The concept of 'radicalization' is now used to account for all forms of violent and non-violent political Islam. Used widely within the security services and picked up by academia, the term was initially coined by the General Intelligence and Security Service of the Netherlands (AIVD) after the 9/11 and Pentagon attacks, an origin that is rarely recognised. This book comprises contributions from leading scholars in the field of critical security studies to trace the introduction, adoption and dissemination of 'radicalization' as a concept. It is the first book to offer a critical analysis and history of the term as an 'empty signifier', that is, a word that might not necessarily refer to something existing in the real world. The diverse contributions consider how the term has circulated since its emergence in the Netherlands and Belgium, its appearance in academia, its existence among the people categorized as 'radicals' and its impact on relationships of trust between public officials and their clients. Building on the traditions of critical security studies and critical studies on terrorism, the book reaffirms the importance of a reflective approach to counter-radicalization discourse and policies. It will be essential reading for scholars of security studies, political anthropology, the study of Islam in the west and European studies.

How does a craft reinvent itself as `traditional' following cultural, social and political upheaval? In the township of Dingshu, Jiangsu province of China, artisans produce zisha or Yixing teapots that have been highly valued for centuries. Yet in twentieth-century socialist imagination, handicrafts were an anomaly in a modern society. The Maoist government had clear ambitions to transform the country by industrialization, replacing craft with mechanized methods of production. Four decades later, some of the same artisans identified as `backward' handicraft producers in the 1950s and made to join workers' cooperatives, were now encouraged to set up private workshops, teach their children and become entrepreneurs. By the 2000s ceramic production in Dingshu is booming and artisans are buying their first cars, often luxury brands. However, many involvements of the Chinese state are apparent, from the control of raw materials, to the inscription of the craft on China's national list of intangible cultural heritage. In this perceptive study, Gowlland argues that this re-evaluation of heritage is no less inherently political than the collectivism of the communist regime. Reflecting that the craft objects, although produced in very different contexts, have remained virtually the same over time and that it is the artisans' subjectivities that have been transformed, he explores the construction of mastery and its relationship to tradition and authenticity, bringing to the fore the social dimension of mastery that goes beyond the skill of simply making things, to changing the way these things are perceived, made and talked about by others.

Contained Empowerment and the Liminal Nature of Feminisms and Activisms examines the processes by which activist successes are limited, outlines a theoretical framing of the liminal and temporal limits to social justice efforts as "contained empowerment." With a focused lens on the third wave and contemporary forms of feminism, the author investigates feminist activity from the early 1990s through responses and reactions to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, and contrasts these efforts with anti-feminist, white supremacist, and other structural normalizing efforts designed to limit and repress women's, gendered, and reproductive rights. This book includes analyses of celebrity activism, girl power, transnational feminist NGOs, digital feminisms, and the feminist mimicry applied by practitioners of neo-liberal and anti-feminism. Victoria A. Newsome concludes that the contained nature of feminist empowerment illustrates how activists must engage directly with intersectional challenges and address the multiplicities of structural oppressions in order to breach containment.

Herder Warfare in East Africa presents a regional analysis of the spatial and social history of warfare among the nomadic peoples of East Africa, covering a period of 600 years. The long duree facilitates understanding of how warfare among pastoralist communities in earlier centuries contributed to political, economic and ethnic shifts across the grazing lands in East Africa. The book discusses herder warfare from the perspective of warfare ecology, highlighting the interrelations between environmental and cultural causalities - including droughts, famine, floods, ritual wars, religious wars and migrations - and the processes and consequences of war. Regional synthesis concentrates on frontiers of conflicts extending from the White Nile Basin in south Sudan - into the southern savannas of East Africa, the Great East African Rift Valley, and the northern and southern Horn of Africa - examining historical military power shifts between diverse pastoralist cultures. Case studies are set in the coastal hinterland of East Africa and the Jubaland-Wajir frontiers. Warfare combined with environmental disasters caused social-economic breakdowns and the enslavement of defeated groups. The dynamics of herder warfare changed after colonial entry, response to pastoralist resistance and slave emancipation. The book is of interest to specialist and non-specialist readers exploring pastoralism, social anthropology and warfare and conflict studies; and is suitable for introductory graduate courses in environmental and social history of warfare .

