Books published by Berghahn Books

The issue of abortion forces a confrontation with the effects of poverty and economic inequalities, local moral worlds, and the cultural and social perceptions of the female body, gender, and reproduction. Based on extensive original field research, this provocative collection presents case studies from Asia.

This book analyzes the highly complex interconnections among the cultural-political concepts of various ideological groups and asks why the most artistically ambitious art forms were viewed as politically important by all cultured (or even semi-cultured) Germans in the period from 1933 to 1945...

The collapse of the Iron Curtain, the renationalization of eastern Europe and the simultaneous eastward expansion of the European Union have all impacted the way the past is remembered in today's eastern Europe. At the same time, memory in western Europe has changed significantly in recent years...

The civil war in Sri Lanka and the part that nationalism seemed to play in it inspired the writing of this book some twenty-three years ago. The argument was developed through a comparative analysis of nationalism in Sri Lanka with the author's native Australia. At the time this constituted an innovative approach to comparison in anthropology, as well as to nationalism and its possibilities. It was not based on differences but on the way in which perspectives from within the two nationalisms, when seen side-by-side, could present an understanding of their implication in producing the violence of war, racism, and social exclusion. The book has lost none of its importance and urgency as proven by the chapters in the Appendix, written by top scholars working in Sri Lanka and in Australia. These contributions bring together new material and critically explore the book's themes and their continued relevance to the various trajectories in nationalist processes since the first publication of the book.

This volume looks at the fluid and dynamic nature of identity-building among Jews and the many issues that cut across different Jewish groupings. An important contribution to scholarship on contemporary Jewry, it reveals the often unrecognized dynamism in new forms of Jewish identification and affiliation in Israel and in the Diaspora.

After 1945, those responsible for conservation in Germany resumed their work with a relatively high degree of continuity as far as laws and personnel were concerned. Yet conservationists soon found they had little choice but to modernize their views and practices in the challenging postwar context. Forced to change by necessity, those involved in state-sponsored conservation institutionalized and professionalized their efforts, while several private groups became more confrontational in their message and tactics. Through their steady and often conservative presence within the mainstream of West German society, conservationists ensured that by 1970 the map of the country was dotted with hundreds of reserves, dozens of nature parks, and one national park. In doing so, they assured themselves a strong position to participate in, rather than be excluded from, the left-leaning environmental movement of the 1970s.

This study examines refugee communities closely linked with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and a host of other UN agencies in the case of the Sahrawi and near total lack of humanitarian aid in the case of Afghan refugees in Iran.

The authors in this volume question what the possible appeal of these old religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam could be in the new urban environment and, conversely, what impact global urbanization will have on learning and on the performance and nature of ritual.

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.

In the last five years of the 20th century, films by the 2nd and 3rd generation of the so-called German guest workers exploded onto the German film landscape. Self-confident, articulate, and dynamic, these films situate themselves in the global exchange of cinematic images, citing and rewriting American gangster narratives, Kung Fu action films...

In this volume, Caron brings together the different facets of his expertise in order to present a broad panorama of modern technology. Caron shows how artisanal know-how was adapted, expanded, and formalized during the three industrial revolutions that swept over Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States...

Following the Second World War, a massive land reclamation project to boost Japan's rice production capacity led to the transformation of the shallow lagoon of Hachirogata in Akita Prefecture into a seventeen-thousand-hectare expanse of farmland. In 1964, the village of Ogata-mura was founded on the empoldered land inside the lagoon and nearly six hundred pioneers from across the country were brought to settle there. The village was to be a model of a new breed of highly mechanized, efficient rice agriculture; however, the village's purpose was jeopardized when the demand for rice fell, and the goal of creating an egalitarian farming community was threatened as individual entrepreneurialism took root and as the settlers became divided into political factions that to this day continue to struggle for control of the village. Based on seventeen years of research, this book explores the process of Ogatamura's development from the planning stages to the present. An intensive ethnographic study of the relationship between land reclamation, agriculture, and politics in regional Japan, it traces the internal social effects of the village's economic transformations while addressing the implications of national policy at the municipal and regional levels.

