This book explores how the often well-meaning routines and assumptions of a generous welfare state can reflect and even contribute to the stigmatisation of refugees and Muslims in Europe today. While the main cases are from Sweden, examples are included from the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. Mark Graham examines how suspicion is woven into the fabric of welfare bureaucracies with potential adverse consequences for the people they serve. He complicates our understanding of what Islamophobia means, and how it is expressed and created, by exploring contexts in which the logic of "othering" Muslims operates, but where explicit Islamophobia itself is absent. The book starts with Swedish public-sector bureaucracies and attempts by staff to make sense of Muslim refugee clients with categories and models that reappear in wider society. It goes on to explore the logic of integration policies, official concepts of culture, Swedish multiculturalism, educational strategies in schools, and debates surrounding "genuine" and "false" refugees. In all cases, the homologies between these different socio-cultural domains are explored.

A collection of ethnographic case studies of urban planners and their practices Urban planners project the future of cities. As experts, they draft visions of places and times that do not yet exist, prescribing the tools to be used to achieve those visions. Their choices can determine how a city will merge its public transit and automobile traffic or how it will meet a demand for thousands of new dwelling units as quickly and with as little avoidable damage as possible. Life Among Urban Planners considers planning professionals in relation to the social contexts in which they operate: the planning office, the construction site, and even in the confrontations with those affected by their work. What roles do planners have in shaping the daily practices of urban life? How do they employ, manipulate, and alter their expertise to meet the demands asked of them? The essays in this volume emphasize planners' cultural values and personal assumptions and critically examine what their persistent commitment to thinking about the future means for the ways in which people live in the present and preserve the past. Life Among Urban Planners explores the practices and politics of professional city-making in a wide selection of geographical areas spanning five continents. Cases include but are not limited to Bangkok, Bogotá, Chicago, Naimey, Rome, Siem Reap, Stockholm, and Warsaw. Examining the issues raised around questions of expertise, participation, and the tension between market and state forces, contributors demonstrate how certain planning practices accentuate their specific relationship to a place while others are represented to a global audience as potentially universal solutions. In presenting detailed and intimate portraits of the everyday lives of planners, the volume offers key insights into how the city interacts with the world. Contributors: Margaret Crawford, Adèle Esposito, Trevor Goldsmith, Mark Graham, Michael Herzfeld, James Holston, Gabriella Körling, Jennifer Mack, Andrew Newman, Lissa Nordin, Bruce O'Neill, Kevin Lewis O'Neill, Federico Pérez, Monika Sznel.

Since the 1990s, biometric border control has attained key importance throughout Europe. Employing digital images of, for example, fingerprints, DNA, bones, faces or irises, biometric technologies use bodies to identify, categorize and regulate individuals’ cross-border movements. Based on innovative collaborative fieldwork, this book examines how biometrics are developed, put to use and negotiated in key European border sites. It analyses the disparate ways in which the technologies are applied, perceived and experienced by border control agents and others managing the cross-border flow of people, by scientists and developers engaged in making the technologies, and by migrants and non-government organizations attempting to manoeuvre in the complicated and often-unpredictable systems of technological control. Biometric technologies are promoted by national and supranational authorities and industry as scientifically exact and neutral methods of identification and verification, and as an infallible solution to security threats. The ethnographic case studies in this volume demonstrate, however, that the technologies are, in fact, characterized by considerable ambiguity and uncertainty and subject to substantial subjective interpretation, translation and brokering with different implications for migrants, border guards, researchers and other actors engaged in the border world.

This book grounds an understanding of lynching as an increasingly globalised phenomenon through an examination of two cases in Guatemala. The chapters cover issues of migration, tourism, gangs, inter-generational conflict, media, gossip, and rumour to understand national and global patterns of mob-based vigilantism and how diverse factors are funnelled into singular acts of violence. Gavin Weston critically engages with the discussion of Guatemalan lynchings as a form of post-conflict violence alongside other less direct chains of causation. Lynchings have complex, tiered causations based in contestations regarding ideas and provision of justice. Underlying social problems and similarities in the way lynchings spread through talk and media make them relatively anticipatable in certain contexts and suggest possible spaces for mitigation against their viral spread. This volume will be relevant to Latin Americanists and those interested in the anthropology and sociology of violence, post-conflict violence, and peace studies.