Flexible Families examines the struggles among Nicaraguan migrants in Costa Rica (and their families back in Nicaragua) to maintain a sense of family across borders. The book is based on more than twenty-four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Costa Rica and Nicaragua (2009-2012) and more than ten years of engagement with Nicaraguan migrant communities. Author Caitlin Fouratt finds that migration and family intersect as sites for triaging inequality, economic crisis, and a lack of state-provided social services since the 1990s. Flexible Families situates transnational families in an analysis of the history of unstable family life in Nicaragua due to decades of war and economic crisis, rather than in the migration process itself, which is often blamed for family breakdown in public discourse. Fouratt argues that the kinds of family configurations often seen as problematic consequences of migration-specifically single mothers, absent fathers, and grandmother caregivers-represent flexible family configurations that have enabled Nicaraguan families to survive the chronic crises of the past decades. By examining the work that goes into forging and sustaining transnational kinship, the book argues for a rethinking of national belonging and discourses of solidarity. In parallel, the book critically examines conditions in Costa Rica, especially the ways in which the instabilities and inequalities that have haunted the rest of the region have begun to take shape there, resulting in perceptions of increased crime rates and a declining quality of life. By linking this crisis of Costa Rican exceptionalism to recent immigration reform, the book also builds on scholarship about the production and experiences of immigrant exclusion. Flexible Families offers insight into the impacts of increasingly restrictive immigration policies in the everyday lives of transnational families within the developing world.

Pastoralist Livelihoods in Asian Drylands brings together the work of scholars from across Asia to discuss the transforming boundaries, agencies and risks involved in pastoralist livelihoods. The authors, whose research sites range from Oman to Mongolia, Syria to Pakistan, share methodological commitment to long-term field research, participant observation and engagement with local communities. There is a focus on pastoralist engagements with governance institutions and the essays collectively argue that risk, which is often imagined in environmental terms for pastoralist peoples, often stems from government policies and political circumstances. The authors challenge common ecological approaches to understanding social change amongst pastoralist groups by focusing on the politics of resource distribution and control. Papers in the volume support an indigenous perspective on pastoralists and present academic perceptions and assessments of key issues in their local context.

In 2007, while researching mountain culture in upstate South Carolina, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall stumbled upon the small community of Liberia, in the Blue Ridge foothills. There he met Mable Owens Clarke and her family, the remaining members of a small African American community still living on land obtained immediately after the Civil War. This intimate history tells the story of five generations of the Clarke family and their friends and neighbors, chronicling their struggles through slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the desegregation of the state. Through hours of interviews with Mable and her relatives, as well as friends and neighbors, Coggeshall presents an ethnographic history that allows a largely ignored community to speak and record their own history for the first time. This story sheds new light on the African American experience in Appalachia, and in it Coggeshall documents the community's 150-year history of resistance to white oppression, while offering a new way to understand the symbolic relationship between residents and the land they occupy, tying together family, memory, and narratives to explain this connection.

