In Workers' Self-Management in Argentina, Marcelo Vieta homes in on the history, consolidation, and socio-political dimensions of Argentina's empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (worker-recuperated enterprises), a worker-led company occupation movement that has surged since the turn-of-the-millennium and the country's neo-liberal crisis.

This anthropological work thoroughly illustrates the novel synthesis of Christian religion and New Age spirituality in Greece. It challenges the single-faith approach that traditionally ties southern European countries to Christianity and focuses on how processes of globalization influence and transform vernacular religiosity. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in Greece, this book demonstrates how the popular belief in the 'evil eye' produces a creative affinity between religion and spirituality in everyday practice. The author analyses a variety of significant research themes, including lived and vernacular religion, alternative spirituality and healing, ritual performance and religious material culture. The book offers an innovative social scientific interpretation of contemporary religiosity, while engaging with a multiplicity of theoretical, analytic and empirical directions. It contributes to current key debates in social sciences with regard to globalization and secularization, religious pluralism, contemporary spirituality and the New Age movement, gender, power and the body, health, illness and alternative therapeutic systems, senses, perception and the supernatural, the spiritual marketplace, creativity and the individualization of religion in a multicultural world.

The study of Roman society and social relations blossomed in the 1970s. By now, we possess a very large literature on the individuals and groups that constituted the Roman community, and the various ways in which members of that community interacted. There simply is, however, no overview that takes into account the multifarious progress that has been made in the past thirty-odd years. The purpose of this handbook is twofold. On the one hand, it synthesizes what has heretofore been accomplished in this field. On the other hand, it attempts to configure the examination of Roman social relations in some new ways, and thereby indicates directions in which the discipline might now proceed.
The book opens with a substantial general introduction that portrays the current state of the field, indicates some avenues for further study, and provides the background necessary for the following chapters. It lays out what is now known about the historical development of Roman society and the essential structures of that community. In a second introductory article, Clifford Ando explains the chronological parameters of the handbook. The main body of the book is divided into the following six sections: 1) Mechanisms of Socialization (primary education, rhetorical education, family, law), 2) Mechanisms of Communication and Interaction, 3) Communal Contexts for Social Interaction, 4) Modes of Interpersonal Relations (friendship, patronage, hospitality, dining, funerals, benefactions, honor), 5) Societies Within the Roman Community (collegia, cults, Judaism, Christianity, the army), and 6) Marginalized Persons (slaves, women, children, prostitutes, actors and gladiators, bandits). The result is a unique, up-to-date, and comprehensive survey of ancient Roman society.

Fashion is an integral part of popular culture, closely intertwined with tales, magazines, photography, cinema, television, music and sports...up to the emergence of dedicated exhibitions and museums. Fashion is undergoing a major digital transformation: garments and apparels are presented and sold online, and fashion trends and styles are launched, discussed and negotiated mainly in the digital arena. While going well beyond national and linguistic borders, digital fashion communication requires further cultural sensitivity: otherwise, it might ignite inter-cultural misunderstandings and communication crises. This book presents the recent transformation of fashion from being a Cinderella to becoming a major cultural attractor and academic research subject, as well as the implications of its digital transformation. Through several cases, it documents intercultural communication crises and provides strategies to interpret and prevent them.

Divining with Achi and Tara is a book on Tibetan methods of prognostics with dice and prayer beads (mala). Jan-Ulrich Sobisch offers a thorough discussion of Chinese, Indian, Turkic, and Tibetan traditions of divination, its techniques, rituals, tools, and poetic language. Interviews with Tibetan masters of divination introduce the main part with a translation of a dice divination manual of the deity Achi that is still part of a living tradition. Solvej Nielsen contributes further interviews, a mala divination of Tara and its oral tradition, and very useful glossaries of the terminology of Tibetan divination and fortune telling. Appendices provide lists of deities and spirits and of numerous identified ritual remedies and supports that are an essential element of a still vibrant Tibetan culture.

Immigrant laborers who came to the New South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves poised uncomfortably between white employers and the Black working class, a liminal and often precarious position. Campaigns to recruit immigrants primarily aimed to suppress Black agency and mobility. If that failed, both planters and industrialists imagined that immigrants might replace Blacks entirely. Thus, white officials, citizens, and employers embraced immigrants when they acted in ways that sustained Jim Crow. However, when they directly challenged established political and economic power structures, immigrant laborers found themselves ostracized, jailed, or worse, by the New South order. Both industrial employers and union officials lauded immigrants' hardworking and noble character when it suited their purposes, and both denigrated and racialized them when immigrant laborers acted independently. Jennifer E. Brooks's Resident Strangers restores immigrant laborers to their place in the history of the New South, considering especially how various immigrant groups and individuals experienced their time in New South Alabama. Brooks utilizes convict records, censuses, regional and national newspapers, government documents, and oral histories to construct the story of immigrants in New South Alabama. The immigrant groups she focuses on appeared most often as laborers in the records, including the Chinese, southern Italians, and the diverse nationals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with a sprinkling of others. Although recruitment crusades by Alabama's employers and New South boosters typically failed to bring in the vast numbers of immigrants they had envisioned, significant populations from around the world arrived in industries and communities across the state, especially in the coal- and ore-mining district of Birmingham. Resident Strangers reveals that immigrant laborers' presence and individual agency complicated racial categorization, disrupted labor relations, and diversified southern communities. It also presents a New South that was far from isolated from the forces at work across the nation or in the rest of the world. Immigrant laborers brought home to New South Alabama the turbulent world of empire building, deeply embedding the region in national and global networks of finance, trade, and labor migration.

Changing practices and perceptions of parenthood and family life have long been the subject of intense public, political and academic attention. Recent years have seen growing interest in the role digital media and technologies can play in these shifts, yet this topic has been under-explored from a discourse analytical perspective. In response, this book's investigation of everyday parenting, family practices and digital media offers a new and innovative exploration of the relationship between parenting, family practices, and digitally mediated connection. This investigation is based on extensive digital and interview data from research with nine UK-based single and/or lesbian, gay or bisexual parents who brought children into their lives in non-traditional ways, for example through donor conception, surrogacy or adoption. Through a novel approach that combines constructivist grounded theory with mediated discourse analysis, this book examines connected family lives and practices in a way that transcends the limiting social, biological and legal structures that still dominate concepts of family in contemporary society.

Afghanistan in the 20th century was virtually unknown in Europe and America. At peace until the 1970s, the country was seen as a remote and exotic land, visited only by adventurous tourists or researchers. Afghan Village Voices is a testament to this little-known period of peace and captures a society and culture now lost. Prepared by two of the most accomplished and well-known anthropologists of the Middle East and Central Asia, Richard Tapper and Nancy Tapper-Lindisfarne, this is a book of stories told by the Piruzai, a rural Afghan community of some 200 families who farmed in northern Afghanistan and in summer took their flocks to the central Hazarajat mountains. The book comprises a collection of remarkable stories, folktales and conversations and provides unprecedented insight into the depth and colour of these people's lives. Recorded in the early 1970s, the stories range from memories of the Piruzai migration to the north a half century before, to the feuds, ethnic strife and the doings of powerful khans. There are also stories of falling in love, elopements, marriages, childbirth and the world of spirits. The book includes vignettes of the narrators, photographs, maps and a full glossary. It is a remarkable document of Afghanistan at peace, told by a people whose voices have rarely been heard.