Author: Berghahn Author

Meet the Editors – Interview with Andrew Whitehouse, co-editor of Landscapes beyond Land: Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives

Landscapes beyond Land: Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives, edited by Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst, and Andrew Whitehouse has recently been released as part of the EASA series. Here Andrew Whitehouse takes us behind the makings of the volume and shares how through his involvement he overcame his own skepticism for the usefulness of landscape as an idea in anthropology.

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1. What drew you to the study of how landscapes are constituted and recollected?
We were initially encouraged by getting some funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council to run a series of workshops on the theme of landscape. The four of us (myself, Jo Vergunst, Nicolas Ellison and Arnar Arnason) were all interested in environmental anthropology and we were keen to see how different anthropologists were thinking about landscapes. Nicolas is from France and one of our aims was to compare French and British approaches. This really came to the fore when we had a workshop in Paris. We also wanted to see how ethnographic writing about landscape could draw together different elements, from very direct perception to large scale and long-term structural dimensions.

2. What aspect of writing or assembling this work did you find most difficult?
Probably just the sheer task of communicating with all of the different people who have been involved in the book. That’s one of the challenges of an edited volume, I guess. Sometimes there were different perspectives within the editorial team, but in many ways we wanted the book to reflect different ideas about landscape, so that wasn’t a problem.

3. How did your perceptions of the book’s topic change from the time you started your research to the time you completed the book?
I definitely learnt a lot about landscape! When we began the series of workshops on which the book was based, I’ll confess to being a bit skeptical about the usefulness of landscape as an idea in anthropology. I thought it was a problem that it had so much baggage and that it lacked precision. I’ve come to rather like that baggage though, because it tends to take things in an interesting direction. I love the way that landscape seems to encourage us to draw nature, culture and history together.

4. If you weren’t an anthropologist, what would you have done instead?
I used to work on a nature reserve and in fact became an anthropologist initially as a way to think about that sort of landscape. I certainly wouldn’t mind working on a reserve these days. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m fairly obsessed with wildlife and it would be good to work outdoors a bit more than I do.

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Andrew Whitehouse is a Teaching Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has conducted research in various parts of Britain and elsewhere on conservation issues and human–animal relations, with a particular focus on relations with birds through sound.

The fantasy of a historical source

Michaela Bank’s Women of Two Countries: German-American Women, Women’s Rights and Nativism, 1848-1890 has just been released by Berghahn. The second volume in our new series Transatlantic Perspectives, it focuses on the challenges faced by three German-American feminists not only with the US women’s rights movement itself but also within their own ethnic community. In the following post, the author recounts the discovery of a seemingly significant event while undertaking her research.

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When I first spent long days in libraries and archives to find out more about German-American women’s participation in the US women’s rights movement I stumbled over an extensive report of a German women’s rights convention that took place in 1868 near Boston. Reading the report, which had been published in a German-language paper by Karl Heinzen, who was one of the rather more radical political editors of the time, I found the presented ideas clear and expressed in sharp language. To give an example, here is what one female speaker is recorded as having said to the audience:

“I predict that, if women are granted the right to vote, the political party that seeks to limit the freedom of social life by moral police and seeks to expand the authority of the clerics by religious coercion will be significantly strengthened. What it has not achieved so far, it will conceivably achieve now with the help of American women who are generally more dependent on the representatives of religion than American men. This party’s goal will be achieved if those women’s additional votes are not made powerless by a pull in the opposite direction. And who shall and will provide this pull? Only the German women!”

Such an openly aggressive opposition to the US-American women’s rights movement among German-American women struck me as rather exceptional. I was thrilled as this convention report was a marvelous source for my study on German-American women, nativism and women’s rights in this period, and so I continued to dig deeper into the sources to find out more about it. How did the grand ladies of the US-American movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and other prominent advocates of women’s rights, react to this opposition?

…Yet, not all paths in historical research lead to success: I could not find any records of the Roxbury convention anywhere. Then, a few weeks later, I found a short note revealing that Karl Heinzen’s report had actually been a fictional one. Suddenly the shockingly clear and sharp language made sense to me.

