Month: December 2015

International Migrants Day

On December 18, the international community recognizes and celebrates the rights of migrants around the world. Since year 2000, the international community has recognized International Migrants Day to highlight the human rights of migrants and express our support and solidarity.

 

To honor the day Berghahn is offering a 25% discount on all our Refugee & Migration Studies books for the next 30 days. At checkout, simply enter the code IMD15.

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Berghahn Journals is delighted to present a Free Virtual Issue dedicated to migration with hope that this will contribute to the overall discussion of the lives of migrants.

Click Here to Access the Special Virtual Issue! 

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Below is a selection of relevant titles on Refugee & Migration StudiesInternational Migrants Day

 

BUSH BOUND
Young Men and Rural Permanence in Migrant West Africa
Paolo Gaibazzi

Continue reading “International Migrants Day” →

Željko Jokić: Researching Assault Sorcery

This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between D. S. Farrer and Željko Jokić. Farrer is the special issue editor for Social Analysis Volume 58, Issue 1, and Jokić is the author of the article “Shamanic Battleground: Magic, Sorcery, and Warrior Shamanism in Venezuela” appearing in that issue. Below, Jokić answers a series of questions related to her article in Social Analysis.

 

This is the eighth in a series of interviews with contributors to this volume. Find the previous contributions on our blog.

 

Continue reading “Željko Jokić: Researching Assault Sorcery” →

Nationalism, Communal Violence, and Tamil Tiger Devotion

This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between D. S. Farrer and Michael Roberts. Farrer is the special issue editor for Social Analysis Volume 58, Issue 1, and Roberts is the author of the article “Encompassing Empowerment in Ritual, War, and Assassination: Tantric Principles in Tamil Tiger Instrumentalities” appearing in that issue. Below, Roberts answers a series of questions related to her article in Social Analysis.

This is the seventh in a series of interviews with contributors to this volume. Find the previous contributions on our blog.

 

Continue reading “Nationalism, Communal Violence, and Tamil Tiger Devotion” →

Material Agency as a Challenge to Empirical Research?

nature and cultureThe following is a guest blog post from Stefan Böschen, Jochen Gläser, Martin Meister, and Cornelius Schubert, guest editors of Nature and Culture Volume 10, Issue 3.

 

Our interest in compiling this special issue was sparked by a curious imbalance that prevails in the recent turn to materiality in social research. The current proclamations for (re)considering materiality are mostly levelled at theoretical conceptualizations. Framing materiality as a theoretical challenge is of course necessary, but this debate has little to say about how to deal with materiality in terms of empirical research. We think that considering materiality as a purely theoretical challenge is taking the second step before the first. What might be even worse is that decoupling conceptual treatments of material agency from empirical research makes the “material” of material agency itself disappear behind abstract concepts. It seems that although there is substantial interest in the research on materiality and agency, there also is a marked carelessness, if not helplessness, to how deal with this challenge in empirical research.

 

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Supernatural Powers and a “Discourse of Decline”

This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between D. S. Farrer and J. David Neidel. Farrer is the special issue editor for Social Analysis Volume 58, Issue 1, and Neidel is the author of the article “Discourse of Decline: Local Perspectives on Magic in Highland Jambi, Indonesia” appearing in that issue. Below, Neidel answers a series of questions related to her article in Social Analysis.

This is the sixth in a series of interviews with contributors to this volume. Find the previous contributions on our blog.

 

 

What drew you to the study of War Magic & Warrior Religion?

I conducted research for my Ph.D. dissertation in the highlands of Sumatra, Indonesia. My research project focused on a national park- community conflict, so I was not intending to study war magic. Supernatural powers, spirit possession, and other related phenomena, however, played such a large role in the local culture (as seen in legends, oral histories, village ceremonies, and actual practice) that I started collecting data on the subject as a side project.

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Why Every Country Must Become “An Immigrant Country”

TheoriaThis is a guest post written by Adam K Webb, contributor to Volume 62, Number 142 of the journal Theoria. Adam K Webb is the author of the article titled “Not an Immigrant Country? Non-Western Racism and the Duties of Global Citizenship.”

What is an “immigrant country”? The phrase brings to mind for most people countries like America and Australia made up largely of settlers from elsewhere and their descendants.

But the striking thing about the phrase is how often it is used in denial. Germany, despite receiving millions of guest workers from Turkey and elsewhere, insisted until the 1990s that it was “not an immigrant country,” before eventually having to recognise reality and adjust its laws to fit. Most of Europe now is made up of “immigrant countries,” so to speak. Continue reading “Why Every Country Must Become “An Immigrant Country”” →

Habits of Austerity

The following is a guest blog post written by Jürgen Schraten.  Below, Schraten discusses his chapter in the recently published book, Economy for and Against Democracy.

 

 

I wrote the first chapter of the book Economy For and Against Democracy, edited by Keith Hart and published this month by Berghahn Books – you can buy the book here with a 50% discount until 20 December; use the code HAR449. The chapter is titled “Habits of austerity: financialisation and new ways of dealing with money”. As the title suggests, it focuses on the financialisation of everyday life in South Africa within the global context of the concomitant expansion of financialised markets and government austerity policies.

 

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Reading Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt

“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.” ― Hannah Arendt

 

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. Read more about her life here.

Below, we’ve curated a reading list related to Hannah Arendt and her political philosophy from a selection of our books and journals.

 

 

 

 

The Legacy of Liberal JudaismThe Legacy of Liberal Judaism:
Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Conversation
Ned Curthoys

 

“Most readers will finish this work with a renewed appreciation of the continuing significance of the moral vision articulated by these exemplars of liberal Judaism.” · Choice

 

“The book then provides various interesting challenges to scholarship on Arendt, as well as the material on thinkers brought together here as part of the tradition of Liberal Judaism. All this make The Legacy of Liberal Judaism of relevance beyond an exclusively scholarly debate.” · Patterns of Prejudice

Continue reading “Reading Hannah Arendt” →

Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Issues Published in November

 

Anthropology of the Middle East

Volume 10, Issue 1

In this issue, we present contributions that deal with museums, museology and their approaches to the new social situations through which they must navigate.

 

Transfers

Volume 5, Issue 3

This issue features a special section on settler-colonial mobilities

 

Social Analysis

Volume 59, Issue 3

This issue covers a range of topics including fieldwork relations, street art, economic practices, and more.

 

Anthropological Journal of European Cultures

Volume 24, Issue 2

The thematic focus of this issue is Urban Place-making Between Art, Qualitative Research and Politics.

 

French Politics, Culture & Society

Volume 33, Issue 3

This issue explores themes of race and racism in France.

 

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

Volume 33, Issue 2

The issue’s special section on ‘Intimacy Revisited’ features articles that situate dominant understandings of ‘intimacy’ in its associations with sexuality, but then expand to examine intimacy as a much broader empirical issue.

 

Nature and Culture

Volume 10, Issue 3

This special issue is motivated by the question of why materiality is so difficult to deal with in terms of research methods. As a whole, the contributions illustrate the variety of research problems in the social sciences to which material agency matters, as well as the methodological challenges included in the empirical investigation of things.

 

Critical Survey

Volume 27, Issue 2

This special issue is devoted to Victorian literature and science.