Tropical islands are magical, volcanoes are magical and coral reefs are magical. Classical ruins, old town centres, modern artworks, and contemporary architecture are magical as well. Even local people are magical. The attribution of magical qualities appears central in the constitution of contemporary tourism attractions.

Two of the most destructive moments of state violence in the twentieth century occurred in Europe between 1933 and 1945 and in China between 1959 and 1961 (the Great Leap famine). This is the first book to bring the two histories together in order to examine their differences and to understand if there are any similar processes of transmission at work. The author expertly ties in the Taiwanese civil war between Nationalists and Communists, which included the White Terror from 1947 to 1987, a less well-known but equally revealing part of twentieth-century history. Personal and family stories are told, often in the individual's own words, and then compared with the public accounts of the same events as found in official histories, commemorations, school textbooks and other forms of public memory. The author presents innovative and constructive criticisms of social memory theories in order to make sense both of what happened and how what happened is transmitted.

This volume brings together scholars who have conducted research on funerary events across sub-Saharan Africa. The contributions offer an in-depth understanding of the broad changes and underlying causes in African societies over the years, such as changes in religious beliefs, social structure, urbanization, and technological changes and health.

The notion of "sociality" is now widely used within the social sciences and humanities. However, what is meant by the term varies radically, and the contributors here, through compelling and wide ranging essays, identify the strengths and weaknesses of current definitions and their deployment in the social sciences.

The traditionally American genre of the road movie has been explored and reconfigured in the French context since the later 1960s. Comparative in its approach, this book studies the inter-relationship between American and French culture and cinemas, and in the process considers and challenges histories of the road movie. It combines film history with film theory methodologies, analysing transformations in social, political and film-industrial contexts alongside changing perspectives on the meaning and possibilities of film. At once chronological and thematic in structure, The French Road Movie provides in each chapter a comprehensive introduction to key themes emerging from the genre in the French context - liberty, identity and citizenship, masculinity, femininity, border-crossing - followed by detailed, innovative and often revisionist readings of the chosen films. Through these readings the author justifies the place of the road genre within French cinema histories and reinvigorates this often neglected and misunderstood area of study.

Most non-Central Americans think of the narrow neck between Mexico and Colombia in terms of dramatic past revolutions and lauded peace agreements, or, sensational problems of gang violence and natural disasters. In this volume, the contributors examine regional circumstances within frames of democratization and neoliberalism...

The phrase Christian politics points in two directions: political relations between denominations in one direction, and ways that Christian churches contribute to debates about how society should be governed in the other.

This volume illuminates the ways in which an Asia-based analysis of migration can yield new data on global migration patterns, new theoretical insights for a broader understanding of global migration, and new methodological approaches to the spatial and temporal complexity of human migration.

Simone de Beauvoir's work has not often been associated with film studies. This is paradoxical when it is recognized that she was the first feminist thinker to inaugurate the concept of the gendered "othering" gaze. Moreover, other concepts associated with Beauvoirian existentialism such as ambiguity, gendered alienation, situated freedom...

What can anthropology and political science learn from each other? The authors argue that collaboration, particularly in the area of concepts and methodologies, is tremendously beneficial for both disciplines, though they also deal with some troubling aspects of the relationship. Focusing on the influence of anthropology on political science, the book examines the basic assumptions the practitioners of each discipline make about the nature of social and political reality, compares some of the key concepts each field employs, and provides an extensive review of the basic methods of research that "e;bridge"e; both disciplines: ethnography and case study. Through ethnography (participant observation), reliance on extended case studies, and the use of "e;anthropological"e; concepts and sensibilities, a greater understanding of some of the most challenging issues of the day can be gained. For example, political anthropology challenges the illusion of the "e;autonomy of the political"e; assumed by political science to characterize so-called modern societies. Several chapters include a cross-disciplinary analysis of key concepts and issues: political culture, political ritual, the politics of collective identity, democratization in divided societies, conflict resolution, civil society, and the politics of post-Communist transformations.

