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A rewarding part of this project involved writing three cases studies which focus on preserving a scenic gorge, landscaping a canalized river, and restoring “wild” nature to a managed forest. Taken together, these stories capture important shifts in West German efforts to restore varying degrees of naturalness in their intensively used landscapes.  Research took me to the Black Forest, the Mosel Valley, and the Bavarian Forest, and to the homes and offices of dedicated conservationists.  Whether perusing Black Forest Society records in the basement of a retired forester or reviewing hundreds of postcards protesting the Mosel Canal in the Foreign Office archives, I was struck by the daunting challenge conservationists faced in promoting sustainable uses of nature when more powerful groups favored exploiting it and when legal and administrative support systems for conservation remained weak.

The first case study investigates conservationists’ struggle in the 1950s to preserve the Wutach River and Gorge from development by a state-owned utility company intent on damming the river to generate peak energy for the Black Forest region. Using newly restored democratic institutions, conservationists galvanized local support to oppose the company.  Their activism was emboldened by state and federal officials who eventually demanded that projects, even those of limited scale like the Wutach, be evaluated in the context of regional water management plans—ultimately to support multiple uses that would sustain economic growth.  Facing organized opposition, the utility company abandoned its plans for the Wutach but pursued even larger projects in the area.

Not long after this modest victory for preservation, conservationists found unlikely allies in a group of Ruhr industrialists, but failed to prevent the scenic Mosel River from being canalized as part of France’s plans to establish a common market for coal and steel. Because the river was an international waterway, its fate was decided by Chancellor Adenauer.  Pressured by France, he agreed to canalization, but also secured important concessions, including the return of coal-rich Saarland and modifications to the Rhine Lateral Canal.  During construction (1956-1964), conservationists hoped to play a leading role in naturalizing the engineered channel. But they were only partially successful, hindered by a lack of trained personnel, loopholes in existing laws, and the rapid timetable for construction.

The third case study examines one of conservationists’ most successful undertakings during the postwar “miracle years.” In the late 1960s a vocal minority of conservationists, including Frankfurt Zoo director Bernhard Grzimek, worried about vanishing opportunities for West Germans to experience “wild” nature.  So, they spearheaded a plan to transform the managed Bavarian Forest into West Germany’s first national park, complete with reintroduced wildlife.  State foresters denounced the project, as did supporters of the country’s successful recreational nature park program. But the Bavarian government endorsed the national park, hoping it would revitalize the region’s depressed economy. Approved as a regional development project, the national park became a revenue-generating space where species and natural processes were protected for scientific observation and public enjoyment—and for their own sake.

The case studies helped me integrate the story of conservation into the mainstream of West German history, revealing a gradual democratization of society, increased scientific management of landscapes, and a partial greening of society and politics.  Germany’s experience remains instructive in our era of climate change because this densely populated, economically advanced country boasts a hard-won, favorable record on environmental reform and sustainable development.

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Sandra Chaney is Professor of History at Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina, where she teaches courses in European and women’s history and contemporary global issues.

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The still on the cover of my book—from the 1949 British/U.S. co-production The Third Man–depicts the American Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten). He’s had a few too many drinks, and has just seen his old friend Harry Lime—a friend he believed dead— disappear somewhere on the square “Am Hof” in post-WWII Vienna. He is torn between doubts over his own sanity, unrequited love for Lime’s Czech girlfriend Anna, relief that his friend may still be alive, and near certainty that Harry is mixed up in a vicious black market racket. The darkness and mysterious aura of the Vienna square reinforces the haunted expression on Holly’s face. His predicament—that of an enterprising but unwelcome American pulp fiction writer stumbling through the labyrinth of postwar Europe–is inextricably linked with the city where he finds himself.

Holly’s search for his friend in the streets and sewers of Vienna still fascinates today. “The Third Man Tour” of the major sites of the film is among the most popular attractions in Vienna, and the film is still screened regularly in local theatres. I went on this tour in 1999, the fiftieth anniversary of the film. What struck me was the contrast between the “real Vienna” of the film, and the “real Vienna” on the tour. Here were some of the historic location sites, clearly recognizable if not entirely unchanged after half a century, and yet they were so different from what I’d seen in the film that I began to wonder—if they’d filmed The Third Man in a Hollywood studio, would the contrast have seemed any starker?

