Excerpt

Austrian “Gypsies” in the Italian archives

Paola Trevisan

In the spirit of Gypsy, Roma, Traveller History Month in June, we invite you to read the following excerpt from “Austrian ‘Gypsies’ in the Italian archives: Historical ethnography on multiple border crossings at the beginning of the twentieth century” by Paola Trevisan.

This article is featured in Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, a part of the Berghahn Open Anthro collection of open-access journals.

Podcast

Salon B

Episode 7

Labor

In celebration of International Workers' Day having taken place on May 1st and Karl Marx having been born on May 5th, our theme for this month’s episode is labor.

This episode features Stephanie Fortado, co-editor of Histories of a Radical Book: E. P. Thompson and The Making of the English Working Class; Raffaella Sarti, editor of What is Work?: Gender at the Crossroads of Home, Family, and Business from the Early Modern Era to the Present; and a poem from John Greening, whose most recent collection, A Post Card To, was published this year by Red Squirrel Press.

FocaalBlog

Jaime A Alves

F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology

‘Blue lives matter,’ says the mantra of police fragility. The mythology about defenseless officers being hunted and killed by criminals is indeed a powerful one, mobilized by right-wing politicians endorsed by police unions in countries such as Brazil and the United States.

Berghahn Journals

Open Anthropology

A subscribe-to-open (S2O) Open Access model piloted by Berghahn in partnership with Libraria and Knowledge Unlatched! The aim is to convert 13 Berghahn Anthropology journals to full Open Access on an on-going and sustainable basis.

Digital Archaeology

Unlocking the Love-Lock: The History and Heritage of a Contemporary Custom

Enhanced Love-locks Catalog

Ceri Houlbrook cataloged over 700 love-locks added to Oxford Road Bridge in Manchester from 2014-2019. Using her archaeological data and Timeline.JS, users are here able to view the data collection across 62 months of deposition. At the default zoom, individual dates will indicate all items cataloged on that day. The catalog contains both what are traditionally known as padlocks and “divergent deposits”, or objects that take the form of an array of items from nightclub entrance wristbands to disposable lighters, the variety of which includes obscurity but also pieces that are clearly more personal, even sentimentally valuable.

Featured Series

Worlds of Memory

Editors:

Jeffrey Olick, University of Virginia
Aline Sierp, Maastricht University
Jenny Wüstenberg, Nottingham Trent University

Published in collaboration with the Memory Studies Association

This book series publishes innovative and rigorous scholarship in the interdisciplinary and global field of memory studies. Memory studies includes all inquiries into the ways we—both individually and collectively— are shaped by the past. How do we represent the past to ourselves and to others? How do those representations shape our actions and understandings, whether explicitly or unconsciously?

Photo Gallery

Silence, Screen, and Spectacle

Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information

Edited by Lindsey A. Freeman, Benjamin Nienass, and Rachel Daniell

In an age of information and new media the relationships between remembering and forgetting have changed. This volume addresses the tension between loud and often spectacular histories and those forgotten pasts we strain to hear. Employing social and cultural analysis, the essays within examine mnemonic technologies both new and old, and cover subjects as diverse as U.S. internment camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, the Canadian Indian Residential School system, Israeli memorial videos, and the desaparecidos in Argentina.

Companion Site

Recollectus: A Network of Collections and Recollections

CALL FOR PAPERS: (DE)COMMEMORATION

The toppling of the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England, by activists on June 7 has spotlighted the ubiquitous presence of memorials that glorify colonial and racist legacies. In the wake of protests in 2020 against police violence and racism, calls to dismantle memorials have reverberated around the globe.

AJEC Blog

Ruins and Precarity in European Peripheries

Ognjen Kojanić

Studying political economy forces us to confront uneven development (Gill and Kasmir 2016; Kasmir and Gill 2018; Smith 2008) and the class relations, power differentials, and discourses of difference that accompany it. My article “Theory from the Peripheries: What Can the Anthropology of Postsocialism Offer to European Anthropology?” (Kojanić 2020) is grounded in such a dynamic and relational understanding of space in capitalism. In the article, I highlight analyses of the discursive construction of places as peripheral and the political-economic processes of peripheralization, showing how they often intersect.