Tag: editor interview

Jean-Marc De Grave: Studying a Secret Initiation Ritual

This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between D. S. Farrer and Jean-Marc De Grave. Farrer is the special issue editor for Social Analysis Volume 58, Issue 1, and De Grave is the author of the article Javanese Kanuragan Ritual initiation: A Means to Socialize by Acquiring Invulnerability, Authority, and Spiritual Improvement appearing in that issue. Below, De Grave answers a series of questions related to his article in Social Analysis.

 

This is the second in a series of interviews with contributors to this volume. Read D. S. Farrer’s interview here.

 

 

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War, Occupation, and Empire: Interview with Guest Editor Jean Elisabeth Pedersen

 

Historical ReflectionsThis is the fourth in a series of posts dedicated to celebrating the 40th volume of our journal Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques.

 

A recent issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques is devoted to the special topic of “War, Occupation, and Empire in France and Germany.” This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between Berghahn blog editor Lorna Field and the Guest Editor of this special issue, Jean Elisabeth Pedersen.

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‘Exporting’ Women: Writing on French and German Women’s Colonial Settlement Movements

Historical ReflectionsThis is the third in a series of posts dedicated to celebrating the 40th volume of our journal Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques.

 

The latest issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques is devoted to the special topic of “War, Occupation, and Empire in France and Germany.” This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between the issue’s Guest Editor, Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, and one of the six contributors, Krista Molly O’Donnell.

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Looking at Tourism through Anthropology’s Lens

Just in time for summer vacation, Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches will soon be available for purchase. This collection features a diverse group of scholars who dive deeper into the idea of “tourist” around the world, from Cambodia to Belize to the Netherlands. Following, editors Noel Salazar and Nelson H. H. Graburn give a glimpse into their work with the volume, their histories with the topic, and where they themselves like to “play tourist.”

 

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What drew you to study the seductive draw of tourism?

 

Salazar: It may sound odd, but I became interested in tourism (as an object of study) while working for an NGO specialized in aiding refugees. At the end of the 1990s, the organization sent me on a mission to a remote refugee camp in northern Uganda, on the border with Sudan.

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Propaganda and Prostitution Reform During Germany’s Weimar Republic

Historical ReflectionsThis is the second in a series of posts dedicated to celebrating the 40th volume of our journal Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques.

 

The latest issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques is devoted to the special topic of “War, Occupation, and Empire in France and Germany.” This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between the issue’s Guest Editor, Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, and one of the six contributors, Julia Roos.

 

 

Pedersen: What first drew you to the study of the “black horror” campaign?

Roos: My first book focuses on conflicts over prostitution reform during Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919-1933). It was in this context that I first came across the issue of the brothels for colonial French troops established in the occupied Rhineland during the 1920s. Middle-class German feminists and their conservative allies appealed to racialist fears and nationalist resentment over these brothels to discredit Germany’s own system of police-controlled prostitution. I realized that the protest against the brothels was an important facet of the broader propaganda campaign against France’s colonial occupation troops, which used the racist epithet, “black horror on the Rhine.” What fascinates me about the “black horror” campaign is the fresh light it sheds on the different ways in which World War I unsettled established racial stereotypes and hierarchies between whites/Europeans, on the one hand, and Africans and other colonized peoples, on the other hand. It also offers rich possibilities for exploring the legacies and postwar permutations of wartime propaganda discourses centered on women’s and children’s sexual victimization by racial “Others.”

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Discovering Van der Meersch: Themes of Race and Empire

Historical ReflectionsThis is the first in a series of posts dedicated to celebrating the 40th volume of our journal Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques.

 

The latest issue of the journal is devoted to the special topic of “War, Occupation, and Empire in France and Germany.” This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between the issue’s Guest Editor, Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, and one of the six contributors, W. Brian Newsome.

 

Pedersen: What drew you to the study of Maxence Van der Meersch and his novel Invasion 14?

