Author: Berghahn Author

The Ethical Sequence of Eugenics?

If you could modify the human population to be more intelligent or more beautiful, would you? When this idea of eugenics — or selectively breeding a population with more “desirable” traits — was first popularized in the twentieth century, such contemporary figures as Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, H.G. Wells, and, not surprisingly, Adolf Hitler, were supporters. Now, with renewed interest in the science of eugenics, editors Calum MacKellar and Christopher Bechtel explore the unsavory aspects and issues in The Ethics of the New Eugenics, to be published this month. Following, the editors explain what led them to study this science, and what may be ahead for the field.

 

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What drew you to the study of eugenics?

 

Calum MacKellar: Over the many years that I have worked in the field of human bioethics, I have always suspected that the topic of eugenics would eventually come back to haunt society.

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The Author and Ingmar Bergman: Two Legacies Endure

John Orr’s proposal for a text on Swedish director Ingmar Bergman first came to Berghahn in 2009. In September 2010, however, the prominent film scholar passed away with a manuscript in peer review. It was Professor Orr’s wife, Anne, who took up the finalization of the book, shepherding it through stages of review, revision and production to its publication. Now, this month, The Demons of Modernity: Ingmar Bergman and European Cinema will be published. Following, Anne Orr, who wrote about her experience in the volume’s Afterword, briefly introduces the book and what it meant to help bring it to fruition.

 

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When my husband John Orr died suddenly during the writing of The Demons of Modernity, it was comforting to be assured by two of the foremost experts on Ingmar Bergman – Peter Cowie and Maaret Koskinen – that they considered the manuscript as it stood an original and worthwhile contribution to studies of Bergman.

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Egress and Ingress: Exploring ‘Points of Passage’

Ellis Island in New York City is a historically recognized entrance point for European migrants to the United States. But if this is so well-known, then why do we know so little about the points of departure? This is one of many research questions that informed the writing of Points of Passage: Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880-1914, published last October. Following, an excerpt from the volume — bookended by comments from editor Tobias Brinkmann — delves deeper into these queries.

 

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When I began researching the history of Jewish migrations in the 1990s I concentrated on immigrants. I collected sources on the settlement of Jewish immigrants from small villages in the Central and Eastern European countryside in Chicago between 1840 and 1900. Within a few years the immigrants built a Jewish community, prospered economically and became respected members of Chicago’s social and political circles. My first book concentrated on two major research questions that continue to drive immigration studies: the impact of forces strengthening or weakening ethnic communities, and the impact of assimilation processes on immigrants.

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The Reciprocal Relationship of Media and Movement

Editors Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Erling Sivertsen and Rolf Werenskjold’s volume Media and Revolt: Strategies and Performances from the 1960s to the Present was published last month. Following, the editors introduce the timely volume and share an excerpt from the Introduction. 

 

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Looking at journals, television, or on the internet in these days, news dealing with protests abounds: the upheavals around the Euro-Maidan in the Ukraine, anti-governmental protests in Bangkok, the “Occupy-Gezi-Park”-manifestations in Istanbul or protest actions of NGOs like Greenpeace against oil companies or whale hunters. Obviously protest has an enormous “news value”: it offers spectacular pictures, it makes evident political conflicts and decisions by polarizing their actors, and it offers media the chance to perform as center of society.

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Variations on an Educational Theme

When the traditional educational system of colonizing societies was disseminated to indigenous societies, it was not accepted by the colonized “as-is,” but was adopted as merely an underlying framework. This hybridization led to a multitude of varied, yet similar, educational systems across the post-imperialized world. In the following excerpt from the Introduction of Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post)Colonial Education, to be published this month, editors Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere further explain the connections within modern educational culture.

 

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Connecting Histories of Education bears a double meaning. The volume connects historians of education from South Asia and other parts of the world to enhance a comparative perspective and create a wider research network beyond the Euro-Western world. In addition, it presents local, regional, national and transnational research, with the goal of highlighting the interconnectedness of histories of education in the modern world.

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Uzbekistan, Social Network of Choice

In the Republic of Uzbekistan, being Uzbek has less to do with one’s lineage and more to do with one’s allegiance to a society. The advantages of this voluntary membership within the Uzbek “social network” are explored in Variations on Uzbek Identity: Strategic Choices, Cognitive Schemas and Political Constraints in Identification Processes. Below, Peter Finke discusses his attraction to Uzbekistan, his writing process, and the volume’s potentially controversial reception.

