Tag: africa

Celebration at a Funeral: Addressing an African Phenomenon

JindraFunerals
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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The Anthropology of AIDS in Tanzania: An Discussion with Hansjörg Dilger

Hansjörg Dilger is the editor, along with Ute Luig, of Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, which was published by Berghahn Books in paperback in December 2012. 

 

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What drew you to the study of AIDS in Africa?

 

HD: I started my research on AIDS in Tanzania as a master student. AIDS hadn’t been at the center of “mainstream anthropology” in the mid-1990s, at least not in Western Europe, and I wanted to do “something useful” for my thesis project. Initially, my fieldwork on HIV/AIDS focused on the moral discourses of young men and women on sexuality, modernity, and social transformation in the context of the epidemic in western Tanzania. Later on, this led me to the study of social and kinship relations and how they transform in the context of illness, death, and rural-urban mobility.

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Hot Off the Presses- New Book Releases

European Foundations of the Welfare State, by Franz-Xavier Kaufmann, translated by John Veit-Wilson, foreword by Anthony B. Atkinson

Fortune and the Cursed, the Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination, by Katherine Swancutt

Investigating Srebrenica: Institutions, Facts, Responsibilities, edited by Isabelle Delpla, Xavier Bougarel, and Jean-Louis Fourn

Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, edited by Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber

Learning from the Children: Childhood, Identity and Culture in a Changing World, edited by Jacqueline Waldren and Ignacy-Marek Kaminski

A Lover’s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading, by Ranjan Ghosh

The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama: Religion, Gender and Media in Kinshasa, by Katrien Pype

Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes: An Anthropology of Everyday Religion, edited by Samuli Schielke and Liza Debevec

The Politics of Educational Reform in the Middle East: Self and Other in Textbooks and Curricula, edited by Samira Alayan and Achim Rohde, and Sarhan Dhouib

Revisiting Feminist Approaches to Art Therapy, edited by Susan Hogan

Hot Off the Presses- New Book Releases

Recent Releases from Berghahn Books:
Ambiguous Pleasures: Sexuality and Middle-Class Self-Perceptions in Nairobi, by Rachel Spronk
Collaborators Collaborating: Counterparts in Anthropological Knowledge and International Research Relations, edited by Monica Konrad
Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany, edited by David M. Luebke, Jared Poley, Daniel C. Riley, and Warren Sabean
Cultures of Colour: Visual, Material, Textual, edited by Chris Horrocks
Czechs, Germans, Jews: National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia, by Kate?ina ?apková, translated by Derek and Marzia Paton
Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War, by Simon Harrison
Marginal at the Center: The Life Story of a Public Sociologist, by Baruch Kimmerling, translated by Diana Kimmerling
Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions, edited by Maruška Svašek
Postcolonial Migrants and Identity Politics: Europe, Russia, Japan, and the United States in Comparison, edited by Ulbe Bosma, Jan Lucassen, Gert Oostindie
Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe, edited by Marc Silberman, Karen E. Till, and Janet Ward