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Did you know Berghahn Books has over one hundred series? Covering a wide range of subjects and areas, Berghahn’s series list continues to grow as new interventions and trends in scholarship are made.
Continue reading “A Series on a Series: Part I”BY JAN LINDSTRÖM
Continue reading “Muted Memories”
Continue reading “Thinking through Sociality: An Anthropological Interrogation of Key Concepts”
by Robert OrttungMore than four million people live in the Arctic, but so far few scholars have addressed urban conditions there. In fact, most people living in the Arctic reside in cities. Sustaining Russia’s Arctic Cities: Resource Politics, Migration, and Climate Change is one of the first to try to examine how sustainable these cities are.
The edited volume Sustaining Russia’s Arctic Cities grew out of a multi-disciplinary and multi-national team of scholars interested in the Arctic. The idea to focus on cities came from one of the book’s contributors, Nikolay Shiklomanov, during a meeting of faculty with an interest in the Arctic at George Washington University. Participants represented both natural scientists who study permafrost and climate change, and social scientists interested in migration and energy development. Cities proved to be the meeting ground where all of our interests converged. As resource extraction continues in the Arctic, more workers are moving to the region and building more infrastructure there. However, the extraction and subsequent combustion of fossil fuels leads to warming in many parts of the Arctic, typically at a rate much faster than on other parts of the planet.
The focus of this book is on Russian cities in the Arctic because Russia has gone the farthest of the Arctic countries in developing urban space in the far north. Stalin built large cities in the region as did subsequent Soviet leaders in an effort to develop the rich resources found there.
The book addresses the question of how humans can live in the Arctic while having minimal impact on the environment. There are no easy answers, so the various chapters consider the history of Arctic development in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, policy-making processes for the Arctic in Moscow, the administration of specific Arctic cities, the nature of the workers who make their living in the Arctic, the prospects for land and sea transportation in the region, and what we know about the future climate.
This book is the first of several that we hope to publish in an on-going research project. Currently, Sustaining Russia’s Arctic Cities serves as a foundation for developing an Arctic Urban Sustainability Index. This index will examine five types of variables – economic, social, environmental, governance and planning. The Index is in its early stages and we are reporting progress over time at our project website. The most recent publications include two reports in the 2017 Arctic Yearbook. The project has the support of the National Science Foundation Partnerships for International Research and Education.
We hope that readers from a wide variety of disciplines and perspectives will find the book useful in starting to think more serious about cities in the Arctic. Ultimately, we hope that this research program will lead to useful advice for mayors and other Arctic policy makers as they try to improve lives for the citizens of Arctic cities.
Robert W. Orttung is the research director for the George Washington University Sustainability Collaborative. He is also an associate research professor at GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He has written and edited numerous books on Russia and energy politics.
How we think about and what we think of as money is constantly changing. And in many cases, those changes are driven in locales that are not necessarily centers of global capital. Consider for the instance of the relatively recent introduction of “mobile money”. In 2007, the Kenyan mobile network operator, Safaricom, launched a mobile payment service named M-Pesa. The service enabled people with no bank accounts (and no access to bank branches) to send and receive money via their mobile phone. By 2011, the service had enlisted 17 million subscribers; by 2014, it was estimated to have double the number of people using formal financial services in Kenya (from 30 percent in 2006 to 65 percent in 2014); in 2018, Google Play started accepting payments via M-Pesa for apps bought online in Kenya. M-Pesa is routinely cast as a technological innovation from the postcolonial South that is ushering in a new wave of financial exclusion for the so-called “unbanked.” Over the last decade, leading international organizations such as The World Bank, government agencies such as USAID, industry trade bodies such as GSMA, and private philanthropic foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Mastercard Foundation have embraced (and are heavily investing in) mobile money and other electronic and digital financial instruments for the purpose of financial inclusion. The proliferation of mobile money in the global South and its embrace as a quick-fix to financial inclusion raises a number of questions of interest to scholars and policymakers of money and development: How, if at all, do new forms of money impact people’s everyday financial lives? How do these technologies intersect with other financial repertoires as well as other socio-cultural institutions? How do these technologies of financial inclusion shape the global politics and geographies of difference and inequality?
Continue reading “Changes in the Uses and Meanings of Money”
The following is an interview with Andrés Barrera-González, Monica Heintz and Anna Horolets (editors of European Anthropologies which was recently published by Berghahn). Andrés Barrera-González is tenured Profesor Titular in Social Anthropology at Universidad Complutense, Madrid. Monica Heintz (PhD Cambridge 2002) is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Paris Nanterre. Anna Horolets is an Associate Professor at the Chair of Social Anthropology, University of Gdańsk.Continue reading “Interview with the Editors: European Anthropologies ”
“John Quincy Adams warned Americans not to search abroad for monsters to destroy, yet such figures have frequently habituated the discourses of U.S. foreign policy,” offers a succinct summation of newly published U.S. Foreign Policy and the Other. Following, editors Michael Patrick Cullinane and David Ryan use Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick as a cautionary tale, explaining that the U.S. should revise its policy of “othering” to avoid a fate similar to that of Captain Ahab and crew.
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Herman Melville’s Moby Dick persists in literary history as one of the greatest American novels. The book takes readers on a terminal voyage in the Pequod as it sails over oceans in search of a monstrous white whale that robbed its captain, Captain Ahab, of his leg on an earlier expedition. As literature goes, this classic depicts the struggle for identity, identification, and the distinctiveness between the self and the “other.”
Stephen Gudeman is a Series Editor for Berghahn’s Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Series. Below, he answers our questions about his work.
Working with Chris Hann, you have started a new Series with Berghahn Books exploring the connection between economics and anthropology: Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy. Can you explain what we may learn covering this ground? How can anthropology help the study of economics, which is generally a quantitative discipline?
Continue reading “Between Anthropology and Economy: an Interview with Stephen Gudeman”
From Virtue to Vice: Negotiating Anorexia is the result of creative and academic collaboration between Penny Van Esterik and Richard A. O’Connor. In the following post, Van Esterik reflects on the collaboration of this pair—Van Esterik, an expert on breastfeeding, and O’Connor, an anthropologist who watched someone close suffer with anorexia—and how their book was made much stronger through their unique vantage points.
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Like most academics, I am a lone wolf writer, needing the silence to propel my thoughts on to screens and paper. But sometimes we become more than the sum of our isolated parts when we work together. Richard’s voice as an anthropologist was already in my work long before we began formal collaboration on From Virtue to Vice and ongoing in The Dance of Nurture [their next co-written book on breastfeeding].
Continue reading “‘More than the Sum of Our Isolated Parts’: Reflections of a Co-Author”