Month: September 2013

‘Wrapped in the Flag of Israel’ Author Earns Heart at East Award

On May 21, 2013, in Tel Aviv, the Heart at East Lifetime Achievement Plaque was bestowed upon Prof. Smadar Lavie. Her scholarly and activist voice for the rights of Mizrahi Jewish women living in Israel received formal recognition. Lavie’s two decades of ethnographic research and community leadership to better the lives of those within these populations not only earned her the award, but also led her to write Wrapped in the Flag of Israel, to be published in April 2014. Below, Lavie explains why Heart at East is significant—both within the State of Israel and for herself.

 

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Smadar Lavie
— Photo by Jutta Henglein-Bildau

I was so thrilled to receive Facebook messages from Reuven Abarjel, co-founder of the Jerusalem Black Panthers, and Shira Ohayon, a longtime Mizrahi feminist and educational director of Israel’s Andalusian Orchestra, that I was to be awarded the Heart at East Lifetime Achievement Plaque in May 2013.

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Extra-Terrestrial Life: Good or Bad News?

Is there life beyond Earth? And how will the human race — specifically our media — react if there is? Civilizations Beyond Earth: Extraterrestrial Life and Society, which will be released as a paperback this month, is a collection of essays that address the (plausible) possibility that we are not alone in the universe. If that is true, and if we do one day make contact — wonders contributor Morris Jones — how will news outlets portray such an event? And will that lead to worldwide awe or global panic?

 

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Let’s assume that evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life is discovered tomorrow.

 

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The Man, The Legend: General de Gaulle

If you’ve ever visited France, it is likely you are familiar with the name Charles de Gaulle. The Cold War politics of the widely revered former general and president of France are highlighted in General de Gaulle’s Cold War: Challenging American Hegemony, 1963-68, published this month. Author Garret Joseph Martin writes why these policies—respected by French countrymen and women—so dismayed U.S. leaders of the day. The author shares his thoughts about the figurehead, below.

 

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Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of General Charles de Gaulle?

 

Garret Martin: More than forty years after his death, General Charles de Gaulle remains a towering figure in France, and he was arguably the most influential Frenchman of the twentieth century. Growing up in France, you simply could not escape his presence and his legacy—see the multiple monuments in his honor and the streets named after him.

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Aloha to Beginnings: Writing ‘Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation’

A talk-story, or mo`olelo, is an informal and traditionally Hawaiian way of sharing stories to preserve them for posterity. In The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation, to be published this month, author Judith Schachter pairs these informal conversations with fieldwork observations to give readers a view into the island culture post-U.S. annexation. Below she shares the story of her beginning in Hawai`i, and how her work took root. 

 

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My work in Hawai`i began “in small,” with the idea of adding a chapter to my book on American kinship, family, and adoption. I intended to see what happened to Polynesian customs when the U.S. brought its legal system to the Pacific Island state.

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Is All Repression Created Equal?

The recent revelations by Edward Snowden about the extensive online information-gathering activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) have led to a flurry of comparisons in the German media between the American agency and the infamous East German Ministry for State Security, or Stasi. According to a popular statistic, the Stasi could have filled 42,000 filing cabinets with the information it had gathered over 40 years—the NSA 48,000,000,000! Chancellor Angela Merkel, a former East German herself, has rejected such comparisons as crude and misleading. Below, in an excerpt from the introduction to Becoming East German: Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler, to be published this month, co-editor Andrew I. Port discusses the extent to which such comparisons are appropriate and potentially valuable.

 

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Let us pose a rhetorical question that is sure to raise some hackles: was the GDR truly more repressive than the Federal Republic—or other Western states, for that matter?

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Life Beyond Earth? Survey Says…

In 2005, a survey of 1,000 U.S. men and women of various backgrounds revealed that 6 in 10 Americans believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life. If this slice of the public is correct, what does it mean for our world? That is one of the questions editors Douglas A. Vakoch and Albert A. Harrison attempt to answer through the collection Civilizations Beyond Earth: Extraterrestrial Life and Society, which was released in paperback August 2013. Below, volume contributor George Pettinico begs the question of the American reaction: How will the U.S. react if we discover life outside of our blue planet?

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Imagine the day, if and when it should come, that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) confirms there is indeed intelligent life on other planets.

 

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Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for August

Journeys
Volume 14, Issue 1
This issue discusses railway guides in South Wales, the work of Wilfred Thesiger, tourist blogs in Southwestern Ethiopia, and a former Soviet prison camp. It also features book reviews.

Anthropology of the Middle East
Volume 8, Issue 1
This is a very particular issue, and its topic–art in the Middle East–is new. All of the writers seem deeply involved in their subject and present their research in a fresh and spirited way.

Museum Worlds
Volume 1, Issue 1
This is the first issue of our newest journal. Museum Worlds represents trends in museum-related research and practice and builds a profile of various approaches to the expanding discipline of museum studies.

Transfers
Volume 3, Issue 2
This issue features articles exploring many subjects within mobility scholarship as well as film, museum, and book reviews. 

German Politics & Society
Volume 31, Issue 2
This special issue is devoted to the experience surrounding migration from Turkey to Germany and was motivated by the 50th anniversary of the first Turkish migrant marked in 2011.

Anthropology in Action
Volume 20, Issue 2
This special issue on the study of organizations investigates the dynamic nature of boundaries arising from historical and social contexts. 

French Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 31, Issue 2
This journal explores modern and contemporary France from the perspectives of the social sciences, history, and cultural analysis. It also examines the relationship of France to the larger world, especially Europe, the United States, and the former French Empire. 

Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques
Volume 39, Issue 2
This special issue comprises articles exploring issues of genocide and the Holocaust, especially as they relate to notions of betrayal, justice, and social bonds. 

Regions and Cohesion
Volume 3, Issue 2
This journal promotes the comparative examination of the human and environmental impacts of various aspects of regional integration across geographic areas, time periods, and policy arenas.

Sibirica
Volume 12, Issue 2
This special issue comprises articles based on papers presented at the session “Baikal Issues under Persistent State Care” at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers.

 

A Matter of Morality

Originally published in 2009, The Anthropology of Moralities, edited by Monica Heintz, will be published in paperback this month. The collection deals with the collision of moralities as human beings exist on a more and more globalized scale. Below, the editor discusses what first interested her in a moral study and what made it, and keeps it, important to the field of anthropology.

 

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Somehow after 1989 the Eastern bloc got obsessed with values. How could it be otherwise for people who had lived with double sets of values in the public and private spheres and who saw all their public values officially collapse in one night?

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Blackface in Berlin Play: Racism or Tradition?

In January 2012, a white man was cast for the part of an African American man in “I’m Not Rappaport” for the German adaptation of the U.S. play. The plan to use blackface makeup—common in American theater up until the Civil Rights movement—to change the man’s appearance stirred controversy, and was called out as racist. Co-editor of Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914, Martin Klimke addresses the sensitive subject of race in Germany in light of this event.

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Germany’s place in the Black Atlantic might have been peripheral in a geographical sense. Intellectually and discursively, however, it played an often underestimated but significant role in the formation of modern social, racial, and national identities.

 

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