Category: In Their Own Words

Uzbekistan, Social Network of Choice

In the Republic of Uzbekistan, being Uzbek has less to do with one’s lineage and more to do with one’s allegiance to a society. The advantages of this voluntary membership within the Uzbek “social network” are explored in Variations on Uzbek Identity: Strategic Choices, Cognitive Schemas and Political Constraints in Identification Processes. Below, Peter Finke discusses his attraction to Uzbekistan, his writing process, and the volume’s potentially controversial reception.

 

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Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of Uzbekistan, specifically “Uzbek Identity”?

 

Peter Finke: My general interest in Central Asia goes back a long way into childhood fantasies of roaming horse riders and the like. Most of Uzbekistan does not really fit that well into this and indeed my early research in the region was on nomadic pastoralists in Western Mongolia. It was after I took up a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute to work on identity issues that I not only switched topics but also field sites.

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Throwing Out Ideas, The Culture of ‘Urban Pollution’

The celebrated volume of anthropologist Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966), broke ground with its discussion of cleanliness, dirtiness, and sacred ritual. Editors Rivke Jaffe and Eveline Dürr took this up in their 2010-published Urban Pollution: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices. The volume, which was published as a paperback earlier this month, dusts off the concepts of clean and dirty, and looks at modern intersections of pollution and culture. Jaffe and Dürr revisit the origins and makings of the volume, below.

 

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Berghahn Books: What is the idea behind the collection, and how did the book come about?

 

Rivke Jaffe and Eveline Dürr: We wanted put together a collection that could help bridge the divide between environmental anthropology and urban anthropology. The bulk of work in environmental anthropology has neglected cities and specifically urban pollution. Meanwhile, urban anthropologists rarely incorporate an environmental dimension in their work.

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Love in the Time of Ethnography

In David Picard’s Tourism, Magic and Modernity: Cultivating the Human Garden, the author uses analogy to shed light on life in La Réunion, a tropical tourist destination in the Indian Ocean. The volume, recently published in paperback, shows that, like plants in a garden, local life is pruned — using the shears of development and nature initiatives — to become a dazzling display for travelers to behold. Following, Picard once again embraces literary technique — on this occasion using a story of lovers — to enchant and delight the reader with the study of anthropology.

 

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Eve-Marie and Adamsky are 20 when they first meet. They are students at the university of La Réunion, in the Western Indian Ocean. They party together, discover life and love, and progressively turn into adults. They fall in love. As with most couples, through their relationship, the two meet different worlds and family histories, and have to grapple with these differences. Their love gets entangled with the aspirations of their respective milieus.

 

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A ‘Privileged’ Prisoner is Still a Prisoner

In German concentration camps, some Jewish prisoners were selected by their Nazi captors to hold more-advantaged positions within the population of the camp. This not only allowed them some protections, but also made them targets of disdain from other victims. Author Adam Brown sheds light on these “privileged” few in his volume Judging “Privileged” Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation, and the “Grey Zone,” published in July of last year. Following, Brown discusses about the origins of his interest in the Holocaust in general, and in this inspirational “Grey Zone,” in particular.

 

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The evolution of my book, Judging “Privileged” Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation and the “Grey Zone,” was – like most books no doubt – somewhat long and complex. To take the long-term view, the project began when I heard the moving personal stories spoken by survivor guides on a high school trip to the Jewish Holocaust Centre in 1999. As a non-Jewish teenager with next to no background knowledge of the event, the visit to the JHC inspired a lasting curiosity and sense of obligation to find out more.

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Following the Diaspora: A Study of the Hadrami Community

The Hadrami community’s migratory patterns throughout the Indian Ocean region have historically been propelled by trade and religious ambitions. Leif Manger’s complex ethnographic account of this community’s varied and widespread diaspora from South Yemen is explored in The Hadrami Diaspora: Community-Building on the Indian Ocean Rim, which was published this month in paperback. Following, Manger discusses his work on this volume and his time spent with this diverse community in widespread areas.

 

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Berghahn Books: What came first, your interest in Hadrami culture or your interest in migration? What drew you to these areas of study?

 

Leif Manger: Yemen has always been a dream for me, but I was particularly fascinated by the terraces in the mountains of the north of the country and the ecological effects of adaptations in such areas. This was due to my research interests in my early career, on intensification of agriculture, agro-pastoral interaction and development.