Although a fantasy, it remained a fascinating report for me because it illustrated pointedly what a group of German-Americans interested in reform politics thought of the women’s rights movement and why conflict arose so often between the two groups. As I discovered, only a few German-American women were willing to stand up and raise their voice strongly and even aggressively. Such were the women who could endure the tension between their ethnic community, which was often at odds with the US-American women’s rights movement because of its nativist and prohibition stances, and the women’s rights movement that they wanted to be a part of. The efforts of Clara Neymann, Mathilde Wendt, and Mathilde Franziska Anneke for an idea of equal women’s rights are special – special, because they were not at all common while still being powerful and influential. In the end, I was still more than happy that I had found the report of the fictional convention even if it was just a „Hirngespinst“ – a pipe-dream – as a newspaper article called it.

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 Michaela Bank received her doctoral degree in American Studies from Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main, Germany in 2009. She was a fellow in the graduate research training group “Public Spheres and Gender Relations” funded by the German Research Foundation from 2005 to 2008. From 2008 to 2010 she was a Lecturer of American History and Gender Studies at Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main.

 

An Excerpt from A Lover’s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading

Note: Berghahn recently published Ranjan Ghosh’s A Lover’s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading, an exploration of the relationship between history and theory. Here the author talks about the origins for the section on dust that appears in the book.

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Dust
I suffer from a dust allergy. If I’m really careful, it wouldn’t affect my life in any significant way. For what, after all, are allergies? A few crustaceans managing to live out their lifespan because a gourmet friend of mine suffers from a seafood allergy. Compared to that exchequer, my allergy has almost no exchange value. I can joke about it, although, only in the way a bald stand-up comedian can joke about his hair or lack thereof. For the truth is this: my relationship with dust has affected the way I have done history.

My mother, whose mythical bedtime stories first introduced me to history as a child, was a historian. Her specialisation was numismatics but she eventually gave up teaching history to take over curatorship of the university museum. She was also diagnosed with asthma — a disease for which dust is an enemy — and she suffered especially during the dusty Indian winter months. I subsequently grew up with a psychosomatic hatred for dust: a maid cleaned our house twice a day and I became the subject of much teenage laughter in school, holding, as I did, a hankie to my nose at all times.

Now, why do I say all this? My book, A Lover’s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading, has a section on dust. When I first read Carolyn Steedman’s fine book, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (it was published exactly a year after my mother’s death), I was overcome by several strong emotions. Primary among them was a sense of despair. Like my mother who would wheeze at the mention of a furry animal or sandstorm, I read Steedman’s book literally out of breath. My sense of despair came from the realisation that I would never be able to work in an archive — that I would never have a career in dust.

My Lover’s Quarrel is, in that sense, also a quarrel with dust, my private trope for history, the past and the future, beyond the biblical from where we come to where we go.

There is a living, buoyant ligature between a historian and the archival milieux where one encounters the recorded past as much as a ‘history of loss’, where the dust rests as no mere squalid accretions but animated particles that can waft into the historian with differential vibrations….Dust speaks; dust makes us aware of a past that is absent and present at the same time, a temptation to the historian’s reconstructionist desires and a reminder of his or her affiliation to grounded evidence. In a kind of sensory encounter with the past, dust, as a materiality, awaits mediation, conjuring up the ‘presence’ of the past. (102)

My book combines South Asian history with the continental philosophies of history. But my accusative finger is at dust and my physiological condition, which has prevented me from being a ‘proper’ historian. I’ve written on textbooks and pamphlets, and their unique semantics of a propagandist historicising, but I’ve always had to take the help of someone, a kind acquaintance at the library, often my wife or father, to first wipe the dust away from their pages before I could examine them.

That has also become my shorthand for doing history: wiping the dust. In that there is much romance and representation, and of course, always, always, a new reading.

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Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English at the University of North Bengal, India. Featuring lectures and a panel discussion on the book, Lover’s Quarrel will be launched on September 21 at the University of North Bengal.

An Excerpt from Patients and Agents: Mental Illness, Modernity and Islam in Sylhet, Bangladesh

Note: Berghahn has just published Alyson Callan’s Patients and Agents: Mental Illness, Modernity and Islam in Sylhet, Bangladesh, an ethnographic study that explores how changes in the global economy have led to an increase in daughters marrying outside of their local kinship network, which in turn has increased their vulnerability to mental illness. An excerpt with images from Chapter 6 follows an introductory note from the author.

