Month: July 2013

The Hearth of the Home

Editors David G. Anderson, Robert P. Wishart, and Virginie Vaté look from many angles—history, cosmology, and architecture—at the idea of home in About the Hearth: Perspectives on the Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North, which will be published next month. Below, co-editor Wishart discusses the importance of home and shares a bit about how life is constructed in the Arctic North.

 

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Berghahn Books: What drew you ‘to the hearth,’ or to the study of the home in the circumpolar north?

 

Robert P. Wishart: For myself it came originally through observations on the importance of building cabins among the Gwich’in.

Continue reading “The Hearth of the Home” →

Knowledge, an Anthropological Commodity

Within the pages of his newly published book, An Anthropological Trompe L’Oeil for a Common World: An Essay On The Economy Of Knowledge, published by Berghahn last month, Alberto Corsín Jiménez addresses the value and framework of knowledge, theory, and scholarship. Below the author discusses the sources of inspiration for the book, the commodity of knowledge, and the trick that not everything is exactly as it first appears.

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Although I did not quite know it at the time, I began writing this book roughly at the time of my appointment to a university lectureship at the University of Manchester in 2003.

 

The university had only just merged with the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology — a merger hailed in various contexts as a harbinger of the changes to come in UK higher education. Continue reading “Knowledge, an Anthropological Commodity” →

Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for June/July

Asia Pacific World
Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2013
Includes transcripts of two keynote speeches from recent International Association for Asia Pacific Studies conferences.

Sibirica
Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2013
Explores Siberia’s important role in the study of the emergence of pottery, maintaining the communal knowledge systems of the indigenous peoples of the circumpolar North and the process of cosmopolitan learning among hosts in a hospitality couchsurfing network.

International Journal of Social Quality
Features empirical papers from a large cross-cultural research project investigating social quality across six Asia-Pacific societies.

Journal of Romance Studies
Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2013
Five articles covering a broad spectrum of topics including: the workings of the Islamic community in Italy, queer and intersex childhood in Argentine filmmaking, the literary and political work of Tunisian poet and theorist Abdelwahab Meddeb.

Anthropology in Action
Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2013
Explores the relationship between modernist, global health promotion agendas and a more locally rooted approaches to improving health and wellbeing.

Social Analysis
Volume 57, Number 1, Spring 2013
This special issue is titled: Time and the Field.  By exploring and unfolding the temporal properties of the field, anthropology can favorably complement and extend the (spatially anchored) notion of multi-sited fieldwork with one of multi-temporal ethnography.

European Judaism
Volume 46, Number 1, Spring 2013
This issue gathers lectures delivered at four of the most recent Annual International Jewish-Christian-Muslim Student Conferences as well as other papers that reflect aspects of new thinking in the field of interfaith dialogue.

Israel Studies Review
Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2013
This issue begins with the Forum, which focuses on a very current issue in Israel–the major attacks on, or abuses of, academic freedom.

European Comic Art
Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2013
This issue is devoted to comics adaptations of literary works.

Girlhood Studies
Volume 6, Number 2, Spring 2013
This is the first issue of Girlhood Studies that we have devoted primarily to method and methodology related to deepening an understanding of girlhood and girls’ lives.

Nature and Culture
Volume 8, Number 2, Spring 2013
This issue covers a variety of topics such as the German energy transition, Love and Kill as mixed constructs in hunting and shifts in governance ushered in by the sustainability paradigm are reshaping knowledge governance.

Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
Volume 22, Number 1, Spring 2013
Special issue on history and place-making.

 

‘Pregnancy in Practice’ and a Royal Baby

Parents preparing to welcome a new bundle of joy follow certain conventions, from decorating the nursery to deciding on baby names, explains Sallie Han in her newly released volume, Pregnancy in Practice: Expectation and Experience in the Contemporary US. Below the author discusses the recent royal birth along these guidelines and explains that though they may be parents of the future King of England, Prince William and Duchess Kate Middleton are perhaps not so different from common parents as thought.

 

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The Duchess of Cambridge and I have this in common: We shared a due date. She is the new mother of a future King of England. I am the new author of a book, Pregnancy in Practice: Expectation and Experience in the Contemporary US. I believe that the period of gestation for my book has been considerably longer.

