ABOUT THIS BOOK

We are living in a new epoch: the Anthropocene, where the world is overheated by human activity, driven too fast and filled too full, uneven and unequal. This collection explores the question of identity in this new world, looking at the consequences of rapidly accelerating change on social and personal identities and providing a concrete set of perspectives on how people conceive their selves and belonging in the twenty-first century. Featuring examinations of the Phiippines, Israel, Australia, the Cape Verde Islands, and Afghanistan, the book studies changes generated by rapid industrialization, forced return of migrants, sudden population growth, and the touristification of local cultures.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo and president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Elisabeth Schober is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and the author of Base Encounters: The US Armed Forces in South Korea.

REVIEWS

"Accelerated change may be a general characteristic of human life today, but the diverse and multi-facetted studies in this volume nevertheless document a significant variety of perceptions, reflections and agency in response to this volatile situation. They thereby demonstrate the great value of the 'slow' science of ethnography in an 'overheated' world."

— Karen Fog Olwig, University of Copenhagen

''This provocative and ethnographically diverse volume illuminates the complexities that shape attempts to reconcile social belonging and self-consciousness in today’s world. It makes a timely contribution towards bringing identity back into conversation with the dynamics of social reproduction and rapid change.''

— Noel Dyck, Simon Fraser University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction: The art of belonging to an overheated world - Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Elisabeth Schober

1. Down with identity! Long live humanity! - Jeremy MacClancy
2. Frozen Cosmopolitanism: Involuntary return and cultural alienation in times of accelerated mobility - Heike Drotbohn
3. ‘We are all strangers here’: Labour and belonging in a desert boomtown - Astrid Stensrud
4. Identifying with accelerated change. Modernity embodied in Gladstone, Queensland - Thomas Hylland Eriksen
5. Transnational guardians of the frontier: Precarity and endurance in an Israeli border town - Cathrine Thorleifsson
6. Cultural Wounding and Healing: Change As Ongoing Cultural Production in a Remote Indigenous Australian Community - Amanda Kearney
7. Indigenous Endurance Amidst Accelerated Change? The Aeta of Subic Bay - Elisabeth Schober
8. Politics of Localness: Claiming Gains in Rural Sierra Leone - Robert Pijpers
9. Too many khans: Old and new elites in Afghanistan - Torunn Wimpelmann
10. Do Homosexuals Wear Moustaches? Controversies around the first Montenegrin Pride Parade - Branko Banovic
11. 'I’m not sure what our identity is anymore': The overheated tension between Manchester United FC and Manchester United PLC - Keir Martin
12. Frozen Moments: Visualising the Polity in Times of Overheating - Iver B. Neumann

Afterword: Eurovision identities - Chris Hann