Meet the Editor: Thomas F. King

Heritage/CRM extraordinaire Thomas F. King discusses the allure of archaeology, the evolution of the Cultural Resource Management and Heritage Studies fields, and what it’s like to collaborate with fourteen contributors. What drew you to the study of archaeology?   When I was 5 years old, my mother took me to see Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia.’ I […]

MINDS: THE ORIGINS OF MIXED HARVEST BY ROB SWIGART

Listen to Mixed Harvest Chapter 2 here. The recently published Mixed Harvest by Rob Swigart is Berghahn’s latest feat of historical fiction, digging into the deep past of human development and its consequences through a combination of storytelling and dialogue. From the first encounter between a Neanderthal woman and a Modern Human she called Traveler […]

The Emotional Language of Flowers

The following is an excerpt from Ute Frevert’s “The Emotional Language of Flowers,” a chapter found in FEELINGS MATERIALIZED: Emotions, Bodies, and Things in Germany, 1500–1950, edited by Derek Hillard, Heikki Lempa, and Russell Spinney. Learn more about the book here. Statistics tell us that the average German currently spends more than one hundred Euros […]

Meet the Author: Venetia Johannes

Dr. Venetia Johannes’s recent ethnographic monograph Nourishing the Nation: Food as National Identity in Catalonia explores the everyday experience of national identity in Catalonia through the lens of food. As an everyday object of consumption, food provides unique insight into the lived realities of Catalan nationalism, and how Catalans experience and express their national identity […]

Action Research, Ethnography, and Intercultural Learning: The CASA-Sevilla Program

by Davydd Greenwood, editorial board member of Learning and Teaching Globalization means that living effectively in intercultural environments, including at home, is a professional and life necessity. Years back, the answer was to “take a foreign language”, do study abroad, or “see the world”, though this only applied to a small percentage of college students. […]

Remembering the Holocaust

The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau—as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism and to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides. […]

Disobedience in Paradise: can we extend a loving frame of mind in time for the Amazon?

Rupert J. M. Medd, words, www.instagram.com/eyesotherwiseWalter Wust, aerial photography, www.walterwust.com Hélène Guyot, illustrations, www.firstrainofsummer.com UNITED NATIONS, NEW YORK, September 21, 2019…More than 30 scientists and researchers gathered at the eve of the UN Climate Action Summit at the UN’s headquarters to call on the scientific community at large to save the Amazon. For context, the […]

Building Bridges and Scaling Spires: A Brief History of Berghahn Books

Introducing the new Berghahn eBooks Library

We are pleased to announce an expanding list of eBooks available for download directly via our site. Right now we have nearly 1000 titles online. You can use the new eBooks browse filter to view eBooks by subject - for example:

All eBooks purchased through our site can be downloaded to your preferred eBook reader and are also stored in your personalized login area at my.berghahnbooks.com for easy access.

See the FAQ page for more details.

New in Paperback

Reluctant Skeptic

Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar Culture

Harry T. Craver

“Harry Craver’s rich and nuanced study revisits Kracauer’s nonconformist views and underscores the religious context in which they emerged… In portraying Kracauer’s reflections on religious concepts as emblematic of post–World War I German intellectual life, Craver sets the stage for a novel, intriguing discussion of Weimar modernity and its crisis.” • American Historical Review

New in Paperback

From Self-fulfilment to Survival of the Fittest

Work in European Cinema from the 1960s to the Present

Ewa Mazierska

“What Mazierska’s invaluable book demonstrates…[is] the importance of expanding our investigations of work into unemployment, leisure and idleness, in order to help us understand the ongoing privileging of precarisation by capital, as well as to help us dismantle the unquestioned edification of today’s ‘labour idols.’” • Studies in European Cinema

New in Paperback

Boro, L'Île d'Amour

The Films of Walerian Borowczyk

Edited by Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda, and Michał Oleszczyk

“The contributors to this collection use new archival sources to provide a comprehensive map of Boro’s career and to reestablish his place in the history of Polish and European avant-garde and art cinema.  All the essays are well informed and clearly written; collectively, they provide valuable insights into Boro's often puzzling, sometimes scandalous motivations and productions.” • Choice

Featured Title

On Violence in History

Edited by Philip Dwyer and Mark Stephen Micale

Is global violence on the decline? Steven Pinker’s highly-publicized argument that human violence across the world has been dramatically abating continues to influence discourse among academics and the general public alike. In this provocative volume, a cast of eminent historians interrogate Pinker’s thesis by exposing the realities of violence throughout human history. In doing so, they reveal the history of human violence to be richer, more thought-provoking, and considerably more complicated than Pinker claims.

Featured Title

Sustaining Indigenous Songs

Contemporary Warlpiri Ceremonial Life in Central Australia

Georgia Curran

“This is a richly detailed ethnography of Warlpiri ritual and song… [It] offers a deeply textured analysis of the Kurdiji ceremony which unpacks the ceremonial structure of kin relations, the dances of ‘travelling ancestral women’ and the semantics of the song series performed by the men.” • Fiona Magowan, Queen’s University Belfast

Featured Title

Money Counts

Revisiting Economic Calculation

Edited by Mario Schmidt and Sandy Ross

“This compact collection focuses on money as number, seen from a wide range of perspectives. The style is impressively dialectical, offering hope that anthropologists may soon be open to more promising ways of engaging with money.” • Keith Hart, University of Pretoria

Featured Series

Series:

Anthropology at Work

“The book is very good. It is well structured, has a clear argument, provides a thorough, varied and comprehensive set of analytical perspectives, brings forth relevant and well-presented empirical examples and has wide-reaching implications.” • Halvard Vike, University of South-Eastern Norway

Archaeogaming

An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games

Andrew Reinhard

Video games exemplify contemporary material objects, resources, and spaces that people use to define their culture. This book serves as a general introduction to "archaeogaming"; it describes the intersection of archaeology and video games and applies archaeological method and theory into understanding game-spaces as both site and artifact.

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Ritual Retellings

Luangan Healing Performances through Practice

Isabell Herrmans

Belian is an exceptionally lively tradition of shamanistic curing rituals performed by the Luangans, a politically marginalized population of Indonesian Borneo. This volume explores the significance of these rituals in practice and asks what belian rituals do — socially, politically, and existentially — for particular people in particular circumstances...

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