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Bangladesh is one of only five countries in the world where women have a shorter life expectancy than men. The low status of women in Bangladesh is underpinned by the virilocal rule of residence. As daughters leave their natal home to live with their husband’s family at the time of marriage, it is argued that nurturing them is regarded as a relative waste of resources, compared to nurturing sons who will stay and contribute to the wealth of the household.

However, women’s oppression is not experienced in a uniform way. Older women achieve a higher status as mothers, and, as mother-in-laws, may oppress their sons’ wives.  The concept ‘woman’ does not occupy a single analytical category and the status of women varies according to the role they occupy.  In this excerpt I suggest that the ‘Ma’ icons seen in most rural households provides evidence that the mother is revered on a par with Allah.

The mother in symbolic opposition to Allah
[There is] a tension evident in Bengali culture between the law of the father and the law of the mother. The popular Indian conception of the mother as self-sacrificing overlies an unconscious fantasy of the phallic, castrating mother (Nandy 1990). Bagchi (1990) suggests that Bengali culture is particularly prone to employing this threatening aspect of the mother. The powerful and murderous Kali, who dances on the corpse of her consort Shiva, is a goddess who enjoys greatest popularity amongst Bengalis (Fuller 1992). Wilce (1998a) argues that in Bangladesh mothers are feared and placed in symbolic opposition to Allah. He cites this famous passage from the Hadith: in answer to the question, ‘To whom do I owe the most respect?’ the Prophet replied, ‘Your mother.’ His answer remained the same when pressed to declare the second and third persons deserving respect. ‘Father’ was listed fourth [1998: 108].

Another quotation commonly recited in Sylhet is ‘Heaven is under the mother’s feet’, meaning that obedience to the mother is the path to heaven. Yet whilst the mother-in-law in Sylhet is feared, conscious representations of the mother portray her to be loving and all-forgiving, if not to say indulgent. This latter attribute seems to me to be diametrically opposed to Allah who takes a meticulous account of his subjects’ good and bad works, doling out punishment and rewards as appropriate on Judgement Day. That the mother is revered on a par with Allah is demonstrated by the prevalence of ‘Ma’ iconography (ma is short for amma – mother). (Muslim) lorry drivers have ‘Ma’ painted on the front of their trucks; posters are sold reproducing poems and pictures celebrating the mother. Most strikingly of all, ‘Ma’ embroidery samplers and other ‘Ma’ icons are hung up on the wall next to Islamic icons – Allah’s name in Arabic, Qur’anic verse, pictures of Mecca. I saw these ‘Ma’ icons in every rural household that had grown-up children present; it was explained that ‘we have maya (love) for Allah and amma above everything else; for amma because she has suffered greatly for us’.

 

Figure 6.1: A ‘Ma’ embroidery sampler is hung to the right of Allah’s name in Arabic

 

Figure 6.2. Lines from the Qur’an on the left; handwritten ‘Ma’ decoration on the right

 

Figure 6.3. Left: Ma icon commemorating the date of death of the household’s mother; the Arabic reads: ‘Allah, we came from you and we will return to you’. Right: the mosque at Madina with lines from the Qur’an.

 

 

Alyson Callan is a psychiatrist and anthropologist. She currently works as a consultant psychiatrist in Brent for the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust.

Interview with the Author – Britta McEwen, author of Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900-1934

Britta McEwen is author of Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900-1934, published earlier this year by Berghahn. Her work uncovers the transformation of sexual knowledge from the realm of specialized medical science to that of social reform for the wider populace. Here she discusses her work, some of the challenges she faced in writing about some of the key historical figures, and how she would utilize her apple pie making skills if she weren’t a historian.

1. What drew you to the study of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century?

I actually got into this field through architecture!  Vienna has these amazing public housing projects from the interwar period, and as I investigated them I learned that they were intended for a new kind of people – upright, moral, hardworking small families.  This seemed to entail a new sexual system, starting with birth control at the very least.  That, combined with a well-timed read of Isabel Hull’s “Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany,” made me think that there was a story to tell in Vienna’s early twentieth century about attitudes towards sex.

