Look for Berghahn at The EASA 2016 Conference

 

We are delighted to inform you that we will be present at The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Conference in Milan, Italy from the 20th-23rd of July 2016. Please stop by our table to browse the latest selection of books at discounted prices, pick up some free journal samples, or chat to Marion Berghahn.

We are pleased to announce that we will be hosting a Reception in the U6 Foyer from 4.30pm on Friday, 22nd July to celebrate the launch of our New Series, Worlds in Motion and its 1st Volume, Keywords of Mobility, edited by Noel B. Salazar and Kiran Jayaram. At the reception, we will also be launching Volume 33 of our Forced Migration Series, namely The Agendas of Tibetan Refugees by Thomas Kauffmann. So if you will be in Milan, we’d be delighted if you could join us at this very special event.

If you are unable to attend the conference, we would like to provide you with a special discount offer. For the next 30 days, receive a 25% discount on all Anthropology titles found on our website. At checkout, simply enter the discount code EASA16. Visit our website­ to browse our newly published interactive online Anthropology & Sociology Catalog and EASA Series Flyer or use the new enhanced subject searching features­ for a complete listing of all published and forthcoming titles.

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Celebrate National Parks and Recreation Month

 

July is Parks and Rec Logo.gif

Each year since 1985, Americans have celebrated national Park and Recreation Month during the month of July to recognize the importance of parks and recreation in establishing and maintaining the quality of life for, and contributing to the physical, economic and environmental well-being of communities. To find out more please visit National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA).

 

Berghahn is happy to present some of its relevant Environmental Studies titles:

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Berghahn titles at Council for European Studies Conference

CES

We are delighted to inform you that Berghahn titles will be on display at The Council for European Studies Conference in Philadelphia, PA on April 14-16, 2016. Please stop by and don’t miss your chance to browse our selection of books at special conference price and pick up free journal samples.

 

If you are unable to attend, we would like to provide you with a special discount offer. For the next 30 days, receive a 25% discount on all Europe Studies titles found on our website. At checkout, simply enter the code CES16.

 

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Berghahn Books Shortlisted for The British Book Industry Awards

AWARDWe are thrilled to announce that Berghahn Books has been shortlisted for The British Book Industry Awards. We are in excellent company for the Independent Academic, Educational and Professional Publisher of the Year Award alongside fellow nominees Bright Red Publishing, How2become, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, Policy Press, and Rowman & Littlefield International.

 

From The Bookseller’s website:

The British Book Industry Awards will celebrate the greatness of the British book trade and the people behind it – the best books, the best writers, the best bookshops, the best publishers – from industry greats to those starting out. Building on the success and legacy of The Bookseller Industry Awards (the trade “Nibbies”), 2016 will mark the first step, and a step-change, in the way the book trade presents itself to itself and to the wider world.

 
The winners will be announced 9th May 2016. Stay tuned!

 

 

 

Solving the Mystery of Nancy Drew

The following is a guest blog post written by Michael G. Cornelius, author of the article Sexuality, Interruption, and Nancy Drew, which appeared in Volume 8, Number 2 of the journal Girlhood Studies.


 

It’s admittedly an odd thing, to be a Nancy Drew scholar.
 
Strictly speaking, “Nancy Drew Scholar” is not the official occupation listed on my tax forms. And when strangers ask me what I do for a living—whenever such casual conversations between strangers bubble up, such as on an airplane—I never reply “Nancy Drew scholar.” I usually say “English teacher” or “professor” or even “medievalist” (which raises more than a few eyebrows on its own, trust me.) And, at the risk of sounding like an actor who worries about typecasting, I’m more than a Nancy Drew scholar. I write on a wide variety of subject matter: sword-and-sandal movies; science fiction; sexuality in the premodern and early modern eras—a quick perusal of my CV would reveal books and articles with words like “Chaucer” and “Shakespeare” and “Gawain” in the titles (there’s also one that includes the word “Farts,” but that’s a subject of a whole different blog post.)
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“Bureaucrats are the evil sisters of ethnographers”: Discussing a new anthropology of bureaucracy

David Graeber, Laura Bear and Nayanika Mathur were recently in conversation at the London School of Economics (LSE) on the anthropology of bureaucracy. They reflected on the connections between their recent publications that propose a new anthropology of bureaucracy (Bear, Navigating Austerity: Currents of debt Along a South Asian River, Stanford 2015; Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, Melville, 2015; Mathur, Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India, Cambridge, 2015, Bear and Mathur, Remaking the Public Good: A New Anthropology of Bureaucracy, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, Spring 2015).

From a wide-ranging discussion that is available in full here, we present a short summary:

What can the post-office tell us about bureaucracy? How do postal services and the bureaucrats that serve in them embody particular public goods and their inequalities? It is important to focus on the history of the politics of race and class in postal services across the world. For instance, in the United States the post office was once seen as the realisation of solid public service and middle class respectability. With the systematic dismantling of the welfare state, however, it becomes a space of racialized violence expressed in the phrase “going postal.” In Germany there is a distinct history with different break points. It began as a public good drawing on military codes, to become (as shown in Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl) a site of social ressentiment and Freudian angst associated with the rise of new right and left wing politics in the 1920s-30s. In the UK its recent progressive privatisation tracks a different trajectory of aspiration and inequality defined by shareholder politics.