During the 1960s the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas introduced the notion of a bourgeois public sphere in order to describe the symbolic arena of political life and conversation that originated with the cultural institutions of the early eighteenth-century; since then the public sphere itself has become perhaps one of the most debated...

The Smi are a Northern indigenous people whose land, Spmi, covers territory in Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden. For the Nordic Smi, the last decades of the twentieth century saw their indigenous rights partially recognized, a cultural and linguistic revival, and the establishment of Smi parliaments. The Russian Smi, however, did not have the same opportunities and were isolated behind the closed border until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This book examines the following two decades and the Russian Smi's attempt to achieve a linguistic revival, to mend the Cold War scars, and to establish their own independent ethno-political organizations.

This book explores the interface between modernity and tradition in selected societies in Taiwan, mainland China and Vietnam. The chapters question to what extent traditions are themselves exploiting modernity in creative ways, in the interests of their own further developments.

Durkheim, in his very role as a 'founding father' of a new social science, sociology, has become like a i gure in an old religious painting, enshrouded in myth and encrusted in layers of thick, impenetrable varnish. This book undertakes detailed, up-to-date investigations of Durkheim's work in an effort to restore its freshness and reveal it as originally created. These investigations explore his particular ideas, within an overall narrative of his initial problematic search for solidarity, how it became a quest for the sacred and how, at the end of his life, he embarked on a project for a new great work on ethics. A theme running through this is his concern with a modern world in crisis and his hope in social and moral reform. Accordingly, the book concludes with a set of essays on modern times and on a crisis that Durkheim thought would pass but which now seems here to stay.

The "e;managerial revolution,"e; or the rise of management as a distinct and vital group in industrial society, might be identified as a major development of the modernization processes, similar to the scientific and industrial revolutions. Studying "e;transnational"e; or "e;global"e; corporate management at the post-millennium moment provides a suitable focal point from which to investigate globalized (post)modernity and capitalism especially, and as such this book offers an anthropology of global capitalism at its moment of crisis. This study provides ethnographically rich descriptions of managerial practices in a set of international corporate investment projects. Drawing also on historical and statistical data, it renders a comprehensive perspective on management, corporations, and capitalism in the late modern globalized economy. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, the book spans the fields of organization, business, and management, and asserts that now, in this period of financial crisis, is the time for anthropology to yet again engage with political economy.

In 1994, the Pacific island village of Matupit was partially destroyed by a volcanic eruption. This study focuses on the subsequent reconstruction and contests over the morality of exchanges that are generative of new forms of social stratification. Such new dynamics of stratification are central to contemporary processes of globalization in the Pacific, and more widely. Through detailed ethnography of the transactions that a displaced people entered into in seeking to rebuild their lives, this book analyses how people re-make sociality in an era of post-colonial neoliberalism without taking either the transformative power of globalization or the resilience of indigenous culture as its starting point. It also contributes to the understanding of the problems of post-disaster reconstruction and development projects.

Between the 1760s and 1914, thousands of young Americans crossed the Atlantic to enroll in German-speaking universities, but what was it like to be an American in, for instance, Halle, Heidelberg, Gttingen, or Leipzig? In this book, the author combines a statistical approach with a biographical approach in order to reconstruct the history of these educational pilgrimages and to illustrate the interconnectedness of student migration with educational reforms on both sides of the Atlantic. This detailed account of academic networking in European educational centers highlights the importance of travel for academic and cultural transformations in nineteenth-century America.

Rapid population aging, once associated with only a select group of modern industrialized nations, has now become a topic of increasing global concern. This volume reframes aging on a global scale by illustrating the multiple ways it is embedded within individual, social, and cultural life courses.