Featured titles from EASA’s publisher, Berghahn books

kjaerulfFLEXIBLE CAPITALISM
Exchange and Ambiguity at Work Edited by Jens Kjaerulff Afterword by Keir Martin Volume 25, EASA Series from Berghahn Books (NEW)

This volume comprises a series of insightful essays that apply existing debates in anthropology...to new empirical contexts of work under flexible capitalism. While each of the chapters makes a valuable contribution in itself, taken together the essays raise a wealth of new issues and question some long-standing assumptions within economic anthropology about work and its lived experience. Geert De Neve, University of Sussex

Approaching “work” as at heart a practice of exchange, this volume explores sociality in work environments marked by the kind of structural changes that have come to define contemporary “flexible” capitalism. It introduces anthropological exchange theory to a wider readership, and shows how the perspective offers new ways to enquire about the flexible capitalism’s social dimensions. The essays contribute to a trans-disciplinary scholarship on contemporary economic practice and change by documenting how, across diverse settings, “gift-like” socialities proliferate, and even sustain the intensified flexible commoditization that more commonly is touted as tearing social relations apart. By interrogating a keenly debated contemporary work regime through an approach to sociality rooted in a rich and distinct anthropological legacy, the volume also makes a novel contribution to the anthropological literature on work and on exchange.

kjaerulfCONTEMPORARY PAGAN AND NATIVE FAITH MOVEMENTS IN EUROPE
Colonialist and Nationalist Impulses Edited by Kathryn Rountree Volume 26, EASA Series from Berghahn Books (FORTHCOMING)

Rountree’s welcome and timely edited volume addresses topical, cutting-edge issues with regard to contemporary European Pagan and Native Faith movements. Focusing on the theoretical richness born out of the tensions found between ‘the local’ and ‘the global,’ past and present, the volume provides a refreshing approach to understanding these movements. Amy Whitehead, University of Wales, Trinity Saint David

Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners’ beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism - especially in post-Soviet societies - and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.