What do we have? Nonfiction? Fiction? Philosophy? Who cares! We do have a man of the 20th and 21st centuries attempting to jot down his daily thoughts. We have a mental diary, or, the diary of somebody who is mental; here, here thoughts of the mental (case), rather than thoughts of the actions of the mental (case). It's a diary of a neurotic, and the neurotic is one precisely because he's not a man of action, not a person of physicality, just one whose main exercise is conjecture, speculation, and obsessive questioning. He, I, is a sportsman of his own mind. Writing about the mental grind of being unemployed in an employed world. The job, having it, a must. The means of earning the paycheck; the means of socialization in group rituals. Unemployed and presently stuck in the suburbs existing beyond time - deserted streets, distant shopping malls, emptied homes. The individual isolated and growing out of touch and out of his mind; the mind retreating into the distant past and future.

This book is an ethnography of the metamorphosis of rural foods and traditional dishes and of the making of cuisine and identity in contemporary Athens. In the wake of the financial crisis in Athens in the mid-2015s, forgotten rural foods of the past are transformed into luxurious artisanal foods, while traditional dishes appear reinvented in fine-dining restaurants, after decades of darkness. How, and why is this all happening in a city of poverty, hardship and economic crisis? Through sensory descriptions and thick ethnographic material, it follows the Athenian affluent middle class in upscale delis and goes inside fine-dining restaurant kitchens, discussing the complex combination of cuisine, tradition, memory and identity, revealing the cultural logic and social aspects of cuisine. It demonstrates how cuisine emerges from very different, often contradictory social spaces, not only as an intellectual and aesthetic endeavour of chefs or as a revival of foods and foodways that link the country and the city, but also as interlinked with embodied memories and embedded in social relations and commensality. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students in Anthropology and Food Studies.

Contains the 4th session of the 28th Parliament through the session of the Parliament.

Israel's cultural space is frequently studied as if it were synonymous with the Hebrew-Israeli one. But within the borders of Israel, a fascinating culture was (and continues to be) created in many languages other than Hebrew, reflecting its reality from angles that the makers of Hebrew-Israeli culture did not know and all too often lacked the tools to express. I Am Your Dust: Representations of the Israeli Experience in Yiddish Prose, 1948–1967 expands the boundaries of current studies of Israel's cultural history by presenting and analyzing Yiddish-Israeli prose written during the country's first two decades as an independent state. It offers a comprehensive study of that unique, and hitherto little understood, literature, a detailed historical documentation of the contexts of its production, and an eye-opening comparison of its themes to the more familiar outputs of Hebrew-Israeli prose. I Am Your Dust is the first socioliterary investigation of Yiddish-Israeli culture, and it explores how Yiddish-Israeli writers played a vital role in shaping the country's cultural identity in its early years.

"One of the main theses of the Marienthal study was that prolonged unemployment leads to a state of apathy in which the victims do not utilize any longer even the few opportunities left to them. The vicious cycle between reduced opportunities and reduced level of aspiration has remained the focus of all subsequent discussions." So begin the opening remarks to the English-language edition of what has become a major classic in the literature of social stratification.

Men and masculinities provides an engaging, accessible and provocative introduction to histories of masculinity for all readers interested in contemporary gender politics. The book offers a critical overview of ongoing historiographical debates and the historical making of men’s lives and identities and ideas of masculinity between the 1890s and the present day. In setting out a new agenda for the field, it makes an ambitious argument for the importance of writing histories which are present-centred and politically engaged. This means that the book engages head-on with ferocious debates about men’s social position and the status of masculinity in contemporary public life. In establishing a critical genealogy for the proliferation of this crisis talk, it sets out new ways of understanding how men’s lives and ideas of masculinity have changed over time while patriarchy and male power have persisted.