Tag: interview

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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The Anthropology of AIDS in Tanzania: An Discussion with Hansjörg Dilger

Hansjörg Dilger is the editor, along with Ute Luig, of Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, which was published by Berghahn Books in paperback in December 2012. 

 

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What drew you to the study of AIDS in Africa?

 

HD: I started my research on AIDS in Tanzania as a master student. AIDS hadn’t been at the center of “mainstream anthropology” in the mid-1990s, at least not in Western Europe, and I wanted to do “something useful” for my thesis project. Initially, my fieldwork on HIV/AIDS focused on the moral discourses of young men and women on sexuality, modernity, and social transformation in the context of the epidemic in western Tanzania. Later on, this led me to the study of social and kinship relations and how they transform in the context of illness, death, and rural-urban mobility.

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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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A Conversation with the Editors of “Civilizing Nature” on the National Park

Patrick Kupper, Bernhard Gissibl, and Sabine Höhler are the editors of Civilizing Nature, published in November 2012 by Berghahn Books.  Civilizing Nature examines the phenomenon of the national park from a historical and transnational perspective.  

 

Why did you choose a global history approach to studying national parks?

 

Patrick:

National parks have arguably been the most important tool of nature conservation worldwide. Since the first patches of nature were segregated under that label in the late 19th century, parks have become a global phenomenon – there are thousands of them all over the world, and they occupy an astonishing amount of terrestrial and, more recently, also maritime space. We found a paradoxical relationship between the national and the global in nature conservation, and the connections behind parks a striking and illustrative instance of what we have become accustomed to call globalization. Delving into this genuinely global history says a lot about the making and the nature of global environmentalism.

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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.

Continue reading “Meet the Editors – Rex Clark and Oliver Lubrich” →

Interview with the editors of Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Beauvoirian Perspective

What inspired the project?

Ursula Tidd: As far as I was concerned, I was keen to show the immense relevance of Beauvoir’s thought to film studies and hence, to take her work more deeply into the area of film studies. I have noticed that Beauvoir’s work is often implied in discussions in film studies about ‘the male gaze’ and on the topic of gender relations more broadly, but not always made explicit in what it contributes to the debates.

Jean-Pierre Boulé: A desire to use The Second Sex to show that Beauvoir still has a lot to say about human relationships.

 

How did you hope it might influence the field?

J-PB: For people to go back to or discover Beauvoir and realise that she has a place in film studies.

UT: I hope that this volume will inspire more people to look at film through Beauvoirean eyes, so to speak! And to engage more closely with her phenomenologically-based philosophy on gender and ageing.

 

Which aspect of co-editing did you find most difficult?

J-PB: Not difficult as such, but bearing in mind a student readership, making the volume accessible to them. And choosing the front cover photograph.

UT: Yes, it’s important to keep in mind the future readership of a volume like this – although one can’t please everyone…

 

Would the films discussed be the kind of films Simone de Beauvoir would be interested in?

UT: For sure! Beauvoir was highly eclectic in her cultural interests and an avid film-goer, at least for most of her life. She enjoyed art house as well as Hollywood cinema so I think that all the films discussed would have engaged her.

J-PB: Absolutely! I like to think she would have liked the various genres under study, as she herself wrote in a variety of genres. I think she would have loved Revolutionary Road, set in 1955, with its story of oppression and liberation.

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Jean-Pierre Boulé is Professor of Contemporary French Studies at Nottingham Trent University.

 

Ursula Tidd is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Manchester.

 

Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Beauvoirian Perspective was published by Berghahn Books in September 2012.  A companion volume, Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Sartrean Perspective, edited by Jean-Pierre Boulé and Enda McCaffrey, is also available from Berghahn Books.

Meet the Editors – Interview with Andrew Whitehouse, co-editor of Landscapes beyond Land: Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives

Landscapes beyond Land: Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives, edited by Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst, and Andrew Whitehouse has recently been released as part of the EASA series. Here Andrew Whitehouse takes us behind the makings of the volume and shares how through his involvement he overcame his own skepticism for the usefulness of landscape as an idea in anthropology.

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1. What drew you to the study of how landscapes are constituted and recollected?
We were initially encouraged by getting some funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council to run a series of workshops on the theme of landscape. The four of us (myself, Jo Vergunst, Nicolas Ellison and Arnar Arnason) were all interested in environmental anthropology and we were keen to see how different anthropologists were thinking about landscapes. Nicolas is from France and one of our aims was to compare French and British approaches. This really came to the fore when we had a workshop in Paris. We also wanted to see how ethnographic writing about landscape could draw together different elements, from very direct perception to large scale and long-term structural dimensions.

2. What aspect of writing or assembling this work did you find most difficult?
Probably just the sheer task of communicating with all of the different people who have been involved in the book. That’s one of the challenges of an edited volume, I guess. Sometimes there were different perspectives within the editorial team, but in many ways we wanted the book to reflect different ideas about landscape, so that wasn’t a problem.

