‘Pregnancy in Practice’ and a Royal Baby

Parents preparing to welcome a new bundle of joy follow certain conventions, from decorating the nursery to deciding on baby names, explains Sallie Han in her newly released volume, Pregnancy in Practice: Expectation and Experience in the Contemporary US. Below the author discusses the recent royal birth along these guidelines and explains that though they may be parents of the future King of England, Prince William and Duchess Kate Middleton are perhaps not so different from common parents as thought.

 

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The Duchess of Cambridge and I have this in common: We shared a due date. She is the new mother of a future King of England. I am the new author of a book, Pregnancy in Practice: Expectation and Experience in the Contemporary US. I believe that the period of gestation for my book has been considerably longer.

 

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Hot Off the Presses – New Paperback Releases

 

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Newly released paperbacks from Berghahn:

Youth Gangs and Street Children: Culture, Nurture and Masculinity in Ethiopia, Paula Heinonen

Funerals in Africa: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon, Michael Jindra and Joël Noret

Gardening the World: Agency, Identity and the Ownership of Water, Veronica Strang

Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Children and Adolescence, Ute Eickelkamp

Hot Off the Presses – New Book Releases

Newly released titles from Berghahn’s Anthropology, Colonialism, Economics, Politics, and HistoryCorsinAnthropological lists:

Creating a Nation with Cloth: Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora, Ping-Ann Addo

Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara

An Anthropological Trompe L’Oeil for a Common World: An Essay on the Economy of Knowledge, Alberto Corsín Jiménez

Framing Africa Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema, Nigel Eltringham

Tax Justice and the Political Economy of Global Capitalism, 1945 to the Present, Jeremy Leaman and Attiya Waris

Routes into the Abyss Coping with Crises in the 1930s, Helmut Konrad and Wolfgang Maderthaner

Bedouin of Mount Sinai: An Anthropological Study of their Political Economy, Emanuel Marx

Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

Family Upheaval Generation, Mobility and Relatedness among Pakistani Migrants in Denmark, Mikkel Rytter

Up Close and Personal: On Peripheral Perspectives and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge, Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka

Astonishment and Evocation: The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne

The Gaddi Beyond Pastoralism: Making Place in the Indian Himalayas, Anja Wagner

The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, Anton Weiss-Wendt

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Mount Sinai

In this excerpt from his new book The Bedouin of Mount Sinai: An Anthropological Study of their Political Economy, published June 2013, Emmanuel Marx reflects on how a short visit led to a decade-long study of the Bedouin people of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

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Soon after the Israeli forces occupied Sinai in 1967 the peninsula was inundated with many kinds of tourists and journalists. I avidly listened to their glowing accounts of the Bedouin of Sinai. Yet for several years I hesitated to visit Sinai. I wavered between fear and hope that I would be tempted to study the Bedouin, and again experience the intellectual and emotional tumult of my earlier study of the Negev Bedouin.

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Writing the Wrongs of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, published June 2013, offers a wide-ranging view of the Spanish slave trade, from Caribbean trafficking to Spanish antislavery protests. Editors Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara speak to the trials and rewards of editing the collection of work, their influences, and a prediction of what will be the future important studies in the field.

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Berghahn Books: What drew each of you to the study of the Spanish empire’s Atlantic holdings?

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Research & Reward in Central Australia

Called a “timely collection” and a “worthwhile contribution” to the discourse of Aboriginal life, Growing up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence was first published in June 2011 and was published last month in paperback. Editor Ute Eikelkamp revisits the volume and describes the joy and reward of fieldwork that led to its publication.

 

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Paying attention to the life experiences and capacities of the Aboriginal children I had known as mediators, shifting presences and welcome companions for some years during field research with the senior knowledge bearers in a central Australian community has been a most rewarding experience, both personally and intellectually.

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Successful Transformation or Failed Transition: ‘United Germany’ Presents Lively Debate

East meets West in United Germany: Debating Processes and Prospects, to be published this month, a collection of works that compares and contrasts German sentiments since the fall of the Berlin Wall nearly a quarter of a century ago. Editor Konrad Jarausch answers questions about the collection and the roots of his passion for the subject.

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What drew you to the study of Germany’s re-unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

 

Since we had just bought an apartment at the Bayerischer Platz in Schöneberg during the summer of 1989, I was able to witness a good deal of the “peaceful revolution” firsthand. Moreover, as co-chair of an IREX commission of GDR and U.S. historians I became personally involved in the transition difficulties of my East German colleagues. After so many decades of Cold War stagnation, it seemed that history had returned with a vengeance – posing a challenge for explanation which I could not resist.

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The Turn of the Title

Astonishment and Evocation: The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, published last month, addresses the rhetorical turn in the study of human and social sciences, with emphasis on the human reaction to and interaction with the magic of media and art. Below, co-editor Ivo Strecker spellbinds the reader with a discussion of this rhetorical turn in the study of culture.

 

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I returned home from attending Ronald Soeteart and Kris Rutten’s exciting conference on “Rhetoric as Equipment for Living: Kenneth Burke, Culture and Education” (Ghent, 22-25 May 2013) and find (in my dream-mail) news that a grand book launch of Astonishment + Evocation. The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology is imminent with the press, television, authors, editors and staff of Berghahn Books present.

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Celebration at a Funeral: Addressing an African Phenomenon

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Funerals in Africa: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon, originally published in September 2011, was released this month in paperback form. Below, co-editor Michael Jindra shares the root of his interest in this cultural phenomenon, and discusses the collection and what became its purpose: to shed light on funerary traditions and to inspire other scholars.

One could say the genesis of this book was way back in 1984, when I went to Cameroon as a Peace Corps Volunteer, fresh out of university. I worked with rural credit unions (village banks), and at times when I showed up at a village for a meeting, I would find out the meeting was cancelled because of a “death celebration.”

 

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A Matter of Identity: What it Means to be Jewish in the 21st Century

Race, Color, Identity: Rethinking Discourses about ‘Jews’ in the Twenty-First Century, published May 2013, opens a fresh discussion about Jewish racial identity in the Twenty-First Century. Below, editor Efraim Sicher shares how a resurgence of racism, advances in genetic technology, and social and cultural constructs have given fresh breath to a discussion within the volume of what Jewishness means today.

 

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Berghahn Books: Did any perceptions on the subject change from the time you started your research/compiled the contributions to the time you completed the volume?

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