 

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Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of Uzbekistan, specifically “Uzbek Identity”?

 

Peter Finke: My general interest in Central Asia goes back a long way into childhood fantasies of roaming horse riders and the like. Most of Uzbekistan does not really fit that well into this and indeed my early research in the region was on nomadic pastoralists in Western Mongolia. It was after I took up a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute to work on identity issues that I not only switched topics but also field sites.

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Vienna, Dream City within a ‘Paradoxical Republic’

For the next three weeks, New York City will resonate with the energy of Austria. Vienna: City of Dreams will feature a slate of events presented by Carnegie Hall. Capping the festival will be symphony performances of the Vienna Philharmonic, an orchestra which has been celebrated since its first concert in 1842. This arrangement of musicians became a cultural beacon in post-World War II Austria, the subject of Oliver Rathkolb’s The Paradoxical Republic: Austria 1945-2005. Following, in an excerpt from the volume, which will soon be published as a paperback, Rathkolb discusses the Philharmonic’s presence in a discordant time.

 

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In 1953 . . . neither the Vienna Staatsoper nor the Burgtheater had yet been rebuilt; they were not yet functional as memory sites. However, this did not detract from the importance of the aesthetic role music, notably classical music, played in the postwar era. The sense of purpose felt when the old and new political and economic elites gathered for the first Philharmonic concerts on 27 and 28 April 1945 was highly significant. There was a strong admixture of the Soviet military in the audience, deliberately encouraged by the liberal dispensation of free tickets by the Philharmonic.

 

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Throwing Out Ideas, The Culture of ‘Urban Pollution’

The celebrated volume of anthropologist Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966), broke ground with its discussion of cleanliness, dirtiness, and sacred ritual. Editors Rivke Jaffe and Eveline Dürr took this up in their 2010-published Urban Pollution: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices. The volume, which was published as a paperback earlier this month, dusts off the concepts of clean and dirty, and looks at modern intersections of pollution and culture. Jaffe and Dürr revisit the origins and makings of the volume, below.

 

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Berghahn Books: What is the idea behind the collection, and how did the book come about?

 

Rivke Jaffe and Eveline Dürr: We wanted put together a collection that could help bridge the divide between environmental anthropology and urban anthropology. The bulk of work in environmental anthropology has neglected cities and specifically urban pollution. Meanwhile, urban anthropologists rarely incorporate an environmental dimension in their work.

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Love in the Time of Ethnography

In David Picard’s Tourism, Magic and Modernity: Cultivating the Human Garden, the author uses analogy to shed light on life in La Réunion, a tropical tourist destination in the Indian Ocean. The volume, recently published in paperback, shows that, like plants in a garden, local life is pruned — using the shears of development and nature initiatives — to become a dazzling display for travelers to behold. Following, Picard once again embraces literary technique — on this occasion using a story of lovers — to enchant and delight the reader with the study of anthropology.

 

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Eve-Marie and Adamsky are 20 when they first meet. They are students at the university of La Réunion, in the Western Indian Ocean. They party together, discover life and love, and progressively turn into adults. They fall in love. As with most couples, through their relationship, the two meet different worlds and family histories, and have to grapple with these differences. Their love gets entangled with the aspirations of their respective milieus.

 

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A ‘Privileged’ Prisoner is Still a Prisoner

In German concentration camps, some Jewish prisoners were selected by their Nazi captors to hold more-advantaged positions within the population of the camp. This not only allowed them some protections, but also made them targets of disdain from other victims. Author Adam Brown sheds light on these “privileged” few in his volume Judging “Privileged” Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation, and the “Grey Zone,” published in July of last year. Following, Brown discusses about the origins of his interest in the Holocaust in general, and in this inspirational “Grey Zone,” in particular.

 

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The evolution of my book, Judging “Privileged” Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation and the “Grey Zone,” was – like most books no doubt – somewhat long and complex. To take the long-term view, the project began when I heard the moving personal stories spoken by survivor guides on a high school trip to the Jewish Holocaust Centre in 1999. As a non-Jewish teenager with next to no background knowledge of the event, the visit to the JHC inspired a lasting curiosity and sense of obligation to find out more.

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