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Berghahn titles at The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth Conference

 

We are delighted to inform you that Berghahn will be present at The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth Conference in Durham, UK from the 4th-7th July 2016. Please stop by our table to browse the latest selection of books at discounted prices and pick up some free journal samples.

 

If you are unable to attend, we would like to provide you with a special discount offer. For the next 30 days, receive a 25% discount on all Anthropology titles found on our website. At checkout, simply enter the discount code ASA16. Visit our website­ to browse our newly published interactive online Anthropology & Sociology Catalog or use the new enhanced subject searching features­ for a complete listing of all published and forthcoming titles.


Here is a preview of some of our newest releases on display, as well as some upcoming titles:

 

Paperback Original 

WITCHES AND DEMONS
A Comparative Perspective on Witchcraft and Satanism
Jean La Fontaine

Volume 10, Studies in Public and Applied Anthropology

 

Devil worship, black magic, and witchcraft have long captivated anthropologists as well as the general public. In this volume, Jean La Fontaine explores the intersection of expert and lay understandings of evil and the cultural forms that evil assumes. The chapters touch on public scares about devil-worship, misconceptions about human sacrifice and the use of body parts in healing practices, and mistaken accusations of children practicing witchcraft. Together, these cases demonstrate that comparison is a powerful method of cultural understanding, but warns of the dangers and mistaken conclusions that untrained ideas about other ways of life can lead to.

Read Introduction: Understanding the Other

 

Paperback Original 

GIRLHOOD AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE
Edited by Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler

 

This title is available Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License and published in partnership with Knowledge Unlatched.

Examining context-specific conditions in which girls live, learn, work, play, and organize deepens the understanding of place-making practices of girls and young women worldwide. Focusing on place across health, literary and historical studies, art history, communications, media studies, sociology, and education allows for investigations of how girlhood is positioned in relation to interdisciplinary and transnational research methodologies, media environments, geographic locations, history, and social spaces. This book offers a comprehensive reading on how girlhood scholars construct and deploy research frameworks that directly engage girls in the research process.

Read Introduction: The Significance of Place in Girlhood Studies

 

 

ENDURING UNCERTAINTY
Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life
Ines Hasselberg

Volume 17, Dislocations

 

This title is available Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License and published in partnership with Knowledge Unlatched.

Focusing on the lived experience of immigration policy and processes, this volume provides fascinating insights into the deportation process as it is felt and understood by those subjected to it. The author presents a rich and innovative ethnography of deportation and deportability experienced by migrants convicted of criminal offenses in England and Wales. The unique perspectives developed here – on due process in immigration appeals, migrant surveillance and control, social relations and sense of self, and compliance and resistance – are important for broader understandings of border control policy and human rights.

Read Introduction: An Ethnography of Deportation from the UK

 

THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS WRITER
Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Helena Wulff

 

Writing is crucial to anthropology, but which genres are anthropologists expected to master in the 21st century? This book explores how anthropological writing shapes the intellectual content of the discipline and academic careers. First, chapters identify the different writing genres and contexts anthropologists actually engage with. Second, this book argues for the usefulness and necessity of taking seriously the idea of writing as a craft and of writing across and within genres in new ways. Although academic writing is an anthropologist’s primary genre, they also write in many others, from drafting administrative texts and filing reports to composing ethnographically inspired journalism and fiction.

Read Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer: Across and Within Genres

 

 

 

TRUSTING AND ITS TRIBULATIONS
Interdisciplinary Engagements with Intimacy, Sociality and Trust
Edited by Vigdis Broch-Due and Margit Ystanes

 

“This impressive volume stands as a powerful corrective to latent ethnocentric tendencies lying at the heart of much contemporary scholarship on the nature of trust… Instead of identifying trust with the intimacies of family life, or attributing it to the conscious calculations of risk-averse individuals, this manuscript reveals the importance of approaching trust as something performed.” · Sharon Hutchinson, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Despite its immense significance and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the complex workings of trust are poorly understood and theorized. This volume explores trust and mistrust amidst locally situated scenes of sociality and intimacy. Because intimacy has often been taken for granted as the foundation of trust relations, the ethnographies presented here challenge us to think about dangerous intimacies, marked by mistrust, as well as forms of trust that cohere through non-intimate forms of sociality.

Read Introduction: Introducing Ethnographies of Trusting

 

COSMOS, GODS AND MADMEN
Frameworks in the Anthropologies of Medicine
Edited by Roland Littlewood and Rebecca Lynch

 

The social anthropology of sickness and health has always been concerned with religious cosmologies: how societies make sense of such issues as prediction and control of misfortune and fate; the malevolence of others; the benevolence (or otherwise) of the mystical world; local understanding and explanations of the natural and ultra-human worlds. This volume presents differing categorizations and conflicts that occur as people seek to make sense of suffering and their experiences. Cosmologies, whether incorporating the divine or as purely secular, lead us to interpret human action and the human constitution, its ills and its healing and, in particular, ways which determine and limit our very possibilities.

