Base Encounters explores the social friction that US bases have caused in South Korea, where the entertainment districts next to American military installations have come under much scrutiny. The Korean peninsula is one of the most heavily militarised regions in the world and the conflict between the North and South is continually exacerbated by the presence of nearly 30,000 US soldiers in the area. Crimes committed in GI entertainment areas have been amplified by an outraged public as both a symbol for, and a symptom of, the uneven relationship between the United States and the small East Asian nation. Elisabeth Schober's ethnographic history scrutinises these controversial zones in and near Seoul. Sharing the lives of soldiers, female entertainers and anti-base activists, she gives a comprehensive introduction to the social, economic and political factors that have contributed to the tensions over US bases in South Korea.

The world is overheated: Too full and too fast; out of sync, contradiction-ridden and unequal. It is the age of the Anthropocene, of humanity's indelible mark upon the planet. In short, it is globalisation - but not as we know it. This collection explores social identities in today's 'overheated' world, seen from an anthropological perspective. The focus is on contradictions, tensions and paradoxes: How can an identity be stable if its border is constantly shifting? How can a community survive if it is incorporated into a huge entity? How does belonging work in new cities? And what can indigenous peoples do to retain a sense of self in a fast-moving neoliberal world? Ethnographically rich and diverse in its scope, Identity Destabilised contains chapters from many parts of the world, including the Philippines, Israel, Australia, the Cape Verde Islands and Afghanistan. The authors investigate how identity changes in response to contemporary forces, from rapid industrialisation, the enforced return of migrants and the silencing of indigenous groups to sudden population growth in boomtowns and the touristification of local culture.

The recent discovery of an archive full of personal documents of the philosopher and biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, founder of the General System Theory, paved the way for a reconsideration of important elements concerning his life and thought. This updated biography of a thinker, who is equally often cited as misjudged, takes into consideration all of his publications, his correspondence, as well as the secondary sources devoted to him, and attempts to reveal his richness and complexity to a general reader. This biography thus aims at initiating and promoting a study that is both critical and appreciative of his oeuvre. It equally seeks to navigate between two all too common pitfalls found in connection with von Bertalanffy: hagiographic temptation and reductive judgements, which are often ideologically motivated.