Books published by Berghahn Books

Belief in magic and particularly the power of witchcraft was a deep and enduring presence in popular culture; people created and concealed many objects to protect themselves from harmful magic. Detailed are the principal forms of magical house protection in Britain and beyond from the fourteenth century to the present day.

Assuming that women's empowerment would accelerate the pace of social change in rural Nepal, the World Bank urged the Nepali government to undertake a "e;Gender Activities Project"e; within an ongoing long-term water-engineering scheme. The author, an anthropologist specializing in bureaucratic organizations and gender studies, was hired to monitor the project. Analyzing her own experience as a practicing "e;development expert,"e; she demonstrates that the professed goal of "e;women's empowerment"e; is a pretext for promoting economic organizational goals and the interests of local elites. She shows how a project intended to benefit women, through teaching them literary and agricultural skills, fails to provide them with any of the promised resources. Going beyond the conventional analysis that positions aid givers vis-vis powerless victimized recipients, she draws attention to the complexity of the process and the active role played by the Nepalese rural women who pursue their own interests and aspirations within this unequal world. The book makes an important contribution to the growing critique of "e;development"e; projects and of women's development projects in particular.

In historical writing on World War I, Czech-speaking soldiers serving in the Austro-Hungarian military are primarily studied as Czechs, rarely as soldiers, and never as men.

As seen in military documents, medical journals, novels, films, television shows, and memoirs, soldiers' invisible wounds are not innate cracks in individual psyches that break under the stress of war. Instead, the generation of weary warriors is caught up in wider social and political networks and institutions-families, activist groups, government bureaucracies, welfare state programs-mediated through a military hierarchy, psychiatry rooted in mind-body sciences, and various cultural constructs of masculinity. This book offers a history of military psychiatry from the American Civil War to the latest Afghanistan conflict. The authors trace the effects of power and knowledge in relation to the emotional and psychological trauma that shapes soldiers' bodies, minds, and souls, developing an extensive account of the emergence, diagnosis, and treatment of soldiers' invisible wounds.

The resettlement of the Negev Bedouin (Israel) has been wrought with controversy since its inception in the 1960s. Presenting evidence from a two-decade period, the author addresses how the changes that took place over the past sixty to seventy years have served the needs and interests of the State rather than those of Bedouin community at large. While town living fostered improvements in social and economic development, numerous unintended consequences jeopardized the success of this planning initiative. As a result, the Bedouin community endured excessive hardship and rapid change, abandoning its nomadic lifestyle and traditions in response to the economic, political, and social pressure from the State-and received very little in return.

"The failure of Liberalism" in Germany and its responsibility for the rise of Nazism is widely discussed among scholars inside and outside Germany. The author argues that German liberalism failed because of the irreconcilable conflict between two competing visions of German identity.

German unification brought fundamental, often traumatic changes for the people in eastern Germany. Women as a group were arguably more deeply affected by the changes than any other, and in one area in particular: that of work, which had far-reaching effects on them and their families' economic situation. Rachel Alsop critically examines the processes behind women's changing relationship to the labor market in eastern Germany following the collapse of state socialism and the transition to a market economy. By the 1980s women made up virtually half of the East German work force. The collapse of the GDR transformed the field of work, drastically diminishing the general demand for labor. Yet while economic and political restructuring reduced the volume of both male and female employment, it was women who bore the brunt of unemployment. In the immediate transitional period a re-masculinization of the workforce was evident, with women constituting the large part of the unemployed. Using an extensive range of both quantitative and qualitative data, the author explores the gender dynamics of the social, economic, and political restructuring of eastern Germany, thereby producing an important new context in which to examine contemporary debates on gender and work.

Arising from the need to go beyond the semiotic, cognitive, epistemic and symbolic reading of diagrams, this book looks at what diagrams are capable of in scholarly work related to the social sciences. Rather than attempting to define what diagrams are, and what their dietic capacity might be, contributions to this volume draw together the work diagrams do in the development of theories. Across a range of disciplines, the chapters introduce the ephemeral dimensions of scientist's interactions and collaboration with diagrams, consider how diagrams configure cooperation across disciplines, and explore how diagrams have been made to work in ways that point beyond simplification, clarification and formalization.

THE FREEHOF INSTITUTE OF PROGRESSIVE HALAKHAH The Freehof Institute of Progressive Halakhah is a creative research center devoted to studying and defining the progressive character of the halakhah in accordance with the principles and theology of Reform Judaism. It seeks to establish the ideological basis of Progressive halakhah, and its application to daily life. The Institute fosters serious studies, and helps scholars in various portions of the world to work together for a common cause. It provides an ongoing forum through symposia, and publications including the quarterly newsletter, HalakhaH, published under the editorship of Walter Jacob, in the United States. The foremost halakhic scholars in the Reform, Liberal, and Progressive rabbinate along with some Conservative and Orthodox colleagues as well as university professors serve on our Academic Council. This collection of essays is the product of the symposia held in Atlanta and Pittsburgh in 1995 and 1996. This book follows the volumes DYNAMIC JEWISH LAW; Progressive Halakhah - Essence and Application (1991), RABBINIC -LAY RELATIONS IN JEWISH LAW (1993), CONVERSION TO JUDAISM IN JEWISH LAW (l994), DEATH AND EUTHANASIA INJEWISH LAW (1995) and THE FETUS AND FERTILITY IN JEWISH LAW (1995), ISRAEL AND THE DIASPORA IN JEWISH LAW (1997). It is part of a series whose subjects are diverse and the approaches taken by the authors are equally so. We wish to encourage wide ranging discussions of contemporary and historic themes.

Michael Jackson's response to our beleaguered age is to ask what forms of speech and action are called for in `dark times'. He argues that experiences that fall outside the concepts and categories we habitually deploy in rendering life manageable and intelligible have both critical and redemptive power.

Hotbeds of Licentiousness is the first substantial critical engagement with British pornography on film across the 1970s, including the "e;Summer of Love,"e; the rise and fall of the Permissive Society, the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, and beyond. By focusing on a series of colorful filmmakers whose work, while omnipresent during the 1970s, now remains critically ignored, author Benjamin Halligan discusses pornography in terms of lifestyle aspirations and opportunities which point to radical changes in British society. In this way, pornography is approached as a crucial optic with which to consider recent cultural and social history.

For millennia, messianic visions of redemption have inspired men and women to turn against unjust and oppressive orders. Yet these very same traditions are regularly decried as antecedents to the violent and authoritarian ideologies of modernity. Informed in equal parts by theology and historical theory, this book offers a provocative exploration of this double-edged legacy. Author Jayne Svenungsson rigorously pursues a middle path between utopian arrogance and an enervated postmodernism, assessing the impact of Jewish and Christian theologies of history on subsequent thinkers, and in the process identifying a web of spiritual and intellectual motifs extending from ancient Jewish prophets to contemporary radicals such as Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek.

Over the last two centuries, collectors from around the world have historicized, politicized, and digitized media in the pursuit of knowledge and education. This collected volume explores how collections of educational media influence the ways in which people learn in both the present and future.