 

Continue reading “‘Pregnancy in Practice’ and a Royal Baby” →

Hot Off the Presses – New Paperback Releases

 

HeinonenYouth

Newly released paperbacks from Berghahn:

Youth Gangs and Street Children: Culture, Nurture and Masculinity in Ethiopia, Paula Heinonen

Funerals in Africa: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon, Michael Jindra and Joël Noret

Gardening the World: Agency, Identity and the Ownership of Water, Veronica Strang

Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Children and Adolescence, Ute Eickelkamp

Hot Off the Presses – New Book Releases

Newly released titles from Berghahn’s Anthropology, Colonialism, Economics, Politics, and HistoryCorsinAnthropological lists:

Creating a Nation with Cloth: Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora, Ping-Ann Addo

Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara

An Anthropological Trompe L’Oeil for a Common World: An Essay on the Economy of Knowledge, Alberto Corsín Jiménez

Framing Africa Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema, Nigel Eltringham

Tax Justice and the Political Economy of Global Capitalism, 1945 to the Present, Jeremy Leaman and Attiya Waris

Routes into the Abyss Coping with Crises in the 1930s, Helmut Konrad and Wolfgang Maderthaner

Bedouin of Mount Sinai: An Anthropological Study of their Political Economy, Emanuel Marx

Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

Family Upheaval Generation, Mobility and Relatedness among Pakistani Migrants in Denmark, Mikkel Rytter

Up Close and Personal: On Peripheral Perspectives and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge, Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka

Astonishment and Evocation: The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne

The Gaddi Beyond Pastoralism: Making Place in the Indian Himalayas, Anja Wagner

The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, Anton Weiss-Wendt

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Mount Sinai

In this excerpt from his new book The Bedouin of Mount Sinai: An Anthropological Study of their Political Economy, published June 2013, Emmanuel Marx reflects on how a short visit led to a decade-long study of the Bedouin people of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

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Soon after the Israeli forces occupied Sinai in 1967 the peninsula was inundated with many kinds of tourists and journalists. I avidly listened to their glowing accounts of the Bedouin of Sinai. Yet for several years I hesitated to visit Sinai. I wavered between fear and hope that I would be tempted to study the Bedouin, and again experience the intellectual and emotional tumult of my earlier study of the Negev Bedouin.

Continue reading “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Mount Sinai” →

Writing the Wrongs of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, published June 2013, offers a wide-ranging view of the Spanish slave trade, from Caribbean trafficking to Spanish antislavery protests. Editors Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara speak to the trials and rewards of editing the collection of work, their influences, and a prediction of what will be the future important studies in the field.

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Berghahn Books: What drew each of you to the study of the Spanish empire’s Atlantic holdings?

Continue reading “Writing the Wrongs of the Atlantic Slave Trade” →

Research & Reward in Central Australia

Called a “timely collection” and a “worthwhile contribution” to the discourse of Aboriginal life, Growing up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence was first published in June 2011 and was published last month in paperback. Editor Ute Eikelkamp revisits the volume and describes the joy and reward of fieldwork that led to its publication.

 

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Paying attention to the life experiences and capacities of the Aboriginal children I had known as mediators, shifting presences and welcome companions for some years during field research with the senior knowledge bearers in a central Australian community has been a most rewarding experience, both personally and intellectually.

Continue reading “Research & Reward in Central Australia” →

Successful Transformation or Failed Transition: ‘United Germany’ Presents Lively Debate

East meets West in United Germany: Debating Processes and Prospects, to be published this month, a collection of works that compares and contrasts German sentiments since the fall of the Berlin Wall nearly a quarter of a century ago. Editor Konrad Jarausch answers questions about the collection and the roots of his passion for the subject.

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What drew you to the study of Germany’s re-unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

 

Since we had just bought an apartment at the Bayerischer Platz in Schöneberg during the summer of 1989, I was able to witness a good deal of the “peaceful revolution” firsthand. Moreover, as co-chair of an IREX commission of GDR and U.S. historians I became personally involved in the transition difficulties of my East German colleagues. After so many decades of Cold War stagnation, it seemed that history had returned with a vengeance – posing a challenge for explanation which I could not resist.

Continue reading “Successful Transformation or Failed Transition: ‘United Germany’ Presents Lively Debate” →