Read Introduction: Divinity, Disease, Distress

 

 

 

THINKING THROUGH SOCIALITY
An Anthropological Interrogation of Key Concepts
Edited by Vered Amit

 

As issues and circumstances investigated by anthropologists are becoming ever more diverse, the need to address social affiliation in contemporary situations of mobility, urbanity, transnational connections, individuation, media, and capital flows, has never been greater. Thinking Through Sociality combines a review of classical theories with recent theoretical innovations across a wide range of issues, locales, situations and domains. In this book, an international group of contributors train attention on the concepts of disjuncture, field, social space, sociability, organizations and network, mid-range concepts that are “good to think with.” Neither too narrowly defined nor too sweeping, these concepts can be used to think through a myriad of ethnographic situations.

Read Introduction:Thinking through Sociality: The Importance of Mid-Level Concepts

 

 

 

LEARNING UNDER NEOLIBERALISM
Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education
Edited by Susan Brin Hyatt, Boone W. Shear, and Susan Wright

Volume 1, Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies

 

As part of the neoliberal trends toward public-private partnerships, universities all over the world have forged more intimate relationships with corporate interests and more closely resemble for-profit corporations in both structure and practice.  These transformations, accompanied by new forms of governance, produce new subject-positions among faculty and students and enable new approaches to teaching, curricula, research, and everyday practices. The contributors to this volume use ethnographic methods to investigate the multi-faceted impacts of neoliberal restructuring, while reporting on their own pedagogical responses, at universities in the United States, Europe, and New Zealand.

Read Introduction: Higher Education, Engaged Anthropology, and Hegemonic Struggle

 

 

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New in Paperback!

 

THE DREAM IN ISLAM
From Qur’anic Tradition to Jihadist Inspiration
Iain R. Edgar

 

“The book stands out as noteworthy in one respect especially, because the author goes beyond the continual struggle between orientalists and anti-orientalists. One consequence of defining Islamic studies within this vicious circle is that a majority of the current generation of Islamic historians believes that the study of Arabic legal, theological or historical texts from the eighth to the nineteenth centuries is good enough to define ‘native’ Islamic civilisation. Edgar deconstructs that old approach, and brings to the task considerable expertise in social science methodology. Subsequent case studies on dream narratives will benefit immensely from his imagination-based research methods.” · Political Studies Review

 

 

 

ORDINARY LIVES AND GRAND SCHEMES
An Anthropology of Everyday Religion
Edited by Samuli Schielke and Liza Debevec

Volume 18, EASA Series

 

“The great merit of this book consists in taking the practices of the people “on the ground” into account. It thereby addresses a gap: the moments when grand schemes and daily practices come together, often in contradiction or in complex and open ways… a compelling and inspirational volume.” · Allegra Laboratory

Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such.

Read Introduction

 

IRISH/NESS IS ALL AROUND US
Language Revivalism and the Culture of Ethnic Identity in Northern Ireland
Olaf Zenker

Volume 6, Integration and Conflict Studies

 

This book will be of interest to linguistic anthropologists, cultural anthropologists, as well as sociologists, political scientists, and historians of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It will also be valuable to those interested in cultural identity formation within politically charged contexts, including postcolonial contexts. It complements and extends the existing research on political identities in Northern Ireland.  ·  American Ethnologist

The author’s theoretical approach to ethnicity and ethnic revivals presents an expanded explanatory framework for the social (re)production of ethnicity, theorizing the mutual interrelations between representations and cultural practices regarding their combined capacity to engender ethnic revivals. Relevant not only to readers with an interest in the intricacies of the Northern Irish situation, this book also appeals to a broader readership in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history and political science concerned with the mechanisms behind ethnonational conflict and the politics of culture and identity in general.

Read Chapter 1. A Walk of Life: Entering Catholic West Belfast

 

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF ACHIEVEMENT
Edited by Nicholas J. Long and Henrietta Moore

Volume 2, WYSE Series in Social Anthropology

 

“The range of ethnographic settings is dazzling… there is something here for everyone and a veritable cornucopia for the lover of ethnographic diversity.” · American Ethnologist

What happens when people “achieve”? Why do reactions to “achievement” vary so profoundly? And how might an anthropological study of achievement and its consequences allow us to develop a more nuanced model of the motivated agency that operates in the social world? These questions lie at the heart of this volume. Drawing on research from Southeast Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America, this collection develops an innovative framework for explaining achievement’s multiple effects—one which brings together cutting-edge theoretical insights into politics, psychology, ethics, materiality, aurality, embodiment, affect and narrative. In doing so, the volume advances a new agenda for the study of achievement within anthropology, emphasizing the significance of achievement as a moment of cultural invention, and the complexity of “the achiever” as a subject position.

Read Introduction: Achievement and Its Social Life

 

BORDER ENCOUNTERS
Asymmetry and Proximity at Europe’s Frontiers
Edited by Jutta Lauth Bacas and William Kavanagh†

 

“…provides a rich and thought provoking perspective on encounters and connectivity at the borders of Europe – both internal and external.”  ·  The Journal of Cross Border Studies in Ireland

This volume investigates, from a local, ground-up perspective, what is happening at some of these border encounters: face-to-face interactions and relations of compliance and confrontation, where people are bargaining, exchanging goods and information, and maneuvering beyond state boundaries. Anthropological case studies from a number of European borderlands shed light on the questions of how, and to what extent, the border context influences the changing interactions and social relationships between people at a political frontier.

