‘Healing Roots’: Author Traces Life of Wild Plant from Farm to Pharm

The healing powers of a plant in sub-Saharan Africa, long used for indigenous medicine, are now being harnessed as a pharmaceutical to be more widely produced and sold. Author Julie Laplante follows this path of production of Artemesia Afra from a wild-growing bush to a processed, controlled substance in her soon-to-be-published monograph, Healing Roots: Anthropology in Life and Medicine. Following, Laplante shares how her own path led her from researcher to author.

 

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The journey told in the book began in August 2006 within the Biomedicine in Africa research group at the Max Planck Institute für etnologische forshung in Halle (Saale), Germany, as we were invited to explore how biomedicine is both shaping and being shaped through its practices in Africa. My own research project entitled ‘South African Roots towards Global Knowledge’ namely intended to find out how this is done through the practices of clinical trials as they aim to ‘recognize’ indigenous medicine.

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Starting with Place: Understanding Characters and Experiences in Jane Austen’s Final Novel

Critical Survey

The following is the first in a series of posts on Jane Austen. This is a guest post written by Rebecca Posusta, contributor to a special issue of Critical Survey which is devoted to the subject of Jane Austen. Rebecca Posusta is the author of the article titled “Architecture of the Mind and Place in Jane Austen’s Persuasion.”

 

“Architecture of the Mind and Place in Jane Austen’s Persuasion” is in essence a project that explores how the characters of Jane Austen’s final novel understand their physical, social, and psychological place. But, it is also about how the places in which they live tell the story about who they are. It is a project that began to germinate long ago, early in my scholarly career, and is the product of my earliest ideas about myself and how I fit in the world. I grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana; and, it is in New Orleans that I first met Jane Austen and found a connection to the ordinary ideas of humanness with which her novels deal. New Orleans is an old city filled with the physical remnants of a luminous past which fascinate me and ground me in my personal history.

 

I am descended from a long line of French Creoles on my mother’s side who arrived in New Orleans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Growing up, I remember stories my mother and grandmother used to tell of the big house on Esplanade Avenue that was lost after the Civil War, the dashing young man who dabbled in vaudeville and scandalous womanizing, the house on Verbena Street with the mom-and-pop grocery at the back, and the new house on Dodge Avenue with its cinderblock siding, fish pond, and summer house meant for sleeping in on hot summer nights prior to the advent of central air conditioning. Walking through the red-bricked French Quarter with its wrought-iron balconies and cool shaded courtyards, or along the River Road amongst the crumbling façades of the antebellum plantations, I am reminded of a troubled and turbulent past, and have often wondered about my ancestors who once walked the same streets and along the same shelled drives as I have. Who were they? What were they like? Few have told their stories, but the walls and bricks, balconies and flying staircases of the places they lived echo with their lives and experiences.

 

It occurs to me that even fictional characters, particularly those of Austen, are a product of the place in which they live, or at least a product of the place in which their creator lives. This may be why fiction is so appealing to us; we can see our own experiences in the experiences of others. If I start to tell my story, I begin with a place, as I have done here. Austen’s novels often begin with place as well. We meet her characters as they face a disruption in their normal domestic routine and move, change, or accept unpleasant alterations to the place in which they live. At the beginning of Persuasion, Anne Elliot defines herself by her place at Kellynch, but when she moves away from that place and can look back at it with a more critical and detached eye, she learns to define herself and her future. She learns to tell her story by the new places she occupies just like I know myself by both where I have been and where I am headed.

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Rebecca Posusta, M.A., is a Senior Instructor in the English Department at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

access Rebecca Posusta’s Article here

Get a free sample issue of critical survey here  

 

 

Simulated Shelves: Browse January 2015 New Books

We are delighted to present a selection of our newly published January 2015 titles from our core subjects of Anthropology, Economics, Environmental Studies, Film Studies, History, Jewish Studies, Medical Anthropology, and Politics, along with a selection of our New in Paperback titles.

