Children of the Welfare State uses the case of Denmark—employed as emblematic of the European state—to consider the ways in which children are “civilized” within child-focused institutions, such as schools, daycare, and the family unit, under the auspices of the welfare state. Through deep ethnographic studies, the authors build a clear account of children’s experiences at a variety of ages, different genders, and from differing ethnic and social backgrounds. Ultimately they show that even though Danish welfare institutions are marked by a strong egalitarian ideal, they nonetheless tend to reproduce dominant norms of social class and distinctions of ethnicity and religion.  

Product Description: “Provides rich new ethnographic material on a little-known population, the Bedouin of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. It positions such marginal populations in the broader theoretical context of modernization and health and demographic transitions...read more

Interviews with young, black Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hopThis groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim―displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic U.S. Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested―critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.

Product Description: The subject of climate change could hardly be more timely. In Climate and Cultural Change in Prehistoric Europe and the Near East, an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine climate change through the lens of new archaeological and paleo-environmental data over the course of more than 10,000 years from the Near East to Europe...read more

Product Description: What causes violent conflicts around the Middle East? All too often, the answer is sectarianism--popularly viewed as a timeless and intractable force that leads religious groups to conflict. In Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon, Joanne Nucho shows how wrong this perspective can be...read more

Product Description: Interest in the anthropology of food has grown significantly in recent years. This is the first handbook to provide a detailed overview of all major areas of the field.Twenty original essays by leading figures in the discipline examine traditional areas of research as well as cutting-edge areas of inquiry...read more