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'Jihad' is a highly charged word. Often mistranslated as 'Holy War', it has become synonymous with terrorism. Current political events have entirely failed to take account of the subtlety and complexity of jihad. Like many concepts with a long history, different cultural ideas have influenced the religious aspects of jihad. As a result its original meaning has been adapted, modified and destabilized - never more than at the present time. How does jihad manifest itself in Muslims' everyday lives? What impact has 9/11 and its backlash had on jihad? By observing the current crisis of identity among ordinary Muslims, this timely book explores why, and in what circumstances Muslims speak of jihad. In the end, jihad is what Muslims say it is. Marranci offers us a nuanced and sophisticated anthropological understanding of Muslims' lives far beyond the predictable cliches. Have a look at the author's blog (http://marranci.wordpress.com. Explores the different cultural ideas that have influenced the religious aspects of jihad. 'Jihad', a term often mistranslated as 'Holy War', has become synonymous with terrorism. This book, by observing the crisis of identity among ordinary Muslims, explores why, and in what circumstances Muslims speak of jihad. Gabriele Marranci is Lecturer in the Anthropology of Religion, School of Divinity and Religious Studies, University of Aberdeen. He is the founding editor of Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life.

This article investigates the authorised heritage discourse (AHD) through the lens of conservation planning practice. The AHD is characterised as an exclusionary discourse that privileges the physical nature of 'heritage', defined scientifically by 'experts'. Set within the context of wider international trends towards more inclusive heritage practices, the article advances understanding of the contemporary AHD. Using local heritage designation as an investigatory platform, a thesis is developed to explain professional representations of heritage operating in this setting. In doing so, a pervasive, yet nuanced AHD is exposed. At the same time, a complex variety of contextual factors that constrain radical readjustment of the AHD are also uncovered. These include struggles over the subjectivity and operationalisation of social and cultural heritage values in rational planning environments. The conclusions drawn from this research challenge and subtly refine the AHD, and crucially, propose that wider trends in the heritage discourse cannot be adequately implemented within the current legal apparatus and mind-set of traditional rational planning. The article suggests that further research is required to understand how the multiple and diverse layers of heritage meanings can be emplaced and legitimised within planning settings.

"The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to solve their fundamental problem: how to extract labor from captive workers who had every reason to resist. In this system, enslaved Black drivers were tasked with supervising and punishing other enslaved laborers. In The Driver's Story, Randy M. Browne illuminates the predicament and harrowing struggles of these men-and sometimes women-at the heart of the plantation world. What, Browne asks, did it mean to be trapped between the insatiable labor demands of white plantation authorities and the constant resistance of one's fellow enslaved laborers? In this insightful and unsettling account of slavery and racial capitalism, Browne shows that on plantations across the Americas, drivers were at the center of enslaved people's working lives, social relationships, and struggles against slavery. Drivers enforced labor discipline and confronted the resistance of their fellow enslaved laborers, aiming to maintain a position that helped them survive in a world where enslaved people were treated as disposable. Drivers also protected the people they supervised, negotiating workloads and customary rights to essentials like food and rest with white authorities. Within the slave community, drivers helped other enslaved people create a sense of belonging, as husbands and fathers, as Big Men, and as leaders of diasporic African "nations." Sometimes, drivers even organized rebellions, sabotaging the very system they were appointed to support. Compelling and original, The Driver's Story enriches our understanding of the never-ending war between enslavers and enslaved laborers by focusing on its front line. It also brings us face-to-face with the horror of capitalist labor exploitation. While critics attacked the driving system as barbaric and backwards, in pushing workers to their utter limits it was, in fact, fundamentally modern-a stark example of what historian Walter Rodney called capitalism without its loincloth."

This book explores the recent developments in global and Japanese whaling from the viewpoint of the members of the Japanese whaling community, a perspective that is largely neglected and misinterpreted. Japanese whaling has been one of the most contentious issues in global environmental governance in recent years, and Japan is often harshly criticized for its whaling programs. By distinguishing between the different whaling-related actors and their experiences, this book widens our understanding of why whaling programs continue to exist. Rich in ethnographic data, the book includes in-depth interviews with representatives of the Japanese whaling community, from government officials to fishermen, shedding light on what whaling represents, both historically and today. As an ethnographic study of a divisive and controversial subject, this book will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars, including, but not limited to, those interested in Japanese studies, anthropology, political science, and ocean resource management.

The cosmopolitan idea has a substantial intellectual history, stretching back to ancient times. It is argued here that the term retains a multifacetedness and, especially, a flexibility, which makes it very suitable for the theorization of the contemporary digitalizedworld. To commence this argument, an overview of the ongoing postdigitality discussion is given, which argues for the present, clear, real and existing convergence of the digital and the analogue. From here three macro-categories of cosmopolitanism within academic writing are proffered, incorporating normative-philosophical, empiricaldescriptive, and processual approaches to cosmopolitanism. Building on this categorization, it is then argued that a number of categories of postdigital cosmopolitanism may also be seen, from (empirical) everyday postdigital cosmopolitanism, with both a cultural and a structural form, to processual postdigital cosmopolitanism, which retains an alter-cosmopolitan and a benign form. The discussion concludes with normativephilosophical postdigital cosmopolitanism, which is also linked to visionary reimaginings of the Internet and its interconnections with the material world.

