Social Anthropology

A paradigmatic shift in drug addiction treatment took place in a therapeutic community in northern Italy over the last 30 years, moving from a ritual model to a person‐centred one. While both models can be interpreted as devices for re‐shaping subjects who, through drug addiction, are experiencing a deep biographical crisis and are in need of reaching their deepest emotional level, the underlying ‘emotional ontologies’ – i.e. the role, place and sense of emotions – are quite different. This local change can be put into relation with wider anthropological changes affecting Western societies over recent decades.

The Holocaust, a significant moral principle for contemporary Germany, is embedded in a politically and emotionally charged discourse of remembering and forgetting. German politicians and young German adults often perceive the Holocaust as a threat associated with guilt, and call it , killer‐phrase, or , bludgeon. This paper analyses how the Holocaust is endowed with agency, and how demands to control its powers are aligned with this. Some young German adults used this narrative practice to position themselves in the German memory discourse, while others criticised it. This paper argues that agency attribution contributes to the mechanisms of forgetting by reducing the complexities of social and historical entanglements.

Delamaza, Gonzalo. 2015. Enhancing democracy. Public policies and citizen participation in Chile. New York: Berghahn Books. 296 pp. Hb.: US$92.40. ISBN‐13: 978‐1‐78238‐546‐2.

Some double tasks of ethnography and anthropology: reflections on audiovisual ethnography

Suhr, Christian and Rane Willerslev (eds.) 2013. Transcultural montage. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. 300 pp. Pb.: US$49.95/£32.00. ISBN: 978‐0‐85745‐964‐0.