Photo courtesy Johannes Innerhofer

If we compare the film still on the book cover with a recent photo of  “Am Hof”, we can see the contrast. The buildings in the background look familiar, as they are centuries old, but the 1949 film added its own props, the angel and the fountain; moreover, in the “real” Vienna there was never a kiosk as we see it over Holly Martins’s shoulder, and thus no entrance to the sewer system.  The kiosk was a prop strategically placed so as to hide the “real” statue in the background, the “Mariensäule” (Mary’s Pillar) erected in the late seventeenth century.

What to do with this contrast? It made little sense to condemn one or the other version as false, or “less original” than the other. The technical explanations of the filmmaking process shed some light, of course: lighting, perspective, props, actors etc., transform “reality” into fiction. Yet what was it that gave me the uncanny feeling the film had actually been more “real” than the place I was looking at on the tour?

I sought some answers to this question by looking at the ways The Third Man was received by audiences and critics during the early Cold War, as well as in the relationship between Graham Greene’s versions of the story and the film itself. Film publicity in Germany, for example, claimed The Third Man was ‘much more’ than just a film—it had ‘captured’ the ‘reality’ of the postwar world. In my explorations of the historical dimensions of the film’s literary “predecessor” and its reception, I discovered that one important aspect of this postwar reality had to do with the marked ambivalence of  Europeans toward the influence and presence of American popular culture. This quality is reflected, ironically, in the American Holly Martin’s expression as he ponders whether he should catch the next plane out of Vienna before he finds out more than he wants to know. His face, framed by the dark Vienna square, mirrors his own disappointed expectations as well as those of European audiences,  who were both mesmerized by and deeply suspicious of America’s role in postwar Europe.

Today, films such as The Third Man, and other movies I discuss in the book, enjoy a reputation as “film classics”, as textbook examples of a certain style of filmmaking.  For film buffs who know these movies well, a closer look at the transnational historical dynamics that went into their production and reception will shed new light on old favorites. For a younger generation of film and media viewers, used to very different visual styles and practices,  a historical perspective on both classic and more contemporary adaptations can make palpable how moving images of stories of the past intrigued audiences, and provide a jumping off point for understanding present day negotiations between media and story-telling as more than just fodder for the global media canon. Perhaps they too– if read carefully–are ‘capturing the reality’ of our post Cold War world. 

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Anne-Marie Scholz holds a teaching affiliation with the University of Bremen, Germany and is currently an Adjunct Professor of American Studies at the University of Konstanz. She is also a freelance language teacher and translator. She has published in The European Journal of American Studies, Film and History, Amerikastudien/American Studies, and German History and has taught at the Universities of Bonn, Hamburg, Tübingen, Bremen, and the University of California, Irvine.

Historical Reflections
Volume 39, Number 1, Spring 2013
Featuring writing on the ideas of Claude Langlois, specifically his work concentrated on women, religion, and the French Revolution.

Transfers
Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2013
Special section on Media and Mobility, featuring articles on interactions between physical movement and communicational media.

Projections
Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2013
Focusing on the topic of violence in movies, a subject of continuing controversy and discussion, with articles on television and film.

Critical Survey
Volume 25, Number 1, Spring 2013
With articles dedicated to the life of Shakespeare, from a variety of angles ranging from biofiction to what we would recognize as more traditional biography.

Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society
Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 2013
Special issue on Postcolonial Memory Politics in Educational Media, with articles focusing primarily on Europe.

Projections is the winner of the 2008 AAP/PSP Prose Award for Best New Journal in the Social Sciences & Humanities. It is published in association with The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and The Forum for Movies and Mind.

To access the special issue, click the following link: http://bit.ly/10dgD7D

Free access to the issue will end 5/22/13.

Religion and Society was introduced as part of the Advances in Research series of journals in 2010 by Berghahn. In this post, the Editors of Religion and Society discuss the foundation of the journal, its intentions, the selection of articles, and the latest issue.