3. How did your perceptions of the book’s topic change from the time you started your research to the time you completed the book?
I definitely learnt a lot about landscape! When we began the series of workshops on which the book was based, I’ll confess to being a bit skeptical about the usefulness of landscape as an idea in anthropology. I thought it was a problem that it had so much baggage and that it lacked precision. I’ve come to rather like that baggage though, because it tends to take things in an interesting direction. I love the way that landscape seems to encourage us to draw nature, culture and history together.

4. If you weren’t an anthropologist, what would you have done instead?
I used to work on a nature reserve and in fact became an anthropologist initially as a way to think about that sort of landscape. I certainly wouldn’t mind working on a reserve these days. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m fairly obsessed with wildlife and it would be good to work outdoors a bit more than I do.

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Andrew Whitehouse is a Teaching Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has conducted research in various parts of Britain and elsewhere on conservation issues and human–animal relations, with a particular focus on relations with birds through sound.

Interview with the Author – Britta McEwen, author of Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900-1934

Britta McEwen is author of Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900-1934, published earlier this year by Berghahn. Her work uncovers the transformation of sexual knowledge from the realm of specialized medical science to that of social reform for the wider populace. Here she discusses her work, some of the challenges she faced in writing about some of the key historical figures, and how she would utilize her apple pie making skills if she weren’t a historian.

1. What drew you to the study of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century?

I actually got into this field through architecture!  Vienna has these amazing public housing projects from the interwar period, and as I investigated them I learned that they were intended for a new kind of people – upright, moral, hardworking small families.  This seemed to entail a new sexual system, starting with birth control at the very least.  That, combined with a well-timed read of Isabel Hull’s “Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany,” made me think that there was a story to tell in Vienna’s early twentieth century about attitudes towards sex.

2. Did any perceptions on the subject change from the time you started your research to the time you completed the book?

On of my assumptions at the beginning of my project was that science was always a liberating voice vis-à-vis sexuality.  While scientific discourse was used to challenge Church teachings about sex, I found that many authors in the early twentieth century were actually using melodramatic language, rather than scientific language, to express the call to sexual and social justice.  At first I thought this was just a trick to popularize complex ideas, but as I went on I came to believe that melodrama offered people writing about sex a way to talk about ignorance, shame, and consequences in a way that would be convincing to a wide audience.

3. What aspect of writing this work did you find most challenging?  Most rewarding?

I’ll answer that one by combining the questions and talking about what was both challenging AND rewarding…  some of the historical characters I met in my research were so very colorful and compelling that they threatened to overshadow the “knowledge” they sought to impart.  Here I’m thinking of Wilhelm Reich, Johann Ferch, and above all, Hugo Bettauer.  Bettauer became a personal hero of mine as I wrote, which made it difficult to really focus on his journalism, rather than his person, for the book.  In another world, I think I would have ditched the reams of research I had collected and simply written about Bettauer’s humanism and his outrageous career.

4. To what extent do you think the book will contribute to debates among academics within the field?

Although one of the arguments of my book is that Vienna was a special site for the production and distribution of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century, I think it would be interesting to see comparative work done on this issue.  How unusual were places like Vienna, Paris, and Berlin?  What made them unique?  I also wonder if books like mine will help dispel the belief that there was only one sexual revolution.  Finally, the debate in the German-speaking world about the “repressive” sexual regimes of the twentieth century is really heating up, and I think books like mine will help contextualize what sexual “liberation” meant to different historical actors.

5. If you weren’t a historian, what would you have done instead?

Although I am a hardly an entrepreneur, I do think I might have been able to run a public space.  Lord knows I waitressed enough to know a good cup of coffee when I see it, and I make a mean apple pie.  So some days I fantasize about running a bookstore specializing in science fiction and mysteries, where you could get something sweet to eat and sit all day (just like in Vienna), reading and gabbing.  I imagine it to be the kind of place with a bad pun in the title and a standing feminist knitting circle – come to think of it, the kind of place that could be lampooned on “Portlandia.”

Britta McEwen teaches European History at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

Interview with the Editors- Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman, editors of Environment and Citizenship in Latin America

Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman are the editors of Environment and Citizenship in Latin America: Natures, Subjects and Struggles, recently published by Berghahn. The work aims to advance debates on environmental citizenship, while simultaneously and systematically addressing broader theoretical and methodological questions related to the particularities of studying environment and citizenship in Latin America. Here, they discuss the origins of their interest in the topic, where they see the work fitting within the field, and the process of putting the volume together.

