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Wastelands is an exploration of trash, the scavengers who collect it, and the precarious communities it sustains. After enduring war and persecution in Kosovo, many Ashkali refugees fled to Belgrade, Serbia, where they were stigmatized as Gypsies, consigned to slums, sidelined from the economy, and subjected to violence. To survive, Ashkali collect the only resource available to them: garbage. Vividly recounting everyday life in an illegal Romani settlement, Eirik Saethre follows Ashkali as they scavenge through dumpsters, build shacks, siphon electricity, negotiate the recycling trade, and migrate between Belgrade, Kosovo, and the European Union. He argues that trash is not just a means of survival: it reinforces the status of Ashkali and Roma as polluted Others, creates indissoluble bonds to transnational capitalism, enfeebles bodies, and establishes a localized sovereignty.
Far from being the preserve of middle-class women from Northern Europe, au pairing is now booming worldwide. This collection, the first dedicated entirely to examining the lives of au pairs, traces their experiences across five continents showing how this form of domestic labour and childcare is thriving in the twenty-first century.
Introduction -- Problems with cooperatives -- The anthropology of co-ops, the Mafia and the Sicilian lens -- Cooperatives and the historical anti-Mafia movement -- Worldviews of labour: legality and food ideologies -- The limits of 'bad kinship': Sicilian anti-Mafia families -- The use of gossip: setting cooperative boundaries -- 'Wage is male-but land is a woman' -- Community troubles: cooperative conundrum -- Divided by land: Mafia and anti-Mafia proximity -- Conclusion. the private life of political cooperativism.
This open access book uncovers one important, yet forgotten, form of itinerant livelihoods, namely petty trade, more specifically how it was practiced in Northern Europe during the period 1820–1960. It investigates how traders and customers interacted in different spaces and approaches ambulatory trade as an arena of encounters by looking at everyday social practices. Petty traders often belonged to subjugated social groups, like ethnic minorities and migrants, whereas their customers belonged to the resident population. How were these mobile traders perceived and described? What goods did they peddle? How did these commodities enable and shape trading encounters? What kind of narratives can be found, and whose? These questions pertaining to daily practices on a grass-root level have not been addressed in previous research. Encounters and Practices embarks on hidden histories of survival, vulnerability, and conflict, but also discloses reciprocal relations, even friendships.
The Gitanos of el Rastro carry an ‘ontology of simultaneity’ as self-employed traders and Pentecostal practitioners in Madrid. This makes the Spanish Romani be considered as both a part of and apart from mainstream society. This book is an anthropological account of a group of middle and upper-class Gitanos and their ways of creating a ‘society within society’ based upon distinct cultural, moral and ideological values, notions and practices. The study renders a comprehensive perspective on social processes of classification, stratification, ‘othering’ and the role of ‘strangers’ in society and how these processes unfold in the interface between social, ritual and economic life on a local to global scale.
This book studies how religion influences the way people in Colombia remember a massacre of 79 civilians that occurred in a Catholic church in 2002. It analyses how strategies of memorialisation are part of religious peacebuilding initiatives that aim to resist and denounce crimes against human, ethnic, cultural and economic rights.
The longstanding European conception that Roma and non-Roma are separated by unambiguous socio-cultural distinctions has led to the construction of Roma as “non-belonging others.” Challenging this conception, Textures of Belonging explores how Roma negotiate and feel belonging at the everyday level. Inspired by material culture, sensorial anthropology, and human geography approaches, this book uses ethnographic research to examine the role of domestic material forms and their sensorial qualities in nurturing connections with people and places that transcend socio-political boundaries.
Traditionally viewed as an abstraction, the quantitative nature of money is essential in evaluating the relationship between monetary systems and society. Money Counts moves beyond abstraction, exploring the conceptual diversity and everyday enactment of money’s quantity. Drawing from case studies including British jewelers, blood-money payments in Germanic law codes, and the quotidian use of money in cosmopolitical Moscow, a Western Kenyan village, and socialist Havana, the chapters in this volume offer new theoretical and empirical interpretations of money’s quantitative nature as it relates to abstraction, sociality, materiality, freedom, and morality.
Rudari Lingurari families, one of many significant minority groups in southeastern Europe, have been characterized by mobility since the end of the 19th century, from voluntary border crossings to deportations and forced relocations. Other Borders draws from participatory, multi-site ethnographic research to explore rudari families’ cultural and relational frames of mobility through their social and economic organization. Sabrina Tosi Cambini develops the concept of a “moving gaze” to more effectively explore rudari migration paths across multiple countries, their occupation of unoccupied buildings in Italy, their housing practices in both Italy and Romania, and the movement of their objects, ideas, and imaginaries.
This book explores developmental policymaking across the multiple levels of Mexico’s contemporary state, arguing that many of the innovations in industrial policy have been driven at the subnational level. In the three decades since Mexico’s neoliberal turn in its political economy, subnational units of government have taken a lead in industrial transformation, galvanising policy from below. With most literature on new developmentalism focusing on the national level, this book is an important exploration of the differentiated and rewarding results that may be found below the state’s centre. Based on an original dataset of written and oral interviews gained from national and subnational...