Hot Off the Presses – New Book Releases

FelliniJourney

Newly released titles from Berghahn’s Anthropology and Applied Anthropology, Film Studies, and History lists:

Toward Engaged Anthropology, Sam Beck and Carl A. Maida

Pastoralism in Africa: Past, Present, and Future, Michael Bollig, Michael Schnegg, and Hans-Peter Wotzka

The Journey of G. Mastorna: The Film Fellini Didn’t Make, Federico Fellini, with the collaboration of Dino Buzzati, Brunello Rondi, and Bernardino Zapponi, translated with a commentary by Marcus Perryman

Soldiering Under Occupation: Processes of Numbing among Israeli Soldiers in the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Erella Grassiani

Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914, Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann

Elusive Promises: Planning in the Contemporary World, Simone Abram and Gisa Weszkalnys

Judging “Privileged” Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation, and the “Grey Zone”, Adam Brown

Pregnancy in Practice: Expectation and Experience in the Contemporary, Sallie Han

United Germany: Debating Processes and Prospects, Konrad Jarausch

Ethics in the Field: Contemporary Challenges, Jeremy MacClancy and Agustín Fuentes

Paul Stoller: Retzius Reflections

Paul Stoller, whose article “Embodying Knowledge: Finding a Path in the Village of the Sick” appeared in Ways of Knowing, edited by Mark Harris, earned the 2013 Anders Retzius medal for excellence in anthropology—an honor bestowed every three years—April 24. Below, Stoller reflects on his life’s work that helped him earn the award.

 

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Paul Stoller

Milestones in life compel you to think about where you’ve been, where you are and where you are going.

 

In 2012 I received an email, marked as “possible spam,” that invited me to Stockholm in April 2013 to receive the Anders Retzius Gold Medal in Anthropology, which is given once every three years.

Continue reading “Paul Stoller: Retzius Reflections” →

The Rise and Fall of Völkerpsychologie

Before there was cultural psychology, there was Völkerpsychologie. This social science was used as a way of looking at cultures and trying to make sense of them—an attempt often seen as stereotyping. But, in The Mind of the Nation: Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851-1955, to be released this month, author Egbert Klautke gives the often-overlooked social science due credit. He shares his thoughts about the volume and this particular form of psychology below.

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Berghahn Books: How would you define “Folk Psychology” and what drew you to the study of it?

 

Egbert Klautke: “Folk Psychology” is an awkward translation of the German term Völkerpsychologie. Originally, it referred to attempts to study the psychological make-up of nations, and as such is a forerunner of today’s social psychology. However, in today’s common understanding, Völkerpsychologie equals national prejudice: it is seen as a pseudo-science not worth considering seriously. Continue reading “The Rise and Fall of Völkerpsychologie” →

Remembering African-German Points of Contact

Eight centuries of German and African interactions up until World War I are often glossed over in historical literature.  The contributors to Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914, published last month, seek to illuminate these intersections and share popular sentiments of the time. Below, co-editor Martin Klimke describes a significant—and still remarkable—relic of this pre-WWI period.

 

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For more than ten years now, visitors to the German Historical Museum in Berlin have paused in amazement before a painting unlike any other in the museum’s collection.

Continue reading “Remembering African-German Points of Contact” →

Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for July

Theoria
Volume 60, Number 135
This issue focuses on matters of human rights, justice, immigration, and the conditions of the social sciences in South Africa and beyond.

Contributions to the History of Concepts
Volume 8, Number 1
This special issue is titled Concepts of Empire and Imperialism.

Nomadic Peoples
Volume 17, Number 1
This special issue focuses on securing the land and resource rights of nomadic communities in East Africa.

Focaal
Volume 2013, Number 66
This issue features a theme section titled: Recasting Pasts and Futures in Postsocialist Europe.

Learning and Teaching
Volume 5, Number 2
This overall theme of this issue is change — managing it, initiating it, and experiencing it.

 

A Moving Picture: The Evolution of Africa on Screen

The perception of Africa through the lens has certainly changed since the films of the 1950s. That change in the way viewers see Africa in twenty-first century film is the topic of Framing Africa: Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema, published in June 2013. Below, the collection editor Nigel Eltringham discusses the changing frame of Africa in mainstream cinema.