Drawing on the ethnographic experience of the contributors, this volume explores the Cultural Models of Nature found in a range of food-producing communities located in climate-change affected areas. These Cultural Models represent specific organizations of the etic categories underlying the concept of Nature (i.e. plants, animals, the physical environment, the weather, humans, and the supernatural). The adoption of a common methodology across the research projects allows the drawing of meaningful cross-cultural comparisons between these communities. The research will be of interest to scholars and policymakers actively involved in research and solution-providing in the climate change arena.

This book develops an examination and critique of human extinction as a result of the ‘next pandemic’ and turns attention towards the role of pandemic catastrophe in the renegotiation of what it means to be human. Nested in debates in anthropology, philosophy, social theory and global health, the book argues that fear of and fascination with the ‘next pandemic’ stem not so much from an anticipation of a biological extinction of the human species, as from an expectation of the loss of mastery over human/non-humanl relations. Christos Lynteris employs the notion of the ‘pandemic imaginary’ in order to understand the way in which pandemic-borne human extinction refashions our understanding of humanity and its place in the world. The book challenges us to think how cosmological, aesthetic, ontological and political aspects of pandemic catastrophe are intertwined. The chapters examine the vital entanglement of epidemiological studies, popular culture, modes of scientific visualisation, and pandemic preparedness campaigns. This volume will be relevant for scholars and advanced students of anthropology as well as global health, and for many others interested in catastrophe, the ‘end of the world’ and the (post)apocalyptic.

Security Blurs makes an important contribution to anthropological work on security. It introduces the notion of “security blurs” to analyse manifestations of security that are visible and identifi able, yet constructed and made up of a myriad and overlapping set of actors, roles, motivations, values, practices, ideas, materialities and power dynamics in their inception and performance. The chapters address the entanglements and overlaps between a variety of state and non-state security providers, from the police and the military to vigilantes, community organisations and private security companies. The contributors offer rich ethnographic studies of everyday security practices across a range of cultural contexts and reveal the impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. This book presents a new anthropological approach to security by explicitly addressing the overlap and entanglement of the practices and discourses of state and non-state security providers, and the associated forms of cooperation and confl ict that permit an analysis of these actors’ activities as increasingly “blurred”.

Focusing on contexts of accelerated economic and political reform, this volume critically examines the role of slogans in the contemporary projects of populist mobilization, neoliberal governance, and civic subversion. Bringing together a collection of ethnographic studies from Greece, Slovakia, Poland, Abu Dhabi, Peru, and China, the contributors analyze the way in which slogans both convey and contest the values and norms that lie at the core of hegemonic political economic projects and ideologies.

Welfare offices usually attract negative descriptions of bureaucracy with their queues, routines, and impersonal nature. Are they anonymous machines or the locus of neutral service relationships? Showing how people experience state public administration, The Bureaucrat and the Poor provides a realistic view of French welfare policies, institutions and reforms and, in doing so, dispels both of these myths. Combining Lipsky's street-level bureaucracy theory with the sociology of Bourdieu and Goffman, this research analyses face-to-face encounters and demonstrates the complex relationship between welfare agents, torn between their institutional role and their personal feelings, and welfare applicants, required to translate their personal experience into bureaucratic categories. Placing these interactions within the broader context of social structures and class, race and gender, the author unveils both the social determinations of these interpersonal relationships and their social functions. Increasing numbers of welfare applicants, coupled with mass unemployment, family transformations and the so-called 'integration problem' of migrants into French society deeply affect these encounters. Staff manage tense situations with no additional resources - some become personally involved, while others stick to their bureaucratic role; most of them alternate between involvement and detachment, assistance and domination. Welfare offices have become a place for 're-socialisation', where people can talk about their personal problems and ask for advice. On the other hand, bureaucratic encounters are increasingly violent, symbolically if not physically. More than ever, they are now a means of regulating the poor.

Author Ludwig von Mises was concerned with the spread of socialist ideals and the increasing bureaucratization of economic life. While he does not deny the necessity of certain bureaucratic structures for the smooth operation of any civilized state, he disagrees with the extent to which it has come to dominate the public life of European countries and the United States. The author's purpose is to demonstrate that the negative aspects of bureaucracy are not so much a result of bad policies or corruption as the public tends to think but are the bureaucratic structures due to the very tasks these structures have to deal with. The main body of the book is therefore devoted to a comparison between private enterprise on the one hand and bureaucratic agencies/public enterprise on the other.