Books published by Berghahn Books

This collected volume brings together leading anthropologists and cultural analysts to offer a concise look at the narratives, symbolic, and metaphoric fields related to extremism, systemitizing an approach to contemporary extremism by placing these idealogies into historical, political, and geo-systemic contexts.

Polish cinema has inescapably been shaped by the nation's succession of different economic and ideological regimes over the last century. This volume is the first to analyze the entirety of the nation's film history-from independence in 1918 to today-through the lenses of political economy and social class.

Changes in the Air looks at New Orleans and its changing cultural responses to hurricanes over three centuries, carefully exploring the complex interplay of sociopolitical, economic, legal, and cultural factors in the development or stagnation of adaptive practices.

Expanding our understanding of contagion further than typical notions of infection and pandemics, this book widens the field to include biosocial epidemics. The chapters propose varied and detailed answers to questions about the epidemic and contagious potential of specific infections and non-infectious conditions.

The Power of Scripture uncovers how biblical scripture directly shaped a national religious politics, forming a lasting impression on the socio-political structural development of Stuart England.

Based on interviews and fieldwork conducted among residents of Pula, a coastal city in Northwestern Croatia, this study explores various aspects of a local feeling of boredom. This is mirrored in the term tapija, a word of Turkish origin describing a property deed, and in Pula's urban slang it has morphed from its original sense describing a set of affective states into one of lameness, loneliness, unwillingness, and irony. Combining lively conversations with a significant bibliography of the topic, the result is a compelling local anthropological study of boredom in a wider historical and global context.

In this ethnographic study of post-paternalist ruination and renovation, Christian Straube explores social change at the intersection of material decay and social disconnection in the former mine township Mpatamatu of Luanshya, one of the oldest mining towns on the Zambian Copperbelt. Touching on topics including industrial history, colonial town planning, social control and materiality, gender relations and neoliberal structural change, After Corporate Paternalism offers unique insights into how people reappropriate former corporate spaces and transform them into personal projects of renovation, fundamentally changing the characteristics of their community.

Best known for his 1979 film David, Peter Lilienthal was an unusual figure within postwar filmmaking circles. A child refugee from Nazi Germany who grew up in Uruguay, he was uniquely situated at the crossroads of German, Jewish, and Latin American cultures: while his work emerged from West German auteur filmmaking, his films bore the unmistakable imprints of Jewish thought and the militant character of New Latin American cinema. Peter Lilienthal is the first comprehensive study of Lilienthal's life and career, highlighting the distinctively cross-cultural and transnational dimensions of his oeuvre, and exploring his role as an early exemplar of a more vibrant, inclusive European film culture.

In "western" cultures, some people have chosen a dreadlock hairstyle, despite many in mainstream society looking at it in a negative light. Based on interviews and close observations in social media, the book offers insights into the culture(s) surrounding dreadlocks and ultimately interprets the phenomenon as a postmodern form of individuality.

Looking at the cultural responses to death and dying, this collection explores the emotional aspects that death provokes in humans, whether it is disgust, fear, awe, sadness, anger, or even joy. More broadly, this collection suggests a new paradigm in the study of death and dying.

From 1933 onward, Nazi Germany undertook massive and unprecedented industrial integration, submitting an entire economic sector to direct state oversight. This innovative study explores how German professionals navigated this complex landscape through the divergent careers of business managers in two of the era's most important trade organizations. While Jakob Reichert of the iron and steel industry unexpectedly resisted state control and was eventually driven to suicide, Karl Lange of the machine builders' association achieved security for himself and his industry by submitting to the Nazi regime. Both men's stories illuminate the options available to industrialists under the Third Reich, as well as the real priorities set by the industries they served.

Drawing on ethnographic data from fairs in the Southern Andes involving highland herders and lowland cultivators, This book advances an anthropology of the practice of barter, contributing to a fuller understanding of how social groups create themselves through economic exchange and material circulation.

This is Kaniuekutat's book. In it, he tells the story of his life and that of Innu culture in the northern parts of Labrador. The pages of this book are filled with the voice of Kaniuekutat giving his account of an Innu hunter's life and the problems and distress that have been caused by sedentarization and village life.

With case studies ranging from mega-plantations in Southeast Asia to sports events, Contemporary Megaprojects explores the increasing ambition and pervasiveness of these projects, as well as their significant impact on both society and the environment.

William Robertson Smith's influence on anthropology ranged from his relationship with John Ferguson McLennan, to advising James George Frazer to write about "Totem" and "Taboo" for the Encyclopaedia Britannica that he edited. This biography places a special emphasis on the notes and observations from his travels to Arabia...

For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk-the ideal of the "total work of art"-has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk's lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea's evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.

Since the early 1990s, phenomenology and cognitivism have become two of the most influential approaches to film theory. Emotion, Ethics, and the Cinematic Experience explores how these two approaches might work together to create a philosophy of film that is both descriptively rich and theoretically productive.

Tracing Mead's career as an ethnographer, as the early voice of public anthropology, and as a public figure, this elegantly written biography links the professional and personal sides of her career. This short volume is an ideal starting point for anyone wanting to learn about, arguably, the most famous anthropologist of the twentieth century.

Since the early 1990s, phenomenology and cognitivism have become two of the most influential approaches to film theory. Emotion, Ethics, and the Cinematic Experience explores how these two approaches might work together to create a philosophy of film that is both descriptively rich and theoretically productive.

In this new edition of Wolfgang Mommsen's illuminating study, Max Weber is presented in terms of the major questions that preoccupied him as one of the towering social scientists of his time, with insights that are persistently relevant as we deal with the structures and dynamics of modern industrial societies.

Making a comeback in Northern Europe and North America, wolf populations cause conflicts by affecting the livelihoods of rural peoples. However, their arrivals also become embedded in more general societal tensions.

Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author Anselma Gallinat shows, such memory work-initially undertaken after fundamental regime change-inevitably shapes citizenship and democracy in the present.

Spanish Comics offers an overview on contemporary scholarship on Spanish comics, focusing on a wide range of comics dating from early comics history in 1875-1939; the Francoist dictatorship, 1939-1975; the Political Transition, 1970-1985; and Democratic Spain from the early 1980s, and themes of memory, gender, regional identities, and history.

Sovereignty is a significant force regarding the ownership, use, protection and management of natural resources. By placing an emphasis on the complex intertwined relationship between natural resources and diverse claims to resource sovereignty, this book reveals the backstory of contemporary resource contestations in Latin America and their positioning within a more extensive history of extraction in the region. Exploring cases of resource contestation in Bolivia, Colombia and Guatemala, Sovereign Forces highlights the value of these relationships to the practice of environmental governance and peacebuilding in the region.

Reconsidering issues of representation in the insular Pacific, this volume explores authenticity and authorship in practice as "traveling concepts" that spawn cross-fertilization along the cultural and historical routes they traverse.

Drawn from across the U.S. and Mesoamerica, the chapters in this volume explore the use, meanings, and cross-cultural patterns present in the use of ash. and highlight the importance of ash in ritual closure, social memory, and cultural transformation.

How will we live in the future? Are we moving towards global homogeneity? Will the world succumb to the global spread of fast food and Hollywood movies? Or are there other possibilities? In this book, Samuel Collins argues not only for the importance of the future of culture, but also stresses its centrality in anthropological thought over the last century. Beginning with 19th-century anthropology and continuing today in the work of anthropologies of emergent sciences, anthropologists have not only used their knowledge of present cultural configurations to speculate on future culture but have also used their assumptions about the future of culture to understand the present.