Product Description: This book contains nine contributions at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and sociocultural politics in mainland Southeast Asia, inspired by the remarkable career of Achan Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, an academic who has worked tirelessly in Thailand and beyond to foster critical social-science scholarship that engages with marginalized communities...read more

Product Description: In the third edition of this important and influential book, Michael Herzfeld revisits the idea of ‘cultural intimacy’. The chapters examine a range of topics touching on the relationship between state and citizen, and the notion of ‘national character’...read more

Product Description: This volume contains the majority of the papers presented at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, held in Lubbock, Texas, October 16-19, 1980. The varied styles topics, methodologies, and intellectual traditions represented here reflect the current state of flux in semiotics--a healthy chaos, in which new ideas vie for survival and experiment is at a premium...read more

Product Description: Anthropologist Daphne Berdahl was one of the leading scholars of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in central and eastern Europe. From her pathbreaking ethnography of a former East German border village in the aftermath of German reunification, to her insightful analyses of consumption, nostalgia, and citizenship in the early 21st century, Berdahl's writings probe the contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities of postsocialism as few observers have done...read more

Product Description: In this new updated edition, Herzfeld includes more discussion about what cultural intimacy has come to mean for other authors and researchers, and how it can contribute to present studies of global processes and the forces that resist them.

Product Description: The Body Impolitic is a critical study of tradition, not merely as an ornament of local and national heritage, but also as a millstone around the necks of those who are condemned to produce it.Michael Herzfeld takes us inside a rich variety of small-town Cretan artisans' workshops to show how apprentices are systematically thwarted into learning by stealth and guile...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld first met Greek novelist Andreas Nenedakis in the drafty courtyard of a public library. This encounter led to an enduring intellectual relationship that prompted Herzfeld to reconsider both the contours of fiction and the nature of anthropology...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Herzfeld argues that "modern" bureaucratically regulated societies are no more "rational" or less "symbolic" than the societies traditionally studied by anthropologists. He suggests that we cannot understand national bureaucracies divorced from local-level ideas about chance, personal character, social relationships and responsibility...read more

Michael Herzfeld describes what happens when a bureaucracy charged with historic conservation clashes with a local populace hostile to the state and suspicious of tourism. Focusing on the Cretan town of Rethemnos, once a center of learning under Venetian rule and later inhabited by the Turks, he examines major questions confronting conservators and citizens as they negotiate the "ownership" of history: Who defines the past? To whom does the past belong? What is "traditional" and how is this determined? Exploring the meanings of the built environment for Rethemnos's inhabitants, Herzfeld finds that their interest in it has more to do with personal histories and the immediate social context than with the formal history that attracts the conservators. He also investigates the inhabitants' social practices from the standpoints of household and kin group, political association, neighborhood, gender ideology, and the effects of these on attitudes toward home ownership. In the face of modernity, where tradition is an object of both reverence and commercialism, Rethemnos emerges as an important ethnographic window onto the ambiguous cultural fortunes of Greece.

Product Description: Using Greek ethnography as a mirror for an ethnography of anthropology itself, this book reveals the ways in which the discipline of anthropology is ensnared in the same political and social symbolism as its object of study. The author pushes the comparative goals of anthropology beyond the traditional separation of tribal object from detached scientific observer, and offers the discipline a critical source of reflexive insight based on empirical ethnography rather than on ideological speculation alone...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The description for this book, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village, will be forthcoming.

Product Description: Book by Herzfeld, Michael