Books published by Berghahn Books

In an era cross-cut with various agendas and expressions of national belonging and global awareness, "e;the nation"e; as a collective reference point and experienced entity stands at the center of complex identity struggles. This book explores how such struggles unfold in practice at a highly symbolic battlefield site in the Danish/German borderland. Comprised of an ethnography of two profoundly different institutions - a conventional museum and an experience-based heritage center - it analyses the ways in which staff and visitors interfere with, relate to, and literally "e;make sense"e; of the war heritage and its national connotations. Borders of Belonging offers a comparative, in-depth analysis of the practices and negotiations through which history is made and manifested at two houses devoted to the interpretation of one event: the decisive battle of the 1864 war in which Otto von Bismarck, on his way to uniting the new German Empire, led the Prussian army to victory over the Danish. Working through his empirical material to engage with and challenge established theoretical positions in the study of museums, modernity, and tourism, Mads Daugbjerg demonstrates that national belonging is still a key cultural concern, even as it asserts itself in novel, muted, and increasingly experiential ways.

The relationship between migration and development is becoming an important field of study, yet the fundamentals - analytical tools, conceptual framework, political stance - are not being called into question or dialogue. This volume provides a valuable alternative perspective to the current literature...

As the first historical study of East Germany's sepulchral culture, this book explores the complex cultural responses to death since the Second World War. Topics include the interrelated areas of the organization and municipalization of the undertaking industry; the steps taken towards a socialist cemetery culture such as issues of design, spatial layout, and commemorative practices; the propagation of cremation as a means of disposal; the wide-spread introduction of anonymous communal areas for the internment of urns; and the emergence of socialist and secular funeral rituals. The author analyses the manifold changes to the system of the disposal of the dead in East Germany-a society that not only had to negotiate the upheaval of military defeat but also urbanization, secularization, a communist regime, and a planned economy. Stressing a comparative approach, the book reveals surprising similarities to the development of Western countries but also highlights the intricate local variations within the GDR and sheds more light on the East German state and its society.

Renowned historical sociologist Charles Tilly wrote many years ago that "banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war-making all belong on the same continuum." This volume pursues the idea by revealing how lawbreakers and lawmakers have related to one another on the shadowy terrains of power over wide stretches of time and space.

In Europe and around the world, social policies and welfare services have faced increasing pressure in recent years as a result of political, economic, and social changes. Just as Europe was a leader in the development of the welfare state and the supportive structures of corporatist politics from the 1920s onward...

In Israel, as in numerous countries of the global North, Filipina women have been recruited in large numbers for domestic work, typically as live-in caregivers for the elderly. The case of Israel is unique in that the country has a special significance as the 'Holy Land' for the predominantly devout Christian Filipina women and is at the center of an often violent conflict, which affects Filipinos in many ways. In the literature, migrant domestic workers are often described as being subject to racial discrimination, labour exploitation and exclusion from mainstream society. Here, the author provides a more nuanced account and shows how Filipina caregivers in Israel have succeeded in creating their own collective spaces, as well as negotiating rights and belonging. While maintaining transnational ties and engaging in border-crossing journeys, these women seek to fulfill their dreams of a better life. During this process, new socialities and subjectivities emerge that point to a form of global citizenship in the making, consisting of greater social, economic and political rights within a highly gendered and racialized global economy.

By drawing on the complex interplay of ecology and feminism, ecofeminists identify links between the domination of nature and the oppression of women. This volume introduces a variety of innovative approaches for advancing ecofeminist activism, demonstrating how words exert power in the world.

Emphasizing the global nature of racism, this volume brings together historians from various regional specializations to explore this phenomenon from comparative and transnational perspectives. The essays shed light on how racial ideologies and practices developed, changed, and spread in Europe, Asia, the Near East, Australia, and Africa...

From its scattered beginnings in the 1980s the Austrian new wave has developed into a cinema with broad international recognition.

Outside France, French anthropology is conventionally seen as being dominated by grand theory produced by writers who have done little or no fieldwork themselves, and who may not even count as anthropologists in terms of the institutional structures of French academia.

Cosmopolitanism is often discussed in a critical and disapproving manner: as a concept complicit with the interests of the powerful, or as a notion related to Western political supremacy, the ills of globalization, inequality, and capitalist economic penetration...

Psychologists have done a great deal of research on the effects of trauma on the individual, revealing the paradox that violent experiences are often secreted away beyond easy accessibility, becoming impossible to verbalize explicitly.

The last century has seen radical social changes in Ireland, which have impacted all aspects of local life but none more so than traditional Irish music, an increasingly important identity marker both in Ireland and abroad. The author focuses on a small village in County Clare, which became a kind of pilgrimage site for those interested...

Analyzing both historical contexts and geographical locations, this volume explores the continuous reformation of state power and its potential in situations of violent conflict. The state, otherwise understood as an abstract and transcendent concept in many works on globalization in political philosophy, is instead located and analyzed here...