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In November 2004, I attended the annual meeting of the African Studies Association in New Orleans. A flier inserted into the conference programme invited participants to a private screening of a new film, Hotel Rwanda, at a small arts cinema nearby.

Continue reading “A Moving Picture: The Evolution of Africa on Screen” →

Bittersweet Europe: A Study of Albania and Georgia

Adrian Brisku connects two seemingly disconnected European experiences—those of Georgia and Albania—in Bittersweet Europe: Albanian and Georgian Discourses on Europe, 1878-2008, to be published this month. Brisku shares the triumphs and difficulties of the writing process, and what interested him in the area to begin with, below.

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Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of Albania and Georgia, especially as they exist within the larger European framework?

 

Adrian Brisku: I had written about Albanian debates on ‘Europe’ while living in Georgia—from the year 2001 to 2005.

Continue reading “Bittersweet Europe: A Study of Albania and Georgia” →

The Hearth of the Home

Editors David G. Anderson, Robert P. Wishart, and Virginie Vaté look from many angles—history, cosmology, and architecture—at the idea of home in About the Hearth: Perspectives on the Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North, which will be published next month. Below, co-editor Wishart discusses the importance of home and shares a bit about how life is constructed in the Arctic North.

 

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Berghahn Books: What drew you ‘to the hearth,’ or to the study of the home in the circumpolar north?

 

Robert P. Wishart: For myself it came originally through observations on the importance of building cabins among the Gwich’in.

Continue reading “The Hearth of the Home” →

Knowledge, an Anthropological Commodity

Within the pages of his newly published book, An Anthropological Trompe L’Oeil for a Common World: An Essay On The Economy Of Knowledge, published by Berghahn last month, Alberto Corsín Jiménez addresses the value and framework of knowledge, theory, and scholarship. Below the author discusses the sources of inspiration for the book, the commodity of knowledge, and the trick that not everything is exactly as it first appears.

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Although I did not quite know it at the time, I began writing this book roughly at the time of my appointment to a university lectureship at the University of Manchester in 2003.

 

The university had only just merged with the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology — a merger hailed in various contexts as a harbinger of the changes to come in UK higher education. Continue reading “Knowledge, an Anthropological Commodity” →

Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for June/July

Asia Pacific World
Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2013
Includes transcripts of two keynote speeches from recent International Association for Asia Pacific Studies conferences.

Sibirica
Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2013
Explores Siberia’s important role in the study of the emergence of pottery, maintaining the communal knowledge systems of the indigenous peoples of the circumpolar North and the process of cosmopolitan learning among hosts in a hospitality couchsurfing network.

International Journal of Social Quality
Features empirical papers from a large cross-cultural research project investigating social quality across six Asia-Pacific societies.

Journal of Romance Studies
Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2013
Five articles covering a broad spectrum of topics including: the workings of the Islamic community in Italy, queer and intersex childhood in Argentine filmmaking, the literary and political work of Tunisian poet and theorist Abdelwahab Meddeb.

Anthropology in Action
Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2013
Explores the relationship between modernist, global health promotion agendas and a more locally rooted approaches to improving health and wellbeing.

Social Analysis
Volume 57, Number 1, Spring 2013
This special issue is titled: Time and the Field.  By exploring and unfolding the temporal properties of the field, anthropology can favorably complement and extend the (spatially anchored) notion of multi-sited fieldwork with one of multi-temporal ethnography.

European Judaism
Volume 46, Number 1, Spring 2013
This issue gathers lectures delivered at four of the most recent Annual International Jewish-Christian-Muslim Student Conferences as well as other papers that reflect aspects of new thinking in the field of interfaith dialogue.

Israel Studies Review
Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2013
This issue begins with the Forum, which focuses on a very current issue in Israel–the major attacks on, or abuses of, academic freedom.

European Comic Art
Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2013
This issue is devoted to comics adaptations of literary works.

Girlhood Studies
Volume 6, Number 2, Spring 2013
This is the first issue of Girlhood Studies that we have devoted primarily to method and methodology related to deepening an understanding of girlhood and girls’ lives.

Nature and Culture
Volume 8, Number 2, Spring 2013
This issue covers a variety of topics such as the German energy transition, Love and Kill as mixed constructs in hunting and shifts in governance ushered in by the sustainability paradigm are reshaping knowledge governance.

Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
Volume 22, Number 1, Spring 2013
Special issue on history and place-making.