Author: Berghahn Author

A Reflection on ‘Japanese Tourism’

Carolin Funck and Malcolm Cooper’s Japanese Tourism: Spaces, Places and Structures, published this month, explains the nuances of Japanese tourism, both by the Japanese and within Japan by tourists from around the world. Below, the editors recall what drew them to this fascinating field of study, how the field has changed since they started writing, and how they predict it will continue to change in the future.

 

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Berghahn Books: When were you drawn to the study of Japanese tourism? What inspired your love of your subject?

 

Malcolm Cooper: The lack of a readily available text that brought together the several elements of Japanese tourism and chronicled its form and function over the years when I first started to teach this subject more than 10 years ago.

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Old World Topic, New Discussion: A Look at Migration and Belonging

Who migrates, when they migrate, where they migrate, and why they migrate has a huge effect on cultural identity, acceptance and belonging. This is a hot current topic on news cycles worldwide, but it is certainly not a new phenomenon. Looking from a European perspective, editors Steven King and Anne Winter add an important contribution to this discussion with Migration, Settlement and Belonging in Europe, 1500-1930s: Comparative Perspectives, to be published this month. Below, the editors discuss the volume and their aim to make sense of these experiences across borders of place and time.

 

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The British print and online media has for the last year been awash with compelling stories about abuses of the welfare system: the mother who has 11 children and feels the state should fund her life choices; the recent immigrants who are entitled to welfare benefits notwithstanding a lack of accumulated contribution; the ‘disabled’ welfare claimants who are exposed as professional dancers or scuba divers.

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An Uprising of Historical Importance

The cyclical course of history comes into sharp focus when one looks at Greek political uprisings. The widely publicized youth dissent in recent years is nothing new, but actually has earlier roots in 1973 — with different players, but with the same activist vigor. This 1970s group — later to be known as the Polytechnic Generation — comes into clear focus in newly published Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the “Long 1960s” in Greece, by Kostis Kornetis. Following is the opening to the volume’s introduction. 

 

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In 2010 the well-known British Pakistani writer and political activist Tariq Ali commented that “were there a Michelin Great Protest guide, France would still be top with three stars, with Greece a close second with two stars.” Ali did not only refer to the 2005 riots in France and the 2008 civil disturbances in Greece, but to a longue durée structure of civil disobedience in the two countries that dates back to the 1960s and 1970s.

 

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Understanding Europe before, after 1945

In Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926-1950, published last month, author Christian Bailey seeks to understand how Germans became such “good Europeans” after 1945. Whereas many histories of European integration tend to largely focus on the diplomatic goings-on between elites, this book focuses on how support for a united Europe was cultivated in civil society. Below, the author and his colleague Benno Gammerl share a dialogue about Bailey’s recent volume.

 

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Benno Gammerl: Your book convincingly challenges what one could call the negative founding myth of post-1945 European integration. According to this well-established narrative the European Union ultimately resulted from the wish to once and for all prevent falling back into the perils of fascism and total war. You highlight earlier visions of Europe instead that date back to the interwar period and that have at times commanded much wider popular support than the let-us-avoid-our-earlier-mistakes-rhetoric. Which positive aims and motivations sustained these European projects?

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Care and Anti-Care in Greece

In her book Capricious Borders: Minority, Population, and Counter-conduct between Greece and Turkey, published earlier this year, Olga Demetriou examines the mechanisms through which particular groups of people are turned into “minorities.” At the center of these processes she identifies naming, genealogy and state care, as key modes of governmentality. Discussing a recent incident of biopolitical policing, the author shows here how “state care” continues to have more relevance as a repressive rather than an empowering mechanism in the minoritization context.

 

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In Greece, the “management of population” (in the sense of a Foucauldian biopolitics of demography, spatial order, classification, and knowledge production) has long been racialized.