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In the Beginning, There Were ‘Visions of the End’

When WWII drew to a close in the late 1940s, the fighting may have stopped, but the tension was just building. This sustained Cold War friction lasted longer than four decades, the whole time of which, the main players had ideas of how it would look when it ended. The editors and contributors of Visions of the End of the Cold War in Europe, 1945-1990, to be published next month, explore these ‘conceived programmes’ and ‘utopian aspirations.’ Below, an excerpt from the Introduction sets the scene, starting at the end, with the fall of the Wall.

 

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The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 quickly came to symbolize the end of the Cold War as a whole, including the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet rule in 1989, the unification of Germany in 1990 and the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. Its twentieth anniversary in autumn 2009 was therefore an opportunity to celebrate not just that particular event – however meaningful – but an extraordinary period that in barely two years led from the dismantling of the Iron Curtain to the liquidation of the whole ‘Yalta’ order.

 

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A Note on the Influence of ‘Rhetoric and Culture’

 Astonishment and Evocation: The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne, was published earlier this year as the newest volume within the Studies of Rhetoric and Culture series. The volume and series have gained attention within the academic community, one such supporter being Michał Mokrzan, a future collaborator within the series and a scholar of rhetoric. In response to the newest volume, Mokrzan writes an entry of his own interactions with the series, series editors, and series volumes.

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Due to the fact that the Rhetoric Culture Project develops at a rapid pace – Astonishment + Evocation is the fifth volume of the Berghahn Books series Studies in Rhetoric and Culture – one can risk the thesis that we are now witnessing a crystallization of a new theoretical and methodological trend in anthropology, which can be described as a ‘rhetorical turn in anthropology’.

 

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Souvenir of the Right: Reexamining Twentieth-Century French Politics

The French Right Between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism, to be published this month, re-opens the history books on  France between World Wars I and II. In this collection of essays, scholars take a look at the polarized political scene, especially the right, within the country. Below, in an interview with editors Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy, the scholars speak to the challenges of compiling the collection as well as the potential controversy of writing on such a politically charged topic.

 

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Berghahn Books: What aspect of compiling an edited collection did you find most challenging?  Most rewarding?

 

Sean Kennedy: When we began this project I was anxious that coordinating thirteen different contributions – in terms of deadlines and ensuring consistency in format – would be a major challenge. I should not have worried so much. Our contributors did a fine job of sticking to the production schedule and carrying out editorial work.

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Author Becomes Subject: Droysen as Topic of Historical Volume

Scholarship has come full circle for Johann Gustav Droysen — a historian lauded for his much-cited volume on Alexander the Great — as the author-historian is now the subject of study. Author Arthur Alfaix Assis delves into the historical theories of Droysen in What is History For? Johann Gustav Droysen and the Functions of Historiography, to be published later this month. Assis precedes the publication by sharing the root of his interest in the scholar, why he believes Droysen is important, and what Assis might have done if he did not follow the path of academia.

 

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Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of Johann Gustav Droysen?

 

Arthur Alfaix Assis: I like to think that part of it has to do with the great impression left on me by the very first text I read as an undergraduate: Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’. I was a freshman at a provincial university in central Brazil, and was very eager to get in touch with serious historical and philosophical literature. But after a single week of lectures came a three-month-long strike, and the only reading assignment left was Weber’s text.

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‘Screening Nature’ Turns the Cinematic Gaze to Mother Earth

Flora, fauna and film are the foci of Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human, published in November 2013. The collection, edited by Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway, hopes to open the film-viewers’ gaze to the often-overlooked nonhuman living subjects in film. The following is an interview with Pick and Narraway on the mission of Screening Nature, and on the environmental and ecocritical challenges to the discipline of Film Studies.

 

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Berghahn Books: What is the idea behind the collection and how did it come about?

 

Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway: Screening Nature is one installment in a bigger project to push Film Studies to engage more closely with the natural world and with issues of ecology. It is fair to say that there is currently an “ecological turn” in Film Studies, and the book is part of what we hope will be a significant paradigm shift in the way we think and talk about film. But despite the growing interest in the ecological dimensions of cinema, both in terms of cinema’s representation of nonhuman nature and animals, and in terms of cinema’s ecological impact as a consumer and emitter of fossil fuels, Film Studies departments remain staunchly humanist and anthropocentric, with most courses theorizing and making films with little regard—in the literal sense of the word—to more-than-human concerns.

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