Anthropologies of Unemployment offers accessible, theoretically innovative, and ethnographically rich examinations of unemployment in rural and urban regions across North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The diversity of case studies demonstrates that unemployment is a pressing global phenomenon that sheds light on the uneven consequences of free-market ideologies and policies. Economic, social, and cultural marginalization is common in the lives of the unemployed, but their experience and interpretation are shaped by local and national cultural particularities. In exploring those differences, the contributors to this volume employ recent theoretical innovations and engage with some of the more salient topics in contemporary anthropology, such as globalization, migration, youth cultures, bureaucracy, class, gender, and race. Taken together, the chapters reveal that there is something new about unemployment today. It is not a temporary occurrence, but a chronic condition. In adjusting to persistent, longstanding unemployment, people and groups create new understandings of unemployment as well as of work and employment; they improvise new forms of sociality, morality, and personhood. Ethnographic studies such as those found in Anthropologies of Unemployment are crucial if we are to understand the broader forms, meanings, and significance of pervasive economic insecurity and discover the emergence of new social and cultural possibilities.

Drawing on decades of research on Alexander literature from all over the world, this book is bound to become a medievalist's best companion. It studies Alexander romances from the East and the West in literary form and content.

Today, climate-related processes and problems are referred to as Global Change by nearly everyone including scientists, politicians, and economists; citizens worldwide are anxious about the often ob served disorientation of our environment under the influence of man. Better information on the Earth's natural systems and their possible alterations is necessary. The topic itself is so wide that sound scien tific descriptions of it as a whole are rare. For the non-specialist infor mation from relevant fields is not easy to obtain; and often, the pro gnostic models presented are contradictory and even for specialists difficult to evaluate. Therefore, this book on Climate, Earth Processes and Earth History by Richard Huggett fills an important gap. It discusses the great, climate-related areas of the Earth's environment. The atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the sediments as products of weathering and geomorphic processes, the relief as landforms and soils, and the biosphere are thoroughly treated as the prominent sub systems which are greatly affected by climate. These subsystems not only control the visual and internal aspects of our landscapes, but they are themselves especially influenced by climatic changes which can be due to either changes in the natural system or anthropogenic changes. Thus, our landscapes will be subject to significant altera tions, if climatic variations exceed certain thresholds. The plan for the present book by Richard Huggett was originally discussed in regard to the Springer Series on Physical Environment.

Schools, welfare agencies, and a wide variety of other state and local institutions of vital importance to citizens are actually controlled by attorneys and judges rather than governors and mayors. In this valuable book, Ross Sandler and David Schoenbrod explain how this has come to pass, why it has resulted in service to the public that is worse, not better, and what can be done to restore control of these programs to democratically elected—and accountable—officials. Sandler and Schoenbrod tell how the courts, with the best intentions and often with the approval of elected officials, came to control ordinary policy making through court decrees. These court regimes, they assert, impose rigid and often ancient detailed plans that can founder on reality. Newly elected officials, who may wish to alter the plans in response to the changing wishes of voters, cannot do so unless attorneys, court-appointed functionaries, and lower-echelon officials agree. The result is neither judicial government nor good government, say Sandler and Schoenbrod, and they offer practical reforms that would set governments free from this judicial stranglehold, allow courts to do their legitimate job of protecting rights, and strengthen democracy.