Author: Berghahn Author

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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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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The ‘Life-World’ of Translation

Some words escape translation—a fact Stephen Barlau discovered quickly when he set about translating Rudolph van Thadden’s novel, originally published as Trieglaff. Eine pommersche Lebenswelt zwischen Kirche und Politik 1807-1948. Barlau brought the work into English as Trieglaff: Balancing Church and Politics in a Pomeranian World, 1807-1945, which was published this month by Berghahn. Below, the translator shares the importance of care and nuance when translating five generations worth of stories to English.

 

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The breadth and depth of meaning of German Lebenswelt, used in the original subtitle of Trieglaff, escapes capture in English.

 

It refers to the world of daily life in all its elements. Setting is immanent, environment is conjured; life extends beyond daily to happenings for an extended period with its characterizing features; both dynamic living and graphic life are encompassed. All these elements are denoted, not connoted; meaning fails if any are absent—or perhaps the word is all connotation, all shadow implication of meanings.

 

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Where High Housing Prices Meet Activism

Earlier this year, Sam Beck, co-editor of Toward Engaged Anthropology, earned the Daisy Lopez Award of Churches United for Fair Housing. He earned the award for his work to help further the mission of CUFFH—that is, to provide affordable housing in North Brooklyn, where property values have skyrocketed in recent decades. Below, Beck discusses the work that helped him earn the award and why it is important.

 

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I received the 2013 Daisy Lopez Leadership Award of Churches United for Fair Housing (CUFFH). This organization’s mission is to promote the sustainability of the North Brooklyn Latino community by advocating affordable housing. This part of Brooklyn experienced the dramatic withdrawal of capital and city services in the 1970s, whose Puerto Rican and Dominican population suffered the consequences of low incomes, dilapidated housing, poor schools, and inadequate health care.

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Down, Not Out: Ethiopian Youth on the Street

Paula Heinonen’s decade of research and reflection led to the publication of Youth Gangs and Street Children: Culture, Nurture, and Masculinity in Ethiopia, which was published as a paperback in June 2013. Based on careful observations and interviews, the volume provides insight into common misconceptions of why  Ethiopian boys and girls take to the street.  

 

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Before embarking on my six years longitudinal field research and four years of follow-up enquiry and reflection, I read extensively on the street children phenomena worldwide.

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Paul Stoller: Retzius Reflections

Paul Stoller, whose article “Embodying Knowledge: Finding a Path in the Village of the Sick” appeared in Ways of Knowing, edited by Mark Harris, earned the 2013 Anders Retzius medal for excellence in anthropology—an honor bestowed every three years—April 24. Below, Stoller reflects on his life’s work that helped him earn the award.

 

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Paul Stoller

Milestones in life compel you to think about where you’ve been, where you are and where you are going.

 

In 2012 I received an email, marked as “possible spam,” that invited me to Stockholm in April 2013 to receive the Anders Retzius Gold Medal in Anthropology, which is given once every three years.

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