 

This racialism has fluctuated through different political conjunctures yielding differing policies of birth rate monitoring and incentivization. Last month “care” emerged as a tool of biopolitical policing in a discussion that went well beyond the bounds of Greece, after authorities arrested a couple raising a child who was “not their own.” The couple was Roma, the child at first assumed not, and much of the racialized presentation of the incident turned on the stereotypical discourse about “Gypsies stealing children.”

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SETI: An Alien Concept?

If there is extra-terrestrial life in the Universe, how might it communicate? In Science, SETI, and Mathematics, to be published this month, author Carl DeVito seeks to answer this question in a conversational way, explaining the role of mathematics in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). DeVito explores the science and history behind the search, and shares the many questions associated with it, especially those regarding language and communication.

 

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The early workers in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence were concerned with the technical problems of sending and receiving radio signals across inter-stellar distances.

 

Slowly, however, the deeper questions inherent in this endeavor rose to prominence: questions about the nature of intelligence, the nature of language, and the philosophical/psychological motivation behind this search.

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Are Law-Maker, Law-Breaker So Different?

In the past, the world’s political economy has not always been built through honorable dealings. In fact, not much may have been, according to the recently published volume The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption, and States, which sheds light on such shadowy parts of economic history. Below, editor Renate Bridenthal develops this idea to share how those in power and those illicitly taking power may not be so different after all.

 

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A specter is haunting history. The ghostly presence of economic crime as political power has been all but absent in history writing, but not in history itself.

 

Like dark matter, its synergy has been palpable if not always visible. Yet in our time, more and more emerges from the shadows, exposed in newspapers and tried in courts, and compels us to consider the history of the illicit political economy and its effects in past and present.

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The New Namibia: Building a Nation after Apartheid

In 1990, Namibia gained its independence as a democratic state from the South African apartheid regime. Author John T. Friedman reflects on what this realistically meant and currently means for the making of a Namibian state in Imagining the Post-Apartheid State: An Ethnographic Account of Namibia, the paperback version of which was published last month after the original was published July 2011. Below the author explains his ethnographic method in an excerpt from the Introduction.

 

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At first reading, the title of this book is likely to arouse some scepticism. How is it possible for an anthropologist to present an ethnographic account of Namibia, of an entire country? As anthropologists we are accustomed to investigate the localised, the small-scale, the village community. We are specifists, not generalists. The critic will thus be quick to suggest that any such attempt can yield only two possible outcomes: either a generalised account of ‘the Namibian people’, or a superficial survey of Namibia’s ethnic groups.

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Fresh Ink on a Classic: Going ‘Beyond “Writing Culture”’

In 1986, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography was published, and it changed the perception of ethnographic study from then on. Little more than 20 years later, Olaf Zenker and Karsten Kumoll took its reach further with Beyond Writing Culture: Current Intersections of Epistemologies and Representational Practices, published originally in 2010 and published as a paperback last month. Below, the editors share how their work engages with the inspiration piece, how they came to publish the collection, and the ways in which their work corresponds to and challenges the original.

 

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Berghahn Books: Tell us about the original Writing Culture? How does your volume expound on the principles set forth in this groundbreaking work, and how does your volume differ?

 

Olaf Zenker: The publication in 1986 of Writing Culture by James Clifford and George Marcus was crucial for the discipline of anthropology as a whole. Continue reading “Fresh Ink on a Classic: Going ‘Beyond “Writing Culture”’” →

Good Borders Make Good Neighbors

What are the social impacts as European political borders are being redefined? Using a variety of case studies, editors William Kavanagh and Jutta Lauth Bacas seek to answer that question in Border Encounters: Asymmetry and Proximity at Europe’s Frontiers, to be published this month. The editors and contributors examine the implications as borders are strengthened in some parts of the continent, and weakened in others. Below, Kavanagh and Lauth Bacas share their thoughts on the volume.

 

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Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of political and social borders? Why is this study important?

 

Jutta Lauth Bacas: The core experience which triggered my interest in border studies and in the topic of irregular crossing at a maritime border was my encounter with destroyed inflatable dinghies having been used by refugees to enter a Greek border island clandestinely.

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