Anthropologists have been saying for quite a while that it would be great to have an English-language journal dedicated to religion, and so we jumped at the suggestion for just such a publication when it was proposed by Marion Berghahn in 2009. We decided that we wanted the journal to contain a variety of sections that would really try to show current research in the making.

       Our ‘standard’ articles have contained critical, engaged overviews of topics ranging from cognitive approaches in the study of religion to discussions of space and place, publics, phenomenology, Pentecostalism, and so on. We’ve combined these with what we hope are discipline-defining profiles of key figures in our sub-field, including Maurice Bloch, José Casanova and most recently Jean Comaroff, where each scholar’s reflections on their own work are juxtaposed with further comments from colleagues.

       This sense of a sub-field being produced in dialogic form also emerges in our ‘debate’ section on topics of current concern (so far the credit crisis, violence, and revolution) as well as in our ‘author meets critics’ sections. And it should also be evident in our section on teaching the sub-field, where we ask people to reflect on successful techniques in the making of anthropologists of religion. The journal also contains a ‘news’ section and a reviews section, edited by Maya Mayblin, that deals with films as well as books produced in previous year or so. Ruy Blanes originally edited the reviews for the journal, and has now become one of the general editors.

       It’s worth saying something about how we obtain copy. We don’t take unsolicited papers but we do work with our extensive editorial board to identify some of the most exciting topics being written about, and some of the most exciting writers – whether they are old hands or newer researchers. We’re also keen to include but also to go beyond more established Euro-American arenas for debate: for instance a recent piece examined the anthropology of Pentecostalism from the perspective of national academic and political culture in Brazil.

       In volume 3, apart from the portrait of Jean Comaroff’s career and contributions to the study of religion, our debate section continues to address problems that emerge from current events. In this case, we invited authors to reflect on ‘religion and revolution’. We also offer a critical debate around the book More than Belief, by Manuel Vásquez, and articles that cover diverse issues of comparative theoretical interest such as cosmology (Holbraad & Abramson), seriousness and irony (Carrithers), Afro-Brazilian religions, diaspora and the anthropology of mission (Sansi & Parés, Johnson, Montero respectively), the intersection of religion and sport (Carter), and political activism (Tremlett).

       Although our papers are published in English we have in the past translated some pieces by scholars from different language traditions and continue to explore possibilities. As editors we hope that Religion in Society can be a journal of record for our sub-field.

– Ruy Blanes, Simon Coleman, Maya Mayblin and Ramon Sarró

  Editors, Religion and Society

Volume 3 of Religion and Society is now available online through Ingenta here.

To download and read the Introduction to the issue for free, click here.

For more information on Religion and Society, please visit the journal’s website: http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/air-rs/

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
                      Muhammad Yunus at The New York Times office in New York.

Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, is receiving the Congressional Gold Medal in recognition of his “efforts to combat global poverty.” According to The New York Times, “The award places Yunus in the company of a small group of people – including Norman Borlaug, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and Mother Teresa — who have received this award, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Nobel Peace Prize.”

This past Autumn, Mr. Yunus’s speech at the International Association for Asia Pacific Studies discussing his vision for creating a poverty-free world was published in one of our journals, Asia Pacific World. Berghahn is proud to publish work by such esteemed scholars as Mr. Yunus, and congratulates him on his immense achievement.

To celebrate, we are making this article available for free online for the next two weeks. Simply click here, enter your email address, and enjoy!

Wind over Water grew out of a concern to see East Asia – and East Asian scholars – better represented in the literature on contemporary human migration. Perhaps its most important purpose has been to show the full range and import of migration in East Asia rather than attempt any particular theoretical or policy argument. Thus the volume ranges, as the back cover blurb will tell you, “from Korean bar hostesses in Osaka to African entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, from Vietnamese women seeking husbands across the Chinese border to Pakistani Muslim men marrying women in Japan, from short-term business travelers in China to long-term tourists from Japan who ultimately decide to retire overseas.” While there are limitations to this kind of inclusive approach, it has the decided advantage of forcing a consideration of East Asia migration in its entirety: whether short-term or long-term, whether internal or across national borders, whether for economic or social purposes. Furthermore, it does so for countries that are closely linked politically and culturally but divided quite sharply between those with already rather well-developed economies, like Japan and South Korea, and those with still developing ones, such as China and Vietnam.

