Celebrating International Day for Monuments & Sites, also known as World Heritage Day!

Celebrated yearly on April 18th, the International Day for Monuments and Sites, also known as World Heritage Day, encourages local communities and individuals throughout the world to consider the importance of cultural heritage to their lives and to promote awareness of its diversity and vulnerability and the efforts required to protect and conserve it. For information on this year’s theme please visit ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) webpage www.icomos.org.

In joining the celebration, Berghahn is excited to present relevant Heritage Studies titles and Journals, as well as highlight our Explorations in Heritage Studies series.

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A Refugee Pastor in a Refugee Church

Karen Lauterbach

World Refugee Day (20 June) offers a chance to raise awareness of the plight of refugees around the world and of the efforts to protect their human rights. In the spirit of this day, we are featuring an excerpt from “‘A Refugee Pastor in a Refugee Church’: Refugee-Refugee Hosting in a Faith-Based Context” by Karen Lauterbach (published in Migration and Society, Vol 4: Issue 1).

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An Interview with Courtney Work

Courtney Work is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnology, National Chengchi University (Taiwan). She studied at Cornell University, and has published multiple papers on the intersections of religion, traditional practices, and the politics of land, global development, and climate change. She is the author of the forthcoming title Tides of Empire: Religion, Development, and Environment in Cambodia, a new volume in our Asian Anthropologies series.


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Who is María Lionza?

A GODDESS IN MOTION: Visual Creativity in the Cult of María LionzaBy Roger Canals, lecturer in the department of social anthropology at the University of Barcelona.


The book A Goddess in Motion: Visual Creativity in the Cult of María Lionza finds its origins in my vivid interest in Afro-Latin American religions, art and visual anthropology. I understand the latter in a broad sense, that is, as an anthropology of images, as an exploration on the act of seeing and being seen, as a visual ethnography and, lastly, as an attempt to write and publish the outcomes of our research, including visual material.

 

The main goal of A Goddess in Motion: Visual Creativity in the Cult of María Lionza  is to explore how this goddess is represented and what people do with –and through– her images in contemporary Venezuelan society and abroad. For those who do not know this amazing figure, let me tell you that María Lionza is a fascinating goddess, still highly unexplored by academia: symbol of the Venezuelan identity, she is represented as Indian, White, Mestiza and as a Black woman, sometimes benevolent and sometimes evil, at once represented with a high sexual component and at once depicted as a mature woman close to the Virgin Mary. The images of María Lionza may be found in many different locations, where they play a variety of roles: on religious altars, in museums and galleries, on television, on the Internet or on the walls of the streets of Venezuelan cities, to mention just a few. Moreover, María Lionza can “descend” into the mediums’ bodies or “appear” in dreams, visions and apparitions.

 

The challenge of this book is to think of all these images (material, corporeal and mental) as a whole, that is, as a sort of dynamic and open network in which practices, discourses and visual representations mingle.

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Anthropological Knowledge Making, the Reflexive Feedback Loop, and Conceptualizations of the Soul

The following is a guest post from Katherine Swancutt, who co-edited Animism beyond the Soul: Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge. This title is now available in hardback and paperback, and we’re offering 25% off this book with code SWA663 until June 30, 2018.

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Marcel Mauss: Between Sociology and Anthropology

mauss

Marcel Mauss, (born May 10, 1872—died Feb. 10, 1950), nephew of Émile Durkheim, French sociologist and anthropologist whose contributions include a highly original comparative study of the relation between forms of exchange and social structure. His views on the theory and method of ethnology are thought to have influenced many eminent social scientists.

Learn more about the life and legacy of this influential sociologist with these books from Berghahn:

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