May is Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM) is a celebration of the culture, traditions, and history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States.

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Berghahn is happy to present several series and a selection of books on studies of Asia-Pacific cultures, societies, and histories.

 

ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology Series

The Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) is an international organization dedicated to studies of Pacific cultures, societies, and histories. This series publishes monographs and thematic collections on topics of global and comparative significance, grounded in anthropological fieldwork in Pacific locations.

 

Volume 7 Forthcoming

MORTUARY DIALOGUES
Death Ritual and the Reproduction of Moral Community in Pacific Modernities
Edited by David Lipset and Eric K. Silverman
Foreword by Shirley Lindenbaum

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Academic Book Week is Here!

AcBookWeek

Academic Book Week will be celebrated in the UK and internationally from 9-16 November 2015, and it’s organized as part of the Academic Book of the Future Project.

 

This week-long series of events aims to raise awareness for the variety and accessibility of academic books and to enhance the wider debate about the value of arts and humanities research in the UK.

 

Berghahn is delighted to celebrate Academic Book Week with special offers on all titles in the followring seven Featured Series.

Get 50% off orders placed via our website between 9th and 15th November when you enter the code BBABW at checkout!

 

 

 


 

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Holdings of the Kingdom of Norway

 

When considering powerhouses of colonization, most do not rank Norway among the likes of England and France. However, this country did have numerous outposts and much influence in Africa and Oceania. These territories come into focus in Navigating Colonial Orders: Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania, which was published this month. Following, editors Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen share insights into their book.

 

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What drew you to the study of the entrepreneurial efforts of Norwegians in colonial Africa and Oceania? How was Norway’s involvement different from its counterparts in the rest of Europe at the time? How were they the same?

 

When looking at classical representations of colonial Africa, Oceania or, also, Latin America, one is struck by how the large colonizing countries have monopolized history. What struck us when starting to follow Norwegians that went abroad in the late 1800s and early 1900s was that this was simply not the case: The various colonial settings that we have examined have uncovered great diversity in terms of non-indigenous inhabitants and, thus, revealed different forms of colonial dynamics than what has often been contained in colonial histories of the major countries.

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In Their Own Words: Matt Tomlinson and Debra McDougall on Christian Politics in Oceania

Matt Tomlinson and Debra McDougall are the editors of Christian Politics in Oceaniapublished in November 2012 by Berghahn Books.

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As anthropologists who have worked in the Pacific Islands since the 1990s, we both felt that most political analyses of the region have been flawed for one simple reason: they overlook the enormous but complex political influence of Christian churches. This influence does not always take the form that observers of American politics might expect, where particular churches take explicit stances on political issues or support particular candidates or parties. The political influence of churches in Oceania is both more subtle and more pervasive than that. Time and again during our fieldwork in Fiji and Solomon Islands, we saw how the words of preachers and pastors, activities of Christian organisations, and interpretations of the Bible shaped how people understood their place in political communities. In Oceania, like everywhere else, there is no single Christianity, making it frustratingly difficult to generalize about ‘Christian politics’. Although anthropologists have increasingly turned attention to Christianity, little attention has yet been given to the ways that rival churches position themselves against each other. Our ethnographic research  led us to see denominationalism as key source of social friction and creative energy, essential to any understanding of politics in the region.

 

            For these reasons, we began talking with our colleagues about working on a project to understand Christian politics in the Pacific. The result is this book, from which we would like to quote the following edited passage from the introduction:

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