Category: In Their Own Words

The Anthropology of AIDS in Tanzania: An Discussion with Hansjörg Dilger

Hansjörg Dilger is the editor, along with Ute Luig, of Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, which was published by Berghahn Books in paperback in December 2012. 

 

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What drew you to the study of AIDS in Africa?

 

HD: I started my research on AIDS in Tanzania as a master student. AIDS hadn’t been at the center of “mainstream anthropology” in the mid-1990s, at least not in Western Europe, and I wanted to do “something useful” for my thesis project. Initially, my fieldwork on HIV/AIDS focused on the moral discourses of young men and women on sexuality, modernity, and social transformation in the context of the epidemic in western Tanzania. Later on, this led me to the study of social and kinship relations and how they transform in the context of illness, death, and rural-urban mobility.

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Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi on 19th Century Celebrity

In the collection Constructing Charisma, editors Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi have brought together a series of essays exploring the growth of the idea of celebrity in 19th century Europe. In this lengthy interview, the editors discuss the roots of their ideas, and how the study of the 19th century is still significant for understanding celebrity today. 

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What drew you to the study of celebrity, especially in 19th Century Europe?

 

1. Both of us had been working on certain celebrated individuals in 19th century Europe. In Ed’s case, it was colonial figures like Henry Morton Stanley; in Eva’s it was the German Kaiser. We each saw that our historical subjects owed a large part of their renown to forms of media new to the 19th century, especially photography and the mass press. The Kaiser would, of course, have been well known in any case, but Eva showed that photography helped make him not just a household name, but a household object, as individuals collected pictures of him. As for Stanley and other “colonial heroes,” they became celebrities because the mass press obsessively promoted them and their exploits. Through our individual works, we both perceived that that celebrity became a hugely important social and cultural phenomenon in the 19th century; to investigate it further, we decided to bring together colleagues from a variety of disciplines with expertise in the key European countries.

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A Conversation on Nature and Culture’s Latest Special Issue

The latest issue of Nature and Culture is a Special Symposium on “Nature, Science, and Politics, or: Policy Assessment to Promote Sustainable Development?” This post is a conversation between the issue’s Guest Editors, Sabine Weiland, Vivien Weiss, and John Turnpenny, on why this topic was selected.

The issue is currently available via Ingenta on the Nature and Culture website, here. Continue reading “A Conversation on Nature and Culture’s Latest Special Issue” →

Exploring the Arab Spring with Regions & Cohesion Editors Harlan Koff and Carmen Maganda

The Arab uprisings of 2011 are among those rare events that shake the world and capture our attention because they are largely unexpected and because their significance remains a mystery. Often we get used to everyday situations, and politics can become routine so that we conveniently forget that change is the only constant in global affairs. These revolts, which caught most world leaders off-guard, confirm this view. They became popularized in public debate as the “Arab Spring”, since many outsiders viewed them as refreshing change in a region where it was thought that time had frozen, and hierarchical societies were unchangeable. Continue reading “Exploring the Arab Spring with Regions & Cohesion Editors Harlan Koff and Carmen Maganda” →

Juridical Human Rights – An Excerpt from Gret Haller’s Human Rights Without Democracy?

In Human Rights Without Democracy?, published in an English translation by Berghahn Books in December 2012, Swiss politician, diplomat, and human rights activist Gret Haller interrogates why human rights are defined in a certain manner internationally. 

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Do Human Rights really reflect the interests of the people? Can citizens in a democracy decide what human rights are? Or do we leave it up to experts and the courts to define human rights? I believe that human rights are something that the people of any given society should be able to establish democratically. Human rights are the outcome of a struggle to right what has gone wrong. To explain my view, I sketch the history of the concept of human rights that must be seen as separate from the historical development of factual rights. One of the many insights that emerge is that there is a significant difference in how human rights are understood in the United States of America on the one hand and in Great Britain and Continental Europe on the other.

 

I take a look at theory from John Locke to Immanuel Kant to explain why, from a philosophical point of view, liberty and equality need not be mutually exclusive. We need freedom and equality for all. The end of the Cold War gives us a new opportunity to see how equality can be constitutive of freedom.  The West has not yet seized this opportunity. Instead, we let self-appointed experts drawing on individual court rulings prescribe human rights for us. Taken to ever higher courts that eventually revise political decisions, we end up with citizens that are discouraged from participating in the democratic shaping of political will.

 

Gret Haller

 

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Behind the Launch of Asia Pacific World with Chief Editor Malcolm J. M. Cooper

Back in 2009, a few faculty members at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (located in Beppu, Oita, Japan), along with the university’s first president, considered that the often promoted concept in the early years of the 21st century of this being the “Asia Pacific Century” needed re-evaluation, not only with respect to possible scenarios for the years to come, but even of what was meant by the term “Asia Pacific.” Even though “Asia Pacific” was being used widely in the media and in academe to describe an emerging region, this usage was often (in fact, usually) imprecise and elusive, and tended to change over the years in line with changes in the global political economy. As we explored the idea of a new refereed journal that would provide a fresh look at the region and its evolving position in the world, one thing which became very clear to us was that the most useful and illuminating academic work on the region is nearly always multidisciplinary, drawing on a range of theories and methods. Analysis using a single narrowly-defined theoretical or methodological perspective is often both highly technical for the non-specialist and ignorant of a large part of the reality on the ground.

