The classification of natural spaces and cultural practices as ‘heritage’ profoundly alters their form and function. Individuals and communities responsible for maintaining the space or practice are often subjected to the dictates of governments, non-governmental institutions and tourists’ tastes, whilst the symbols of heritage themselves are projected as emblematic of how the state wishes itself to be perceived. The condition of statelessness magnifies the vulnerability of communities to these processes of heritagization, with the state co-opting cultural attributes into icons of heritage without any prospect of redress and exacerbating the invisibility and relative lack of agency that characterize many stateless communities. This chapter explores these issues in the context of mobile maritime communities that are stateless or at risk of statelessness in Southeast Asia. It demonstrates how states such as Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar have introduced restrictions on everyday livelihood practices through the imposition of marine protected areas and transformed other aspects of these communities’ lives, such as their houseboats, into objects of touristic consumption under the aegis of natural, cultural and intangible ‘heritage’ that serve to benefit the state yet further degrade the human rights of individuals in the affected communities.

After a brief introduction to the outbreak of the Austrian Credit Anstalt crisis in May 1931 and the early response by central bankers from Bank of England, the BIS and the New York Federal Reserve Bank, this chapter proceeds to present the book’s overall issues and main concepts, which will be used as a heuristic framework throughout the narrative. The main concepts of the book are radical uncertainty, sensemaking, narrative emplotment, imagined futures and epistemic communities. In the chapter, I discuss how these concepts are helpful in understanding central bankers’, and other actors’, decision-making and practices in the five month from May through September. The chapter also discusses my analytical strategy and presents the empirical material, which comes from the Bank of England, Bank for International Settlements, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the J.P. Morgan Archive, the Rothschild Archive and a few others. At the end of the chapter, I present the structure of the book.

This chapter ties together the narratives presented in the book’s three substantive chapters to provide an overview of the conceptual history of ethnicity. The chapter then unpacks the ideological functions performed by this concept in service of the international order, and recaps how the emergence of ethnicity contributed to both the negation and preservation of imperial hierarchies. Drawing inspiration from Carl Schmitt’s discussion of ‘nomos’, the chapter concludes by proposing a speculative notion of ‘ethnos’ as the foundational ordering of beings.

This chapter explores how the conceptual shift from ‘tribes’ to ‘ethnic groups’ contributed to the dismantling of the standard of civilisation. Whereas the binary distinction between civilised nations and primitive tribes reinforced the imperial hierarchy between European and non-European peoples, the concept of ethnicity is characterised by a cultural relativism that acknowledges the formal equality of all peoples. The chapter also shows how these conceptual changes enabled the reimagining of the international order as an ‘anarchical’ system populated by sovereign nation-states: at the very moment that anthropologists were moving away from colonial notions of ‘primitive society’ and ‘ordered anarchy’, IR theorists were adopting this vocabulary to conceptualise their own object. In this way, IR effectively accumulated the functions of colonial anthropology as the scientific vehicle for the study of the modern state’s primitive ‘other’. The chapter wraps up with a discussion of indigenous rights and their relationship to minority rights.

US Latinx adolescents strongly endorse familism, a salient cultural value characterized by close family relationships, interdependence between family members, and the prioritization of family over self. Cultural values, like familism, can serve as cultural scripts that inform behaviors, such as Latinx adolescents’ routine and self-disclosure. In this chapter, we examine routine and self-disclosure and/or domains of disclosure to parents among US Latinx youth while attending to parent and youth gender. Further, we explore associations between familism values and Latinx adolescents’ routine and self-disclosure and/or domains of disclosure to parents and siblings. Based on this literature review, we identify limitations of the current literature. We also recommend future research directions, for example, examining how associations differ based on involvement in US mainstream culture, exploring Latinx youth’s disclosure to extended family members, and investigating Latinx cultural values beyond familism.

Describes simple mathematical models for bacterial growth and death and how to experimentally measure growth curves.

This chapter demonstrates how the emergence of ethnicity led to the ‘domestication’ of race. During the nineteenth century, ‘race’ was an incredibly malleable term that could be used to describe both vast transnational populations differentiated by physical characteristics and smaller national communities such as the French or the Jews. With the emergence of a sharper divide between the biological and sociocultural spheres in the early twentieth century, this polyvalence came to be seen as a problem. To specify the meaning of race with greater precision, a cluster of new ethnos-based terms (ethnic group, ethnicity, ethnie, ethnos) was coined around the turn of the century. One important consequence of this conceptual shift was the effacement of the transnational stratum of race: there is no global ethnic line comparable to the global colour line. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how a pluralised concept of civilisation has filled in for the suppressed transnational stratum of race.

