Tag: new book releases

Egress and Ingress: Exploring ‘Points of Passage’

Ellis Island in New York City is a historically recognized entrance point for European migrants to the United States. But if this is so well-known, then why do we know so little about the points of departure? This is one of many research questions that informed the writing of Points of Passage: Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880-1914, published last October. Following, an excerpt from the volume — bookended by comments from editor Tobias Brinkmann — delves deeper into these queries.

 

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When I began researching the history of Jewish migrations in the 1990s I concentrated on immigrants. I collected sources on the settlement of Jewish immigrants from small villages in the Central and Eastern European countryside in Chicago between 1840 and 1900. Within a few years the immigrants built a Jewish community, prospered economically and became respected members of Chicago’s social and political circles. My first book concentrated on two major research questions that continue to drive immigration studies: the impact of forces strengthening or weakening ethnic communities, and the impact of assimilation processes on immigrants.

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The Reciprocal Relationship of Media and Movement

Editors Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Erling Sivertsen and Rolf Werenskjold’s volume Media and Revolt: Strategies and Performances from the 1960s to the Present was published last month. Following, the editors introduce the timely volume and share an excerpt from the Introduction. 

 

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Looking at journals, television, or on the internet in these days, news dealing with protests abounds: the upheavals around the Euro-Maidan in the Ukraine, anti-governmental protests in Bangkok, the “Occupy-Gezi-Park”-manifestations in Istanbul or protest actions of NGOs like Greenpeace against oil companies or whale hunters. Obviously protest has an enormous “news value”: it offers spectacular pictures, it makes evident political conflicts and decisions by polarizing their actors, and it offers media the chance to perform as center of society.

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Variations on an Educational Theme

When the traditional educational system of colonizing societies was disseminated to indigenous societies, it was not accepted by the colonized “as-is,” but was adopted as merely an underlying framework. This hybridization led to a multitude of varied, yet similar, educational systems across the post-imperialized world. In the following excerpt from the Introduction of Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post)Colonial Education, to be published this month, editors Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere further explain the connections within modern educational culture.

 

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Connecting Histories of Education bears a double meaning. The volume connects historians of education from South Asia and other parts of the world to enhance a comparative perspective and create a wider research network beyond the Euro-Western world. In addition, it presents local, regional, national and transnational research, with the goal of highlighting the interconnectedness of histories of education in the modern world.

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Uzbekistan, Social Network of Choice

In the Republic of Uzbekistan, being Uzbek has less to do with one’s lineage and more to do with one’s allegiance to a society. The advantages of this voluntary membership within the Uzbek “social network” are explored in Variations on Uzbek Identity: Strategic Choices, Cognitive Schemas and Political Constraints in Identification Processes. Below, Peter Finke discusses his attraction to Uzbekistan, his writing process, and the volume’s potentially controversial reception.

 

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Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of Uzbekistan, specifically “Uzbek Identity”?

 

Peter Finke: My general interest in Central Asia goes back a long way into childhood fantasies of roaming horse riders and the like. Most of Uzbekistan does not really fit that well into this and indeed my early research in the region was on nomadic pastoralists in Western Mongolia. It was after I took up a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute to work on identity issues that I not only switched topics but also field sites.

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Vienna, Dream City within a ‘Paradoxical Republic’

For the next three weeks, New York City will resonate with the energy of Austria. Vienna: City of Dreams will feature a slate of events presented by Carnegie Hall. Capping the festival will be symphony performances of the Vienna Philharmonic, an orchestra which has been celebrated since its first concert in 1842. This arrangement of musicians became a cultural beacon in post-World War II Austria, the subject of Oliver Rathkolb’s The Paradoxical Republic: Austria 1945-2005. Following, in an excerpt from the volume, which will soon be published as a paperback, Rathkolb discusses the Philharmonic’s presence in a discordant time.

 

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In 1953 . . . neither the Vienna Staatsoper nor the Burgtheater had yet been rebuilt; they were not yet functional as memory sites. However, this did not detract from the importance of the aesthetic role music, notably classical music, played in the postwar era. The sense of purpose felt when the old and new political and economic elites gathered for the first Philharmonic concerts on 27 and 28 April 1945 was highly significant. There was a strong admixture of the Soviet military in the audience, deliberately encouraged by the liberal dispensation of free tickets by the Philharmonic.