 

The result of our efforts was Asia Pacific World, a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal that focuses on the social, political, cultural and economic development of the Asia Pacific region.  One of the core reasons for launching Asia Pacific World was the hope of encouraging the publishing of interdisciplinary work accessible to a wide range of regional specialists, which in turn could provide comparative insights into the nature of the processes and changes taking place across the region as a whole. So far we have certainly published interdisciplinary and wide-ranging papers in our three volumes (six issues) to date. The following keyword cloud shows the topic distribution of the published papers. We continue to receive a steady stream of papers and a good response from potential reviewers.

 

You can receive Asia Pacific World through membership in its parent association: the International Association for Asia Pacific Studies (IAAPS). IAAPS aims to shape and promote Asia Pacific Studies. It focuses on the Asia Pacific from interdisciplinary perspectives, encompassing humanities, social and management sciences and natural sciences. IAAPS has held three annual conferences so far (from which some papers have been published in Asia Pacific World): two at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University and the most recent one in November 2012 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The 2013 conference will be held in Manila at De La Salle University.

 

We hope that the journal will provide the academic frame for our quest to redefine and understand the Asia Pacific in the next few years, and we encourage contributions from those reading this post with an interest in Asia Pacific studies.

 

Malcolm J. M. Cooper

Chief Editor, Asia Pacific World

For the most recent issues of Asia Pacific World, please visit the journal’s website: http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/apw/

A Conversation with the Editors of “Civilizing Nature” on the National Park

Patrick Kupper, Bernhard Gissibl, and Sabine Höhler are the editors of Civilizing Nature, published in November 2012 by Berghahn Books.  Civilizing Nature examines the phenomenon of the national park from a historical and transnational perspective.  

 

Why did you choose a global history approach to studying national parks?

 

Patrick:

National parks have arguably been the most important tool of nature conservation worldwide. Since the first patches of nature were segregated under that label in the late 19th century, parks have become a global phenomenon – there are thousands of them all over the world, and they occupy an astonishing amount of terrestrial and, more recently, also maritime space. We found a paradoxical relationship between the national and the global in nature conservation, and the connections behind parks a striking and illustrative instance of what we have become accustomed to call globalization. Delving into this genuinely global history says a lot about the making and the nature of global environmentalism.

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In Their Own Words: Matt Tomlinson and Debra McDougall on Christian Politics in Oceania

Matt Tomlinson and Debra McDougall are the editors of Christian Politics in Oceania, published in November 2012 by Berghahn Books.

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As anthropologists who have worked in the Pacific Islands since the 1990s, we both felt that most political analyses of the region have been flawed for one simple reason: they overlook the enormous but complex political influence of Christian churches. This influence does not always take the form that observers of American politics might expect, where particular churches take explicit stances on political issues or support particular candidates or parties. The political influence of churches in Oceania is both more subtle and more pervasive than that. Time and again during our fieldwork in Fiji and Solomon Islands, we saw how the words of preachers and pastors, activities of Christian organisations, and interpretations of the Bible shaped how people understood their place in political communities. In Oceania, like everywhere else, there is no single Christianity, making it frustratingly difficult to generalize about ‘Christian politics’. Although anthropologists have increasingly turned attention to Christianity, little attention has yet been given to the ways that rival churches position themselves against each other. Our ethnographic research  led us to see denominationalism as key source of social friction and creative energy, essential to any understanding of politics in the region.

 

            For these reasons, we began talking with our colleagues about working on a project to understand Christian politics in the Pacific. The result is this book, from which we would like to quote the following edited passage from the introduction:

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The History of Sibirica from Associate Editor Alexander D. King

Alexander D. King served as Managing Editor of Sibirica for six years, and recently stepped into the role of Associate Editor in order to focus on his field research, which is being conducted in Kamchatka over the next ten months. In this post, he discusses the 30-year history of the journal as it moved from home to home and finally landed here at Berghahn, where it has been since 2006.

Sibirica is now finishing up its eleventh volume but it has existed for much longer than just 11 years. The journal started as an occasional publication of the papers from the British Universities Siberian Studies Seminar (BUSSS), which was a regular meeting of mostly historians and geographers starting in the 1980s. The very first issue is an unnumbered publication titled simply Sibirica, with the 1690 Siberian coat of arms and the subtitle British Universities Siberian Studies Seminar, Report of the second meeting held at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, 15-16 April 1983. These earliest Sibiricas, published through 1989, were edited and produced by Alan Wood at Lancaster University. The production was a modest affair, appearing as a typescript on A5 format, photocopied with a staple binding in the spine.
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Jonathan Magonet of European Judaism on the Past and Future of the Journal

For over 40 years, European Judaism has provided a voice for the postwar Jewish world in Europe. It has reflected the different realities of each country and helped to rebuild Jewish consciousness after the Holocaust. Jonathan Magonet took over as Editor in 2004. In this post, he details the foundation and evolution of the journal over its extensive history, as well as his visions for the future.

Given its title, European Judaism has to be as broad-based as its subject area. Every European country is different in history, language, culture and concerns, and the local Jewish community reflects all of these as well as its own particular experience and agenda. Yet across the European continent, there are also broader issues that have an impact on Jews, or to which Jews make significant contributions. How to reflect this complexity yet offer a (relatively) coherent voice has been the challenge faced by the editors over the journal’s now more than forty year history.

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