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With the rise of imperialism, the centuries-old European tradition of humanist scholarship as the key to understanding the world was jeopardized. Nowhere was this more true than in nineteenth-century Germany. It was there that the battle lines of today's “culture wars” were first drawn when anthropology challenged humanism as a basis for human scientific knowledge. Drawing on sources ranging from scientific papers and government correspondence to photographs, pamphlets, and police reports of “freak shows,” the author demonstrates how German imperialism opened the door to antihumanism. As Germans interacted more frequently with peoples and objects from far-flung cultures, they were forced to reevaluate not just those peoples, but also the construction of German identity itself. Anthropologists successfully argued that their discipline addressed these issues more productively—and more accessibly—than humanistic studies.

Between 1914 and 1918, German anthropologists conducted their work in the midst of full-scale war. The discipline was relatively new in German academia when World War I broke out, and, as this book reveals, its development was profoundly altered by the conflict. As the war shaped the institutional, ideological, and physical environment for anthropological work, the discipline turned its back on its liberal roots and became a nationalist endeavor primarily concerned with scientific studies of race. Combining intellectual and cultural history with the history of science, this book examines both the origins and consequences of this shift. Evans locates its roots in the decision to allow scientists access to prisoner-of-war camps, which prompted them to focus their research on racial studies of the captives. Caught up in wartime nationalism, a new generation of anthropologists began to portray the country's political enemies as racially different. After the war ended, the importance placed on racial conceptions and categories persisted, paving the way for the politicization of scientific inquiry in the years of the ascendancy of National Socialism.

At the height of the Greek Civil War in 1948, thirty-eight thousand children were evacuated from their homes in the mountains of northern Greece. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries in the national government placed the rest in children’s homes elsewhere in Greece. A point of contention during the Cold War, this controversial episode continues to fuel tensions between Greeks and Macedonians and within Greek society itself. The authors present here a comprehensive study of the two evacuation programs and the lives of the children they forever transformed. Marshalling archival records, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork, they analyze the evacuation process, the political conflict surrounding it, the children’s upbringing, and their fates as adults cut off from their parents and their homeland. The authors also give voice to seven refugee children who poignantly recount their childhood experiences and heroic efforts to construct new lives in diaspora communities throughout the world. A corrective to previous historical accounts, the book is also a searching examination of the enduring effects of displacement on the lives of refugee children.

This book offers an historical anthropology of the re-emergence of the Mediterranean as a transnational region in modern times. It examines this region formation by showing how Sicilian poaching in North African fishing grounds transformed transnational political action, imaginaries, and relations in the central Mediterranean: how Sicilians and Tunisians came to regard each other as related. The book is centered around the ethnography of life aboard a fishing boat from the fleet of Mazara del Vallo, a fishing town at the south-western tip of Sicily, ninety nautical miles northeast of the African shore. Beyond the trawler’s deck, the book focuses on Mazara’s recent turbulent history: from a relatively unimportant viticulture town in the 1940s to a central scene in Fish Wars, clandestine migration, the Trans-Mediterranean gas pipeline, and the rising importance of the Mediterranean in Italian politics since the 1970s. Drawing on 21 months of ethnographic research ashore and at sea and extensive archival research in Sicily and Tunisia, it makes a case for treating regions as the medium and scales of transnationalism. The book argues that the historical processes through which transnational regions form should become objects of anthropological analysis. It proposes to view such spaces as ever-changing constellations, which form and dissipate through the interaction between cross-boundary practices and official region-making projects. And it shows how we can attain this viewpoint from the moving vessels that weave these constellations together and stage their social relations and dynamics in full view.

The coveted “Made in Italy” label calls to mind visions of nimble-fingered Italian tailors lovingly sewing elegant, high-end clothing. The phrase evokes a sense of authenticity, heritage, and rustic charm. Tight Knit exposes how Chinese migrants sew "Made in Italy" labels into items for a thriving fast-fashion industry—all the while adding new patterns to the social fabric of Italy’s iconic fashion industry. The work reveals motivating ambitions and crushing defeats of an intensely globalized age. It provides texture to the ways individuals, families, and institutions become entangled in the hegemony of global supply chains. Specifically, it argues that the ultimate flexible workers are Chinese migrants, whose parenting practices include circulating children back to China to create global households. Tight Knit is based on long-term research in Prato, the historic hub of textile production in the heart of metropolitan Tuscany. Methodological innovation appears in the approach of encounter ethnography. The work demonstrates the power of transnational collaboration to illuminate cultural dynamics in the era of globalization, including the heterogeneity of contemporary capitalism. The book brings to the fore the tensions—over value, money, beauty, family, care, and belonging—that are reaching a boiling point as the country struggles to deal with the same migration pressures that are triggering backlash all over Europe and North America. It illuminates the political struggles of an urban area grappling with intense population change and segregation in the context of economic crisis. It contributes to scholarly literature on globalization, health, migration, and late capitalism.

In this book it is argued that the commodification of labor in a modern economy relies on complex technical procedures and an extensive institutional infrastructure that precede, and may in fact replace, the role of market forces. The history of evaluating labor in capitalist work science and socialist wage policy in Hungary between 1920 and 1956 illustrates the means by which labor is transformed from a generic activity to discrete units of value accrued over time in a hierarchically structured workplace. This account situates the analysis in the broader context of rationalizing work and business in the mid-20th c. By adopting an alternative periodization to analyzing the scientific transformation of wages across two economic regimes it is possible to challenge several longstanding assumptions in the historiography on the transition to socialism in Hungary: the degree to which the new Marxist-Leninist party/state altered the ways state planning was conducted; how the Soviet Union did, and did not, influence collectivization; who actually crafted new socialist policies; and what class warfare looked like in the countryside. Theoretical debates in Science Studies over the performativity of economics, technology and infrastructure, and the pragmatics of quantification are at the heart of the analysis.