2. Did any perceptions on the subject change from the time you started your research to the time you completed the book?

On of my assumptions at the beginning of my project was that science was always a liberating voice vis-à-vis sexuality.  While scientific discourse was used to challenge Church teachings about sex, I found that many authors in the early twentieth century were actually using melodramatic language, rather than scientific language, to express the call to sexual and social justice.  At first I thought this was just a trick to popularize complex ideas, but as I went on I came to believe that melodrama offered people writing about sex a way to talk about ignorance, shame, and consequences in a way that would be convincing to a wide audience.

3. What aspect of writing this work did you find most challenging?  Most rewarding?

I’ll answer that one by combining the questions and talking about what was both challenging AND rewarding…  some of the historical characters I met in my research were so very colorful and compelling that they threatened to overshadow the “knowledge” they sought to impart.  Here I’m thinking of Wilhelm Reich, Johann Ferch, and above all, Hugo Bettauer.  Bettauer became a personal hero of mine as I wrote, which made it difficult to really focus on his journalism, rather than his person, for the book.  In another world, I think I would have ditched the reams of research I had collected and simply written about Bettauer’s humanism and his outrageous career.

4. To what extent do you think the book will contribute to debates among academics within the field?

Although one of the arguments of my book is that Vienna was a special site for the production and distribution of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century, I think it would be interesting to see comparative work done on this issue.  How unusual were places like Vienna, Paris, and Berlin?  What made them unique?  I also wonder if books like mine will help dispel the belief that there was only one sexual revolution.  Finally, the debate in the German-speaking world about the “repressive” sexual regimes of the twentieth century is really heating up, and I think books like mine will help contextualize what sexual “liberation” meant to different historical actors.

5. If you weren’t a historian, what would you have done instead?

Although I am a hardly an entrepreneur, I do think I might have been able to run a public space.  Lord knows I waitressed enough to know a good cup of coffee when I see it, and I make a mean apple pie.  So some days I fantasize about running a bookstore specializing in science fiction and mysteries, where you could get something sweet to eat and sit all day (just like in Vienna), reading and gabbing.  I imagine it to be the kind of place with a bad pun in the title and a standing feminist knitting circle – come to think of it, the kind of place that could be lampooned on “Portlandia.”

Britta McEwen teaches European History at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

In their own words: The broader context of Small Town and Village in Bavaria

Note: Berghahn recently published Peter H. Merkl’s Small Town and Village in Bavaria: The Passing of a Way of Life, a study of that region’s modernization efforts in the 1970s and 1980s that led to a considerable reduction in the autonomy of its small communities. Here the author discusses how the decline of iconic village life (and the broader implications) motivated his study:

Immense changes have occurred in German agriculture and in the economic and social life of very small towns, which I explore in my work Small Town and Village in Bavaria: The Passing of a Way of Life. In many ways, these changes mirror transformations occurring in small towns across the industrialized world. While many people in today’s urbanized society actually come from small town backgrounds or grew up in the countryside and feel nostalgia for the closeness of small communities or for a family farming way of life, these settings have nearly vanished in the last 100 years or so. Where once a majority of the German population were farmers, only a tiny percentage remain so today and most of them are part-time farmers. The majority of really small places have lost their taverns and other local businesses while both schoolchildren and adults commute daily to distant, larger towns.

While the populations of small places decline, the charms of their old historical structures endure, highlighted in art and literature. When we travel through very old towns we are struck by the medieval walls, gates and turrets, and ancient churches that manifest the venerable age of communities that have witnessed centuries of political and social change. Tourists have discovered such places all over Europe, especially in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany where such well-known medieval towns as Rothenburg on the Tauber River or the small villages along the Romantic Road in Bavaria still enchant the visitor.

My book not only focuses on the long-term changes in German agriculture and in fifteen old Franconian mini-towns but also examines the effects of an ambitious modernization project by the Bavarian state that sought to deprive all communities under a certain size of their autonomy and to force them into “administrative unions” with other small places. It was a process not unfamiliar in the U.S. and many European countries, though usually in a more voluntary form, but resulting in far fewer, modernized local units in either case.