How are bureaucracies both moral and military technologies?

Our comparison of different postal services led us towards a discussion of the technologies that found new bureaucracies. Services such as the railways, postal services, the telegraph are often considered as military technologies – particularly in the context of colonialism. However, these are also moral technologies as they are attempts to shape the legitimacy of rule. The bureaucrat and technician bear the burden of efficiency and of performing a particular kind of ethical self. So bureaucrats and their technologies simultaneously enact utopias and lines of violent force. This is a highly confusing combination for citizens as they interact with them.

Why does the history of bureaucracy matter?

Citizens’ encounters with bureaucracies vary across time and space. How can we reflect on bureaucracy through a historical and comparative frame? Our various research sites of the United States, India, and Madagascar offer interesting points of contrast. In India we discuss how, even today, the state and its associated bureaucratic apparatus is believed to embody an abstract vision of justice; one that it is never able to approximate in practice but the ideal is always held out as a promise. In Madagascar, on the other hand, the state was considered akin to a natural disaster – something you speedily get out of the way of. What methods of comparison at a middle range of analysis are possible across these diverse forms? Technology offers an obvious entry point (as our discussions have shown so far), but what about common usages of language and their performative effects?

What does language reveal about bureaucracy; especially about contemporary financialised bureaucracies?

All three monographs as well as our special issue on the public good explore the financialisation of bureaucratic structures the world over. In this context, it becomes particularly important to pay attention to the common language that is being deployed in public discourse and the new words that are gaining prominence. David has looked at ‘deregulation’ in the United States while Laura, Nayanika, and the contributors to their special issue study the effects of ‘austerity,’ ‘transparency,’ ‘consensus,’ ‘accountability,’ and ‘efficiency.’ Our attempt here is to recast the study of bureaucracy through an ethnographic tracing of the new public goods circulated by usages of these ethically loaded words; and the forms of precarious citizenship that they generate. Taking efficiency as an example, we discussed how the ends of this efficiency are never considered—the accumulation of more profits for the private sector.

Is it difficult to study bureaucracy? Is it possible to not study bureaucracy?

Our conversation lingered on how difficult it remains – despite the recent spate of ethnographies – to study bureaucracy anthropologically. Our 3 monographs and the special issue of CJA are recent attempts to overcome this longstanding anthropological difficulty. We all underlined that it remains impossible to escape bureaucracy, be it in our roles as academics in the UK or ethnographers in India and Madagascar or just residents of our own countries. The bureaucrat is the evil sister of the anthropologist in their techniques; therefore we have to find ways to maintain our position as the ‘good sister.’ It is vital to find new ways through which we can study and articulate bureaucracy as more than ‘boring’ or ‘necessary.’

How can we articulate the violence of bureaucracy through the study of paperwork?

A growing ethnography of paperwork has successfully made the violence within bureaucratic procedure visible. David has written of the struggles surrounding his mother’s illness as he encountered the American health system. He makes the point that the supreme idiocy of paperwork is a mere manifestation of the systemic violence of bureaucracy. Our encounter with it is paradoxical; we understand it won’t let us in, yet we still desire to be recognized by it. Laura has written on the tortuous petitions that Anglo-Indian and Bengali railway workers sent to the bureaucracy in colonial India seeking individual recognition (Bear 2007); and Nayanika has looked at how transparency is materially made by documents in contemporary development work in India (Mathur 2012).

How is contemporary paperwork in financialised bureaucracies different from past forms?

We all agreed that the new public good of transparency is critical in changing the forms of paperwork. It remains a largely uncriticised public good in the contemporary world even as it does the work of masking new forms of opacity and state control. What is the relationship between secrecy and government today? How does the discourse of transparency change Weber’s idea of the official secret – that most wonderful bureaucratic invention? All of us gave examples of the manner in which transparency and secrecy operate in our experience and ethnography. We agreed that there is a need for a more robust anthropology of secrecy and spying. The doublethink and triplethink that is central to bureaucracy needs to be elaborated and acknowledged.

Are the bureaucrats conspiring?

Talk of secrecy led, inevitably, to the way in which the existence of bureaucracies enables conspiracy theories. The analytical problem is that bureaucracies provoke conspiracy theories and accounts of centralised control; so how can we identify the difference between a ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ causal chain in our ethnographic analysis? How can we track both and disentangle the ways in which they mutually support each other? We discussed how Foucault’s decentralised model of state power is not sufficient to capture this complexity. Class inequality is especially important in the study of conspiracy theories; the middle classes and bureaucrats do ‘strategy’ while the working classes are labelled as ‘paranoid.’ We reflected on how states sometimes feed people who are conspiracy theorists with conspiracies to prove that they are ‘insane.’