Josef von Sternberg's 1930 film The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel) is among the best known films of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). A significant landmark as one of Germany's first major sound films, it is known primarily for launching Marlene Dietrich into Hollywood stardom and for initiating the mythic pairing of the Austrian-born American director von Sternberg with the star performer Dietrich. This fascinating cultural history of The Blue Angel provides a new interpretive framework with which to approach this classic Weimar film and suggests that discourses on mass and high culture are integral to the film's thematic and narrative structure. These discourses surface above all in the relationship between the two main characters, the cabaret entertainer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) and the high school teacher Immanuel Rath (one-time Oscar winner Emil Jannings). In addition to offering insight into some of the major debates that informed the Weimar Republic, this book demonstrates that similar issues continue to shape the contemporary cultural landscape of Germany. Barbara Kosta thus also looks at Dietrich as a contemporary cultural icon and at her symbolic value since German unification and at Lola Lola's various "e;incarnations."e;

Imperial Germany's governing elite frequently sought to censor literature that threatened established political, social, religious, and moral norms in the name of public peace, order, and security. It claimed and exercised a prerogative to intervene in literary life that was broader than that of its Western neighbors...

Jazz has had a peculiar and fascinating history in Germany. The influential but controversial German writer, broadcaster, and record producer, Joachim-Ernst Berendt (1922-2000), author of the world's best-selling jazz book, labored to legitimize jazz in West Germany after its ideological renunciation during the Nazi era.

As Director of the Refugee Law Project at the University of Makerere, Kampala, Uganda, Dolan offers a behind-the-scenes, cross-disciplinary study of one of Africa's longest running and most intractable conflicts. This book shows how, alongside the activities of the Lord's Resistance Army, government decisions and actions on the ground, consolidated by humanitarian interventions and silences, played a central role in creating a massive yet only very belatedly recognized humanitarian crisis. Not only individuals, but society as a whole, came to exhibit symptoms typical of torture, and the perpetrator-victim dichotomy became blurred. It is such phenomena, and the complex of social, political, economic and cultural dynamics which underpin them, which the author describes as social torture. Building on political economy, social anthropology, discourse analysis, international relations and psychoanalytic approaches to violence, this book offers an important analytical instrument for all those seeking entry points through which to address entrenched conflicts, whether from a conflict resolution, post-conflict recovery or transitional justice perspective.

This original and thought-provoking collection of case studies examines some of the ways in which migration, and the concomitant processes of ecological and social change, have shaped and continue to shape human-environment relations in Amazonia.

Our lives are mostly composed of ordinary reality - the flow of moment-to-moment existence - and yet it has been largely overlooked as a subject in itself for anthropological study. In this work, the author achieves an understanding of this part of reality for the Mehinaku Indians, an Amazonian people, in two stages...

Around 1800 roughly three per cent of the human population lived in urban areas; by 2030 this number is expected to have gone up to some seventy per cent. This poses problems for traditional religions that are all rooted in rural, small-scale societies.

In recent years, the field of study variously called local, indigenous or traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) has experienced a crisis brought about by the questioning of some of its basic assumptions. This has included reassessing notions that scientific methods can accurately elicit and describe TEK...

The past few decades have seen growing interest in the study of the body. However, the increasing number of exciting and influential publications has primarily, if not exclusively, focused on the body in Western cultures.

Drawing on fieldwork with British Pakistani clients of a UK genetics service, this book explores the personal and social implications of a 'genetic diagnosis'. Through case material and comparative discussion, the book identifies practical ethical dilemmas raised by new genetic knowledge and shows how, while being shaped by culture, these issues also cross-cut differences of culture, religion and ethnicity. The book also demonstrates how identifying a population-level elevated 'risk' of genetic disorders in an ethnic minority population can reinforce existing social divisions and cultural stereotypes. The book addresses questions about the relationship between genetic risk and clinical practice that will be relevant to health workers and policy makers.

Where lived experience of surroundings is shifting, visceral, and immersive, interpretation of social spaces tends to be static and remote. "Space" and "place" are also often analyzed without grappling much (if at all) with the social, political, and historical roots of spatial practice.

While the first decade after the fall of the Berlin wall was marked by the challenges of unification and the often difficult process of reconciling East and West German experiences, many Germans expected that the new centuryA" would achieve normalization.A" The essays in this volume take a closer look at Germany's new normalcy...

The legacy of emigres in the British film industry, from the silent film era until after the Second World War, has been largely neglected in the scholarly literature. Destination London is the first book to redress this imbalance...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a uniquely reluctant and distinctly German Lutheran revolutionary. In this volume, the author, an Anglican priest and historian, argues that Bonhoeffer's powerful critique of Germany's moral derailment needs to be understood as the expression of a devout Lutheran Protestant. Bonhoeffer gradually recognized the ways in which the intellectual and religious traditions of his own class - the Bildungsbrgertum - were enabling Nazi evil. In response, he offered a religiously inspired call to political opposition and Christian witness-which cost him his life. The author investigates Bonhoeffer's stance in terms of his confrontation with the legacy of Hegelianism and Neo-Rankeanism, and by highlighting Bonhoeffer's intellectual and spiritual journey, shows how his endeavor to politicially reeducate the German people must be examined in theological terms.

Court dance in Java has changed from a colonial ceremonial tradition into a national artistic classicism. Central to this general transformation has been dance's role in personal transformation, developing appropriate forms of everyday behaviour and strengthening the powers of persuasion that come from skillful manipulation...

Introduces academics, students and political analysts to some of the trends in the study and state of culture and international history: NGOs, internationalism, cultural violence, the "Romance of Resistance," and the culture of diplomacy.