistic endeavor. In German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 Lora Wildenthal untangles the...
Salt in the Sand
Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present
Language: English
Release Date: July 17, 2007
Salt in the Sand is a compelling historical ethnography of the interplay between memory and state violence in the formation of the Chilean nation-state. The historian and anthropologist Lessie Jo Frazier focuses on northern Chile, which figures prominently in the nation’s history as a site of military...
Disciplining Statistics
Demography and Vital Statistics in France and England, 1830–1885
Language: English
Release Date: November 28, 2006
In Disciplining Statistics Libby Schweber compares the science of population statistics in England and France during the nineteenth century, demonstrating radical differences in the interpretation and use of statistical knowledge. Through a comparison of vital statistics and demography, Schweber describes...
Beyond Belief
India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism
Language: English
Release Date: May 28, 2007
Beyond Belief is a bold rethinking of the formation and consolidation of nation-state ideologies. Analyzing India during the first two decades following its foundation as a sovereign nation-state in 1947, Srirupa Roy explores how nationalists are turned into nationals, subjects into citizens, and...
Nostalgia for the Modern
State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey
Language: English
Release Date: August 30, 2006
As the twentieth century drew to a close, the unity and authority of the secularist Turkish state were challenged by the rise of political Islam and Kurdish separatism on the one hand and by the increasing demands of the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank on the other....
Native Sons
West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century
Language: English
Release Date: July 19, 2006
For much of the twentieth century, France recruited colonial subjects from sub-Saharan Africa to serve in its military, sending West African soldiers to fight its battles in Europe, Southeast Asia, and North Africa. In this exemplary contribution to the “new imperial history,” Gregory Mann argues...
Sociology and Empire
The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline
Language: English
Release Date: June 19, 2013
The revelation that the U.S. Department of Defense had hired anthropologists for its Human Terrain System project—assisting its operations in Afghanistan and Iraq—caused an uproar that has obscured the participation of sociologists in similar Pentagon-funded projects. As the contributors to Sociology...
The Cunning of Recognition
Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism
Language: English
Release Date: July 19, 2002
The Cunning of Recognition is an exploration of liberal multiculturalism from the perspective of Australian indigenous social life. Elizabeth A. Povinelli argues that the multicultural legacy of colonialism perpetuates unequal systems of power, not by demanding that colonized subjects identify with...
American Empire and the Politics of Meaning
Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism
Language: English
Release Date: March 14, 2008
When the United States took control of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the wake of the Spanish-American War, it declared that it would transform its new colonies through lessons in self-government and the ways of American-style democracy. In both territories, U.S. colonial officials built extensive...
Ruling Oneself Out
A Theory of Collective Abdications
Language: English
Release Date: April 21, 2008
What induces groups to commit political suicide? This book explores the decisions to surrender power and to legitimate this surrender: collective abdications. Commonsensical explanations impute such actions to coercive pressures, actors’ miscalculations, or their contamination by ideologies at odds...
Affective Communities
Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship
Language: English
Release Date: January 11, 2006
“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” So E. M. Forster famously observed in his Two Cheers for Democracy. Forster’s epigrammatic manifesto, where the idea of the “friend” stands as a metaphor for dissident...
States of Imagination
Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State
Language: English
Release Date: December 12, 2001
The state has recently been rediscovered as an object of inquiry by a broad range of scholars. Reflecting the new vitality of the field of political anthropology, States of Imagination draws together the best of this recent critical thinking to explore the postcolonial state. Contributors focus on...