 

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A ‘Privileged’ Prisoner is Still a Prisoner

In German concentration camps, some Jewish prisoners were selected by their Nazi captors to hold more-advantaged positions within the population of the camp. This not only allowed them some protections, but also made them targets of disdain from other victims. Author Adam Brown sheds light on these “privileged” few in his volume Judging “Privileged” Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation, and the “Grey Zone,” published in July of last year. Following, Brown discusses about the origins of his interest in the Holocaust in general, and in this inspirational “Grey Zone,” in particular.

 

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The evolution of my book, Judging “Privileged” Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation and the “Grey Zone,” was – like most books no doubt – somewhat long and complex. To take the long-term view, the project began when I heard the moving personal stories spoken by survivor guides on a high school trip to the Jewish Holocaust Centre in 1999. As a non-Jewish teenager with next to no background knowledge of the event, the visit to the JHC inspired a lasting curiosity and sense of obligation to find out more.

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In the Beginning, There Were ‘Visions of the End’

When WWII drew to a close in the late 1940s, the fighting may have stopped, but the tension was just building. This sustained Cold War friction lasted longer than four decades, the whole time of which, the main players had ideas of how it would look when it ended. The editors and contributors of Visions of the End of the Cold War in Europe, 1945-1990, to be published next month, explore these ‘conceived programmes’ and ‘utopian aspirations.’ Below, an excerpt from the Introduction sets the scene, starting at the end, with the fall of the Wall.

 

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The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 quickly came to symbolize the end of the Cold War as a whole, including the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet rule in 1989, the unification of Germany in 1990 and the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. Its twentieth anniversary in autumn 2009 was therefore an opportunity to celebrate not just that particular event – however meaningful – but an extraordinary period that in barely two years led from the dismantling of the Iron Curtain to the liquidation of the whole ‘Yalta’ order.

 

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A Class Issue: Language and Education in India

In the past three decades within India, a knowledge of the English language has become more important for economic advantage. All the while, Hindi is essential to those who wish to pursue class mobility. These “mediums” form a divide within the country’s educational system, which come to the forefront in Chaise LaDousa’s Hindi is our Ground, English is our Sky: Education, Language, and Social Class in Contemporary India, published this month. Following are two excerpts from the book, the first from the Foreword by Krishna Kumar, and the second from the Preface.

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[Chaise LaDousa] has studied India’s vertical language divide in the North Indian city of Varanasi. The study takes us well beyond the shibboleths proffered about India’s linguistic plurality. The key word that enables LaDousa to enter the separate yet interwoven milieus of Varanasi is “medium.” The term is so omnipresent in the Indian urban environment that no one marvels at the versatile service it renders to India’s society and state. It resides securely in the phrase “medium of instruction” that is used across India as a public code to identify two types of schools and the opportunity markets to which they promise access.

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Unfree, but not Exploited in Eurasia

Is “unfree labor” good for business? Is it good for the unfree? Author Alessandro Stanziani aims to answer questions of labor, rights and freedoms in a comparison of Russian labor and business practices with those in Asia, Europe, and the Indian subcontinent. He covers this topic extensively in his new book, Bondage: Labor and Rights in Eurasia from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries, to be published this month. Below, in an excerpt from the volume, Stanziani gives an glimpse into nearly four centuries of Eurasian labor.

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This book is about the evolution of labor and labor institutions in Russia as compared with Europe, Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean region, between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. It questions common ideas about the origin of labor institutions and market economies—their evolution and transformation in the early-modern and modern world.

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A Note on the Influence of ‘Rhetoric and Culture’

 Astonishment and Evocation: The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne, was published earlier this year as the newest volume within the Studies of Rhetoric and Culture series. The volume and series have gained attention within the academic community, one such supporter being Michał Mokrzan, a future collaborator within the series and a scholar of rhetoric. In response to the newest volume, Mokrzan writes an entry of his own interactions with the series, series editors, and series volumes.

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Due to the fact that the Rhetoric Culture Project develops at a rapid pace – Astonishment + Evocation is the fifth volume of the Berghahn Books series Studies in Rhetoric and Culture – one can risk the thesis that we are now witnessing a crystallization of a new theoretical and methodological trend in anthropology, which can be described as a ‘rhetorical turn in anthropology’.

 

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