Chapter 5 explores xiangchou as a materially and culturally embedded concept in the 2010s, which represented an ‘era of crises’ in China. The chapter frames crises as both the acute global COVID-19 pandemic, as well as through longer-term and more embedded ‘crises,’ categorized broadly as: the ’big city disease’, the existential crisis of meaninglessness, and the three-rural issue. Discursive analysis of various government text illustrates how different state organs can invoke the language of xiangchou to describe both a symptom of such crises as well as a response and potential remedy to these crises. Various case studies also demonstrate how feelings of homesickness and the inevitable separations from those ‘left behind’ can compel various forms of ‘rural return,’ but to varying effects and opportunities.

Chapter 6 examines another group of ‘returnees’ in Heyang: young entrepreneurs with various backgrounds of urban socialization. They represent a generation of youth caught in the crosshairs of institutionalized competition, an achievement-complex, mounting youth unemployment, and a pervasive experience of ‘involution.’ Through the social category of fanxiangqingnian, “return youth,” this chapter examines how xiangchou becomes a mobilizing discourse that can encourage return from the standpoint of individual choice and desire, and how it helps reshape the overall discourse surrounding the countryside as both a place and ‘lifestyle’ considered as desirable to return to. Xiangchou becomes a language of ‘escape’ and a materialized reality where one can seemingly ‘escape to’. However, the experience of the young entrepreneurs in Heyang also underscore the complexities of this ‘return’ in the forms of the limitations, challenges, and dilemmas that they encounter in the village.

The epilogue provides a reflection on the experience of writing this book and it uses an anecdote surrounding the construction of a pond in Heyang village as a way to provide an update on the changes and developments in village life since the primary research for this book was conducted in 2017-2022.

The chapter offers an ethnographic study of a court trial of a former judge of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, who was accused of lying in his lustration statement about his past links with communist secret services. Through an observation of the court proceedings, analysis of the court file, and life history interviews with the judge, the chapter engages the questions of violence, guilt, and responsibility. In particular, the chapter focuses attention on the notion of “communist guilt” and the subjective effects of public shaming, and highlights the ways in which lustration articulates the entangled problems about socialist-era state violence and neoliberal capitalist violence, around which rightwing populist groups mobilize. In conversation with the work of Iris Marion Young and Hannah Arendt, among others, the chapter suggests a notion of political responsibility to address this entanglement and thinks past the narrowly construed, individualized, guilt-driven understanding of moral and legal responsibility.

The chapter offers a critical social-historical and theoretical framework to analyze transitional justice politics in Eastern Europe, particularly Polish lustration, in the global post-Cold War moment marked by the proclamations of the “end of history” and ideology, the “moral turn,” the memory boom, the rise of human rights and rule-of-law imaginaries, neoliberal globalization, and their crises and alleged ends today. The chapter unpacks the concept of moral autopsy, which underpins transitional justice efforts such as lustration and reconstructs communism as a dead and ruinous past and criminality, the truth of which it seeks to trace and dissect in the persons associated with communism, especially communist secret service. The chapter focuses on the themes of truth-telling, deception, and treason articulated by moral autopsy and Polish lustration, and places them in the context of postsocialist contradictions of liberal legal and capitalist transformations. The chapter discusses the key methodological orientations of the book, particularly the conditions of ethnographic research on lustration, marked by pervasive suspicion of betrayal and moralization of politics and history.

Chapter 5 begins by reading Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House as an experiment in cinematic projection, a phantasmagoric erasure of the means of projection. I compare Cather’s cartographic romance to that of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s Moana of the South Seas, the first film to be called “documentary.” Both the Flahertys and Cather mark US national space against the anachronism of the remote island. Spinning this view around, I tell the story of Fialelei, who served as producer and translator for the Flahertys in Sāmoa. She also accompanied them to the United States, and her voyage embodies the Samoan principle of the Vā, or “space-between.” This Oceanian counterpoint provides a new position for studying the role of cinematic fantasy in isolating the “primitive” from “civilized,” and projecting the former onto the “insular.”

