Tag: cultural studies

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

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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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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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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Will “the real Vienna” please stand up?

Anne Marie Scholz’s From Fidelity to History: Film Adaptations as Cultural Events was published by Berghahn Books in April 2013. In what follows, Scholz discusses the experience of touring Vienna and seeing parts of the city made famous by The Third Man. 

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The still on the cover of my book—from the 1949 British/U.S. co-production The Third Man–depicts the American Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten). He’s had a few too many drinks, and has just seen his old friend Harry Lime—a friend he believed dead— disappear somewhere on the square “Am Hof” in post-WWII Vienna. He is torn between doubts over his own sanity, unrequited love for Lime’s Czech girlfriend Anna, relief that his friend may still be alive, and near certainty that Harry is mixed up in a vicious black market racket. The darkness and mysterious aura of the Vienna square reinforces the haunted expression on Holly’s face. His predicament—that of an enterprising but unwelcome American pulp fiction writer stumbling through the labyrinth of postwar Europe–is inextricably linked with the city where he finds himself.

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Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi on 19th Century Celebrity

In the collection Constructing Charisma, editors Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi have brought together a series of essays exploring the growth of the idea of celebrity in 19th century Europe. In this lengthy interview, the editors discuss the roots of their ideas, and how the study of the 19th century is still significant for understanding celebrity today. 

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What drew you to the study of celebrity, especially in 19th Century Europe?

 

1. Both of us had been working on certain celebrated individuals in 19th century Europe. In Ed’s case, it was colonial figures like Henry Morton Stanley; in Eva’s it was the German Kaiser. We each saw that our historical subjects owed a large part of their renown to forms of media new to the 19th century, especially photography and the mass press. The Kaiser would, of course, have been well known in any case, but Eva showed that photography helped make him not just a household name, but a household object, as individuals collected pictures of him. As for Stanley and other “colonial heroes,” they became celebrities because the mass press obsessively promoted them and their exploits. Through our individual works, we both perceived that that celebrity became a hugely important social and cultural phenomenon in the 19th century; to investigate it further, we decided to bring together colleagues from a variety of disciplines with expertise in the key European countries.

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Hot Off the Presses – New Book Releases

Newly released paperbacks from Berghahn:

Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi
Comics in French: The Bande Dessinée in Context, Laurence Grove
News as Culture: Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions, Ursula Rao
Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification, Nigel Rapport
State Practices and Zionist Images: Shaping Economic Development in Arab Towns in Israel, David A. Wesley, with a foreword by Emanuel Marx
The Ethnographic Self as Resource: Writing Memory and Experience into Ethnography, edited by Peter Collins and Anselma Gallinat

Hot Off the Presses – New Book Releases

Newly released titles from Berghahn’s history and anthropology lists:

The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture, edited by Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg and Simon Shaw-Miller

Blood and Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present, edited by Christopher H. Johnson, Bernhard Jussen, David Warren Sabean, and Simon Teuscher

A Social History of Europe, 1945-2000: Recovery and Transformation after Two World Wars, Hartmut Kaelble

Two Sides of One River: Nationalism and Ethnography in Galicia and Portugal, António Medeiros

The Golden Chain: Family, Civil Society and the State, edited by Jürgen Nautz, Paul Ginsborg, and Ton Nijhuis

Meet the Editors – Rex Clark and Oliver Lubrich

Rex Clark and Oliver Lubrich are the editors of Cosmos and Colonialism and Transatlantic Echoes, two volumes that collect writings by and about Alexander von Humboldt – the first collection of its kind.  Below, the editors discuss their enthusiasm for von Humboldt’s life and work, and its continued relevance in the 21st century.

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What drew you to the study of Alexander von Humboldt?

Humboldt was a fascinating character—explorer of South American tropics, extreme mountain climber in the Andes, darling of the salon society in Paris and Berlin, and a celebrity intellectual known around the world in his time. His vision of society and knowledge discovery was truly intercultural and multidisciplinary and throughout his long life he sparked controversy and attracted attention.

In our original discussions about the project we were struck by how scholarship and conference presentations seemed very isolated and split between English, Spanish, and German language topics and traditions of Humboldt research. We planned to bridge this with a volume of representative essays from around the world. In researching the background contexts we discovered a rich history of literary and critical responses to Humboldt. So then the project morphed and grew to become a cultural history of those responses. We were drawn to how Humboldt appeared in poetry and fiction from his day to the present and we collected the literary responses which became the 100 texts in Transatlantic Echoes. The philosophical discussions and critical works inspired by Humboldt became the 50 essays of Cosmos and Colonialism.

So our two volumes are not really focused on Humboldt per se, but rather on the works of authors who created their own stories and myths, their own theories and propaganda. A mash up of Humboldt’s life and works, if you will, imagined by other writers, crossing two centuries and mixing up genres and nationalities. Other media are there as well, films, plays, comics. And since many of these were originally published in other languages, we had those texts translated so we can present everything in English to our readers. For us it was a big adventure of discovery—to find texts, research authors and their context, and then make the selections. And then we had to get the translations done and deal with all the issues of editing and copyright permissions, that was the part of the journey where we could identify with some of the hardships of Humboldt’s travels.

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