 

We are especially excited to announce the publication of JESUS RECLAIMED: Jewish Perspectives on the Nazarene by Walter Homolka

“This book offers a constructive contribution to the debates on the theological significance of Jewish and Christian approaches to the historical Jesus. The author’s knowledge of Jewish and Christian discourses on both sides of the Atlantic is impressive.” · Werner G. Jeanrond, University of Oxford

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JESUS RECLAIMED
Jewish Perspectives on the Nazarene
Walter Homolka
Translated by Ingrid Shafer

 

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Social Exchange and Conceptual Query

Combining classic and contemporary theory, Thinking through Sociality: An Anthropological Interrogation of Key Concepts is an exploration of concepts from disjuncture to social space and field to sociability. In advance of the volume’s publication later this month, editor Vered Amit discusses its origins and purpose.

 

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This volume is the outcome of a continuing series of exchanges among the contributors, which took place over several years. When I initiated the first of these exchanges in 2006, I wondered why anthropologists had often resorted uncritically to relatively few, familiar concepts of sociality—such as community—in spite of the availability of a much broader range of ideas that might be effectively applied to the varied contemporary situations they were seeking to apprehend.

 

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Writing for Goffman: Coincidence Drives Idea behind ‘Vehicles’

Recently published Vehicles: Cars, Canoes and other Metaphors of Moral Imagination, edited by David Lipset and Richard Handler, offers insight into the vehicle as an object that can move not only people, but also ideas. Following, Handler discusses the origination of the volume, which all came about by way of an interesting connection of coincidence.

 

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This volume came about serendipitously.

 

My friend David Lipset emailed me in the summer of 2008 with the standard “what are you working on” question. I replied that I was working on a series of essays about the great American sociologist, Erving Goffman. David wrote back to tell me the rather astounding story about his first car, a late-1950s VW Beetle that his father had bought from Goffman, in Berkeley, California, where both of them taught.

 

The fact that Goffman was an “early adopter” (in the U.S.) of the Beetle explained, I thought, some cryptic comments in Behavior in Public Places, where Goffman described the interactional contempt that drivers of small cars endured.

 

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International Holocaust Remembrance Day

International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the United Nations General Assembly, is an international memorial day on 27 January commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. It commemorates the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated 6 million Jews, 1 million Gypsies, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

 

January 27th, 2015 also marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis’ most notorious concentration camp, Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most of about 1.1 million people that passed through the gates between 1940 and 1945 never left, many of them murdered in the camp’s gas chambers. Only some 200,000 are believed to have survived that fate. No one knows how many of the survivors remain alive today, but it’s a group that is dwindling as age takes its toll. To mark the liberation’s anniversary, about 300 former Auschwitz prisoners are travelling to Oświęcim, Poland, to pay tribute on Jan. 27 at Birkenau’s Gate of Death, the unloading ramp at the camp’s rail entrance.

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In honor of the UN’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Berghahn has made several relevant journal articles freely available through a special virtual issue. You may access the issue through this link: bit.ly/Holocaust-Remembrance-Day

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Berhahn Books would also like to present a selection of relevant titles on the history of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

 

JEWISH HISTORIES OF THE HOLOCAUST
New Transnational Approaches
Edited by Norman J. W. Goda

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Announcing 3 New Journals!

AnnouncementBerghahn Journals is delighted to announce that we will begin publishing three new journals in 2015!

 

These new publications will cover a range of topics across disciplines and promote academic discussion through articles, reviews, interviews, special sections, and more. For more information, please see below or click through to access the journals’ respective websites.

Boyhood Studies – An Interdisciplinary Journal

Boyhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for the discussion of boyhood, young masculinities, and boys’ lives by exploring the full scale of intricacies, challenges, and legacies that inform male and masculine developments. Boyhood Studies is committed to a critical and international scope and solicits both articles and special issue proposals from a variety of research fields including, but not limited to, the social and psychological sciences, historical and cultural studies, philosophy, and social, legal, and health studies.

