Bücher veröffentlicht von Berghahn Books

Although dying can be seen as the paradigm of liminality, because periods of transition are often associated with death, many volumes on death in the social sciences do not specifically address liminality. This book investigates these "ultimate ambiguities" as crucial periods of creativity, change, and emergent aspects of social and religious life.

What set our ancestors off on a separate evolutionary trajectory was the ability to flex their reproductive and social strategies in response to changing environmental conditions. Exploring new cross-disciplinary research that links this capacity to critical changes in the organization of the primate brain, Social DNA presents a new synthesis of ideas on human social origins - challenging models that trace our beginnings to traits shaped by ancient hunting economies, or to genetic platforms shared with contemporary apes.

Written for study abroad practitioners, this book introduces theoretical understandings of key study abroad terms including "e;the global/national,"e; "e;culture,"e; "e;native speaker,"e; "e;immersion,"e; and "e;host society."e; Building theories on these notions with perspectives from cultural anthropology, political science, educational studies, linguistics, and narrative studies, it suggests ways to incorporate them in study abroad practices. Through attention to daily activities via the concept of immersion, it reframes study abroad not as an encounter with cultural others but as an occasion to analyze constructions of "e;differences"e; in daily life, backgrounded by structural arrangements.

This volume explores the indeterminacy left behind by conventional understandings of progress and shows how totalizing forward movement may be resisted by fragments, open-endedness, and the possibility of going nowhere at all.

Built around key events, from the eviction of a self-managed social centre in Copenhagen in 2007 to the Climate Summit protests in 2009, this book contributes to anthropological literature on contemporary Euro-American politics foreshadowing recent waves of public dissent. Stine Krijer explores political forms among left radical and anarchist activists in Northern Europe focusing on how forms of action engender time. Drawing on anthropological literature from both Scandinavia and the Amazon, this ethnography recasts theoretical concerns about body politics, political intentionality, aesthetics, and time.

Facing the Crisis brings together ethnographic material from anthropological research projects carried out in various Italian industrial locations during the last economic crisis. With its wide number of locations and industries, the volume looks at all corners of the diverse Italian manufacturing system.

This volume explores emerging cultural meanings and social responses to population aging in contemporary East Asian societies. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, policy, archival, and media data, the authors trace both common patterns and diverging trends across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Korea.

In the early 1980s, when the contributors to this volume completed their graduate training at Oxford, the conditions of practice in anthropology were undergoing profound change. Here self-ethnography is used to portray the contributors' anthropological trajectories, showing how analytical and academic engagements interacted creatively over time.

Set at the forested edge of Cambodia's frontier, this book shares stories and insights from migrants, loggers, and soldiers carving homesteads into a new village.

Beginning with an original historical vision of financialization in human history, this volume then continues with a rich set of contemporary ethnographic case studies from Europe, Asia and Africa. Authors explore how finance influences social and economic structures in different environments.

This book traces the complex interactions between hunters, birds and the landscapes they inhabit, as well as the dynamics and politics of bird conservation. It looks at the practice and meaning of hunting in a specific context, and raises broader questions about human-wildlife interactions and the uncertain outcomes of conservation.

This volume brings together theoretical and practical considerations to provide transnational memory scholars with an interdisciplinary investigation into agency-the "who" and the "how" of cross-border commemoration that motivates activists and fascinates observers.

Provides an overdue exploration of labour history on both sides of the Aegean, before as well as after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Deploying the approaches of global labour history as a framework, this volume presents transnational, transcontinental, and diachronic comparisons that illuminate the shared history of Greece and Turkey.

In a series of illuminating case studies, Curto follows the history and perception of major Portuguese colonial initiatives while integrating the complex perspectives of participating agents to show how the empire's life and culture were richly inflected by the operations of imperial expansion.

Examining street vending as a global, urban, and informalized practice found both in the Global North and Global South, this volume presents contributions from international scholars working in cities as diverse as Berlin, Dhaka, New York City, Los Angeles, Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City. The aim of this global approach is to repudiate the assumption that street vending is usually carried out in the Southern hemisphere and to reveal how it also represents an essential--and constantly growing--economic practice in urban centers of the Global North. Although street vending activities vary due to local specificities, this anthology illustrates how these urban practices can also reveal global ties and developments.

