"John Gage's Color and Meaning is full of ideas. . .He is one of the best writers on art now alive."--A. S. Byatt, Booker Prize winner

The result is a compelling ethnography of a Russian village, the first of its kind in modern, North American anthropology.

“She walked into my office smelling like a meadow of flowers and looking like one long night of trouble.” Myron Foote is a private detective on the wrong side of the tracks who does not like to be on the receiving end of violence but is sometimes a little too quick to hand it out to others. From his dumpy little office on the edge of the red light district, he works bottom‑of‑the‑barrel divorce cases ... until a gorgeous redhead walks into his life and offers him $105,000 to pose as her uncle Percy. It sounds simple. Too simple. But who could turn down that kind of money? Or that kind of redhead? The job takes him down a dark path littered with lies and secrets, blackmail and murder ... a path that leads straight into Cynthia Thacketer’s arms ... and into a deadly trap. Soon, all that stands between Foote and life in prison is an alibi he cannot use. Author Ray Garton keeps the pace brisk and the action intense in this hard‑boiled modern noir that will have you guessing until the final gunshot.

Material Culture in Russia and the USSR comprises some of the most cutting-edge scholarship across anthropology, history and material and cultural studies relating to Russia and the Soviet Union, from Peter the Great to Putin.Material culture in Russia and the USSR holds a particularly important role, as the distinction between private and public spheres has at times developed in radically different ways than in many places in the more commonly studied West. With case studies covering alcohol, fashion, cinema, advertising and photography among other topics, this wide-ranging collection offers an unparalleled survey of material culture in Russia and the USSR and addresses core questions such as: what makes Russian and Soviet material culture distinctive; who produces it; what values it portrays; and how it relates to 'high culture' and consumer culture.

Using film as a lens though which we can witness the global transformations in politics, economy, culture, and communication, this book analyzes Hollywood's shift in its depictions of China and Tibet.

After the 1917 Revolution in Russia, the Bosheviks launched a massive assault on religion. Although we know a great deal about how the Bolsheviks went about doing this&—propaganda, persecution of clergy and laity, seizing church property&—scholars have not devoted much attention to the other side of the story: the people who were being persecuted and how they responded to their persecutors. Glennys Young shows how ordinary Russian peasants devised ways of asserting their religious faith during the difficult period of New Economic Policy, 1921&–28, when the Party-state was ideologically obsessed with eradicating religion. Faced with persecution, torture, and the creation of antireligious organizations such as the League of the Godless, Orthodox clergy and laity organized themselves against the Bolsheviks. They revived factional politics, even using the village soviets, the intended cornerstone of Soviet power in the countryside, to defend their religious interests. When they achieved some degree of success in their resistance, the Bosheviks were forced to respond and adapt their strategies&—a conclusion that scholars have not put forward previously. Based on extensive research in archives and published sources, Young's book will force historians of Soviet Russia to confront religious issues as central to rural politics. Her work also draws upon cultural anthropology and theories of peasant politics, making it of great interest to any scholars studying the processes of secularization and desacralization in other cultures.

Justin Snedegar develops and defends contrastivism about reasons. This is the view that normative reasons are fundamentally reasons for or against actions or attitudes only relative to sets of alternatives. Simply put, reasons are always reasons to do one thing rather than another, instead of simply being reasons to do something, full stop. Work on reasons has become central to several areas of philosophy, but besides a couple of exceptions, this view has not been discussed. Contrastive Reasons makes the case that this is a mistake. Snedegar develops three kinds of arguments for contrastivism. First, contrastivism gives us the best account of our ordinary discourse about reasons. Second, contrastivism best makes sense of widespread ideas about what reasons are, including the idea that they favor the things they are reasons for and the idea that they involve the promotion of certain kinds of objectives. Third, contrastivism has attractive applications in different areas of normative philosophy in which reasons are important. These include debates in normative ethics about whether better than might be intransitive and debates in both epistemology and practical reasoning about the rationality of withholding or suspending belief and intention.

As perceived icons of indifferent marginality, disorder, indolence, and parasitism, “Gypsies” threatened the Bolsheviks’ ideal of New Soviet Men and Women. The early Soviet state feared that its Romani population suffered from an extraordinary and potentially insurmountable cultural “backwardness,” and sought to sovietize Roma through a range of nation-building projects. Yet as Brigid O’Keeffe shows in this book, Roma actively engaged with Bolshevik nationality policies, thereby assimilating Soviet culture, social customs, and economic relations. Roma proved the primary agents in the refashioning of so-called “backwards Gypsies” into conscious Soviet citizens. New Soviet Gypsies provides a unique history of Roma, an overwhelmingly understudied and misunderstood diasporic people, by focusing on their social and political lives in the early Soviet Union. O’Keeffe illustrates how Roma mobilized and performed “Gypsiness” as a means of advancing themselves socially, culturally, and economically as Soviet citizens. Exploring the intersection between nationality, performance, and self-fashioning, O’Keeffe shows that Roma not only defy easy typecasting, but also deserve study as agents of history.

The German Prevention Congress [Deutscher Präventionstag – DPT] (former German Congress on Crime Prevention – GCOCP) is an annual event that takes place since 1995 in different German cities and targets all areas of crime prevention. Since its foundation the German Prevention Congress has been open to an international audience with a growing number of non-German speaking participants joining. To give the international guests their own discussion forum, the Annual International Forum (AIF) was established in 2007. For international guests this event offers lectures in English language as well as other activities within the German Prevention Congress that are translated simultaneously. This book reflects the outcomes of the 13th AIF (20 and 21 May 2019 in Berlin) and of the 14th AIF (10 and 11 May 2021 in Cologne). The articles show worldwide views on crime prevention and criminal policy as well as the current status, discussion, research and projects in crime prevention from different countries.