One of the core missions of the journal is to initiate conversation among disciplines, research angles, and intellectual viewpoints. Both theoretical and empirical contributions fit the journal’s scope with critical literature reviews and review essays also welcomed. Possible topics include boyish and tomboyish genders; boys and schooling; boys and (post)feminisms; the folklore, mythology, and poetics of “male development”; son-parent and male student-teacher relations; young masculinities in the digital and postdigital ages; young sexualities; as well as representations of boyhoods across temporalities, geographies, and cultures.

Conflict and Society – Advances in Research

Organized violence — war, armed revolt, genocide, lynching, targeted killings, torture, routine discrimination, terrorism, trauma and suffering — is a daily reality for some while for others it is a sound bite or news clip seen in passing and easily forgotten. Rigorous scholarly research of the social and cultural conditions of organized violence, its genesis, dynamic, and impact, is fundamental to addressing questions of local and global conflict and its impact on the human condition.

Publishing peer-reviewed articles by international scholars, Conflict and Society expands the field of conflict studies by using ethnographic inquiry to establish new fields of research and interdisciplinary collaboration. An opening special section presents general articles devoted to a topic or region followed by a section featuring conceptual debates on key problems in the study of organized violence. Review articles and topical overviews offer navigational assistance across the vast and varied terrain of conflict research and comprehensive reviews of new books round out each volume. With special attention paid to ongoing debates on the politics and ethics of conflict studies research, including military-academic cooperation, Conflict and Society will be an essential forum for scholars, researchers, and policy makers in the fields of anthropology, sociology, political science, and development studies.

Screen Bodies

Screen Bodies is a peer-reviewed journal focusing on the intersection of Screen Studies and Body Studies across disciplines, institutions, and media. It is a forum promoting the discussion of research and practices through articles, reviews, and interviews that investigate various aspects of embodiment on and in front of screens. The journal considers moving and still images, whether as entertainment or for information through cinema, television, and the Internet; through the private experiences of portable and personal devices; or in institutional settings such as medical and surveillance imaging. Screen Bodies considers the portrayal, function, and reception of the body presented and conceptualized through the lenses of gender and sexuality, feminism and masculinity, trans* studies, queer theory, critical race theory, cyborg studies, and dis/ability studies.

 

 

Today in History

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin (Russian: Ле́нин) died of a brain hemorrhage on January 21st, 1924 at the age of 54. Lenin was one of the Russian leading political figures and revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century. He masterminded the Bolshevik take-over of power in Russia in 1917 serving as head of government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. Under his administration, the Russian Empire was replaced by the Soviet Union and all wealth including land, industry and business was nationalized.

Lenin had a significant influence not only on the history of Russia but on the international Communist movement and was one of the most influential and controversial figures of the 20th century. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, reverence for Lenin declined among the post-Soviet generations, yet he remains an important historical figure for the Soviet-era generations.

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Berghahn Books presents a selection of titles on Russian & Soviet history and culture:

 

Forthcoming in Paperback!

RUSSIAN POSTMODERNISM
New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture
Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, and Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover
With an Introduction by Thomas Epstein

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Meeting of Minds and Disciplines: Authors Discuss ‘Anthropology & Political Science’

Myron J. Aronoff and Jan Kubik’s  Anthropology and Political Science: A Convergent Approach was published in paperback last November. Following, the co-authors reflect on the conception of the book and their writing process, as well as its reception since the initial publication.

 

 

I lived abroad for a dozen years from 1965-1977 having earned a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Manchester University and in political science from UCLA. The Chair of the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, where I had taught for eight years, asked me what I would write about when I returned to the US to take up my position at Rutgers University. I told him that, among other topics, I intended to write an analysis of the convergent approach bridging anthropology and political science that I was developing. I then wrote my third book on Israel and updated and expanded my earlier book on the Israel Labor Party.

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Celebrating ‘Shakeshafte’ by Rowan Williams

 

ShakespeareBerghahn recently published the play ‘Shakeshafte‘ by Rowan Williams in the journal Critical Survey. Williams, who was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, is a highly-regarded poet and theologian whose play has been getting significant attention since its publication. To both honor the author and celebrate the publication of his play, we’ve linked to several articles about his work below. We hope you enjoy.

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