Modeled after the Soviet propaganda magazine SSSR na stroike (›USSR in Construction‹, published 1930–1941, 1949), the Japanese overseas propaganda photo magazine FRONT (1942–1945) provided visual propaganda for the so-called ›Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere‹, a concept that was proclaimed in 1940 and served to disguise Japan's quest for hegemony in Asia. Employing the aesthetics of Russian Constructivism and Socialist Realism of SSSR na stroike, FRONT created a visual aesthetic that could be termed Japanese Co-Prosperity Realism. Its dynamic and modernistic design was a transculturally inspired practice by Japanese photographers, graphic designers, journalists and producers of visual media, some of whom had been left-wing intellectuals or had lived and worked in the Soviet Union. In a comparative perspective, this paper carves out the political, cultural and gendered semantics of the (in)visibility of power, political religion and ethnic diversity that such aesthetics entailed. It explores some of the shifting backgrounds against which photographic techniques were enacted, from their avant-garde beginnings to their application in authoritarian regimes.

It hardly needs stating that as diasporic groups move between countries in search of economic advantage, the increasing proliferation of multiple cultural and ethnic minorities in most modern societies has posed a major challenge to the idea of a homogeneous nation-state. In part, this is the result of greater mobility made possible by technological change in a world that has embraced a globalized economy. It also represents, however, the legacy not only of the period of European imperialism, but also of the trauma arising from the failure of nation-states to achieve a coherence grounded in homogeneity. One thinks, for example, of the horrific consequences of attempts to impose homogeneity in Nazi Germany, or of the breakup and re-Balkanization of Yugoslavia, with the attendant atrocities that ensued from it. “Multiculturalism” as a political policy based on principles of recognition, tolerance, and accommodation is the response that many nations have adopted as a means of addressing the pressing challenges posed by these emergent circumstances.

Consecutive immigrant generations and the process of their incorporation into host societies are emerging as a new focus of interest in the contemporary sociology of migration (Portes and Zhou; Portes and Schauffler; Portes and Rumbaut; Rumbaut and Portes). The bulk of the evidence from different countries and on various types of migration (ethnic return migration, labor migration, asylum seeking) shows a significant tendency to ethnic and cultural retention in the first generation of adult migrants (Alba and Nee; Rumbaut, "Assimilation"; Rumbaut and Portes). When these migrants assimilate at all, the process is usually partial and segmented, that is, the adjustment in some life realms (in the workplace, in educational and other public institutions) is more effective and expedient than in other, more private ones (family life, personal relationships, consumption patterns). In response to these observations, the concept of integration (instrumental adaptation to the host society while retaining the minority's own ethnocultural core) emerged in modern migration discourse to replace the traditional assimilation perspective in research on first-generation migrants (Nauck; Remennick, "What Does").

Borders, democratic legitimacy, multiscale statehood, governance : the covid crisis has shaken things up and emphasized both the contradictions and the central salience of territories. In this sharp volume Oscar Mazzoleni critically reviews the main debates about territories that have unfold over the last two decades, in particular in geography and political sociology. He makes a powerful insight for a critical territorial approach aiming to analyze democratic politics. Patrick Le Galès, CNRS research professor at Sciences Po, Paris, France Mazzoleni has contributed a brief but encompassing study of the concept of territory in social sciences. This well-written piece analyzes the concept of territory as multidimensional and interdisciplinary. His is a rigorous attempt to offer a systematic framework to make territorial politics part of the contemporary research agenda. In developing a territorial approach, he adds to the field by addressing essential gaps in the literature. Margarita Gomez-Reino Cachafeiro, full professor at the UNED University, Madrid, Spain The book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to the uses of the concept of territory in the study of democratic politics. The author tests the limits of a literature which avoid territorial dimensions, and reasserts the relevance of the concepts of territory and territorial space in the understanding of contemporary politics. With a political sociological perspective, but engaging in an interdisciplinary dialogue, the book draws a new conceptual framework focusing on both traditional and innovative topics: state-building and the transformation of nation-states, the changes in democratic citizenship, the relevance of territory for voting behaviour, the territorial dimensions of populism and the experience of the pandemic, taken as a global territorial crisis. Oscar Mazzoleni is Director of the Research Observatory for Regional politics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Hiding and sharing things can go together. Haiǁom and other San hunter-gatherers in southern Africa are considered to be a group in which there is a lot of sharing. At the same time, hiding what could be shared is not rare. The ethnographic situation that I explore in this contribution is that of hiding tobacco and other consumables. What happens when Haiǁom divide their tobacco into two pouches, one for sharing with others and one that is kept hidden? I argue that creating presence but also maintaining a degree of distance characterise Haiǁom sharing practices and their way of dealing with numerous sharing demands in everyday interaction. At a comparative theoretical level, I argue that safeguarding minimal interpersonal distance is part of habitualising a performative ethical sense of how to share. In this context, trying to store things is not necessarily considered unethical as long as those who do still continue to be appropriately responsive to the demands made. What is at stake is the learnt judgement of when demands need to be fulfilled and when other responses are in order.