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1. What drew you to the study of environmental citizenship?
We were both conducting extensive field research in different parts of Latin America (Wittman mainly in Guatemala and Brazil, Latta in Chile) during the early 2000s, when the field of citizenship studies was really picking up. At the same time, researchers working within a long tradition of “green” social theory started talking about “environmental citizens” and probing questions about what it means to think about ecological questions through the lens of citizenship. In the field we couldn’t help observing the way that struggles over environmental issues were closely bound up with debates over questions of recognition, inclusion, rights and inequality. The connection between environment and citizenship was plain to see in communities’ defense of their land rights, activists’ discourses around biodiversity or pollution, corporate agendas to tap natural wealth and government’s efforts to order and regulate different kinds of human-nature relationships. But as we observed this connection in practice, we were dissatisfied with debates about environmental citizenship amongst scholars from the Global North, which didn’t seem to offer the tools we needed to make sense of what was going on in Latin America. Before we even met we had independently decided to work at conceptual innovation to remedy this shortcoming

 

2. How did your perceptions of environment and citizenship change from the time you started work on this volume to the time you completed it?
Working on this volume was a good reality check for us. As a scholar it is easy to get wrapped up in one’s own self-referential bubble of theories, case studies and the like. Hearing what other scholars made of this connection between environment and citizenship had two kinds of outcomes. On the one hand, it confirmed our conviction that this is a fruitful intellectual space for thinking about a series of related ecological, social and political questions. There are all kinds of research avenues still to be explored. On the other hand, working with our collaborators during this project also reminded us that the terminology of citizenship, even as an analytical concept, is not innocent nor is there consensus about definitions and meanings. A number of the scholars who participated in the original workshop, including a couple whose pieces found their way into the book, were critical about the way the notion of citizenship potentially imposes a Western political ontology. They also pushed us with respect to the limits of citizenship as an analytical category (compared, for instance, to environmental justice). Even more importantly, these collaborators have demonstrated in their chapters how the discourses and practices of environmental citizenship can and have been mobilized by state and other actors as tools to re-enforce the subordination of politically marginal subjects such as indigenous peoples.

 

3. Do you think there are aspects of this work that will be controversial to other scholars working in the field? 
To the extent that the volume manages to complicate the terms of debate it is definitely our hope that other scholars in the field will feel the need to respond. There is a reason why the book is not titled “Environmental Citizenship in Latin America”. This collection is aimed to decentre the field of study, unsettling the easy union of these terms and putting in their place a more open-ended research agenda around the intersection of environment and citizenship. Obviously, the collection is also meant to stir the pot by reminding scholars that the Global South can’t be ignored as we seek to develop new paradigms of thought around environmental questions.

 

4. To what extent do you think the book will contribute to debates amongst academics and activists within the Latin American Region?
The fact that the book is in English is a partial barrier to uptake amongst Spanish or Portuguese speaking audiences, though there is an increasing amount of collaboration and cross-fertilization between work conducted in the three different languages, regardless of where it is written and published. Indeed, six of our own contributors are from the region. Moreover, we’ve had excitement about the collection expressed by other Latin American colleagues in research networks to which we belong. There seems to be a hunger amongst scholars and activists in the region for more exploration of the kinds of themes the book’s contributors grapple with. At the same time, in the context of this and other projects we constantly feel that more needs to be done to join up academic debate across the North-South divide, and also to reach out more effectively from the academic sphere into activist circles.

 

5. Putting together an edited volume is a lot of work. Was it worth it?
The opportunity to collaborate on a volume like this, both in terms of our work together as editors and with respect to the larger network of scholars involved in the project, brings significant rewards. We were lucky to have a really dedicated group of contributors, who worked diligently through numerous rounds of revision. In general there is a lot of good feeling around the collaboration that went into this project, and I think we are all pleased with the outcome.

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Alex Latta is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and in the Balsillie School of International Affairs.

Hannah Wittman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Member of the Latin American Studies Program at Simon Fraser University.

Interview with the Author- Christien Klaufus, Author of Urban Residence: Housing and Social Transformations in Globalizing Ecuador

Christien Klaufus is the author of Urban Residence: Housing and Social Transformations in Urbanizing Ecuador, published this spring by Berghahn. Her work examines two contrasting populations in Ecuador’s cities: popular-settlement residents and professionals in the planning and construction sector to understand how they shape the city itself. Here she discusses her work, how she came to it, and her many varied interests outside the academy.

1. What drew you to the study of urban spaces in Ecuador?
My fascination for Latin America started when I was a child. I used to collect clippings about Peru, Bolivia, Mexico and Guatemala from the National Geographic journals that my father brought home. After graduating in Architecture in 1993, I travelled through South America for a few months. It was during that trip that I decided I wanted to switch careers from working in architectural design to becoming an academic researcher on urban spaces and architecture, preferably in Latin America. Ecuador became my favorite destination. So I applied for a BA and MA in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, which later resulted in a PhD dissertation on that topic. The book was a logical outcome of my multidisciplinary academic background and a long-lasting fascination for Latin America. Continue reading “Interview with the Author- Christien Klaufus, Author of Urban Residence: Housing and Social Transformations in Globalizing Ecuador” →