Tag: new in paperback

Life Beyond Earth? Survey Says…

In 2005, a survey of 1,000 U.S. men and women of various backgrounds revealed that 6 in 10 Americans believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life. If this slice of the public is correct, what does it mean for our world? That is one of the questions editors Douglas A. Vakoch and Albert A. Harrison attempt to answer through the collection Civilizations Beyond Earth: Extraterrestrial Life and Society, which was released in paperback August 2013. Below, volume contributor George Pettinico begs the question of the American reaction: How will the U.S. react if we discover life outside of our blue planet?

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Imagine the day, if and when it should come, that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) confirms there is indeed intelligent life on other planets.

 

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A Matter of Morality

Originally published in 2009, The Anthropology of Moralities, edited by Monica Heintz, will be published in paperback this month. The collection deals with the collision of moralities as human beings exist on a more and more globalized scale. Below, the editor discusses what first interested her in a moral study and what made it, and keeps it, important to the field of anthropology.

 

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Somehow after 1989 the Eastern bloc got obsessed with values. How could it be otherwise for people who had lived with double sets of values in the public and private spheres and who saw all their public values officially collapse in one night?

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Down, Not Out: Ethiopian Youth on the Street

Paula Heinonen’s decade of research and reflection led to the publication of Youth Gangs and Street Children: Culture, Nurture, and Masculinity in Ethiopia, which was published as a paperback in June 2013. Based on careful observations and interviews, the volume provides insight into common misconceptions of why  Ethiopian boys and girls take to the street.  

 

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Before embarking on my six years longitudinal field research and four years of follow-up enquiry and reflection, I read extensively on the street children phenomena worldwide.

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Hot Off the Presses – New Paperback Releases

CoyHolyNewly released paperbacks from Berghahn:

Foodways and Empathy: Relatedness in a Ramu River Society, Papua New Guinea, Anita von Poser

Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s, Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire

The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered, Jason Philip Coy, Benjamin Marschke, and David Warren Sabean

Power and Society in the GDR, 1961-1979: The ‘Normalization of Rule’?, Mary Fulbrook

“Vienna is Different”: Jewish Writers in Austria from the fin de siècle to the Present, Hillary Hope Herzog

Divided, but not Disconnected: German Experiences of the Cold War, Tobias Hochscherf, Christoph Laucht, and Andrew Plowman

Hot Off the Presses – New Paperback Releases

 

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Newly released paperbacks from Berghahn:

Youth Gangs and Street Children: Culture, Nurture and Masculinity in Ethiopia, Paula Heinonen

Funerals in Africa: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon, Michael Jindra and Joël Noret

Gardening the World: Agency, Identity and the Ownership of Water, Veronica Strang

Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Children and Adolescence, Ute Eickelkamp

Research & Reward in Central Australia

Called a “timely collection” and a “worthwhile contribution” to the discourse of Aboriginal life, Growing up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence was first published in June 2011 and was published last month in paperback. Editor Ute Eikelkamp revisits the volume and describes the joy and reward of fieldwork that led to its publication.

 

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Paying attention to the life experiences and capacities of the Aboriginal children I had known as mediators, shifting presences and welcome companions for some years during field research with the senior knowledge bearers in a central Australian community has been a most rewarding experience, both personally and intellectually.

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Celebration at a Funeral: Addressing an African Phenomenon

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Funerals in Africa: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon, originally published in September 2011, was released this month in paperback form. Below, co-editor Michael Jindra shares the root of his interest in this cultural phenomenon, and discusses the collection and what became its purpose: to shed light on funerary traditions and to inspire other scholars.

One could say the genesis of this book was way back in 1984, when I went to Cameroon as a Peace Corps Volunteer, fresh out of university. I worked with rural credit unions (village banks), and at times when I showed up at a village for a meeting, I would find out the meeting was cancelled because of a “death celebration.”

 

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Hot Off the Presses – New Paperback Releases

JerzyNewly released paperbacks from Berghahn:

The Ju/’Hoan San of Nyae Nyae and Namibian Independence: Development, Democracy, and Indigenous Voices in Southern Africa, Megan Biesele and Robert K. Hitchcock

Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist, Ewa Mazierska

Avant-Garde to New Wave Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties, Jonathan L. Owen

Anthropologies of Education: A Global Guide to Ethnographic Studies of Learning and Schooling, edited by Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt

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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Hot Off the Presses – New Book Releases

Newly released paperbacks from Berghahn:

Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi
Comics in French: The Bande Dessinée in Context, Laurence Grove
News as Culture: Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions, Ursula Rao
Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification, Nigel Rapport
State Practices and Zionist Images: Shaping Economic Development in Arab Towns in Israel, David A. Wesley, with a foreword by Emanuel Marx
The Ethnographic Self as Resource: Writing Memory and Experience into Ethnography, edited by Peter Collins and Anselma Gallinat