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In the spirit of Saint Valentine’s Day, celebrated February 14th, we’re pleased to feature an excerpt from “Dating Love: A History of The Love-Lock Custom,” Chapter 1 of Unlocking the Love-Lock: The History and Heritage of a Contemporary Custom by Ceri Houlbrook.
Katherine Swancutt is the author of Crafting Chinese Memories: The Art and Materiality of Storytelling.
Storytelling is always an entertaining and lively theme, but it’s surprisingly elusive to come to grips with conceptually. This is especially the case when pairing storytelling with other great warhorses of social theory like art, materiality, and memory, which often require fine-grained interdisciplinary detail to bring them fully to light. Factor in the study of China from ancient times to the present day – with an expansive focus that includes not only the Han ethnic majority, but also China’s ethnic minorities, the strange, and the Other – and you have the makings of a rather epic volume on one of the oldest and richest civilizations in the world. Crafting Chinese Memories sets out to do all of this through original essays on Chinese art, film, historiography, literature, socialism, imagination, fantasy, race, colonialism, statelessness, personal memoirs, elite inner circles, legends, ethnography, mimesis, and gestures to what counts as ‘memorable’. Wearing multiple disciplinary hats at once, each of the volume’s contributors explores personal, social, and cultural memories in and of China. Their contributions reveal the myriad mise-en-abyme (or ‘stories within a story’) that unfold through the memory works of artists, filmmakers, novelists, life writers, civil servants, and indigenous storytellers. Readers are invited to treat themselves to this enthralling panorama of memory-making that unfolds within and beyond China’s borders.
Continue reading “Crafting Chinese Memories: The Art and Materiality of Storytelling”
September 27th is World Tourism Day, a day to foster awareness and appreciation of tourism’s social, cultural, political and economic value.
This year’s theme focus is on “Tourism and Green Investment”. It highlights the need for more and better-targeted investments for the Sustainable Development Goals, the UN roadmap for a better world by 2030. Now is the time for new and innovative solutions, not just traditional investments that promote and underpin economic growth and productivity. For more information please visit https://www.un.org/en/observances/tourism-day
See relevant Berghahn Books below. In addition Journals is offering free access to relevant journals and articles until October 5, 2023.
Continue reading “HAPPY WORLD TOURISM DAY”
In celebration of Pride Month in June, enjoy free access to the following articles and chapters from Berghahn.
Exchanging Objects and my broader research agenda considers how and why certain objects left museums, institutions so often associated with preservation, archiving, and keeping. It can be an odd thing, to go to a museum to intentionally study things that aren’t there. When the idea for this research was suggested to me by anthropologist Nancy Parezo, I admit I was first puzzled, then intrigued.
Continue reading “On Archival Access in a Pandemic”
Continue reading “Marcel Mauss, a gift to the social sciences”
May Day, also called International Workers’ Day, is observed in many countries on May 1. It commemorates the historic struggles and gains of worker and labor movements worldwide.