What constitutes bureaucratic honour and what is its class politics?

If we are to think of bureaucracies as animated spaces inhabited by individuals with particular deals then we need to more clearly consider how bureaucratic honour operates. We need in particular (in an anti-Foucauldian move) to explore its class politics. Examples ranged from military honour under apartheid and post-apartheid regimes in South Africa; to the colonial and post-colonial railway bureaucracy to lower-level development workers in the Indian Himalaya.

How do bureaucracies work in relation to the market now?

We ended by discussing how bureaucracies enable capital accumulation and greater collusion between the market and the state. The distinction between the public and the private that bureaucracy is so intent on upholding is morally real in the personas of bureaucrats; yet is structurally unreal because of the ways in which state institutions now directly funnel profits towards corporate organisations. A need to expose this process of accumulation as well as the morality that underlies bureaucratic action is absolutely critical. This is an approach that we all take in our published and continuing research.

Click here to listen to the discussion in its entirety.

Click here to browse articles in the special issue of The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology on bureaucracy and the public good.

 

 

 

 

 

 

        

 

 

 

 

Populist radical right parties and (trans)national environmental issues

Nature and CultureThis is a guest post written by Bernhard Forchtner, contributor to Volume 10: Issue 2 of the journal Nature and Culture . Bernhard Forchtner is a contributor to the article titled “The Nature of Nationalism: ‘Populist Radical Right Parties’ on Countryside and Climate.”

Conversations about “populist radical right parties” (Cas Mudde) in contemporary Europe usually turn to issues such as asylum seekers, ‘foreigners’ and the European Union. What tends to surprise audiences, however, are stories about far-right ecology. Environmental issues are, after all, issues supposedly covered by ‘the left’. However, even if far-right actors across Europe have hardly prioritised environmental protection over the last decades, these actors do intervene in such debates, making the latter meaningful on the basis of their nationalist stance. And maybe, this should not surprise us in the first place given that nature protection, in its beginnings in the 19th century, was often pushed by rather conservative forces.

In the article The Nature of Nationalism, my colleague Christoffer Kølvraa and I thus ask whether and how different types of “populist radical right parties”, the more mainstream Danish People’s Party and the more radical British National Party, have addressed the topic of the national countryside and the transnational issue of climate change.

Although differences in the ‘radicalism’ of the position of these actors exist, these differences are not fundamental. Instead, there is a fundamental difference in how national countryside and transnational climate are assessed. With regards to the countryside, both parties are ardent defenders of what they view as a quintessential national space, a position underpinned by what we call a nationalist symbolic aesthetics. That is, both parties frame the countryside in terms of its natural splendour coupled with a claim for historical continuity of the national community in this territory, thereby making manifest the political sovereignty the people enjoy over the land. In relation to the nature of climate too, the British National Party goes much further than the Danish People’s Party, the former voicing strong scepticism (if not denial) regarding the thesis of (man-made) climate change – something the latter rather insinuates. However, both parties share a symbolic materialism via which international bodies, arguably necessary in the fight against an inherently transnational phenomenon, are criticised as they apparently endanger national sovereignty and classical nationalist ideas of self-sufficiency. When nationalists justify their stance on environmental issues and claim that “we all hold our land in trust for future generations” (British National Party), one should not simply dismiss their arguments as strategic in order to attract voters. Instead, their notion of ecology and environmental protection is deeply embedded in their ideology.

While the topic has received rather scant attention in the literature to date, and thus research charters much previously unmapped territory, the topic has also proven to be challenging – something noticeable in particular in conversations with environmental activists. While the climate politics of “populist radical right parties” are easily rejected by these activists, many of their more subtle positions, for example on invasive species, cannot easily be distinguished from mainstream and even left-wing arguments. Where they exist, these similarities need to be taken seriously! As the modernization of the far-right across Europe does not seem to lose steam, more and more related, counter-intuitive cases emerge. Currently, a group of German neo-Nazis (Balaclava Küche) promotes veganism within their scene. Partly due to environmental concerns, they do so through their YouTube channel but have also offered catering service at neo-Nazi concerts, etc. In a series of interviews conducted after the completion of The Nature of Nationalism, actors (previously) belonging to “populist radical right parties” voiced ‘traditional’ views on a far-right ecology. For example, interviewees lamented about what they perceive as a cultural crisis which ignores the laws of nature. Instead, nations should be viewed as (eco)systems which – if too much alien elements enter – lose their natural equilibrium and collapse. Subsequently, “nomadic cultures and races” were rejected in favor of rooted (“sesshafte”) people who supposedly care for the environment. This can easily take an anti-Semitic twist but definitely contains a rejection of “foreigners” who are not committed to the beauty of ‘our’ country the way ‘natives’ supposedly are.

What these interviews have shown is that differences between these groups are worth investigating. While our paper foregrounds similarities based on a shared ideological ground, subsequent case-studies should equally focus on differences between various actors within a national space or across boundaries. There is work to do as these actors seem to have a future in, at least European, politics.

Learn more about the journal Nature and Culture