Books published by Berghahn Books

In design history, globalization is deeply intertwined with a long-held bias towards Western, industrialized nations. By reassessing the role of regional and national design histories and challenging the claim that nation states are obsolete in identity construction, Designing Worlds reflects on new national narratives from around the world.

While the Armenian genocide is today widely recognized, the broader context of Ottoman violence against minority groups-including the indigenous, largely Christian Assyrians-are less well known. This volume is the first scholarly edited collection focused on the Assyrian genocide, or "sayfo."

This collection explores rare sources and employs novel interdisciplinary methods to illuminate four interconnected themes: minorities and the meaning of military service, Jewish-Gentile relations, the cultural legacy of the war, and memory politics.

Artifak investigates the meaning and value of (art) objects as commodities in Vanuatu, in differing states of transit and transition: in the local place, on the market, and in the museum. It provides an ethnographic account of commoditization in the context of revitalization of culture and the arts in Vanuatu.

The essays in this volume explore significant physical and psychological aspects of life in the GDR, such as health and diet, leisure and dining, memories of the Nazi past, as well as identity, sports, and experiences of everyday humiliation.

The history of modern Europe is often presented with the hindsight of present-day European integration, which was a genuinely liberal project based on political and economic freedom.

By exploring the lifeworlds of two middle-aged Somalis living in Melbourne, Australia, Being-Here sheds light on the existential dynamics of being-in-place.

Since unification, eastern Germany has witnessed a rapidly changing memorial landscape. Memorializing the GDR provides the first in-depth study of this key topic, investigating the individuals and groups involved in the creation or destruction of memorials while addressing the subject's complex aesthetic, political, and historical dimensions.

Dreams Made Small offers an in-depth, ethnographic look at journeys of education among young Papuans under Indonesian rule, ultimately revealing how dreams of transformation, equality, and belonging are shaped and reshaped in the face of multiple constraints.

The songs of the beloved Irish poet Maire Bhui Ni Laeire (Yellow Mary O'Leary) explore themes of colonial subjection, oppression and injustice, representing an integral contribution to the development of anti-colonial thought in Ireland. Singing Ideas explores the significance of her work, and the immense power of her chosen medium.

The volume enhances the anthropological understanding of the various ways through which the state comes to be experienced as a visceral presence in social life.

By accompanying a range of senior high school history students before, during and after their visits to the museum, Visitors to the House of Memory is an intimate exploration of how young Berliners from across the city experience the Jewish Museum Berlin.

Using case-based and theoretical chapters that examine rural and urban communities of practice, this volume illustrates how participatory researchers and students as well as policy and community leaders find ways to engage with the broader public when it comes to global sustainability research and practice.

Urban areas in Arctic Russia are experiencing unprecedented social and ecological change. This collection outlines the key challenges that city managers will face in navigating this shifting political, economic, social, and environmental terrain.

Since the politicization of anthropology in the 1970s, most anthropologists have been reluctant to approach the topic of universals-that is, phenomena that occur regularly in all known human societies. In this volume, Christoph Antweiler reasserts the importance of these cross-cultural commonalities for anthropological research and for life and co-existence beyond the academy. The question presented here is how anthropology can help us approach humanity in its entirety, understanding the world less as a globe, with an emphasis on differences, but as a planet, from a vantage point open to commonalities.

There is a World Heritage Craze in China. China claims to have the longest continuous civilization in the world and is seeking the recognition from UNESCO. With a sociological lens, this book offers comprehensive insights into World Heritage, as well as China's deep social, cultural, and political structures.

How does an urban community come to terms with the loss of its future? The former socialist model city of Hoyerswerda is an extreme case of a declining postindustrial city. Built to serve the GDR coal industry, it lost over half its population to outmigration after German reunification and the coal industry crisis, leading to the large-scale deconstruction of its cityscape. This book tells the story of its inhabitants, now forced to reconsider their futures. Building on recent theoretical work, it advances a new anthropological approach to time, allowing us to investigate the postindustrial era and the futures it has supposedly lost.

Despite growing affluence, a large number of urban Chinese have problems making ends meet. Based on ethnographic research in Guangzhou, China, Soup, Love and a Helping Hand examines different modes and ideologies of help/support, as well as reciprocity, relatedness (kinship), and changing state-society relations in contemporary China.

Together comprising one of the first modern conflicts of the twentieth century, the Balkan Wars (1912-13) served as precursors of the bloody wars to follow. This volume offers a fascinating exploration of the wars' history, with a central focus on the experiences of both combatants and civilians.

This book is a contribution to the anthropology of Italy and of Europe as an ethnography of queer activism in Bologna; and, at the same time, it is an intervention in a set of ongoing theoretical debates in anthropology surrounding the perennial problem of the relationship between ethnographic data and anthropological analysis.

Money at the Margins is a groundbreaking exploration of the uses and socio-cultural impact of new forms of money and financial services.

This tightly organized collection locates the essence of European parliamentarism in four key aspects-deliberation, representation, responsibility, and sovereignty.

The contributors to this volume offer compelling case studies that demonstrate how indigenous animistic practices, concepts, traditions, and ontologies are co-authored in highly reflexive ways by anthropologists and their interlocutors.

The contributors to this volume offer compelling case studies that demonstrate how indigenous animistic practices, concepts, traditions, and ontologies are co-authored in highly reflexive ways by anthropologists and their interlocutors.

Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork, this book explores the professional, social and cultural world of Burgundy wines and demystifies the terroir ideology to provide a unique long-term ethnographic analysis of what lies behind the concept in Burgundy, raising important questions about the future of quality wine in a global era.