For more than 70 years, South Korea has woven the threat of North Korea into daily life. But now that threat has become mundane, and South Korean national security addresses family, public health, and national unity. Banal Security illustrates how as a result, queer Koreans are seen to represent a viral threat to national security. Taking readers from police stations and the Constitutional Court to queer activist offices and pride festivals, Timothy Gitzen shows how security weaves through daily life and diffuses the queer threat, in a context where queer Koreans are treated as viral carriers, disruptions to public order, and threats to family and culture.
During the last two decades, economic sociology has experienced a remarkable revival and has become one of the most innovative fields of sociological research. Shifts in economic policy worldwide have led to the increasing interest in the sociological analysis of economic phenomena and institutions by challenging traditional research questions and demonstrating the limits and problems inherent in standard economic thinking and reasoning.
Brian Conway, Lene Kühle, Francesco Alicino, Gabriel Bîrsan
Religion, Law, and COVID-19 in Europe investigates how the pandemic and the subsequent legal restrictions influenced religious life in the region. The volume is based on 19 in-depth country case studies that combine legal and sociological analyses. By reflecting the plurality of religious and secular contexts, the volume details how the pandemic affected religious communities and challenged both religions and societies and how this was influenced by varying religious landscapes, political histories and legal cultures. More broadly, this edited volume reveals the importance of sudden, large-scale events in understanding religious change in the modern world.
The devilish has long been integral to myths, legends, and folklore, firmly located in the relationships between good and evil, and selves and others. But how are ideas of evil constructed in current times and framed by contemporary social discourses? Modern Folk Devils builds on and works with Stanley Cohen’s theory on folk devils and moral panics to discuss the constructions of evil. The authors present an array of case-studies that illustrate how the notion of folk devils nowadays comes into play and animates ideas of otherness and evil throughout the world.
Strategy and the Spirit of Ukrainian Resistance 2014–2023
Ilmari Käihkö
“Slava Ukraini!” Strategy and the Spirit of Ukrainian Resistance tells the story of the volunteers lauded to have saved Ukraine twice. First in the spring of 2014 after the onset of the war in Donbas, and again in February 2022 after the large-scale Russian invasion. Aimed at an interdisciplinary audience, this volume makes significant contributions to our understanding of events in Ukraine over the past decade. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with volunteer battalion fighters, the volume focuses on strategy, or the creation, control, and use of force. In addition, “Slava Ukraini!” discusses the volunteers’ long-term sociological impact in Ukraine. While the volunteers may have initially exacerbated internal divisions in Ukraine, their spirit of 2014 also embodied the beginning of Ukrainian resistance, which in 2022 flared-up on a national scale.
This book reinterprets the Finnish experiences in North America by connecting them to the transnational processes of settler colonial conquest, far-settlement, elimination of natives, and capture of terrestrial spaces. It places Finns as active participants in settler colonial histories, circulations of knowledge, and their ongoing legacies.
Producing places, relations and value on a Papua New Guinea resource frontier
Tuomas Tammisto
For the Mengen of Papua New Guinea, ‘hard work’ does not refer to drudgery or physically exhausting labour. Instead, ‘work’ involves creating and recreating meaningful social relations and generating value through acts of care, marriages, ceremonial events, sharing, and working the land together. Similarly, all activities that produce valued people, places, and relations are hard work. This book is a study of human-environmental relations, value production, natural resource extraction, and state formation. It examines these themes by looking at how the Mengen relate to each other, their lived environment, and outside actors.
Locating the Mediterranean brings together ethnographic examinations of processes that make locations and render them meaningful. The volume’s contributions illustrate how historical, legal, religious, economic, political, and social connections and separations shape the experience of being located in the geographical space around the Mediterranean. Theoretically novel and empirically rich, the volume stimulates anthropological debates on the interplay between location and region-making.
This book investigates the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) in the context of the Military Revolution theory that connects military transformations with early modern state formation. Instead of focusing on technological and tactical developments this book examines change and decline in military institutions. This systemic approach offers a reappraisal of the Military Revolution theory and offers new insights into the Thirty Years War.
Helsinki Boys’ Intersectional Relationships in New Times
Marja Peltola, Ann Phoenix
Nuancing Young Masculinities tells a complex story about the plurality of young masculinities. It draws on the narratives of young Finnish boys of different social classes and ethnicities. Boys’ accounts of relations with peers, parents, and teachers give insights into their world.