This chapter highlights the utility of cultural imagination, the ability to see human behaviors not just as the result of their dispositions or immediate situations but also as the result of larger cultural contexts. Our cultural imagination, as researchers, evolves as we are increasingly exposed to ideas from different parts of the world, either through collaboration with other researchers or interacting with individuals outside our immediate cultural context. While cross-cultural research has become simpler with the rise of the Internet, there still remain many challenges. This current chapter delineates concrete steps one can take to conduct an informative cross-cultural study, increasing the diversity of databases for generalizable theories of personality and social behaviors.

This chapter demonstrates the crucial role of geographic proximity in shaping agrarian and herding relations in the history of late Ottoman Kurdistan, including regional political economy, socioeconomic structures, and intercommunal relations. It argues that the region is marked by three distinct ecological zones, which differ from each other in terms of elevation, climate, vegetation, and both human and animal habitation. The chapter then shows the encroachment of the Ottoman state through the arrival of Tanzimat reforms and the multifaceted consequences this had in the region. Next, it illustrates a demographic portrait of the region, depicting how human beings brought different ecosystems into conversation with one another. It argues that pastoralism sustained the conversation between geographic zones into the nineteenth century, creating linkages and slippages between mountains, pastures, and plains, and defining the interaction between the three zones until these links began to weaken in the face of a series of environmental crises. The chapter concludes with a glimpse into five villages from different parts of the region.

This chapter introduces my research questions, framework, and main findings. It begins with two striking vignettes to engage the readers and outline the significance of the two basic questions that motivate this book and intersect at children's social cognition: How do humans learn morality? How do we make sense of fieldnotes? The chapter situates the book in intellectual history, including the Wolfs’ original research, its connections to the Six Cultures Study, and its legacies. It then presents a new framework of cognitive anthropology distinctive from the behaviorist paradigm that motivated the original research. I situate the book in three broad streams of discussions: (1) theoretical conversations between anthropology and psychology on morality; (2) cross-cultural research on childhood learning; (3) studies of Chinese kinship, families, and childhood. I explain why it is important to study children to understand morality, human relatedness, and cultural transmission. I also make the case for reanalyzing historical fieldnotes. I then lay out a methodology that incorporates computational approaches into ethnography, summarize my main arguments, and outline the book structure.

In science, to be ‘conservative’ is to understate your findings. In insurance, it means the opposite: erring on the side of overstatement of risks. For a clear assessment of the risks of climate change, we need these two cultures to meet in the middle. This requires a separation of tasks: between those who gather information, and those who assess risk.

Dictionaries are an ancient and ubiquitous genre, flourishing wherever and whenever humans flourish, but it’s important to remember that dictionaries aren’t products of human biology or necessity; they are products of human creativity and community: dictionaries are cultural and therefore political.  This chapter explores what it means to understand that simple fact. Dictionaries are partisan systems of ordering words and meanings.  They may aim to be universal, but they inevitably emerge from, record, and respond to social moments from particular perspectives.  Those perspectives may seek to celebrate or denigrate certain cultural groups, legitimate or suppress certain languages, facilitate social mobility or discrimination.  Dictionaries may highlight their cultural positionality as such for political or commercial profit, or they may cast their subjective styles as objective and universal for the same political or commercial profit.  In all events, dictionaries end up documenting cultural information in their definitions, usage labels and notes, illustrative examples and quotations, inserts and appendices, and beyond.  And, again in all events, dictionaries can have cultural impacts entirely unintended or unanticipated by their makers, running from the positive and life affirming to the dehumanizing and antisocial.

This chapter addresses the nexus between racism and return migration in the early 1980s, which marked the peak of anti-Turkish racism. As the call “Turks out!” (Türken raus!) grew louder, policymakers debated passing a law that would, in critics’ view, “kick out” the Turks and violate their human rights. During this “racial reckoning,” West Germans, Turkish migrants, and observers in Turkey grappled with the nature of racism itself. Although West Germans silenced the language of “race” (Rasse) and “racism” (Rassismus) after Hitler, there was an explosion of public discourse about those terms. Ordinary Germans, moreover, wrote to their president expressing their concerns about migration, revealing both biological and cultural racism. The simultaneous rise in Holocaust memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) is crucial for understanding this racial reckoning. While many Germans warned against the mistreatment of Turks as an unseemly continuity to Nazism, the emphasis on the singularity of the Holocaust offered Germans a way to dismiss anti-Turkish sentiment. Turkish migrants fought against this structural and everyday racism with various methods of activism. Turks at home, including the government and media following the 1980 military coup, viewed these debates with self-interest, lambasting German racism in the context of the 1983 remigration law.