Bücher veröffentlicht von Berghahn Books

This volume analyzes reflexivity on two analytical planes. On one is the role reflexivity plays in human life and the study of it. The other plane is anthropo-philosophical, which maintains that reflexivity definitively distinguishes the being and becoming of the human.

Detailed are the travels, self-education, and archaeological explorations of Eugene Boban, an expert in the field of pre-Columbian studies and explores the circumstances that allowed him to sell fakes to museums that would remain undetected for over a century.

The essays collected here reconstruct the experiences of vagrants, laborers, religious exiles, refugees, and other migrants during the last five hundred years of German history. These diverse contributions identify important commonalities between eras and contextualize Germany within broader migration histories.

As much as any other nation, Germany has long been understood in terms of totalizing narratives. For Anglo-American observers in particular, the legacies of two world wars still powerfully define twentieth-century German history, whether through the lens of Nazi-era militarism and racial hatred or the nation's emergence as a "model" postwar industrial democracy. This volume transcends such common categories, bringing together transatlantic studies that are unburdened by the ideological and methodological constraints of previous generations of scholarship. From American perceptions of the Kaiserreich to the challenges posed by a multicultural Europe, it argues for-and exemplifies-an approach to German Studies that is nuanced, self-reflective, and holistic.

Astana, the capital city of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan, has often been admired for the design and planning of its futuristic cityscape. This anthropological study of the development of the city focuses on every-day practices, official ideologies and representations alongside the memories and dreams of the city's longstanding residents and recent migrants. Critically examining a range of approaches to place and space in anthropology, geography and other disciplines, the book argues for an understanding of space as inextricably material-and-imaginary, and unceasingly dynamic - allowing for a plurality of incompatible pasts and futures materialized in spatial form.

This volume provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary survey of the struggles over abortion rights in Europe from the immediate postwar era to the present era.

Anthropological writings on humor are not very numerous or extensive, but they do contain a great deal of insight into the diverse mental and social processes that underlie joking and laughter. On the basis of a wide range of ethnographic and textual materials, the chapters examine the cognitive, social, and moral aspects of humor and its potential to bring about a sense of amity and mutual understanding, even among different and possibly hostile people. Unfortunately, though, cartoons, jokes, and parodies can cause irremediable distress and offence. Nevertheless, contributors' cross-cultural evidence confirms that the positive aspects of humor far outweigh the danger of deepening divisions and fueling hostilities

Foods are changed not only by those who produce and supply them, but also by those who consume them. Analyzing food without considering changes over time and across space is less meaningful than analyzing it in a global context where tastes, lifestyles, and imaginations cross boundaries and blend with each other, challenging the idea of authenticity. A dish that originated in Beijing and is recreated in New York is not necessarily the same, because although authenticity is often claimed, the form, ingredients, or taste may have changed. The contributors of this volume have expanded the discussion of food to include its social and cultural meanings and functions, thereby using it as a way to explain a culture and its changes.

The social anthropology of sickness and health has always been concerned with religious cosmologies. The chapters cover a range of ethnographic areas and examine notions of personhood, agency, uncertainty and control among other questions.

Shamanism has always been of great interest to anthropologists. More recently it has been "e;discovered"e; by westerners, especially New Age followers. This book breaks new ground byexamining pristine shamanism in Greenland, among people contacted late by Western missionaries and settlers. On the basis of material only available in Danish, and presented herein English for the first time, the author questions Mircea Eliade's well-known definition of the shaman as the master of ecstasy and suggests that his role has to be seen as that of a master of spirits. The ambivalent nature of the shaman and the spirit world in the tough Arctic environment is then contrasted with the more benign attitude to shamanism in the New Age movement. After presenting descriptions of their organizations and accounts by participants, the author critically analyses the role of neo-shamanic courses and concludes that it is doubtful to consider what isoffered as shamanism.

Germany and the Middle East encounters in detail how the nation came to accept its historical responsibility towards newer states in the Middle East, and how major developments of the twentieth century shaped its approach to the region.

Why is Germany imagined as the `land of music'? How has that image been made over time? Exploring examples that range from Bruckner to the Beatles, from classical song to sex-club dance music, a team of historians and musicologists explores these perennial questions in innovative and exciting ways.

Europeanization in Sweden not only offers insights into how Europeanization is enacted on the ground, but also addresses the question of whether and how the "Swedish model" can guide European integration.

Globalization promised to bring about a golden age of liberal individualism, breaking down hierarchies of kinship, caste, and gender around the world and freeing people to express their true, authentic agency.

This provocative work offers an anthropological analysis of the phenomenon of political correctness, both as a general phenomenon of communication, in which associations in space and time take precedence over the content of what is communicated, and as specific critical historical conjunctures in which new elites attempt to redefine social reality.

Focusing on Italy and the Netherlands since the 1970s, Party Responses to Social Movements demonstrates how political parties have incorporated the demands of social movements to a surprising extent, even as both have grappled with fundamental and inevitable tension between their respective roles and aims.

This in-depth study reveals that military indoctrination was but one piece of the larger effort at the socialization of young men during the Nazi era.

Through perspectives that range from Eastern European art history to theology, with a concentration on the nexus of political, social, and religious history, this volume explores historical narratives that have shaped contemporary Eastern European national identities.

This collection explores the variety of ways in which people have long made themselves at home at sea, bringing together both ethnographic and archaeological research - much of it with an explicit Ingoldian approach - on a wide range of geographical areas and historical periods.

Co-authored by three anthropologists with long-term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, and in recognition of the increasingly non-territorial nature of religion in the contemporary world, Going to Pentecost offers an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements, and Pentecostalism in particular.

As the practice of divination, long stigmatized as an immoral superstition, enjoys a revival in contemporary China, Fate Calculation Experts explores the various ways in which diviners attempt to achieve legitimation in a society which identifies strongly with modernity, science, and rationality.

The seminal work of Jean Cayrol has experienced a revival in the French-speaking world since his death in 2005. Concentrationary Art represents the first translation into English of Cayrol's two essays on concentrationary art, as well as the first book-length study of his theory.

Screening Art represents the first full-length study of films about art and artists produced by the state-owned Eastern German film studio DEFA. It investigates the essential role that these "art films" played in the development of new paradigms of socialist art in post-war Europe.

Humanitarianism & Media brings together scholars from a variety of backgrounds to offer an unprecedented exploration of the history behind humanitarian efforts and the media, spanning from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

Leading scholars from around the world reflect on their practice as historians, ethnographers, social scientists and demographers in order to explore the possibilities and limitations of research into historical consciousness.

This ethnography reveals an everyday universe where uncertain relations are as much internally cultivated in indigenous Mongolian perceptions of social relatedness, as it is externally confronted in postsocialist surroundings of unemployment and diminished social security.

Going beyond the frameworks of the anthropology of death, Articulate Necrographies offers a dramatic new way of studying the dead and its interactions with the living. The collection introduces the concept of "necrography" to describe the way death and the dead create their own kinds of biographies in and among the living.

In the 1960s and 1970s, rapidly growing environmental awareness and concern not only led to widespread calls for new policies, but also created unprecedented demand for ecological expertise by the likes of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Demystifying Somali residence and mobility in urban East Africa, this volume shows its historical depth, and explores the social, cultural and political underpinnings of Somali-led urban transformation.

Based on unprecedented access to the Ghanaian military barracks and inspired by the recent resurgence of coups in West Africa, the book assesses why and how the Ghana Armed Forces were transformed from an organisation that actively orchestrated coups into an institution that accepts the authority of the democratically elected civilian government.