Thanks to Renzo Duin's annotated translation, the voice of Lodewijk Schmidt-an Afrodiasporic Saramaka Maroon from Suriname-is finally available for Anglophone audiences worldwide. More than anything else, Schmidt's journals constitute meticulous ethnographic accounts telling the tragic story of the Indigenous Peoples of the Eastern Guiana Highlands (northern Brazil and southern French Guiana and Suriname). Schmidt's is a story that takes account of the pathological mechanisms of colonialism in which Indigenous Peoples and African Diaspora communities-both victims of colonialism-vilify each other, falling privy to the divide-and-conquer mentality mechanisms of colonialism. Moreover, silenced in the original 1942 publication, Schmidt was sent on a covert mission to determine if the Nazis had established bases and airfields at the southern border of Suriname. Schmidt described the precariousness of the Amazonian forest and the Indigenous Peoples and African Diasporic people who lived and continue to live there, drawing on language that foreshadows our current anthropic and ecological concerns. Duin's profound knowledge of the history, geography, and ecology of the region contextualizes Schmidt's accounts in a new introduction and in his analysis and afterthought forces us to take account of the catastrophe that is deforestation and ethnocide of the Indigenous Peoples of Amazonian Guiana. Lodewijk J. Schmidt (1898-1992) Saramaka from Gansee (modern Saamaka spelling: Ganze; pronounced Ganze), upper Suriname river, Suriname, South America. The Saramaka are one of the largest African Diaspora communities in Suriname. He was educated by the Herrnhutters in the school of the Moravian Church, and during the mid-twentieth century he took part in several momentous expeditions, such as the 1935-38 Border Expedition between Suriname and Brazil. The present work is the annotated translation of his accounts of a tri-partite expedition conducted between 1940 and 1942 at and across the southern border of Suriname. Renzo S. Duin (1974) obtained a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Florida (USA). Between 1996 and 2019 he conducted over 40 months of fieldwork in the Guianas (Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana). His research and publications cover a broad range of topics: socio-political landscape studies; material culture; intangible heritage; social memory; oral history; identity; ethno-astronomy; historical ecology; decolonization; and the intertwining nature of these topics, and as such offers an alternative to the twentieth century model of tropical forest cultures in Amazonia.

South Asia is home to more than a billion Hindus and half a billion Muslims. But the region is also home to substantial Christian communities, some dating almost to the earliest days of the faith. The stories of South Asia's Christians are vital for understanding the shifting contours of World Christianity, precisely because of their history of interaction with members of these other religious traditions. In this broad, accessible overview of South Asian Christianity, Chandra Mallampalli shows how the faith has been shaped by Christians' location between Hindus and Muslims. Mallampalli begins with a discussion of South India's ancient Thomas Christian tradition, which interacted with West Asia's Persian Christians and thrived for centuries alongside their Hindu and Muslim neighbours. He then underscores efforts of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries to understand South Asian societies for purposes of conversion. The publication of books and tracts about other religions, interreligious debates, and aggressive preaching were central to these endeavours, but rarely succeeded at yielding converts. Instead, they played an important role in producing a climate of religious competition, which ultimately marginalized Christians in Hindu-, Muslim-, and Buddhist-majority countries of post-colonial South Asia. Ironically, the greatest response to Christianity came from poor and oppressed Dalit (formerly "untouchable") and tribal communities who were largely indifferent to missionary rhetoric. Their mass conversions, poetry, theology, and embrace of Pentecostalism are essential for understanding South Asian Christianity and its place within World Christianity today.

This impressive and inspiring volume has as its modest origins the documentation of a contemporary collecting project for the British Museum. Informed by curators' critiques of uneven collections accompanied by highly variable information, Sillitoe set out with the ambition of recording the totality of the material culture of the Wola of the southern highlands of Papua New Guinea, at a time when the study of artefacts was neglected in university anthropology departments. His achievements, presented in this second edition of Made in Nuigini with a new contextualizing preface and foreword, brought a new standard of ethnography to the incipient revival of material culture studies, and opened up the importance of close attention to technology and material assemblages for anthropology. The `economy' fundamentally concerns the material aspects of life, and as Sillitoe makes clear, Wola attitudes and behaviour in this regard are radically different to those of the West, with emphasis on `maker users' and egalitarian access to resources going hand in hand with their stateless and libertarian principles. The project begun in Made in Niugini, which necessarily restricted itself to moveable artefacts, is continued and extended by the newly published companion volume Built in Niugini, which deals with immoveable structures and buildings. It argues that the study of material constructions offers an unparalleled opportunity to address fundamental philosophical questions about tacit knowledge and the human condition.