There has been a recent revival of interest in the work of Polish film director Walerian Borowczyk, a label-defying auteur and "escape artist" if there ever was one. This collection serves as an introduction and a guide to Borowczyk's complex and ambiguous body of work, including panoramic views of the director's output, focused studies of particular movies, and more personal, impressionistic pieces. Taken together, these contributions comprise a wide-ranging survey that is markedly experimental in character, allowing scholars to gain insight into previously unnoticed aspects of Borowczyk's oeuvre.

From Christian missionary publications to the media strategies employed by today's NGOs, this interdisciplinary collection explores the entangled histories of humanitarianism and media. It traces the emergence of humanitarian imagery in the West and investigates how the meanings of suffering and aid have been constructed in a period of evolving mass communication, demonstrating the extent to which many seemingly new phenomena in fact have long historical legacies. Ultimately, the critical histories collected here help to challenge existing asymmetries and help those who advocate a new cosmopolitan consciousness recognizing the dignity and rights of others.

Juxtaposing contributions from geneticists and anthropologists, this volume provides a contemporary overview of cousin marriage and what is happening at the interface of public policy, the management of genetic risk and changing cultural practices in the Middle East and in multi-ethnic Europe. It offers a cross-cultural exploration of practices of cousin marriage in the light of new genetic understanding of consanguineous marriage and its possible health risks. Overall, the volume presents a reflective, interdisciplinary analysis of the social and ethical issues raised by both the discourse of risk in cousin marriage, as well as existing and potential interventions to promote "healthy consanguinity" via new genetic technologies.

Located within the forgotten half of Europe, historically trapped between Germany and Russia, Estonia has been profoundly shaped by the violent conflicts and shifting political fortunes of the last century. This innovative study traces the tangled interaction of Estonian historical memory and national identity in a sweeping analysis extending from the Great War to the present day. At its heart is the enduring anguish of World War Two and the subsequent half-century of Soviet rule. Shadowlands tells this story by foregrounding the experiences of the country's intellectuals, who were instrumental in sustaining Estonian historical memory, but who until fairly recently could not openly grapple with their nation's complex, difficult past.

The reindeer herders of Aoluguya, China, are a group of former hunters who today see themselves as "keepers of reindeer" as they engage in ethnic tourism and exchange experiences with their Ewenki neighbors in Russian Siberia. Though to some their future seems problematic, this book focuses on the present, challenging the pessimistic outlook, reviewing current issues, and describing the efforts of the Ewenki to reclaim their forest lifestyle and develop new forest livelihoods. Both academic and literary contributions balance the volume written by authors who are either indigenous to the region or have carried out fieldwork among the Aoluguya Ewenki since the late 1990s.

Examines how the colonial state attempted to administer, control, and integrate its indigenous subjects through mimetic governmentality, as well the ways indigenous states adopted these imitative practices to establish reciprocal ties with, or to resist the presence of, the colonial state.

Examines how the colonial state attempted to administer, control, and integrate its indigenous subjects through mimetic governmentality, as well the ways indigenous states adopted these imitative practices to establish reciprocal ties with, or to resist the presence of, the colonial state.

Controlling food and access to food can be used as a weapon. This is an especially significant issue in zones of conflict, because conflict impinges on the production and the distribution of food causing increased competition for food, land and resources.

This volume's ethnographic analyses provide a theoretical frame through which to consider the production and reproduction of ignorance, non-knowledge, and secrecy.

Contemporary economies, dominated by global finance and political rent-seekers, often inhibit the realization of democracy. This volume features comparative essays and case studies to examine the antagonisms between the economy and democracy and the struggles and visions to make things more equitable.

Despite being two key sites for filmmaking in the Soviet bloc, the national cinemas of Czechoslovakia and East Germany have received comparatively little attention from scholars.

In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people's lives, practices, and stories. Contributors analyse the union of water and social lives, thereby challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their subjects and responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.

For decades, historians have debated how and to what extent the Holocaust penetrated the German national consciousness between 1933 and 1945. This compact volume brings together six historical investigations into the subject from leading scholars, employing newly accessible and previously underexploited evidence.