Read Introduction: Border Encounters – Asymmetry and Proximity at Europe’s Frontiers

 

 

 

ETHICS IN THE FIELD
Contemporary Challenges
Edited by Jeremy MacClancy and Agustín Fuentes

Volume 7, Studies of the Biosocial Society

 

“This book will be informative and helpful for anyone planning to do fieldwork in the social sciences. It is particularly appropriate for environmental or ecological anthropologists because of the often inter- and trans-disciplinary nature of their work and because it covers ethical and methodological issues similar to those they may encounter. Although not an introductory book on field ethics, it would be valuable for advanced undergraduate or graduate students who have previously been introduced to these issues, or as a valued addition to other more basic materials on the subject.”  ·  Journal of Ecological Anthropology

In this volume, practitioners from across anthropological disciplines—social and biological anthropology and primatology—come together to question and compare the ethical regulation of fieldwork, what is common to their practices, and what is distinctive to each discipline.

Read Chapter 1. The ethical fieldworker, and other problems

 

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Forthcoming!

 

THE STATE WE’RE IN
Reflecting on Democracy’s Troubles
Edited by Joanna Cook, Nicholas J. Long, and Henrietta L. Moore

Volume 3, WYSE Series in Social Anthropology

 

What makes people lose faith in democratic statecraft? The question seems an urgent one. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, citizens across the world have grown increasingly disillusioned with what was once a cherished ideal. Setting out an original theoretical model that explores the relations between democracy, subjectivity and sociality, and exploring its relevance to countries ranging from Kenya to Peru, The State We’re In is a must-read for all political theorists, scholars of democracy, and readers concerned for the future of the democratic ideal.

 

 

 

 

‘CITY OF THE FUTURE’
Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana
Mateusz Laszczkowski

Volume 14, Integration and Conflict Studies

 

Astana, the capital city of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan, has often been admired for the design and planning of its futuristic cityscape. This anthropological study of the development of the city focuses on every-day practices, official ideologies and representations alongside the memories and dreams of the city’s longstanding residents and recent migrants. Critically examining a range of approaches to place and space in anthropology, geography and other disciplines, the book argues for an understanding of space as inextricably material-and-imaginary, and unceasingly dynamic – allowing for a plurality of incompatible pasts and futures materialized in spatial form.

 

 

 

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OF RELATED INTEREST FROM BERGHAHN JOURNALS 

 

Conflict and Society

Advances in Research

 

Organized violence-war, armed revolt, genocide, lynching, targeted killings, torture, routine discrimination, terrorism, trauma, and suffering-is a daily reality for some, while for others it is a sound bite or a news clip seen in passing and easily forgotten. Rigorous scholarly research of the social and cultural conditions of organized violence, its genesis, dynamic, and impact, is fundamental to addressing questions of local and global conflict and its impact on the human condition.

 

 

 

 

Anthropological Journal of European Cultures    

 

Published since 1990, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures (AJEC) engages with current debates and innovative research agendas addressing the social and cultural transformations of contemporary European societies. The journal serves as an important forum for ethnographic research in and on Europe, which in this context is not defined narrowly as a geopolitical entity but rather as a meaningful cultural construction in people’s lives, which both legitimates political power and calls forth practices of resistance and subversion.

 

 

 

 

 

Anthropology in Action 

 

Anthropology in Action is a peer-reviewed journal publishing articles, commentaries, research reports, and book reviews in applied anthropology. Contributions reflect the use of anthropological training in policy- or practice-oriented work and foster the broader application of these approaches to practical problems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anthropology of the Middle East

 

This peer-reviewed journal provides a forum for scholarly exchange between anthropologists and other social scientists working in and on the Middle East. The journal’s aim is to disseminate, on the basis of informed analysis and insight, a better understanding of Middle Eastern cultures and thereby to achieve a greater appreciation of Middle Eastern contributions to our culturally diverse world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 

 

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology is an international, peer-reviewed journal committed to publishing leading scholarship in contemporary anthropology. Geographically diverse articles provide a range of theoretical or ethical perspectives, from the traditional to the mischievous or subversive, and aim to offer new insights into the worlds in which we live.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Focaal  

Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology

Visit www.focaalblog.com!

 

Focaal is a peer-reviewed journal advocating an approach that rests in the simultaneity of ethnography, processual analysis, local insights, and global vision. It is at the heart of debates on the ongoing conjunction of anthropology and history as well as the incorporation of local research settings in the wider spatial networks of coercion, imagination, and exchange that are often glossed as “globalization” or “empire.”

 
Social Analysis   

The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice

 

Social Analysis has long been at the forefront of anthropology’s engagement with the humanities and other social sciences. In forming a critical, concerned, and empirical perspective, it encourages contributions that break away from the disciplinary bounds of anthropology and suggest innovative ways of challenging hegemonic paradigms through “grounded theory,” analysis based in original empirical research.