 

Newsome: Several years ago, I was conducting research on the Young Christian Workers and its adult offshoots. Specifically, I was interested in the theology of the Mystical Body of Christ and the ways in which chaplains and lay leaders in Catholic Action groups absorbed and acted upon principles associated this theological concept. My research led to “The Mystical Body of Christ: A Vector of Engagement for French Catholic Action, 1926-1949,” an article that appeared in Politics in Theology, part of Transaction Publishers’ series Religion and Public Life, ed. Gabriel Ricci 38 (June 2012): 147-172.

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The Importance of Being Nourished

Nutrition is essential to human life, no matter one’s cultural background or period in which one lived. Human Diet and Nutrition in Biocultural Perspective: Past Meets Present, published in 2010 and recently available as an ebook, follows this fundamental building block of life and its impact on society from prehistoric to contemporary times, across the world. Following, volume editors Tracy Prowse and Tina Moffat discuss the most (and least) enjoyable aspects of editing a collection, changes in the study of human diet, and the way forward in the Anthropology of diet and nutrition.

 

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Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of health and nutrition?

 

Tracy Prowse: I really like food. Seriously, I’ve always been interested in diet and nutrition in past populations.

 

Tina Moffat: I started out in infant mortality studies and child health and realized quickly that nutrition is a major component of child health. 

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Souvenir of the Right: Reexamining Twentieth-Century French Politics

The French Right Between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism, to be published this month, re-opens the history books on  France between World Wars I and II. In this collection of essays, scholars take a look at the polarized political scene, especially the right, within the country. Below, in an interview with editors Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy, the scholars speak to the challenges of compiling the collection as well as the potential controversy of writing on such a politically charged topic.

 

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Berghahn Books: What aspect of compiling an edited collection did you find most challenging?  Most rewarding?

 

Sean Kennedy: When we began this project I was anxious that coordinating thirteen different contributions – in terms of deadlines and ensuring consistency in format – would be a major challenge. I should not have worried so much. Our contributors did a fine job of sticking to the production schedule and carrying out editorial work.

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‘Screening Nature’ Turns the Cinematic Gaze to Mother Earth

Flora, fauna and film are the foci of Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human, published in November 2013. The collection, edited by Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway, hopes to open the film-viewers’ gaze to the often-overlooked nonhuman living subjects in film. The following is an interview with Pick and Narraway on the mission of Screening Nature, and on the environmental and ecocritical challenges to the discipline of Film Studies.

 

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Berghahn Books: What is the idea behind the collection and how did it come about?

 

Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway: Screening Nature is one installment in a bigger project to push Film Studies to engage more closely with the natural world and with issues of ecology. It is fair to say that there is currently an “ecological turn” in Film Studies, and the book is part of what we hope will be a significant paradigm shift in the way we think and talk about film. But despite the growing interest in the ecological dimensions of cinema, both in terms of cinema’s representation of nonhuman nature and animals, and in terms of cinema’s ecological impact as a consumer and emitter of fossil fuels, Film Studies departments remain staunchly humanist and anthropocentric, with most courses theorizing and making films with little regard—in the literal sense of the word—to more-than-human concerns.

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The Myriad Measures of Achievement

Achievement is commonly defined as a successful completion of a given undertaking, but what it means to “achieve” is not a static idea the world over. Contributors to The Social Life of Achievement, published last month, examine meanings of achievement in countries and cultures throughout the world. Below, co-editor Nicholas J. Long addresses the term and provides insight into the background of the volume, from its inception to its subjects to its methodology.

 

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Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of achievement? And what inspired you to research and write about it?

 

Nicholas J. Long: Fieldwork! In the Riau Islands – the region of Indonesia where I’ve conducted most my research – people talk and think about achievement all the time. It’s become an integral component of the citizenship syllabus: students are taught that a good Indonesian should try to seize any opportunities for ‘achievement’ that they can. And it’s an incredibly widespread trope in public culture. I quickly realised that I wasn’t going to be able to write a good ethnography of the region without engaging in some way with this achievement discourse and how it was shaping people’s lives.

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