Books published by Berghahn Books

On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise is a collection of seven stories about local lives in the fictional village of Wallaceville. They turn rogue in the face of runaway forces that take the form and figure of a Belize beast-time, which can appear as a comic mishap, social ruin, tragic excess, or wild guesses.

Focusing on the small island of Paama, Vanuatu, and the capital, Port Vila, this book presents a rare and recent study of the ongoing significance of urbanization and internal migration in the Global South.

Unsustainable practices since the Industrial Revolution still impact our everyday lives. This book looks at how we can achieve sustainable urban mobility now and in the future by tapping into our knowledge of the historical trajectories leading up to the features of modern mobility in cities today.

Amid the Cold War and global student protests, transnational forces significantly shaped the modernization of educational systems in Spain and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. Each study sheds new light on the transnational circulation of modernization discourses, practices, and ideology within the sphere of education.

This comprehensive volume demonstrates that the question of how to care for the poor has had significant implications for German history throughout the modern era. Here, eight leading historians provide essential case studies and syntheses of current research into German welfare, from the Holy Roman Empire to the present day.

Written by eleven leading anthropologists from around the world, this volume extends the insights of Fredrik Barth, one of the most important anthropologists of the twentieth century, to push even further at the frontiers of anthropology.

In the past two decades, the subject of post-Holocaust justice has experienced a surge of interest among historians and legal scholars. Rethinking Holocaust Justice offers a multifaceted approach to post-Holocaust justice, bringing together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore the complexity of these issues.

This volume represents a landmark intervention in the historiography of concepts. With clarifying overviews of such contested theoretical terrain as translatability, spatiality, and center-periphery dynamics, it also provides valuable insights into the current era of disenchantment with the European project.

Adapting the latest developments in the field of social movements, the chapters in this volume examine the formation, use and contestation of heritage by various official, non-official and activist players and the spaces where such ongoing negotiations and contestation take place.

This volume contributes to transatlantic anthropology and history by bringing together religion, cultural heritage and placemaking in the Atlantic world. The entanglements of religion, cultural heritage and belonging are ethnographically scrutinized to perceive the connections and disconnections of specific places.

The contributors of this volume are social scientists from France, Belgium, England and the United States and represent different disciplines. Each author has attempted, through the prism of their specialties, to demonstrate and analyse how and why this striking difference in access to ART exists.

Written by eleven leading anthropologists from around the world, this volume extends the insights of Fredrik Barth, one of the most important anthropologists of the twentieth century, to push even further at the frontiers of anthropology.

Historian Raul Hilberg produced a variety of archival research, personal essays, and other works over a career that spanned half a century. This book collects some of Hilberg's most essential and groundbreaking writings-many of them published in obscure journals or otherwise inaccessible to nonspecialists-in a single volume.

Italian cinema gave rise to some of the best-known films of the postwar years, and its stars were beloved by both the public and producers. This book explores the many conflicts over stars and stardom that arose during Italian cinema's postwar rebirth, shedding new light on the close relationship forged between cinema and society.

This book gives a dramatic account of life after the socio-economic transformations of the 1990s in Poland, which left many people impoverished and unemployed.

During the high days of modernization fever, among the many disorienting changes Germans experienced in the Weimar Republic was an unprecedented mingling of consumption and identity: increasingly, what one bought signaled who one was. Exemplary of this volatile dynamic was the era's burgeoning motorcycle culture. With automobiles largely a luxury of the upper classes, motorcycles complexly symbolized masculinity and freedom, embodying a widespread desire to embrace progress as well as profound anxieties over the course of social transformation. Through its richly textured account of the motorcycle as both icon and commodity, The Devil's Wheels teases out the intricacies of gender and class in the Weimar years.

The Poplars housing development in suburban Paris is home to what one resident called the "e;Little-Middles"e; - a social group on the tenuous border between the working- and middle- classes. In the 1960s The Poplars was a site of upward social mobility, which fostered an egalitarian sense of community among residents. This feeling of collective flourishing was challenged when some residents moved away, selling their homes to a new generation of upwardly mobile neighbors from predominantly immigrant backgrounds. This volume explores the strained reception of these migrants, arguing that this is less a product of racism and xenophobia than of anxiety about social class and the loss of a sense of community that reigned before.

This ground-breaking ethnography of an export-orientated factory in Egypt examines the dynamic relationships between the emergent Mubarak-bizniz (business) elites, who are caught in an intensely competitive globalized supply chain, and the local realities of the daily lives of their young, educated, and mixed-gender labor force.

Presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through its set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral persons and community amid modernity, and its enormous transformations.

In an era of technological advances and rapidly increasing international exchange, how did young Germans come to understand the world beyond their doorstep? This is a fascinating kaleidoscopic exploration of the ways that children absorbed, combined, and adapted notions of the world in their own ways.

Drawing on a wealth of heretofore neglected sources from multiple languages, this book gives a fascinating account of how vampires-whose various incarnations originally developed within the folk traditions of societies throughout the world-came to be inextricably tied to Eastern Europe in the popular imagination.

Water, Life, and Profit offers a holistic analysis of the people, economies, cultural symbolism, and material culture involved in the management, production, distribution, and consumption of drinking water in the urban context of Niamey, Niger.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, increasingly desperate European Jews looked to far-flung destinations such as the West Indies in search of refuge. Nearly the New World tells the remarkable story of Jewish refugees who overcame persecution and sought safety in the West Indies from the 1930s through the end of World War II

The contributions in this volume demonstrate that even as forms of industrial heritage provide anchors of identity for local populations, their meanings remain deeply contested, as both radical and conservative varieties of nostalgia intermingle with critical approaches...