AUTHOR INTERVIEW(part 1): Anna Odland Portisch on A MAGPIE’S TALE

ANNA ODLAND PORTISCH has taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies and Brunel University. In her new book A Magpie’s Tale: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on the Kazakh of Western Mongolia she recounts her time living with a Kazakh family in a small village.

It’s fascinating (“Can you imagine a stranger showing up on your doorstep and asking to stay for a year?”) and highly evocative (“It was so cold that night, the next morning the driver had to bring the engine back to life by lighting a small fire underneath the car”) and it gave us so much to discuss that we’ve split our discussion into two parts.

Anna’s story begins here and Part Two will follow very soon.

Continue reading “AUTHOR INTERVIEW(part 1): Anna Odland Portisch on A MAGPIE’S TALE”

International Day of Families

In the 1993, May 15 was declared as International Day of Families by the United Nations to provide awareness of family related issues and to increase the knowledge of the social, economic and demographic processes affecting families. This year’s theme is Demographic Trends and Families.

In recognition of the day, Berghahn is pleased to highlight family related books and journal articles.

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‘Is it inevitable you’ll turn into your mother?’

(This post was originally published in 2016)

by Siân Pooley and Kaveri Qureshi

 

On the 2nd March this year, ahead of Mother’s Day, there was a thoughtful discussion on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour addressing the question: ‘is it inevitable you’ll turn into your mother?’. For counsellor Myira Khan, who was interviewed on the programme, this is a topic that comes up frequently in her therapy sessions. Indeed, for women who have struggled with their relationships with their mothers, it can be a source of great conflict. Khan claims that ‘you’re turning into your father’ is not a jibe for men in the same way that ‘you’re turning into your mother’ so often is for women, and that men do not worry about this to the same extent.  She suggests that because our mothers are our role models for womanhood, this gives mother-daughter relationships a particular charge. A lot of her counselling work with women is about trying to ‘break the cycle’, which she approaches therapeutically by exploring mother-daughter relationships, trying to understand what those relationships mean, and encouraging women to accept the reality of who their mother really was, rather than the awe-inspiring model of her that they have in their minds.

 

This programme made us pause for thought, as it was broadcast just ahead of the publication of our book Parenthood Between Generations: Transforming Reproductive Cultures. In this edited volume we bring together ten contributions by historians, anthropologists and sociologists addressing precisely the extent to which people replicate the models of parenthood that they encounter from their own parents. Continue reading “‘Is it inevitable you’ll turn into your mother?’”

Rethinking the Family in Israel

 

This is a special post written by guest editor Sylvie Fogiel-Bijaoui on why the topic of the family in Israel was chosen for Volume 28, Issue 2 of Israel Studies Review.

 

 

Israel is a society of paradoxes. It defines itself as a Jewish and democratic state that strives to institutionalize equality for all the Israeli citizens, but does not accept the basic idea of Israel as a state for all its citizens. It declares that it wants to promote peace, even though it has been involved in war from its very inception, at the very beginning of the Zionist settlement. Moreover, the state of Israel was created so that the Jewish people would become a “normal” people, but de facto, its approach is that of “a people that will dwell alone and not think itself one of the nations”.

 

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