For those already interested in East Asian migration, or more general issues of social continuity and change in the region, the range of explorations in this volume will, we hope, provide some appreciation of the importance of contemporary migration and how complex but also interesting human mobility can be.

For those looking from outside East Asia, the lessons from the book may be a bit different. Two deserve particular attention. The first is that the vast changes in international migration are occurring simultaneously with extraordinary internal migration (as in China and Vietnam), or with massive internal shifts now only a generation or two distant (as in South Korea and Japan). In China much of this internal migration is across the same kind of cultural, linguistic, and even legal boundaries that those in the West tend to associate with international migration. Thus there is an enormous opportunity to reunite the two long-divided aspects of migration studies: internal and international. East Asia provides a particularly interesting complement to Europe where, because of the Schengen agreements, there is also increasing fuzziness and blending between internal migration and immigration as they have been conventionally defined.

The second key lesson lies with how explicitly migration policy is interwoven with other kinds of public policy in East Asian countries. The most developed of the East Asian economies tend to be acutely aware of the social and economic effects of plunging fertility, including both the necessity of more people to avoid demographic collapse, and the more specific need for care workers for an increasingly elderly population. East Asian countries have hardly resolved these issues, but the degree to which they are willing to engage with them is often impressive. Their efforts provide an alternative context for examining long-range social planning and one that may be useful to other countries that face the same forbidding demographic, social, economic, and cultural challenges.

Overall, it may well be the case that migration, as a process and as a policy concern, is an especially useful focus for considering the overall challenges faced by both developing and developed countries in this century. It is a topic that, when considered broadly as it is in this volume, transcends the often compartmentalized issues of social, political, economic, and cultural development. Yet it is also a topic that drills down to the very essentials of human life, of why human beings have over the centuries been alternately highly mobile and highly sedentary. Here, as in many other areas, it is vital to have the East Asian case more clearly on the record.

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David W. Haines is Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University. He is the author of Safe Haven? A History of Refugees in America (2010), has twice been a Fulbright scholar, and is a former president of the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA).

Keiko Yamanaka is a Lecturer in the Departments of Ethnic Studies and International and Area Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work appears in a range of books and journals, including Pacific Affairs; Ethnic and Racial Studies; Diaspora; Asian and Pacific Migration Journal; and Publications of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).

Shinji Yamashita is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tokyo and former president of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology, the world’s second largest national anthropology association. He is the author of Bali and Beyond: Explorations in the Anthropology of Tourism (2003).

Aspasia
Volume 7, Issue 1, 2013
Includes a special theme section on Women’s Autobiographical Writing and Correspondence, as well as the second part of “Clio on the Margins”, continued from last year’s issue.

Contributions to the History of Concepts
Volume 7, Issue 2, Winter 2012
Featuring a Rountable on “Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Reloaded? Writing the Conceptual History of the Twentieth Century” by guest editors Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann and Kathrin Kollmeier.

Focaal
Volume 2013, Issue 65, Spring 2013
Including two theme sections: “Toward an anthropology of affirmative action” and “Horizons of choice: An ethnographic approach to decision making”.

French Politics, Culture & Society
Volume 31, Issue 1, Spring 2013
With articles on the cultural history of World War I in France, the “rise of the Anglo-Saxon”, 1920s beauty contests in France and America, German unification, and filmmaking and the invention of the Paris suburbs.

Religion and Society
Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2013
Focusing on Jean Comaroff’s work and reflection, and also including a debate section on “Religion and Revolution” and comments on the work of Manuel A. Vásquez.

Places of Pain: Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-local Identities in Bosnian War-torn Communities, Hariz Halilovich

The Colours of the Empire: Racialized Representations During Portuguese Colonialism, Patrícia Ferraz de Matos

The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination: Transnational Memories of Protest and Dissent, Suzanne Rinner

Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film, Max Silverman