Blog

Crafting Chinese Memories

The Art and Materiality of Storytelling

by Katherine Swancutt

Storytelling is always an entertaining and lively theme, but it’s surprisingly elusive to come to grips with conceptually. This is especially the case when pairing storytelling with other great warhorses of social theory like art, materiality, and memory, which often require fine-grained interdisciplinary detail to bring them fully to light. Factor in the study of China from ancient times to the present day – with an expansive focus that includes not only the Han ethnic majority, but also China’s ethnic minorities, the strange, and the Other – and you have the makings of a rather epic volume on one of the oldest and richest civilizations in the world.

Podcast

Salon B

Episode 8

Catastrophe

In this episode of Salon B, our senior social science editor, Tony Mason, talks with the series editors of Catastrophes in Context, a Berghahn series that aims to bring critical attention to the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that create disasters, out of natural hazards or political events, and that shape the responses.

FocaalBlog

Steven Sampson

Cabal Anthropology – or whether the anthropology of belief helps us understand conspiracism

QAnon, Deep State, pedophile plots, George Soros, stolen elections, 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers, 5G penetration, the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers… We slow-working, ever so reflective anthropologists are being inundated with one conspiracy theory after another. A May 2021 survey reveals that 15% of Americans and 23% of those who call themselves Republicans believe that ‘the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation’ (PRRI 2021).

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

Nearly the New World

The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945

Joanna Newman

In the years leading up to the Second World War, increasingly desperate European Jews looked to far-flung destinations such as Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica in search of refuge from the horrors of Hitler’s Europe. Nearly the New World tells the extraordinary story of Jewish refugees who overcame persecution and sought safety in the West Indies from the 1930s through the end of the war. At the same time, it gives an unsparing account of the xenophobia and bureaucratic infighting that nearly prevented their rescue—and that helped to seal the fate of countless other European Jews for whom escape was never an option.

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.