The tension between the preservation of these small communities amid the slow dynamics of social change on the one hand and the massive state intervention to modernize Bavarian local government at the periphery on the other is what drew me to this project. It seemed preposterous to force groups of medieval, independent small towns to merge for the sake of modernization. Through my research, which included several mail surveys of mayors, interviews with state and local officials, and statistical materials, I have created a fuller picture of these micro-towns and placed them within the larger hierarchy of German and European levels of government, providing a clearer context for the changes in these localities.

Peter H. Merkl is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published extensively on comparative and German government and politics, in particular the origin of the West German Republic and German unification.

From Idea to Book- Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives

From Idea to Book is an occasional series in which Berghahn authors and Editors discuss the origins of their work. Here, Marcia Inhorn and Soraya Tremayne describe how the volume Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies, which was recently published by Berghahn, came about.

Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologiesis the result of a wonderful conference workshop, held from 18 to 20 September 2009 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, on the theme of “Islam and the Biotechnologies of Human Life.” Following a day of public presentations, the contributors to this volume remained at Yale for an intensive, two-day workshop discussion of their conference papers, which have ultimately become the polished chapters of this edited volume.

To our knowledge, this volume is unique, for it represents the work of nearly all of those scholars whose research focuses on Islam and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). Meeting (often for the first time), discussing our work, and producing this volume together has been an immensely rewarding experience. For us as co-conveners, the project and the process have been especially gratifying, for we have been able to bring together our junior colleagues, many of whom are producing nuanced, field-based research on ARTs in a variety of Islamic settings. As a result, all of the chapters in this volume can be said to be original, timely, and “cutting edge,” reflecting the rapidly evolving ART landscape in the Muslim world in the second decade of the new millennium. Continue reading “From Idea to Book- Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives” →

Interview with the Editors- Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman, editors of Environment and Citizenship in Latin America

Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman are the editors of Environment and Citizenship in Latin America: Natures, Subjects and Struggles, recently published by Berghahn. The work aims to advance debates on environmental citizenship, while simultaneously and systematically addressing broader theoretical and methodological questions related to the particularities of studying environment and citizenship in Latin America. Here, they discuss the origins of their interest in the topic, where they see the work fitting within the field, and the process of putting the volume together.

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1. What drew you to the study of environmental citizenship?
We were both conducting extensive field research in different parts of Latin America (Wittman mainly in Guatemala and Brazil, Latta in Chile) during the early 2000s, when the field of citizenship studies was really picking up. At the same time, researchers working within a long tradition of “green” social theory started talking about “environmental citizens” and probing questions about what it means to think about ecological questions through the lens of citizenship. In the field we couldn’t help observing the way that struggles over environmental issues were closely bound up with debates over questions of recognition, inclusion, rights and inequality. The connection between environment and citizenship was plain to see in communities’ defense of their land rights, activists’ discourses around biodiversity or pollution, corporate agendas to tap natural wealth and government’s efforts to order and regulate different kinds of human-nature relationships. But as we observed this connection in practice, we were dissatisfied with debates about environmental citizenship amongst scholars from the Global North, which didn’t seem to offer the tools we needed to make sense of what was going on in Latin America. Before we even met we had independently decided to work at conceptual innovation to remedy this shortcoming

 

2. How did your perceptions of environment and citizenship change from the time you started work on this volume to the time you completed it?
Working on this volume was a good reality check for us. As a scholar it is easy to get wrapped up in one’s own self-referential bubble of theories, case studies and the like. Hearing what other scholars made of this connection between environment and citizenship had two kinds of outcomes. On the one hand, it confirmed our conviction that this is a fruitful intellectual space for thinking about a series of related ecological, social and political questions. There are all kinds of research avenues still to be explored. On the other hand, working with our collaborators during this project also reminded us that the terminology of citizenship, even as an analytical concept, is not innocent nor is there consensus about definitions and meanings. A number of the scholars who participated in the original workshop, including a couple whose pieces found their way into the book, were critical about the way the notion of citizenship potentially imposes a Western political ontology. They also pushed us with respect to the limits of citizenship as an analytical category (compared, for instance, to environmental justice). Even more importantly, these collaborators have demonstrated in their chapters how the discourses and practices of environmental citizenship can and have been mobilized by state and other actors as tools to re-enforce the subordination of politically marginal subjects such as indigenous peoples.