This chapter explores the ways folksong research in the Czech lands emerged both within and alongside race and ethnicity studies during the first half of the twentieth century. Many scholars have thoughtfully examined interrelationships between folksong research and German nationalism, specimen culture, and Darwinian assumptions, and yet these same interrelationships in Czech music studies have only recently begun to emerge. Anthropologists, too, have brought into focus the political roles of ethnographic studies in defining the Czech and Slovak nations, but the specific role of folksong research within this remains unstudied. Examining the ways music research in the Czech lands participated alongside and sometimes overlapped with German nationalist race and ethnicity research, however, illuminates early Czech folk-music studies as an instrument of ethnonationalism; a tool not merely descriptive of a repertoire, but also delineative of who belonged and who did not.

Kimberly Hope Belcher surveys an impressive number of authors and theories who have engaged with the broad human phenomenon of ritual. For it is evident that both classical ritual studies and more recent approaches have enormous potential for engaging in a dialogue with scholars of Christian liturgy and liturgies.

Intracultural ethnographic research involves studying the flows of culture(s) in all its different expressions – national, occupational, functional, and so on – as they function, co-evolve, and affect the day-to-day lives of individuals within a single organization. The focus here is on the internal organizational challenges and dynamics that are ubiquitous to such complex cultural contexts as foreign direct investments, cross-national mergers and acquisitions, and international joint ventures. The micro context of these kinds of organizations is in fact the global meeting ground where people experience the everyday challenges of working with diverse Others in today’s culturally complex world. Part I of this book explores the challenges and opportunities facing organizations when there are competing national cultural assumptions around how work is done, language differences, and multiple sources of power and influence.

In today’s globalized world, a deep understanding of how culture affects international business phenomena is critical to scholarship and practice. Yet, armed with only superficial measures of national cultural differences, scholars and practitioners find themselves stereotype rich and operationally poor where culture meets real-world international business context. “Culture” is substantially more complex than this, made up of multiple interacting cultural spheres (national, regional, institutional, organizational, functional) that are differentially enacted by individuals many of whom are multicultural themselves. Settings in international business are therefore rife with multilevel cultural interactions as individuals with diverging cultural assumptions are brought together in real time (often virtually) across distance and differentiated contexts. This coursebook on ethnography in IB is the first of its kind, offering students, academics, and executives a way to study, understand, reduce uncertainty about, and make the most of the effects of culture in today’s global and multicultural business contexts.

This book analyzes the role of different political economic sectors that drive deforestation and clearcutting, including mining, ranching, export-oriented plantation agriculture, and forestry. The book examines the key actors, systems, and technologies behind the worsening climate/biodiversity crises that are aggravated by deforestation. The book is theoretically innovative, uniting political economic, sociological, political ecologic, and transdisciplinary theories on the politics of extraction. The research relies on the author’s multi-sited political ethnography, including field research, interviews, and other approaches, across multiple frontiers of deforestation, focusing on Brazil, Peru, and Finland. Why do key global extractivist sectors continue to expand via deforestation and what are the differences between sectors and regions? The hypothesis is that regionally and sometimes nationally dominant politically powerful economic sectors are major explanatory factors for if, how, and where deforestation occurs. To address the deepening global crises, it is essential to understand these power relations within different types of deforesting extractivisms.

The chapter chronicles the close relationship that anthropology, from its very outset as a discipline, had with psychoanalysis, and seeks to make a broader conceptual argument: namely that, over the decades, anthropologists moved from applying to their ethnographic material psychoanalytic concepts, which were generated in clinical settings by practicing psychoanalysts, to engaging themselves in psychodynamic encounters with their own interlocutors, and in so doing reaching the point of generating original theory of psychoanalytic value. This was possible due to the increasing conviction that the prime subject of psychodynamic investigation should not be any given society’s cultural material, interpreted and “analyzed” abstractly to deductively reach aprioristic inferences on the members of the respective community. Rather, the subject of such psychodynamic studies could only be the individual, analyzed from within the social norms, values, and idioms constraining the individual’s development. In turn, this idiographic study would yield invaluable elements necessary to adequately understand the dynamics of the social context in which the individual exists to begin with.