Tag: anthropology in action

Dilemma after Dark: Balancing Sleep and Breastfeeding

In her newly published book, author Cecília Tomori explores a major challenge for new parents, the nighttime balance of sleep and breastfeeding. Nighttime Breastfeeding: An American Cultural Dilemma, published in October, is the result of her long-term ethnographic study alongside new parents and how they cope with the pressures of parenthood. Following, the author gives insight into this in-depth study which eventually became her book.

 

 

As an anthropologist seeking to learn about breastfeeding, I had the privilege of visiting new parents who had just returned home from the hospital after the birth of their first child. During these visits, the joy of becoming parents was visible in the way parents gazed upon one another and held their newborns in their arms. Their joy, however, was often complicated by exhaustion and uncertainty over some fundamental concerns: breastfeeding and sleeping at night.

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Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for September

Anthropology in Action
Volume 21, Number 2
This issue includes articles that provide examples of anthropological research applied to, or with resonance for policy and practice issues.

Girlhood Studies
Volume 7, Number 2
This issue is broadly based on the theme of a girl’s education.

Journal of Romance Studies
Volume 14, Issue 2
This special issue is titled “Oceans: Concepts and Cultures,” and the emphasis is on the ocean as a site of mobility, contact and transformation, as well as a location.

Theoria
Volume 61, Number 140
The articles in this special edition contribute a rich range of arguments that can help clarify and develop what an egalitarian liberalism in South Africa would look like.

 

Reframing Shock to Provide Space for New Solutions and Practices to Emerge

Anthropology in Action

This post was submitted by Mark Powell, who–along with Stephanie Glendinning, Vanesa Castán Broto, Emma Dewberry, and Claire Walsh–contributed the article Shaped by Shock: Staff on the Emergency Department ‘Shop Floor’ to the most recent issue of Anthropology in Action. In this post, Powell discusses some of the challenges and rewards of researching this topic. 

 

 

 

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Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for June

Anthropology in Action
Volume 21, Issue 1
This is a special issue on Applied and Social Anthropology, Arts and Health.

Asia Pacific World
Volume 5, Issue 1
In this first issue of Volume 5, we have chosen to begin with two keynote presentations from the fourth IAAPS Annual Conference.

Contributions to the History of Concepts
Volume 9, Issue 1
This issue focuses on conceptual changes and political struggles around citizenship related to the challenges of Europeanization, as well as both migration and immigration after WWII.

German Politics & Society
Volume 32, Issue 2
This special issue is titled The 2013 Bundestag Election (Part 1). 

Journeys
Volume 15, Issue 1
This journal explores travel as a practice and travel writing as a genre, reflecting the rich diversity of travel and journeys as social and cultural practices as well as their significance as metaphorical processes.

Learning and Teaching
Volume 7, Issue 1
This special issue is titled Collusion, Complicity and Resistance: Theorising Academics, the University and the Neoliberal Marketplace.

Social Analysis
Volume 58, Issue 2
This journal encourages contributions that break away from the disciplinary bounds of anthropology and suggest innovative ways of challenging hegemonic paradigms through analysis based in original empirical research.

 

Cultivating Communication between Cultures

Later this month, Sonya Pritzker’s monograph Living Translation: Language and the Search for Resonance in U.S. Chinese Medicine will be published. Within this volume, Pritzker explains that translation is not a static exercise, but is instead a variable and experiential undertaking. Following, the author shares how she became enamored of Chinese culture and discovered the life of language.

 

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I went to China for the first time in 1995. I was 19. The skies in Beijing were blue then, and the remnants of a stark and closed era were everywhere. I look back on the things of that time with nostalgia, the ever-present red thermoses with flowers, cheap rubber shoes, mian bao che or “bread box” cars, flying pigeon bicycles. My passion for China, in particular the Chinese language, had arisen over time.

 

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Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for May

Israel Studies Review
Volume 29, Issue 1
This issue features quite a bit of variety. We also present two review essays, and the issue concludes with a number of books reviews on a wide range of subjects.

Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society
Volume 6, Issue 1
JEMMS focuses on various types of texts (such as textbooks, museums, memorials, films) and their institutional, political, social, economic, and cultural contexts.

Anthropology in Action
Volume 20, Issue 3
This special issue is titled: Contributions and Challenges of Intercultural Education.

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Forest Protection Fail: How ‘Things Fall Apart’

Pauline von Hellermann seeks the root causes of African deforestation in Things Fall Apart? The Political Ecology of Forest Governance in Southern Nigeria, published in September. The volume stems from Hellermann’s ethnographic and historic research within the tropical forest of Nigeria’s Edo State as she digs to uncover the failings of forest protection. The following is an excerpt from the Introduction.

 

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To international foresters and conservationists, there are clear links between recent management failure and deforestation in Nigeria. The Conservation Atlas of Tropical Forests, for example, states that Nigeria’s ‘natural forests were carefully managed in the early part of the century, [but] they have since been severely over-exploited’ (Lowe, et al. 1992: 230; see also Oates 1999). Nigerians themselves routinely blame corruption and greed amongst foresters and politicians for forest loss and the depletion of timber. Such accounts fit smoothly into the broader perception of Nigerian governments as corrupt and inefficient; into the constant refrain that ‘things fall apart’ in Nigeria.

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A Reflection on ‘Japanese Tourism’

Carolin Funck and Malcolm Cooper’s Japanese Tourism: Spaces, Places and Structures, published this month, explains the nuances of Japanese tourism, both by the Japanese and within Japan by tourists from around the world. Below, the editors recall what drew them to this fascinating field of study, how the field has changed since they started writing, and how they predict it will continue to change in the future.

 

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Berghahn Books: When were you drawn to the study of Japanese tourism? What inspired your love of your subject?

 

Malcolm Cooper: The lack of a readily available text that brought together the several elements of Japanese tourism and chronicled its form and function over the years when I first started to teach this subject more than 10 years ago.

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Fresh Ink on a Classic: Going ‘Beyond “Writing Culture”’

In 1986, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography was published, and it changed the perception of ethnographic study from then on. Little more than 20 years later, Olaf Zenker and Karsten Kumoll took its reach further with Beyond Writing Culture: Current Intersections of Epistemologies and Representational Practices, published originally in 2010 and published as a paperback last month. Below, the editors share how their work engages with the inspiration piece, how they came to publish the collection, and the ways in which their work corresponds to and challenges the original.

 

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Berghahn Books: Tell us about the original Writing Culture? How does your volume expound on the principles set forth in this groundbreaking work, and how does your volume differ?

 

Olaf Zenker: The publication in 1986 of Writing Culture by James Clifford and George Marcus was crucial for the discipline of anthropology as a whole. Continue reading “Fresh Ink on a Classic: Going ‘Beyond “Writing Culture”’” →