Books published by Berghahn Books

Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Macedonian society, the book explores the intersections between modernity, kinship and gender.

This book's comprehensive analysis of the functions and limitations of propaganda, rumors, and mass media, it shows just how significant antisemitism was to the politics of coexistence among Christians and Jews on the eve of the Great War.

This innovative study draws on both archival evidence and archeological research to compare Malta's experience under the regimes of the Knights of St. John from 1530 to 1798 and afterward as a maritime outpost of the British Empire in terms of such topics as slavery, the control of resources, and globalization.

This book offers an account of local stakeholder strategies as they unfolded at Frieda over forty years and provides a strong and novel commentary on sustainability and social accountability of the mining industry operating in indigenous territories.

The use of computation in archaeology is a kind of magic, a way of heightening the archaeological imagination. Agent-based modelling allows archaeologists to test the 'just-so' stories they tell about the past. These models are one end of a spectrum that ends with video games.

The Weimar era in Germany is often characterized as a time of significant change. Such periods of rupture transform the way people envision the past, present, and future. This book traces the conceptions of time and history in the Germany of the early 20th century. By focusing on both the discourse and practices of the youth movement, the author shows how it reinterpreted and revived the past to overthrow the premises of modern historical thought. In so doing, this book provides insight into the social implications of the ideological de-historicization of the past.

Drawing from perspectives from within the everyday life of basic organizations and the practices of the party apparatuses, Communist Parties Revisited sheds light on the inner workings the Eastern Bloc, and the effects of state socialist policy on a micro historical level.

Across varied domains, music and dance both emerge from and give rise to intimate collaboration. This theoretically rich collection takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the collaborative dimension of sound and movement in everyday life...

Draws on three decades of applied research to tease out what has been learned from the field. 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.

Since its sovereign debt crisis in 2009, Greece has been living under austerity. This volume explores the effects of austerity policies on politics, health care, education, media, and other areas, and examines the crisis as the context for changing attitudes in Greek society regarding immigration, crime, minorities, consumption and more.

This book explores how various types of migration that are often seen as distinct phenomena - such as marriage migration, romance tourism and sex work migration - are in fact variations of cross-border mobilities that evolve around experiences and constructions of "intimacy"...

Biomedical Entanglements is an ethnographic study of the Giri people of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the indigenous population's interaction with modern medicine. The study bridges medical anthropology and global health, exploring how the 'biomedical' is imbued with social meaning and how biomedicine affects Giri ways of life.

Having taken over the leadership of the French school of sociology after the death of his uncle, Emile Durkheim, in 1917, Mauss, celebrated author of The Gift, re-launched the flagship journal, the Anne sociologique. Here are two of Mauss's most significant statements on the social sciences. The first, written with Fauconnet, outlines the methodological orientations of the school. The second examines the internal organization of sociology as a division of intellectual labor. The essays are of interest to anthropologists as well as sociologists for Mauss, like Durkheim, did not distinguish in detail the two disciplines.

What does it mean to be a man in our biomedical day and age? Through ethnographic explorations of the everyday lives of Danish sperm donors, Being a Sperm Donor explores how masculinity and sexuality are reconfigured in a time in which the norms and logics of (reproductive) biomedicine have become ordinary. It investigates men's moral reasoning regarding donation, their handling of transgressive experiences at the sperm bank, and their negotiations of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and relatedness, showing how the socio-cultural and political dimensions of (reproductive) biomedicine become intertwined with men's intimate sense of self.

Responding to the need for comparative approaches in the face of the increasingly separated fields of the anthropology of Islam and Christianity, This book gives full attention to moral failure as a constitutive and potentially energizing force in the religious lives of both Muslims and Christians in different parts of the world.

What does it mean to "fit in?" This volume of essays demystifies the discourse on identity, challenging common assumptions about role of similarity in inclusion and exclusion. Armed with intimate knowledge of local social structures, these essays tease out the ways in which ethnicity, religion and nationalism are used for social integration.

What set our ancestors off on a separate evolutionary trajectory was the ability to flex their reproductive and social strategies in response to changing environmental conditions. Exploring new cross-disciplinary research that links this capacity to critical changes in the organization of the primate brain, Social DNA presents a new synthesis of ideas on human social origins - challenging models that trace our beginnings to traits shaped by ancient hunting economies, or to genetic platforms shared with contemporary apes.

This volume explores the indeterminacy left behind by conventional understandings of progress and shows how totalizing forward movement may be resisted by fragments, open-endedness, and the possibility of going nowhere at all.

Built around key events, from the eviction of a self-managed social centre in Copenhagen in 2007 to the Climate Summit protests in 2009, this book contributes to anthropological literature on contemporary Euro-American politics foreshadowing recent waves of public dissent. Stine Krijer explores political forms among left radical and anarchist activists in Northern Europe focusing on how forms of action engender time. Drawing on anthropological literature from both Scandinavia and the Amazon, this ethnography recasts theoretical concerns about body politics, political intentionality, aesthetics, and time.

This volume explores emerging cultural meanings and social responses to population aging in contemporary East Asian societies. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, policy, archival, and media data, the authors trace both common patterns and diverging trends across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Korea.

In the early 1980s, when the contributors to this volume completed their graduate training at Oxford, the conditions of practice in anthropology were undergoing profound change. Here self-ethnography is used to portray the contributors' anthropological trajectories, showing how analytical and academic engagements interacted creatively over time.

Set at the forested edge of Cambodia's frontier, this book shares stories and insights from migrants, loggers, and soldiers carving homesteads into a new village.

This book traces the complex interactions between hunters, birds and the landscapes they inhabit, as well as the dynamics and politics of bird conservation. It looks at the practice and meaning of hunting in a specific context, and raises broader questions about human-wildlife interactions and the uncertain outcomes of conservation.

This volume brings together theoretical and practical considerations to provide transnational memory scholars with an interdisciplinary investigation into agency-the "who" and the "how" of cross-border commemoration that motivates activists and fascinates observers.

In a series of illuminating case studies, Curto follows the history and perception of major Portuguese colonial initiatives while integrating the complex perspectives of participating agents to show how the empire's life and culture were richly inflected by the operations of imperial expansion.

Detlef Siegfried's long-awaited English translation chronicles Ernest Borneman's journey from his days as a young Jewish Communist in Berlin to his ventures in England and Canada, and ultimately, to his endeavors as the most prominent sexologist spearheading the sexual revolution in West Germany and Austria in the twentieth century.

The Imbalance of Power demonstrates that the indigenous societies of the Guiana region of Amazonia do not fit conventional characterizations of 'simple' political units with 'egalitarian' political ideologies and 'harmonious' relationships with nature.