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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The Importance of Being Nourished

Nutrition is essential to human life, no matter one’s cultural background or period in which one lived. Human Diet and Nutrition in Biocultural Perspective: Past Meets Present, published in 2010 and recently available as an ebook, follows this fundamental building block of life and its impact on society from prehistoric to contemporary times, across the world. Following, volume editors Tracy Prowse and Tina Moffat discuss the most (and least) enjoyable aspects of editing a collection, changes in the study of human diet, and the way forward in the Anthropology of diet and nutrition.

 

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Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of health and nutrition?

 

Tracy Prowse: I really like food. Seriously, I’ve always been interested in diet and nutrition in past populations.

 

Tina Moffat: I started out in infant mortality studies and child health and realized quickly that nutrition is a major component of child health. 

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Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for January

German Politics & Society
Volume 31, Issue 4
This special issue is titled “German-Polish Border Regions in Contemporary Culture and Politics: Between Regionalism and Transnationalism.”

Contributions to the History of Concepts
Volume 8, Issue 2
This issue features articles covering a variety of social, political, and cultural topics.

Social Analysis
Volume 57, Issue 3
This special issue is titled “Cutting and Connecting: ‘Afrinesian’ Perspectives on Networks, Relationality, and Exchange.”

Regions & Cohesion
Volume 3, Issue 3
This special issue is titled “Regions Without Borders? Regional Governance, Migration, and  Social Protection in Africa and Europe.”

European Comic Art
Volume 6, Issue 2
In this issue, the authors devote their attention to several aspects of the dialogue between comics and other arts.

Environment and Society: Advances in Research
Volume 4, Issue 1
This issue explores human-animal relations and what it means to be ‘human’ as well as what it means to be ‘animal.’

Italian Politics
Volume 28, Issue 1
This issue features a chronological list of important Italian political events as well as a variety of articles discussing many aspects of Italian politics.

Journal of Romance Studies
Volume 13, Issue 3
This special issue is titled “Revisiting Postmemory: The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Post-Dictatorship Latin American Culture.”

Sibirica
Volume 12, Issue 3
This issue touches on a range of topics related to Siberian Studies.

Critical Survey
Volume 25, Issue 2
This special issue is titled “Eco-Dystopias: Nature and Dystopian Imagination.”

Sartre Studies International
Volume 19, Issue 2
This issue inaugurates a new phase of SSI: for the first time, we are publishing articles in French as well as English.

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 Class Issue: Language and Education in India

In the past three decades within India, a knowledge of the English language has become more important for economic advantage. All the while, Hindi is essential to those who wish to pursue class mobility. These “mediums” form a divide within the country’s educational system, which come to the forefront in Chaise LaDousa’s Hindi is our Ground, English is our Sky: Education, Language, and Social Class in Contemporary India, published this month. Following are two excerpts from the book, the first from the Foreword by Krishna Kumar, and the second from the Preface.

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[Chaise LaDousa] has studied India’s vertical language divide in the North Indian city of Varanasi. The study takes us well beyond the shibboleths proffered about India’s linguistic plurality. The key word that enables LaDousa to enter the separate yet interwoven milieus of Varanasi is “medium.” The term is so omnipresent in the Indian urban environment that no one marvels at the versatile service it renders to India’s society and state. It resides securely in the phrase “medium of instruction” that is used across India as a public code to identify two types of schools and the opportunity markets to which they promise access.

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Unfree, but not Exploited in Eurasia

Is “unfree labor” good for business? Is it good for the unfree? Author Alessandro Stanziani aims to answer questions of labor, rights and freedoms in a comparison of Russian labor and business practices with those in Asia, Europe, and the Indian subcontinent. He covers this topic extensively in his new book, Bondage: Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries, to be published this month. Below, in an excerpt from the volume, Stanziani gives an glimpse into nearly four centuries of Eurasian labor.

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This book is about the evolution of labor and labor institutions in Russia as compared with Europe, Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean region, between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. It questions common ideas about the origin of labor institutions and market economies—their evolution and transformation in the early-modern and modern world.

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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.

StreckerAstonishment
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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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