 

3. Do you think there are aspects of this work that will be controversial to other scholars working in the field? 
To the extent that the volume manages to complicate the terms of debate it is definitely our hope that other scholars in the field will feel the need to respond. There is a reason why the book is not titled “Environmental Citizenship in Latin America”. This collection is aimed to decentre the field of study, unsettling the easy union of these terms and putting in their place a more open-ended research agenda around the intersection of environment and citizenship. Obviously, the collection is also meant to stir the pot by reminding scholars that the Global South can’t be ignored as we seek to develop new paradigms of thought around environmental questions.

 

4. To what extent do you think the book will contribute to debates amongst academics and activists within the Latin American Region?
The fact that the book is in English is a partial barrier to uptake amongst Spanish or Portuguese speaking audiences, though there is an increasing amount of collaboration and cross-fertilization between work conducted in the three different languages, regardless of where it is written and published. Indeed, six of our own contributors are from the region. Moreover, we’ve had excitement about the collection expressed by other Latin American colleagues in research networks to which we belong. There seems to be a hunger amongst scholars and activists in the region for more exploration of the kinds of themes the book’s contributors grapple with. At the same time, in the context of this and other projects we constantly feel that more needs to be done to join up academic debate across the North-South divide, and also to reach out more effectively from the academic sphere into activist circles.

 

5. Putting together an edited volume is a lot of work. Was it worth it?
The opportunity to collaborate on a volume like this, both in terms of our work together as editors and with respect to the larger network of scholars involved in the project, brings significant rewards. We were lucky to have a really dedicated group of contributors, who worked diligently through numerous rounds of revision. In general there is a lot of good feeling around the collaboration that went into this project, and I think we are all pleased with the outcome.

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Alex Latta is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and in the Balsillie School of International Affairs.

Hannah Wittman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Member of the Latin American Studies Program at Simon Fraser University.

From Idea to Book- The Cult and Science of Public Health

From Idea to Book is an occasional series in which Berghahn authors discuss the origins of their work. Here, Kevin Dew describes how a discussion with a student about Durkheim planted the seed that would eventually become The Cult and Science of Public Health: A Sociological Investigation, which was published by Berghahn this spring.

The impetus to write my book developed over a long period of time, but there were occasions that particularly focused my thinking. A pivotal moment was a discussion I had with a PhD student when I was a lecturer in a Department of Public Health at a medical school. She was using the work of Emile Durkheim to consider the role of neighbourhoods in relation to health. We were throwing around ideas about what sort of social factors foster solidarity or cohesion at a neighbourhood level, and we mentioned religion but moved on quickly as religion does not generally operate at a neighbourhood level. It was then that I had an ‘aha’ moment. Continue reading “From Idea to Book- The Cult and Science of Public Health” →

Interview with the Author- Christien Klaufus, Author of Urban Residence: Housing and Social Transformations in Globalizing Ecuador

Christien Klaufus is the author of Urban Residence: Housing and Social Transformations in Urbanizing Ecuador, published this spring by Berghahn. Her work examines two contrasting populations in Ecuador’s cities: popular-settlement residents and professionals in the planning and construction sector to understand how they shape the city itself. Here she discusses her work, how she came to it, and her many varied interests outside the academy.

1. What drew you to the study of urban spaces in Ecuador?
My fascination for Latin America started when I was a child. I used to collect clippings about Peru, Bolivia, Mexico and Guatemala from the National Geographic journals that my father brought home. After graduating in Architecture in 1993, I travelled through South America for a few months. It was during that trip that I decided I wanted to switch careers from working in architectural design to becoming an academic researcher on urban spaces and architecture, preferably in Latin America. Ecuador became my favorite destination. So I applied for a BA and MA in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, which later resulted in a PhD dissertation on that topic. The book was a logical outcome of my multidisciplinary academic background and a long-lasting fascination for Latin America. Continue reading “Interview with the Author- Christien Klaufus, Author of Urban Residence: Housing and Social Transformations in Globalizing Ecuador” →